Enfilade

From Gainsborough’s House:

Drawings and Watercolours from a Private Collection 1700-1840
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, 30 June – 29 September 2012

Curated by Huon Mallalieu

The main exhibition at Gainsborough’s House for 2012 is a selection of British watercolours from a distinguished private collection in East Anglia. Formed during the 1950s and 1960s the extensive collection from which this selection of some 70 examples has been made by guest curator Huon Mallalieu, is one of the last remaining in private hands from the golden age of connoisseurship in British watercolours.

The exhibition concentrates on Thomas Gainsborough’s contemporaries and includes works by famous artists (J.M.W. Turner, Paul Sandby, J.R. Cozens, Thomas Rowlandson, Francis Towne), as well as items by important forerunners, lesser known practitioners, and amateurs of varying skill. The selection is thematic with an emphasis on topography beginning in East Anglia and moving outwards to London across the English Channel to mainland Europe, and then over the oceans to America, India and China.