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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2013 10:06:14 GMT -5
Jonathan Bate has written in to say that persons who visited the Royal Academy's recent exhibition about "Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape" may have been disappointed to see so few large oils. But there is a simple reason: the Academy has only a few such works by those men in its collection. The exhibition in question was thus essentially a print show. Indeed, outside the sale-rooms and the houses of the great, large oil landscapes were not visible to the British public until the opening of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1815, or at least the foundation of the British Institute ten years earlier. How critical it was to Hazlitt's development as both painter and art critic that the 1802 Peace of Amiens gave him the opportunity to visit the Louvre and see the Old Masters closely and personally in a way impossible in Britain. That said, genteel visitors - those who used cake forks to eat cake - were sometimes able to inspect private collections in great houses, and in the seventeen-nineties Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery gave the London public exposure to large-scale history painting.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2013 15:05:06 GMT -5
Of course, if you go to the National Gallery, for example, Sydney Grew, it is full of large oils, so next time you are in London, I would recommend a visit. As we are online, however, you can also see the National Gallery collection on their website: National GalleryAs it happens, I was in the National Gallery today, the Impressionists, in particular, were extremely busy, and it was almost impossible to get close to the paintings by Vincent van Gogh. NG - Vincent van GoghOne painting that did catch my eye, however, was by Thomas Gainsborough. Mr and Mrs AndrewsThis portrait is the masterpiece of Gainsborough's early years. It was painted after his return home from London to Suffolk in 1748, soon after the marriage of Robert Andrews of the Auberies and Frances Carter of Ballingdon House, near Sudbury, in November of that year. The landscape evokes Robert Andrews's estate, to which his marriage added property. He has a gun under his arm, while his wife sits on an elaborate Rococo-style wooden bench. The painting of Mrs Andrews's lap is unfinished. The space may have been reserved for a child for Mrs Andrews to hold. The painting follows the fashionable convention of the conversation piece, a (usually) small-scale portrait showing two or more people, often out of doors. The emphasis on the landscape here allows Gainsborough to display his skills as a painter of convincingly changing weather and naturalistic scenery, still a novelty at this time.  Wikipedia - Mr and Mrs AndrewsWe spent some time looking at this particular painting this afternoon. I rather liked it! What do you think, Sydney Grew? |
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