Step inside to view outside in a whole new, beautiful, light
Summer is the time for venturing outside but the Laing Art Gallery’s new ticketed exhibition offers the best of both worlds. DAVID WHETSTONE ventured inside to see nature in abundance.
THEY’VE brought the outside in for what seems certain to be a popular summer exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery.
Essence of Nature: Pre-Raphaelites to British Impressionists is two rooms of the great outdoors, beautifully rendered with abundant trees, flowers, seaside scenes and, above all, sunlight.
The appeal of many of the paintings displayed lies in the artist’s success in capturing dusk, twilight or the effect of the sun through leaves, on to water or in creating shadows.
After a 30-minute visit you’ll feel your spirits lifted. As exhibitions go, it’s akin to a dose of Vitamin D.
John Brett, an artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, was a fan of the sun.
In 1870 he travelled to Sicily as part of a scientific expedition to witness the solar eclipse of December 22, but couldn’t resist staying on to paint Mount Etna.
His gloriously detailed painting of 1871, Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily, shows the volcano basking in sunlight above a turquoise sea and with dazzling snow on its distant slopes.
From his elevated vantage point, he was also able to see mist evaporating from a valley. We can see it too, clear as day.
The weather, he noted in a letter, had been “outrageously squally” but was now “superb”.
This sun-drenched panorama, on loan from Sheffield Museums Trust, is just one among 100 or so paintings chosen to illustrate how approaches to landscape painting changed from the mid-Victorian era to the 1920s.
Shoulder to shoulder – or frame to frame – we have PreRaphaelites, such as William Holman Hunt, and their champion John Ruskin; British Impressionists, including Wynford Dewhurst and Henry Scott Tuke; and representatives of the Rural Naturalist school such as George Clausen and Henry La Thangue.
It’s possible that when alive they would have argued until the cows came home (a popular artistic subject, incidentally).
Ruskin, the pre-eminent critic of his day, was certainly never shy about sharing his opinions and was apparently sniffy about artists who chose to sully their depictions of Nature with signs of human life.
This is why, according to curator Sarah Richardson, he didn’t much like work done by John William Inchbold after he had helped to fund his painting trip to Switzerland.
The Leeds-born artist, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, broke the Ruskin rules by depicting houses and gardens near the shore of a lake, as you’ll see in his 1857 painting The Lake of Lucerne: Mont Pilatus in the Distance.
On loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, it is displayed in a glass case because it’s so fragile.
“Bah humbug!” the eminent critic might have said.
Most people, I suspect, will agree with Sarah who calls it “a lovely, lovely painting.”
Invited to pick some of her personal exhibition highlights, she says after a few minutes: “I think we’re looking at every painting.”
That tells its own story. Every exhibit is notable and about 60% of what’s on show is in the collection of the Laing and its sister galleries in Gateshead and
South Shields.
“We have a number of artists from all the areas covered in the exhibition and they’re beautiful, really beautiful, but in different ways,” said Sarah.
“All these artists were dealing with nature and all of them wanted to get out in the open air and paint, but they’ve all come up with these different results.”
Particularly well represented in the Laing’s collection, according to Sarah, is the Newlyn School of artists who settled in the picturesque Cornish town in the late 19th Century.
Among them were Laura and Harold Knight, each represented by a stunning painting hung side by side in the second room.
Conservationists who worked on The Beach, Laura’s popular seaside scene, revealed grains of sand in the paint, proving she had quite literally worked on the beach.
Among Sarah’s favourites, hanging at the start of the exhibition, are two meticulous William Holman Hunt watercolours, View of Nazareth and The Plain of Rephaim from Zion, Jerusalem.
Both resulted from a trip to the Holy Land in the 1850s and you can imagine the artist must have sweltered while painting them outdoors.
Figures, Sarah reckons, were added later, to give a sense of scale.
But it’s the frames as much as the paintings that
catch the eye. “They were chosen by Holman Hunt himself and are really beautiful,” notes Sarah.
They do indeed give the paintings, on loan from Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, a human touch.
Throughout the exhibition are reminders that what might have seemed lovely to the artists and their patrons, and seem so to us, might have been viewed differently by those depicted.
George Clausen painted two women at work in a field of flowers. It’s a knockout painting and a popular item in the Laing’s collection but the artist made no attempt to gloss over the subject matter.
The young woman standing in the centre of The Stone Pickers looks down forlornly at her gathered stones. The other woman is simply a dark shape, bent over. You assume she’s older. And tired.
Another painting by Clausen, chosen as the signature image for the exhibition, was done in Brittany. Peasant Girl Carrying a Jar, Quimperlé is another loan from the V&A.
Again, it’s beautifully done. The composition, the flesh tones and the all-encompassing greenery make this a covetable painting but there’s no escaping the grind of the young girl’s existence.
Countering that, there are paintings of people playing tennis, blackberrying and relaxing. All classes are represented, all aspects of our relationship with nature and various ways of portraying it.
And Laura Knight isn’t the only female artist represented.
Look out for Seascape by Ethel Walker (1861 to 1951), Haymaking by Newcastle-born Isa Jobling (1851 to 1926) and Nostalgia by Amy Katherine Browning (1881 to 1978).
The latter won medals at the Paris Salon but tellingly always signed her paintings with her initials to avoid the possibility of critics being biased against female artists.
You wonder how much talent has been squandered over the years.
Essence of Nature: Pre-Raphaelites to British Impressionists, for which an admission charge applies, runs until October 14. Find ticket details and opening times on the Laing Art Gallery website.
■ David Whetstone is the co-editor of Cultured. North East, a website spreading the word about North East culture from www.culturednortheast.co.uk @culturemag @DavidJWhetstone.