Cathy's Art Diary

Clever exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of the Rosettis, Dante Gabrielle, Christina and Elizabeth ne Siddal. It was nice to see three protagonists given almost equal billing and to have poems presented like paintings on the walls with spots to stand on to hear them read. It was an excellent way to blend the visual arts and poetry. The show concentrated on their art more than their lives which was refreshing but to such an extent that I wasn't sure when in the narrative Gabrielle and Elizabeth married. It was also good to see so much of Elizabeth's work. She seemed to work on quite a small scale and a lot of the work was not as fine as her husband's but she was very good at composing an image and I was amused to see that he photographed all her drawings when she died and continued to base work on them. I was interested to see Gabriele's work divided into his work with the Pre-Raphaelites and the later aesthetic work with a beautiful room devoted to t...

Fabulous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the lives and art of the women of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. I was worried that this would just be a lot of portraits of hair and pouting lips but instead it looked at each of the women’s lives in their own right not just as a wife, lover or sister of one of the men. The pictures selected tended to represent a specific moment in their lives not just be a famous picture you know well. There was also lots of examples of their own work and their stories were told well in good commentaries. I loved the room bringing together the three great models, Lizzie Siddall, Fanny Cornford and Annie Miller. I found the show very moving and welled up at seeing a lock of Lizzie Siddall’s hair which was the deep auburn you hoped it was. This was closely followed by another teary moment finding out the Fanny Cornford died in a poor law infirmary and seeing her admission entry and photograph as an old lady. The main big room...

Charming talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival by two novelists who had written novels about artists. The event was a well chaired discussion  between the authors,  led by Nicolette Jones,  bringing out the reasons they wrote the books and their different approaches. This made it much more dynamic that just each talking about their own book in isolation. They had obviously each read and enjoyed the others books which led to a good conversations. Amy Sackville talked about “Painter to the King” about Velazquez at the Spanish Court. She said she started by wanting to invent a court painter at a Baroque court as a painter is an observer plus she wanted to use the world of Jacobean plays. In the end she felt she just kept inventing Velazquez so just used him! Elizabeth Macneal talked about “Doll Factory” a novel based in the world of the Pre-Raphaelites but using imagined main characters. She said she began by looking at the famous p...

Excellent exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. I loved the fact this exhibition included all mediums he worked in not just paintings but also tapestries, furniture and book illustration. They were shown together and given equal weight. There was a great phrase in the commentary which summed up his ethos,   he “remained committed to the ideal of beauty throughout his career. For him it represented the antidote to the crude ugliness and rampant materialism he believed was degrading modern Britain”. Can we have him back please?! The paintings were beautiful and I loved the detail in them however after a while they can feel a bit overwhelming. It was nice to have the room of portraits in the middle of the show to rest your eye from the mass of flowers, drapery and languid figures. I was also impressed by his drawings which were realistic and detailed. “Going to the Battle” in the first room was a stunning example. ...

Interesting but rather niche exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the influence that the purchase and display of the Van Eyck’s Aronolfini Wedding had on the Pre-Raphaelite painters. I liked the idea of looking at the effect of a new work of art going on show on artists and it was interesting to see archive material about its purchase and display in 1842. The Pre-Raphaelites picked up ideas from it about using everyday objects in a symbolic way, the meticulous finish of the work and the use of colour and there were some good examples of all of these. There was also good use of quotes from the artists. However the analogies did become quite strained and extended to the use of mirrors in art. I liked the idea that the picture had been in the Spanish royal collection and Velazquez would have seen it so did it influence Las Meninas? It was also interesting to see how many convex mirrors were used in pictures of artists at home and I loved the Mark Gertler self-portrai...

Delightful exhibition at Tate Britain of works on paper by the Pre-Raphaelite artists. This wasn’t over curated and just showed nice pieces which aren’t often seen with a little bit of commentary on who the artists were. Highlights included a lovely picture of Fanny Cornforth, a lovely sketch by Millais done in a church in Scotland when sheltering from the rain and a portrait of F.G. Stephens by Ford Maddox Brown as a study for the figure of Christ in “Washing Peter’s Feet”. A particular highlight was some watercolours by Lizzie Siddall next to a Rossetti of her.

Wonderful exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the life and work of William Morris as well as taking a look at how he has influences cultural and political life since. This was a brilliantly curated show which touched on all aspects of Morris’ life as a designer, poet, social reformer, environmentalist and political theorist. It included moving personal objects such as one of his satchels and items from the Red House and other homes. It would have been easy to just do a show on his design work but this was dealt with cleverly with the array of wallpapers being show in small panels between the different sections of the exhibition. I loved one quote from the commentary which said that “Wallpaper by the yard was Morris’s most truly democratic art”. The political and social reforming side of his life was shown in an understandable manner and of course I loved the section on his friendships. Did you know Emmeline Pankhurst has run a show selling Morris fabrics...

Small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of pictures of Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, model and embroiderer. I thought I had a good knowledge of Jane Morris but I learnt a lot from this small display. I hadn’t know she had an epileptic daughter who she nursed and that not only did she probably have an affair with Rossetti but also with Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a poet and Irish and Egyptian nationalist. I got a real sense of her having a lot of female friends in her circle and I loved a picture of her on holiday in Sienna with two daughters of an MP and one of their husbands, taken against a photo study backdrop of the city with the man lounged at the women’s feet. One of the women went on to become the first women on the London County Council. I also liked the four pictures of her as an older lady only one of which was printed at the time and the plates of which were found in a skip!

Talk at the Charleston Festival looking at the role of muses in art. Henrietta Garnett talked about and read from her book “Wives and Stunners” which looks at the women who were muses to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Rupert Thomson read from his book “Secrecy” set in post Renaissance Florence and looking at a real sculptor in wax commissioned to create a life-size Venus. Under the excellent chairmanship of Francis Spalding the authors then discussed what had led them to write the books and the role they felt muses had played.

Lovely exhibition at the Watts Gallery of work by Eleanor Fortesecue-Brickdale, often described as the last Pre-Raphaelite. By the end of Eleanor’s working life her style was quite old fashioned but the works were very delicate and engaging. A lot of her work was for book illustration and it was interesting to see the preparatory drawings and finished books together. There was also some lovely paintings such as a Renaissance style portrait Most interesting was a picture of Winifred Roberts who went on to become Winifred Nicholson, a real colliding of artistic worlds. This was the first time I had visited the Watts Gallery and I thought it was delightful and I’ll definitely be going back.

Comprehensive exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the Pre-Raphaelites and those they influenced. I liked the fact that it concentrated on the works in their own right and the achievements of the movement rather than the personal stories however at times that was slightly to the detriment of the flow of the show. Certain bits of the story were told in snippets rather than giving a narrative. I was super to see works by Lizzie Sidall included plus sculptures by Alexander Munro to add a different dimension. The exhibition however did suffer from its own success and was very busy. It was great to see the first Pre-Raphaelite work by each painter together however it was so busy that there was no point in the room where you could view all of them at the same time without a lot of people between you and them. This is probably my own fault for leaving it so late to go but it was still a shame to spend more time dodging round people than looking at the art works. Review...

A lecture at the Courtauld given by Ayla Lepine to compliment the current Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain. I am going to honest and say I did get a bit lost! It is only now reading the introduction to it again that I realise it was about linking the Pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic revival and seeing how they influenced each other, I know it should have been obvious from the title! However this did not really come across clearly in the lecture. The speaker launched straight in and the introduction on the night was more about the current exhibition buy how she was going to take an imaginative view of it an include some works which were not in it. She had a tendency to rush through a series of names and links between them in an amazed fashion. I did start to think that surely as all the names lived about the same time and were operating in artistic circles in London then of course there were connections as there would be now. I think I will chalk this one up to m...

Book talk at the Charleston Festival  bringing together Fiona MacCarthy and Marina Warner. Fiona MacCarthy was talking about her biography of Burne-Jones, which is why I am including it in this blog! She gave an illustrated talk which was fascinating but I felt that she had overly focused the presentation to fit with the subject matter of the second speaker. Marina Warner was talking about her the Arabian Nights which looked at how the stories opened up ideas of magic in the West. I didn’t really feel that the two subjects fitted together. This is very usual for Charleston where speakers are usually matched beautifully to bring more out of each subject but in this case it didn’t work for me. 

Exhibition of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais at Tate Britain. This exhibition was extremely busy as it just has one more weekend to run. I must admit to finding it all a bit sweet and sugary particularly the room entitled Fancies which included pictures of children often in historic costume, the highlight of which was “Bubbles” which was used for the famous Pears Soap advert. It quite turned my stomach! However it is easy to forget how ground breaking some of his early work was. For example “Christ in the house of his parents” is to us a rather over familiar sentimental image however when it was first exhibited was considered offensive. In the early work there is almost a super real quality. One of the picture write ups put it perfectly “mastery of realism in the service of emotional intensity”. It was the portraits I liked best particularly a small one of Emily Patmore and a ¾ length of Louise Jopling. There was also a wonderful Disraeli which had had its expressi...