Life, Legend, Landscape at Courtauld Institute of Art on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Feb 17 2011
until May 15 2011
Lost from view for many years and recently presented to The Courtauld Gallery, The Old Farm Garden by Frederick Walker (1840-1875), sets the scene for a wide-ranging exploration of Victorian drawings and watercolours. The exhibition will be the first devoted to this area of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection and reflects the growing appreciation for Victorian draughtsmanship. The show includes numerous previously unseen works and ranges from informal preparatory drawings for paintings, sculptures and stained glass to highly finished exhibition watercolours. It includes life studies, landscapes, genre scenes and subjects from literature and legend. The exhibition features works by most of the major artists of the age, from the redoubtable Royal Academicians of the early years of Victoria’s reign, such as J.M.W. Turner, William Etty and Edwin Landseer, to Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and works of the 1890s by Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley. The exhibition features a splendid selection of landscapes, produced both abroad and at home. They include John Frederick Lewis’s watercolour of a Cairo silk bazaar, J.M.W. Turner’s late Swiss view of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne and The Quarries of Syracuse (Sicily) – Edward Lear’s final design for one of the few oil paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Lewis’s portrait of a man in North African dress, possibly the artist himself, underscores Victorian taste for travel and the exotic. Also in this vein is David Wilkie’s Madame Giuseppina, a depiction of a celebrated Greek beauty who was the landlady of an inn in Istanbul where Wilkie stayed in 1840 on his last trip abroad. By contrast, Samuel Palmer’s naturalistic watercolour of the Surrey countryside near Dorking responds to the beauty of the English landscape. Views by Philip Wilson Steer and Whistler show the development of a more informal and Impressionistic approach to landscape painting around 1890. The exhibition includes a diverse group of drawings of animals and natural history. An outstanding example is William Henry Hunt’s minutely rendered Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom which exemplifies the critic John Ruskin’s ideal of ‘truth to nature’. Despite its air of uncontrived simplicity, this superbly detailed arrangement with branches of flowering hawthorn was the result of painstaking work in the studio. Edwin Landseer’s coloured sketch of a lion’s head has a very different character and was produced in preparation for the monumental sculpted lions at the base of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. This drawing may have originated on one of Landseer’s regular sketching trips to study the lions in London’s Zoological Gardens. Life, Legend, Landscape is the first exhibition to be organised as part of The Courtauld’s IMAF Centre for the Study and Conservation of Drawings. The Centre was established in 2010 to promote research and conservation of The Courtauld’s collection of over 7,000 drawings and watercolours. The Centre also supports partnerships and research nationally and internationally. OPENING HOURS: Daily 10.00 – 18.00 Image Credits: Frederick Walker (1840-1875), The Old Farm Garden, 1871, Watercolour and gouache over graphite on paper, 273 x 405 mm, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London Edwin Landseer (1802-1873)Head of a Lion, c.1862, Chalk and wash over graphite on paper, 257 x 336 mm© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London John Everett Millais (1829-1896)The Parting of Ulysses, c.1862, Watercolour and gouache on paper 118 x 103 mm, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London  |
