Enfilade

From the museum:

Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner: Pittura inglese verso la modernità
The Dawn of Modernity: Painting in Britain in the 18th Century
Fondazione Roma Museo, Palazzo Sciarra, Rome, 15 April — 20 June 2014

Curated by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi

The exhibition offers the public a comprehensive overview of the social and artistic development that took place during the XVIII century in step with the hegemony gained by Great Britain at the historical, political, and economic level. For this purpose a corpus of over one hundred works belonging to prestigious institutions such as the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London, and the Uffizi Gallery has been formed and is accompanied by a nucleus of works from the important American collection belonging to the Yale Center for British Art.

During the eighteenth century England became an authentic international power, leader of the Industrial Revolution and of the domination of the sea routes, and thus raised the issue of establishing its own artistic school for the first time. The economic development lead by Great Britain created a new middle-class which included professionals, industrialists, merchants, scientists and philosophers who, having found that visible arts considerably affirmed their new social status, became patrons of those masters who over the century contributed to the definition of a domestic school.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections featuring a selection of works by the most significant English painters, for the purpose of documenting the portrait and landscape genres that found more fortune during this century, creating a figurative language capable of interpreting modernity which, in the nineteenth century, became a reference throughout Europe. Visitors may admire artists such as Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Füssli, Constable, and Turner. Their works offer a significant cross-section of the peculiarity and originality of English art, an exhibition of which has not been held in Rome since 1966.

Update (added 19 April 2014) — The exhibition press release, which details the seven sections, is available as a PDF file here».

The catalogue is available from Skira:

Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner: Pittura inglese verso la modernità (Rome: Skira, 2014), 304 pages, ISBN: 8857222707, €40.