Ich Bien Hier! Von Rembrandt zum Selfie
A remarkable collection of watercolour paintings and drawings once owned by the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia will go on show at Hampton Court Palace this spring, as part of the nationwide commemorations marking the 
The catalogue offers an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of Jefferson’s architecture and, at the same time, leads to a clearer understanding of Palladio himself. Jefferson looked to Palladio because he was the architect of one of Europe’s few republics in which administrative power was in the hands of landed gentlemen who avoided the ostentation of princely manners and spent long periods of time in the countryside.
With a collection of more than 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures by David, Girodet, Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix, Faces of Terror presents French forms of fantastical Romanticism. This darker part of 19th-century art reveals a certain strength of spirit and provides a fascinating perspective on imagination during the romantic period.
The British passion for landscape—already present in the literary works of Milton, Shakespeare, and even Chaucer—began to dominate the visual arts at the time of the Industrial Revolution. In his poem “Jerusalem” (1804), William Blake wrote of both “England’s green and pleasant land” and the “dark satanic mills” of its new industrial cities. Drawn from the remarkable collections of the National Museum Wales, Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape will offer audiences a rare opportunity to follow the rise of landscape painting in Britain, unfolding a story that runs from the Industrial Revolution through the eras of Romanticism, Impressionism, and Modernism, to the postmodern and post-industrial imagery of today.
Showcasing masterpieces by artists from Constable to Turner, to Monet working in Britain, the exhibition offers new insights into the cultural history of Britain as it became the world’s first industrial nation late in the eighteenth century. Cities—where the nation’s new wealth was generated and its population concentrated—mills, and factories started to challenge country estates and rolling hills as the defining images of the nation, and artists tracked, recorded, and resisted these changes, inaugurating a new era of British landscape painting which both celebrated the land’s natural beauty and a certain idea of Britain while also observing the feverish energies of the modern world.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The catalogue is published by Giles:
Tim Barringer and Oliver Fairclough, Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape (London: Giles, 2014), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804342, £40 / $60.
Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills recounts the story of British landscape painting from the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century to the present day. Examining 88 paintings from the National Museum of Wales, this volume traces the history of landscape art through romanticism, impressionism and modernism right up to the postindustrial imagery of the 21st century.
The book presents two major essays: one by Tim Barringer on the tradition of British landscape painting and its position within an increasingly industrialized society, the other by Oliver Fairclough on the significance of the Welsh landscape within the British tradition. Loosely chronological and divided into six thematic sections, this new volume demonstrates the strong continuity between the British art of today and that of over 250 years ago: contemporary works, such as conceptual artist Richard Long’s photo pieces based on hiking in the Welsh mountains echo the poetics of place as deeply as Richard Wilson’s landscapes of the 1740s.
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University. His recent publications include Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2013), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design (2013) and Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art (2012). Oliver Fairclough is Keeper of Art, National Museum of Wales, and the author of A Companion Guide to the Welsh National Museum of Art (2011) and Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection (2009).
Although he belonged to an important line of 18th-century artists, Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745–1811) has never before been the subject of a monographic exhibition. The Cognacq-Jay Museum will pay tribute to his alluring talent through a selection of paintings and graphic works. Jean-Baptiste Huet, who spent the majority of his career in Paris, was first trained in his family environment. He then received instruction from the animal painter Charles Dagomer and encouragement from Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, a talented student of Boucher. Benefitting from these influences, Huet developed a naturalistic and graceful style. He excelled in works of pastoral scenery depicting tales of the tender romances of shepherds, painted rustic landscapes with poetic notes and depicted the animal world with frankness and sympathy. He was admitted to the Académie in 1769, had regular exhibitions at the Paris Salon and was entrusted with decorative cycles. Huet’s art met with great success in various mediums. In 1783, Oberkampf, founder of the royal manufacture of Jouy-en-Josas, requested his services in creating printed patterns. His early creations were light, still in the Rococo style, then later gave way to straighter and more orderly shapes in the wake of Neoclassicism. Even up to his very last expressions, Huet’s work constitutes a tremendous tribute to the beauty of nature, with aspects of both reverie and fascination.
leave a comment