Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity

Delightful exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at the life and work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

It was lovely that these works were shown throughout this beautiful house so that some were seen in the sort of aesthetic setting for which they were painted. There was a useful booklet with all the labels in but it took me a while to realise there were also room guides giving more background on some of the main works. I’d thought they were just guides to the rooms themselves. I also missed out on the tape which might have filled in a bit more of the background information.

I was fascinated to see Alma-Tadema’s early work which placed him in the Flemish tradition he had been born into and included a lovely early self-portrait. The second room looked at his honeymoon in Pompeii and the almost overnight effect this had on his work. I loved the imagined Roman scenes populated with Victorian faces.

He moved to London in 1869 on the death of his first wife where he met Laura Epps and was soon married again. Laura was also an artists and it was nice that the show included works by her and his daughter Anna. I got an impression of a close family bound together by art. There were good sections on their two houses in London, Townsend House and Grove End Road with lovely photographs and paintings and objects which had been in them. I particularly liked a series of panels he had asked friends to paint for door panels which included works by Leighton, Val Prinsep and Sargent.

The paintings were a bit sugary but I got pulled into them particularly enjoying spotting regularly used objects and furniture. You can’t help but like the wonderful sense of heat and colour in the classical subjects. It was nice to see “The Roses of Heliogablus” again which is still on loan from Mexico. My favourite picture was a wonderful man’s back from a picture now in sections of “Hadrian in Britain” which was hanging on the stairs reunited with two other sections from the picture.

Closes on 29 October 2017

Reviews
Times
Telegraph

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thomas Becket: Murder and Making of a Saint

Image
Stunning exhibition at the British Museum on the life and afterlife of Thomas Becket. I studied Becket both at A Level and at university so I was really looking forward to this show and it did not disappoint. From walking in to see an old friend, the early Limoges casket showing the murder from the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was gripped. The show told the story well using fantastic objects and led you through his life, the murder, the political aftermath, his sainthood and miracles, and how Canterbury became a major pilgrimage site. It is hard to pick out the best objects as so many were wonderful. I loved that they had early copies of some of the five eyewitness accounts of the murder which made you fell you were almost touching the event. I liked the manuscript on his time in exile which was almost like a comic strip. How wonderful to get a 13th century font from Sweden which shows how far and how quickly the news that Henry II had integrated the murder spread. I think my
Read more

Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year Exhibition 2019

Image
Delightful exhibition at Clarendon Fine Art showing pictures from the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year TV series. I had loved the series which had set nine artists, both professional and amateur, to paint one of three celebrities. It then had a semi-final and final with them all looking at one sitter and in the final they also took on a commission. I loved the way you watched a picture build and how some were then made or spoiled by one stroke of paint.   Finding these pictures I knew so well in the flesh was therefore fascinating. None of them disappointed. My favourite artist from the final, Tom Mead, works looked just as good in real life if not better as you could see the detail. The show included his impressive self-portrait which he submitted to enter the competition, a wonderful fragmented picture of his reflection in a mirror giving a sense of movement. I loved that it included a large version of him and a miniature. His commission for the final of Jazzie B was
Read more

The Renaissance Nude

Image
Beautiful exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at the nude in Renaissance art. The show was gently themed but mainly let the pictures speak for themselves. It began by looking at the subjects, both religious and secular, which include nude figures then examined techniques and models used in these works, finishing by looking at more personal pictures. This is a period I’ve studied a lot so there were a lot of old friends and it was quite fun predicting what might appear. There were a few surprises too such as the rather surprising drawing of the Ecstatic Christ. I liked the fact the show included lots of different art forms not just paintings including sculpture, etchings, drawings and illuminated manuscripts. There were some fascinating hangs to draw comparisons particularly two sets of pictures by Giovanni Bellini and Hand Memling from almost exactly the same date. These were shown back to back in a display cabinet down the middle of one room. My favourite work was
Read more