Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking 

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 

19 June – 3 November 2024 

Hiroshi Yoshida 

El Capitan, 1925 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

Hiroshi Yoshida 

Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1926. 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum 

Dulwich Picture Gallery brings together artworks by the Yoshida family, a Japanese artistic dynasty including Yoshida Hiroshi, Fujio, Tōshi, Hodaka, Chizuko and Ayomi. The first of its kind in the UK – and Europe more widely – this exhibition shines a spotlight on three generations of woodblock print artists and trace the evolution of Japanese printmaking across two centuries.

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950)

The exhibition opens with work by Yoshida Hiroshi, one of Japan’s greatest artists. A pioneer of the shin hanga movement, he travelled across the world and gained an international reputation for his woodblock prints of American and European landscapes. New research will provide an insight into Hiroshi’s time in London, including his visit to Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1900, and his signature in the Gallery’s visitor book, along with his diaries, will serve as an intimate starting point for the show. The exhibition will include over 20 works by Hiroshi, many of which will be on display in the UK for the first time, with highlights including El Capitan (1925), A Canal in Venice (1925) and Kumoi Cherry Trees (1926).

Fujio Yoshida 

Yellow Iris, 1954 

Private Collection 

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa.

Fujio Yoshida  (1887–1987)

Works by Yoshida Fujio, a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker, will be exhibited in the UK for the first time. Fujio was married to Hiroshi and travelled with him across the USA and Europe, exhibiting her delicate watercolours of Japan to acclaim. Upon returning home in 1907, she took part in the first exhibition organised by the Japanese Academy of Arts. A skilled printmaker, Fujio later became known for her iconic close-up designs of plants and flowers.

Toshi Yoshida 

Unknown (Michi no), 1968 

Private Collection 

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa

Tōshi Yoshida (1911–1995) and Hodaka Yoshida  (1926–1995) 

The exhibition also showcases prints by Hiroshi’s and Fujio’s sons, Tōshi and Hodaka, both of whom brought post-war abstraction to the Japanese printmaking process.

Early on in his career, Yoshida Tōshi followed in his father’s footsteps, depicting landscapes and cityscapes, but experimented with abstract prints after World War II. The exhibition includes some of his most accomplished works, including Night Tokyo: Supper Waggon (1938) and Camouflage (1985).

Hodaka Yoshida  

Profile of an Ancient Warrior, 1958 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum 

Yoshida Hodaka was a leading printmaker in post-war Japan. In a break from his family’s established style, he expanded upon traditional printmaking and incorporated collage and photoetching into his practice. Like his father and brother, foreign travels influenced his choice of motifs, but he was also inspired by Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstraction. Works such as Profile of an Ancient Warrior (1958) and Nonsense Mythology (1969) demonstrate his unique style.

Chizuko Yoshida 

Tenryuji Garden, 1953 

Private Collection

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa.

Chizuko Yoshida (1924–2017)

Yoshida Chizuko, who married Hodaka, was a renowned artist and co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, the Women’s Print Association. Chizuko often depicted landscapes, nature, and traditional Japanese scenes but she also explored aspects of abstraction and repetition. Her works were said to have connected popular art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and traditional Japanese printmaking. Highlights include A View at the Western Suburb of the Metropolis/ Rainy Season (1995) and Jazz (1954).

Ayomi Yoshida (b. 1958)

The exhibition culminates with a new site-specific installation of cherry blossom by Yoshida Ayomi, Hodaka’s and Chizuko’s daughter. The youngest member of the Yoshida printmaking family, Ayomi’s practice combines traditional Japanese printmaking techniques with modern elements, often utilising organic materials, and she has been exhibited at major international institutions. Ayomi’s immersive installation, a new work created especially for Dulwich Picture Gallery, explores the recurring theme of seasonality in Japanese art and is inspired by the Cherry trees in Dulwich Village, originally taken from the iconic site of Yoshino in Japan, famous for its cherry blossom.

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking feature loans from international and private collections. The majority of works by Yoshida Hiroshi will be on loan from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan and are travelling to the UK for the first time. The exhibition is curated by Dr Monika Hinkel with support from Helen Hillyard, Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It will be accompanied by a full colour publication featuring new research by Dr Monika Hinkel.

Jennifer Scott, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“I get goosebumps thinking about Yoshida Hiroshi’s visit to Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1900. We (metaphorically) welcome him back with this landmark exhibition which introduces UK audiences to his exquisite work and to his legacy - an exceptional family of printmakers.”

Dr Monika Hinkel, Curator of the exhibition, said:

“It is exciting to be able to exhibit so many iconic works of the renowned Yoshida family of printmakers to showcase the fascinating creative development of such outstanding artists over three generations.”

Ayomi Yoshida  said:

“When I found my grandfather’s signature in the Dulwich Picture Gallery guest book, my heart skipped a beat. What an exciting and intriguing journey it must have been for Hiroshi, then an unknown painter and only 23, traveling from a country so far away. How proud he would be of this family exhibit of six, welcomed 120 years later at this wonderful museum.”

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Soulscapes Exhibition @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - A major exhibition of landscape art that expands and redefine the genre

Soulscapes

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

14 February – 2 June 2024

Mónica de Miranda 

Sunrise, 2023 

Inkjet print on cotton paper 

Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid 

Isaac Julien 

Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds), 2015 

© Isaac Julien / Private collection, London

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Soulscapes, a major exhibition of landscape art that expands and redefine the genre. Featuring more than 30 contemporary works, it spans painting, photography, film, tapestry and collage from leading artists including Hurvin Anderson, Phoebe Boswell, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kimathi Donkor, Isaac Julien, Marcia Michael, Mónica de Miranda and Alberta Whittle, as well as some of the most important emerging voices working today.

Soulscapes explores our connection with the world around us through the eyes of artists from the African Diaspora. It considers the power of landscape art and reflect on themes of belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Anderson, Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives and founder of Black British Art. Anderson said: “Soulscapes grew from the periods of enforced ‘lockdown’ that millions experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the same period, the question of racial equality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement helped ignite conversation about inclusion and social justice. These historical moments gave way to new possibilities for landscape art, which is being interrogated by artists in new and expansive ways. At a time when global consciousness has been profoundly attuned to the precariousness and power of the natural world in our lives, I hope this exhibition will challenge perceptions of our relationship with nature.”

Hurvin Anderson 

Limestone Wall, 2020  

© Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery 

Photo: Richard Ivey

Jermaine Francis 

A Pleasant Land. J. Samuel Johnson, 

& the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures, 2023 

Photographic montage, 130cm x 100cm 

Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis

The exhibition opens by examining the theme of belonging in relation to the natural world and consider the varied ways we experience the land and how this relates to our sense of identity, connection and safety. Limestone Wall (2020), a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. In the series A Pleasant Land. J. Samuel Johnson, & The Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures (2023), photographer Jermaine Francis considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby 

Cassava Garden, 2015 

Acrylic, transfers, colour pencil, charcoal and 

commemorative fabric on paper, 182.88 x 152.4 cm 

© Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy the artist,

Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Photo: Robert Glowacki 

Reflecting on landscapes and memory, the exhibition considers how artists have used the natural world to express personal histories. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, Cassava Garden (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity. The Gallery’s mausoleum is home to a site-specific installation of Phoebe Boswell’s I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know (2019), a meditative video work created over the course of six years that documents daily life in Zanzibar, a place of deep connection for the artist.

Kimathi Donkor 

On Episode Seven, 2020

Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 76 cm

Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London

Photo: Kimathi Donkor

Che Lovelace 

Moonlight Searchers, 2022

Acrylic and dry pigment on board panels 

Private collection. 

Courtesy of the artist, Corvi Mora, Various Small Fires 

and Nicola Vassell Gallery 

Soulscapes celebrates the power of landscapes to evoke joy and pleasure, whether through the representation of personal experiences or through its expression in composition, colour and style. Che Lovelace’s vibrant paintings, The Climber (2022) and Moonlight Searchers (2022), depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Paintings from Kimathi Donkor’s Idyl series (2016-2020) depict Black subjects free to be themselves within nature, hopeful visions that might be approached through the idea of Black Joy. 

Artist Kimathi Donkor, said: “My ‘Idyl’ paintings celebrate tender and contemplative moments shared by families and friends as they enjoy serene meadows, lakes, mountains, forests, rivers and beaches together. As an artist who has often focussed on ‘the struggle’, these works represent hopeful visions that honour what the fulfilment of black liberation might sometimes feel like -- even if only fleetingly.” 

Kimathi Mafafo 

Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery, 2020 

Hand and Machine Embroidered Fabric, 112 x 98cm 

Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 

Finally, the exhibition explores the transformative power of nature to stimulate healing, renewal and wellbeing. In Unforseen Journey of Self-Discovery (2020), a tapestry by Kimathi Mafafo, a woman emerges from a cocooned veil of white muslin, finding her way into the vibrant, colourful and healing space of the natural world. Works by Alberta Whittle manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-Blackness; Whittle invites viewers to interact with her work, and to imagine different futures. 

Artist Alberta Whittle said: “Within my practice, thinking about the land and the natural world as sources of indigenous, pre-colonial knowledge(s) has become a pathway to explore different ways of dreaming new ways of being. Landscape art can gather together less recognised or forgotten relationships between humanity and the land as well as become a lightning rod for galvanising conservation, especially with devastation from climate colonialism looming against the horizon.”

Jennifer Scott, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “Soulscapes marks a new approach to landscape art. Featuring some of the greatest artists of our day, it’s an exciting opportunity to re-present the genre within Dulwich Picture Gallery, the home of the celebrated European landscape masters of the past. This visually stunning exhibition highlights the contemporary relevance of nature in art and its universal possibilities of healing, reflection and belonging.” 

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Berthe Morisot @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Shaping Impressionism

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism 

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 

31 March – 10 September 2023 

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism, the first major UK exhibition of the renowned Impressionist since 1950. In partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, it brings together 40 of Berthe Morisot’s most important works from international collections, many never seen before in the UK, to reveal the artist as a trailblazer of the movement as well as uncovering a previously untold connection between her work and 18th century culture, with around 20 works for comparison.

A founding member of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was known for her swiftly painted glimpses of contemporary life and intimate domestic scenes. She featured prominently in the Impressionist exhibitions and defied social norms to become one of the movement’s most influential figures. Now, in a bold new retelling of Morisot’s story, Dulwich Picture Gallery will draw on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan Monet to trace the roots of her inspiration, revealing the ways in which Morisot engaged with 18th century art and culture, while also highlighting the originality of her artistic vision, which ultimately set her apart from her predecessors.

Highlights include Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875), painted while Berthe Morisot was on honeymoon in England, and her striking Self-Portrait (1885), which appear alongside Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman (c.1769) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection. Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher (1892), In the Apple Tree (1890) and Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte (1893), are among nine paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, many receiving their first ever showing in the UK.

Central to the exhibition is the story of the “rediscovery” of 18th century art in France and its impact on Impressionism with an accompanying body of work by artists including François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Antoine Watteau. After falling out of favour following the French Revolution, the art of the ancien regime was enthusiastically acquired by 19th century collectors and reintroduced to the public through exhibitions and new rooms devoted to its artists at the Musée du Louvre. Morisot copied works by Boucher; she experimented with red chalk, a technique closely associated with Rococo drawing; and declared her admiration for Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and Georges de La Tour. Uniquely amongst her compatriots, Morisot also expressed a passionate enthusiasm for English painters Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Romney.

The exhibition demonstrates the numerous ways in which Berthe Morisot engaged with 18th century themes, drawing on her depictions of everyday life, fashion, interiors and intimate scenes. Works such as At the Ball (1875) reflect the elegance of the fête galante tradition and 18th century portraiture. Hung alongside Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal (c.1715-17) from Dulwich Picture Gallery, a clear comparison can be drawn between the elegantly dressed and costumed figures and Berthe Morisot’s glamorous sitter with her 18th century fan.

Berthe Morisot was known for painting glimpses into women’s private spaces along with an ability to capture feeling and emotion. Works including The Psyche Mirror (1876) and Woman at her Toilette (1875/80) form a point of comparison and contrast with 18th century examples by artists such as Boucher and Fragonard, reflecting the different priorities and perspectives of a woman Impressionist working in a modern 19th century exhibition context, compared with male Rococo painters working for private collectors.

The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Lois Oliver (Curator at the Royal Academy, Adjunct Professor in History of Art at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in London and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art), Dr Marianne Mathieu (Scientific Director of the exhibition) and Dr Dominique d’Arnoult (independent curator and Professor of Art History at the University of Lausanne). 

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue published in both English and French. Edited under the Scientific Direction of Dr Marianne Mathieu, this publication presents ground-breaking archival research and fresh perspectives.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

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Helen Frankenthaler @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Radical Beauty

Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Through 18 April 2022

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by the leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Shining a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts it showcases works never shown before in the UK, to reveal Helen Frankenthaler as a creative force and a trailblazer of printmaking, who endlessly pushed the possibilities of the medium.

Ranging from Helen Frankenthaler’s first ever woodcut in 1973, to her last work published in 2009, this major print retrospective brings together 30 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, including Madame Butterfly (2000) and East and Beyond (1973) to reveal the enormous diversity in scale and technique in her oeuvre. Challenging traditional notions of woodcut printmaking, the exhibition reveals the charge and energy behind Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘no rules’ approach, arranged thematically to spotlight the elements crucial to her unique style of mark-marking, from experimentation to inspiration and collaboration.

At the age of only 23 Helen Frankenthaler created her influential oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952), the first work produced using her signature soak stain technique - pouring thinned paint directly onto canvas from above to create broad expanses of translucent color. It was a breakthrough that would propel Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene at a time where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated. This technique went on to influence the artists of the Color Field school of painting, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and had a profound impact on her printmaking career.

Opening ten years after her death, ‘Radical Beauty’ examines Helen Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s great innovators. In the same way as she did with her earlier paintings, Helen Frankenthaler defied the limitations of what is often considered the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques; she found new dimensions to the medium, experimenting with different orientations and colourways, and a variety of new tools and methods. What resulted is an incomparable body of work, where prints appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms.

Highlights include Helen Frankenthaler’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space. The work holds a sense of tangible colour and form, but at the same time has a fluidity that sets it apart from other artists at the time such as Jasper Johns. Other standout works include Cameo (1980) and Freefall (1993), which further demonstrate how Helen Frankenthaler accepted the challenge of woodcut printmaking and found ways to make it yield to her approach. In Cameo, Helen Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour and used her distinctive “guzzying” technique – where she worked her surfaces with sandpaper and in some instances, dentist drills, to achieve different affects.

A key focus of the exhibition is Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000). Sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and occupies an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title. In this print, and in others in the exhibition we can also understand Helen Frankenthaler’s working process and how each collaboration propelled her forward creatively. The exhibition includes all six woodcuts of the series Tales of Genji (1998), a highly ambitious body of work for which Helen Frankenthaler employed her soak-stain technique– this time painting with water-based colours onto sheets of plywood. Working with Tyler and his studio of printmakers once again, they embarked on a process of constant experimentation and a journey of trial and error to achieve Helen Frankenthaler’s vision.

Jane Findlay, Exhibition Curator and Head of Programme & Engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“This is a truly special opportunity for visitors to get up close to Frankenthaler’s phenomenal works – all of which have never been shown before in this country – in the intimate spaces of Dulwich Picture Gallery. There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism - that born at once feeling - that you see in her painting. And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”

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Adriaen van de Velde @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
12 October 2016 – 15 January 2017

Adriaen van de Velde

Panoramic summer landscape with a horseman and a post wagon, 1661

Oil on panel

Private Collection

In collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Dulwich Picture Gallery will host the first-ever exhibition devoted to the painter and draughtsman ADRIAEN VAN DE VELDE (1636 - 1672), one of the finest landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

Over a career of less than two decades Van de Velde produced a varied body of paintings and drawings that earned him tremendous posthumous fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he was one of the most sought-after names among collectors in Germany, France and England.

Van de Velde was born in Amsterdam, the son and brother respectively of the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger. Adriaen van de Velde, however, pursued an independent career as a landscape painter to focus on tranquil landscapes that depict both typically Dutch and Italianising views populated by figures in peaceful harmony with animals and the surrounding landscape.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape will bring together 60 of his most accomplished works, including landscapes and beachscapes as well as an extraordinary selection of exquisite preparatory studies, many of them in red chalk. Displayed alongside the artist’s paintings, these studies offer a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century landscape painter at work, from conception to completion. The show will also include pen-and-ink drawings and watercolours that stand alone as works of art in their own right, revealing the extent of the young artist’s talent.

Bart Cornelis, curator of the exhibition, commented:

This exhibition provides an opportunity for the public to get to know the work of one of those exceptionally gifted and refined artists of the Dutch Golden Age who has more recently slipped through the net of history but who deserves to be rediscovered as the great painter and draughtsman that he is. What’s more, his drawings provide a fascinating opportunity to see a seventeenth-century Dutch artist at work: we can, as it were, look over his shoulder to see how he composed his landscapes.

The exhibition opens with Van de Velde’s most accomplished paintings, made when the artist was still in his early twenties. Blissful scenes such as the masterly Beach at Scheveningen, 1658 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel)introduce Van de Velde’s highly individual style, in which everything stands out in the pure light of a summer’s day. Especially in his later work Van de Velde succeeded in incorporating the sun-drenched atmosphere of Italianate painters such as Karel Dujardin in his works, but brought a refinement to his subjects that was rarely matched by his contemporaries. Van de Velde probably never travelled outside Holland; the mountainous scenery and Italianate character of some of his landscapes and drawn studies sprung from the imagination and were inspired by the work of fellow artists. Examples include the Pastoral scene from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the preparatory composition drawing for this painting from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

There are few artists whose working procedures can be illustrated as well as in the case of Van de Velde, making it possible to follow precisely the various phases of his creative process. For the first time Van de Velde’s famous painting of The Hut (Rijksmuseum) will be displayed alongside the drawn studies that the artist made in preparation for the painting, providing insight into the work’s genesis.Such studies include Seated woman with basket and Resting cow with three sheep (both Amsterdam Museum), as well as a drawing from a private collection depicting the hut that lends the picture its name. These and other studies in the exhibition reveal Van de Velde’s almost obsessive attention to detail and how he proceeded from a rough composition sketch in pen and ink to separate studies of animals and figures from life, often executed in the medium of red chalk.

Few seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists devoted so much time and energy to sketching from models in the studio and the exhibition will showcase some of the artist’s remarkable figure studies, including a sheet with Two Studies of a Reclining Shepherd (Rijksmuseum), which in its elegance and exquisite use of red chalk prefigures the work of eighteenth-century French artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher.

Van de Velde excelled in the depiction of the human figure and their integration into a landscape and was frequently asked to paint the staffage in the landscapes of his contemporaries; his figures can be found in works by artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and, for example, in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Two Churches and a Town Wall (1660s) by Jan van der Heyden, which will feature in the exhibition.

The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s cabinet-sized works and concludes with his larger paintings. Together they illustrate the enormous variety of subject-matter in Van de Velde’s oeuvre, from panoramic views to hunting scenes, pastoral subjects or depictions of winter. The larger works include the monumental Portrait of a Family in a Landscape (Rijksmuseum) and the idyllic Landscape with cattle and figures (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Together these works show a Dutch Arcadia as it was imagined by this exceptionally refined artist.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape is curated by Bart Cornelis, former Deputy Editor of The Burlington Magazine, London, in collaboration with Marijn Schapelhouman, Senior Curator of Drawings at the Rijksmuseum.

The exhibition includes works from over 20 lending institutions and private collections, including the Royal Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Musée du Louvre, Paris, and The National Gallery, London.

The exhibition is part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Rediscovering Old Masters: The Melosi Series. This exhibition is supported by a grant from the American Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery Inc., made possible through the generosity of The Arthur and Holly Magill Foundation.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape has been organised by Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Winifred Knights @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
Through 18 September 2016

Winifred Knights

© The Estate of Winifred Knights

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major retrospective of work by Winifred Knights (1899-1947), an award-winning Slade School artist and the first British woman to win the Prix de Rome. The exhibition will establish Knights as one of the most original women artists of the first half of the 20th century, bringing together her most ambitious works and preparatory studies for the first time since they were created, including the apocalyptic The Deluge, 1920, which attracted critical acclaim as ‘the work of a genius’.

Winifred Knights’ admiration for the Italian Quattrocento was the inspiration for a highly distinctive and painstakingly executed body of work. The smooth surface, contemplative mood and harmoniously restricted palette of her paintings consciously recall early Renaissance frescoes, adapted to everyday subjects from her own time. Knights’ works are deeply autobiographical: presenting herself as the central protagonist and selecting models from her inner circle, she consistently re-wrote and re-interpreted female figures of fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to create documents of her own lived experience.

Arranged chronologically Winifred Knights (8 June – 18 September) highlights the key periods in the artist’s career, beginning with the work she produced at the Slade School before charting her stylistic developments at the British School at Rome. The exhibition will also explore significant themes that run throughout Knights’ oeuvre including women’s independence, modernity and her experiences of wartime England. Over 70 preparatory studies will provide a true insight into Knights’ working process, displayed alongside her large-scale paintings to reveal an artist of supreme skill with meticulous attention to detail.

Sacha Llewellyn, curator of the exhibition, comments:

“Although never part of the modernist avant-garde, Winifred Knights engaged with modern-life subjects, breathing new life into figurative and narrative painting to produce an art that was inventive and technically outstanding. She explored form and colour to create a mood of calmness and reflection that impacts directly on our senses. Like so many women artists, heralded and appreciated in their own day, she has disappeared into near oblivion. This exhibition, in bringing together a lifetime of work, will create an irrefutable visual argument that she was one of the most talented and striking artists of her generation.”

Winifred Knights attended the Slade School from 1915-16 and 1918-20, four years that would prove definitive in terms of her artistic development. Under the rigorous tuition of Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, she learnt the importance of meticulous compositional discipline which included the use of scale drawings, full-size sketches and life studies, a large selection of which will be exhibited to highlight her early development as an artist and offer a fascinating account of art education at the Slade during this time.

Early works reflect Winifred Knights’ growing awareness of women’s rights, due in part to her close relationship with her aunt Millicent Murby who is sensitively portrayed in the pencil drawing Portrait of Millicent Murby, 1917. A prominent campaigner for women’s emancipation and the right for married women to work, Murby’s writings had a profound influence on Knights’ early compositional work. The seminal work, The Potato Harvest, 1918, is the first of Knights’ compositions to portray the harmonious interaction of male and female workers. Leaving the Munitions Works, 1919, records female munitions workers where, albeit momentarily, progress in the economic emancipation of women was evident. A Scene in a Village Street, with Mill-hands Conversing, 1919, shows a female trade unionist arguing for better conditions for women’s labour at Roydon Mill, Essex.

Winifred Knights 

The Deluge, 1920

Oil on canvas, 152.29 x 183.5 cm

Tate: Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1989.

© Tate, London 2016.

© The Estate of Winifred Knights

Winifred Knights   

Compositional Study for A Scene in a Village Street with Mill-hands Conversing, 1919

Pencil and watercolour on paper, 22.5 x 29 cm,

© UCL Art Museum, 4980, University College London.

© The Estate of Winifred Knights

In 1920 Winifred Knights became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School at Rome with one of the most enduring images in the history of the competition, The Deluge, 1920. Chosen on the insistence of John Singer Sargent, Knights’ painting was seen to possess ‘a rare command of technique in hue, figure and composition, and a meticulous care in detail’.

This epic work will be displayed alongside the numerous studies Knights made in preparation including Compositional Study for the Deluge, 1920, which shows the initial ideas for the painting. The final composition brings together 21 figures who clamber towards and up a mountain, soon to be submerged by the flood. Among the present-day men and women in the scene, Knights appears as the central figure. While Knights avoided making any overt reference to the war, this painting is imbued with its presence. The disposition of the fleeing figures is likely to have drawn upon her first-hand experience of the zeppelin raids over Streatham and the sense of panic in the painting may have reflected this traumatic experience. The picture shows the influence of the war paintings of a previous generation of Slade students including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and C. R. W. Nevinson.

The impact of the five years Knights spent in Italy was the strongest unifying force in her work, fuelling her imagination in works such as Italian Landscape, 1921 and View to the East from the British School at Rome, 1921. She saw Italy as a living landscape that revitalised her creative spirit and as a result she produced some of the most evocative pictures to come out of the British School at Rome: The Marriage at Cana, 1923, Edge of Abruzzi; boat with three people on a lake, 1924-30, and The Santissima Trinita, 1924-30, all of which bridged Renaissance techniques with modernism to create the highly individual language that was her own. In The Marriage at Cana, Knights appears several times as one of the wedding guests, as does her future husband, Thomas Monnington. The meticulous planning of every scene is recorded in a large number of preparatory studies which will be on display including Study of Gigi il Moro, three- quarter rear view reclining, for The Marriage at Cana, 1922, a renowned model from the village of Anticoli Corrado.

Winifred Knights

The Potato Harvest, 1918

Watercolour over pen and ink on paper, 29.7 x 38.5 cm

Private Collection.

© The Estate of Winifred Knights

Winifred Knights

The Santissima Trinita, 1924-30

Oil on canvas, 102 x 112 cm

Private Collection.

© The Estate of Winifred Knights

Although she had previously outshone her male contemporaries at the Slade and the British School at Rome, when Knights returned to England in 1926 she struggled with the conventional chauvinism that then dominated the art world. In 1928 she was awarded a prestigious commission to design an altarpiece for the St. Martin’s chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, on which she worked for five years. The finished piece, Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours, 1928-33, is profoundly autobiographical, expressing Knights' anguish upon giving birth to a stillborn son in January 1928. Among the onlookers are Knights’ mother Mabel and Knights, with Monnington standing alongside. The fixed and melancholic gaze of the three figures records their shared sense of loss.

When World War II broke out, Knights became distraught and her only concern was for the safety of her son. This brought her already intermittent work to a standstill. She only began working again in 1946, a few months before she died of a brain tumour at the age of 48.

The exhibition is guest curated by Sacha Llewellyn, a freelance writer and curator, and Director at Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, specialising in figurative art between the wars.

Loans have been secured from a number of lenders including major lender, UCL Art Museum, University College London, The British Museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Tate, London and numerous private collectors who are generously lending from their collections. A vast majority of these works have never been exhibited before and will be reproduced in the accompanying catalogue for the first time.

Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Modern British series, a programme of exhibitions devoted to critically neglected Modern British artists.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY
Gallery Road
London SE21 7AD
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Gainsborough, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. The masterpiece represent the National Gallery of Art Washington DC at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery

The masterpiece Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Thomas Gainsborough (photo) from the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, on view in London at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery

Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785-87 

Oil on canvas, 220 x 154 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Known in their times as the ‘nightingales’, Elizabeth and Mary Linley were the most beautiful and talked-about young girls in Bath’s society in the 1770s. From a musical family, they were applauded on the theatre stages of Bath and London, as much as they appeared in the newspapers of the day as society figures. They were portrayed together, in 1772, by THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, who was a close friend of their father’s, and their neighbour in Bath. The painter had seen Elizabeth and Mary grow before his eyes and tenderly represented them in their magnificent large canvas known as The Linley Sisters, now at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

In the same year as the Dulwich painting was finished by Gainsborough, Elizabeth eloped to France with the young playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, causing a great scandal. A year later, in 1773, the two were married. Elizabeth did not expect the marriage to be an unhappy one, constantly marked by Sheridan’s infidelities. Elizabeth gave up singing and supported her husband in his career as a writer and politician.

Gainsborough was to portray Elizabeth at different points in her life. This is his last image of her – aged thirtyone- only a few years before her untimely death of tuberculosis in 1792. Elizabeth sits under a tree in the open countryside – a windswept valley so different from the delicate violets and primroses of the earlier double portrait at Dulwich. Elizabeth’s entire figure is transformed by the romantic wind in the canvas, just as passion swept her short life. After her death, William Jackson noted that ‘as a singer she is perished forever, as a woman she still exists in a picture painted by Gainsborough.’

Earl A. Powell III, the Director of the National Gallery of Art Washington, said: “We are delighted that Gainsborough’s Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan will represent the National Gallery of Art at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery.” 

Every month during the Gallery’s Bicentenary celebration year a spectacular masterpiece will hang on the end wall of the Gallery’s enfilade. The masterpiece will be on display from 6 September - 2 October 2011.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY
1811-2011 Gallery's Bicentenary celebration
LONDON SE21 7AD
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk