‘To make a mural,’ the Mexican artist Diego Rivera once said, ‘is to put the world on a wall.’ Britain, however, has long been uncertain which world it wishes to reveal. In the 1920s and 1930s, the nation briefly imagined its public spaces could hold images of enduring purpose, a vision which ultimately ended with the Festival of Britain in 1951. Artists secured mural commissions through a variety…
At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will find itself hidden away in storage. And once it is, it can stay there for years. Yet in these vaults are a wealth of treasures. It’s why I recently launched ‘Everyone’s Art’, which has a simple premise: to get these works out of the storeroom and into community centres, libraries, churches,…
I do not, if I can help it, catch a train to anywhere on a Sunday. Yet there I was at 9.14 a.m. heading out from Woodbridge in Suffolk towards Cambridge to view a painting by Walter Sickert, a work I had not seen before and whose vital statistics – what even the work was of – I had no way of knowing; its owner had refused to send a photograph or describe it over the telephone. Arriving at the…
Capel-y-Ffin (1926-1927) by David Jones A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones. Kenneth Clark considered him ‘the most gifted of all the young British painters’. The talk, by a recent art-history graduate with a first-class degree from a reputable university, began at a cracking pace. It was only when he started to show slides to illustrate his…
It is often said that one of the great unfairnesses in life is that bad people sometimes produce beautiful art. That is certainly true of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, one of the nineteenth century’s most influential painters. Living by the mantra of ‘art for art's sake,’ meant, in Whistler's case, not withdrawing from the world but hurling himself at it, fists flying. He called his autobiography…
In Britain our public art collections contain over 600,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, and other art forms. The Government Art Collection has over 15,000 art works in total, including sculptures, watercolours, textiles, photographs, videos and prints. Its oil paintings range from artists including Marcus Geeraerts the Younger’s jewel-bedecked Queen Elizabeth I to works by Lowry,…
Born to a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia in 1844, Mary Cassatt began her training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1860, when she was 16, one of the few institutions where women were allowed to study. She moved to Paris in 1865, with her indomitable mother Katherine Kelso Johnston acting as a chaperone. Here, Mary set about studying L'art pompier - academic and historical…
Thirty years ago, it wasn’t easy tracking down Vilhelm Hammershøi. Many of his paintings remained in private hands and unless you went to Copenhagen, you were unlikely to come across more than a couple hanging together. Now, a painter who was bypassed and undervalued for several decades is everywhere and value of his work has sky-rocketed. Over the last six years, auction prices for his paintings…
Walter Sickert's landscapes and townscapes of Dieppe and its immediate area, could be said to account for the major part of his lifetime’s achievement. He explored its churches, its arcaded waterfront, its main square dominated by the statue of Admiral Duquesne, its cafés, and its little shop fronts, returning again and again to the same subjects until he had exhausted their possibilities. In this…
Gilbert Spencer was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet his fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of…
Claud Lovat Fraser by Marion Neilson (1913) National Portrait Gallery Claud Lovat Fraser, almost always known as Lovat, is a one of the great unsung heroes of 20thC British design. He was 31 years old when he died – he was an extraordinarily prolific artist and produced hundreds of drawings, watercolours, cartoons, illustrations, painted scenery for theatre, posters and produced the design of toys…
In the years before the First World War, the Slade School of Art in London found they had attracted a golden generation of students – it was what the school's professor of fine art, Henry Tonks, called their last 'crisis of brilliance'. Along with Christopher Nevinson, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, Thomas Saunders Nash was already recognised as a highly gifted and original…
In the summer of 1913, Harry Becker, his wife Georgina and daughter Janet moved from a densely populated area of London with few open spaces to Wenhaston, a small isolated village in the north east of Suffolk where most people worked on the land and few rarely left the county, let alone East Anglia. For the next 15 years, Harry would observe the slow turn of the agricultural year and emerge as one…
In an age where we have become accustomed to limited attention spans and equating significant art with instant impact, there was a time not that long ago, when there was room for stoicism, consummate draughtsmanship, poetry and quiet contemplation. The art of Frederick Cayley Robinson exemplifies all of these virtues and though largely forgotten in the decades since his death in the 1920s, his…
The names are not quite equal in fame. Most people will have heard of Augustus John, one of the great draughtsmen of the early part of the twentieth century – his contemporary, the writer Virginia Woolf, called him the 'saviour' of British painting. By contrast, Derwent Lees, one of John's great friends and collaborators, is a remote figure, though he was celebrated and lionised in his day. The…
If people know of his name at all, Paul Fordyce Maitland is not usually thought of as an archetypal modern painter of London. Ask someone to think of the city and its history of Impressionism and the names that come to mind might be Monet or Whistler. Although both knew London, painted it and lived in the city, neither was a Londoner as Maitland was; he was an artist who had studied London through…