The Art Exhibitions Blog

When the Louvre put on a huge retrospective of the genre of still life in 2022-23, there were only five works by British artists on show out of a total of nearly 170. Brits don't do still life? Wrong, as shown in  The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, with some 140 artworks. Some are beautiful, some are arresting, some are utterly surprising; one or two are downright weird. Boring? Not these still lifes.  The show starts off traditionally enough, with paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, some the work of immigrant artists from the Low Countries, but some home-grown: Right here in Chichester, the three Smith Brothers were among the earliest English artists to specialise in still lifes, and here you can see the work of the eldest, William, with a choice array of fruit , and of George, with as English a theme as you could get, a joint of beef .  The second room takes us into the start of the 20th century, where the e...

There's something very un-Scottish about the Scottish Colourists. So vibrant, so exuberant, so full of sun. Four artists who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, infused their art with a French spirit, the feel of the Mediterranean, Fauvist and Cubist influences. There are a lot of paintings by JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and GL Hunter in Scottish galleries, but the Tate's website musters only five works between them. So Burning Bright: The Scottish Colourists  at the Lightbox in Woking offers those of us in south-east England the rare chance to appreciate these groundbreaking British modernists. The Colourists weren't a movement in the sense that they worked and exhibited together; indeed, the description Scottish Colourists wasn't coined until after World War II, by which time three of them were already dead. But they were friends, their careers followed similar courses and they absorbed the same European influences, having all gone to France bef...