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.
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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).
Antonio Bonazza è esponente di spicco di una delle più operose famigliedi scultori del Settecento veneto: insieme al padre Giovanni eai fratelli Francesco e Tommaso ha lavorato in moltissime chiese diPadova e del territorio, oltre che nei giardini delle ville di campagna dinobili famiglie veneziane.Le sue opere si collocano spesso ben al di sopra del livello di quelle deisuoi contemporanei, e raggiungono esiti di eleganza e leggerezza tra ipiù alti della scultura veneta del Settecento.La giornata di studi, organizzata dal Museo Diocesano di Padova inoccasione dei 250 anni dalla morte dell’artista (12 gennaio 1763), è stata occasione per aggiornare il catalogo delle opere, precisare la cronologia, mettere a fuoco la personalità umana e artistica di Antonio e i suoi rapporti con quella del padre Giovanni e dei fratelli Francesco e Tommaso, indagare modelli e fonti visive ed esplorare le relazioni tra la sua arte e quella dei suoi contemporanei.
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.
The Fitzwilliam Museum: A History traces the full story from the Museum’s origins in the 1816 bequest of Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, up to the present day. It sets the Fitzwilliam’s individual story against the larger context of the growth and development of museums and galleries in the UK and further afield. The text and illustrations draw primarily on the rich and largely unpublished archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, including the Syndicate Minutes, the reports of University debates published in the Cambridge University Reporter from 1870 onwards, compilations of earlier nineteenth-century documents, architectural plans and drawings, newspaper reports, letters, diaries, exhibition catalogues, photographs and other miscellaneous documents. With this material a substantial proportion of the narrative is told through contemporary voices, not least those of the Museum’s thirteen directors to date, each one a strong and influential character.
During the Spanish Colonial period in Latin America (1521–1850), precious gold and silver were crafted into elegant jewelry, then embellished with emeralds from Colombia, coral from Mexico, and pearls from Venezuela. To demonstrate their wealth and status, people were painted wearing their finest dress and elaborate jewelry. Selecting from its permanent collection, the Denver Art Museum installed the long-running exhibition Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry in Colonial Latin America in its Spanish Colonial galleries in December 2014. This lavishly illustrated publication serves as a companion to the Glitterati exhibition and, on a larger scale, to the collection of Spanish Colonial jewelry and portraiture at the museum.
Taking as its focus our newly-acquired sketchbook, which was completed by Sir Joshua Reynolds between 1750 and 1752, this display investigates what attracted the young artist to Italy and the lasting influence his tour had on his life and art. Scroll through a digital version of our sketchbook and see what caught Reynolds’s eye as he sketched his way across Rome. Discover why Italy’s art, history and landscape has had such an enduring influence on centuries of artistic imagination. Featuring works by Wilson, Guardi and Northcote, plus supporting loans from the De Pass Collection at the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, join us for a journey to la bella Italia.
Metropolitan Museum curators William M. Ivins and his protégé A. Hyatt Mayor not only assembled a vast collection of prints, from Renaissance masterworks to ephemeral works, but also expanded the appreciation of prints as aesthetic objects, socio-historical documents, and tools of communication. More radically, by discussing these prints in accessible language, they changed our notions of how art reaches the wider public. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including personal letters and departmental records, this is the first comprehensive exploration of the lives, careers, theories, and influence of Ivins and Mayor. Also included are 120 exceptional prints that represent the breadth and depth of their acquisitions, including works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Callot, Goya, Whistler, Cassatt, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
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