G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary
Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection.
11 November 2008 – 26 April 2009
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G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary is a retrospective
exhibition of one of Britain’s greatest and most original artists,
considered a genius in his lifetime and by his death in 1904 known
all over the world. It includes over eighty paintings, drawings,
and sculptures and explores all facets of Watts’ artistic output
from his ambitious allegorical work to his portraits, landscapes
and engagement with social issues. Masterpieces include Lady
Holland , an early portrait of his important patron; Found
Drowned and Irish Famine, radical social paintings of
the late 1840s; his grand allegorical painting Progress
and one of his last works, The Sower of the Systems, yet
hinting at the abstraction of modern painting that would follow.
Also on loan from a private collection is Watts’s most famous
allegorical painting, Hope (1886), a bent and vulnerable
figure seated on a globe playing a lyre with all but one string
broken—a powerful icon of Victorian faith and doubt.
This exhibition – made possible by the closure of Watts Gallery
for a restoration and development project – provides a unique
opportunity to reassess the output of this extraordinary artist,
whose life spanned the Victorian age but whose art prefigures so
many of the concerns of the 20th century. It is complemented by a
concurrent exhibition at St Paul’s Cathedral, G F Watts:
Parables in Paint, while in the nave, two great Watts
paintings – ‘Time, Death and Judgement’ and ‘Peace and Goodwill’,
gifted by him to the Cathedral exactly one hundred years ago - are
on show together again for the first time in decades.
For more information visit the
Watts
Gallery
No Man's Land - Paintings of the Battlefields of the First
World War, by Brian Yale
13 November - 31 December 2008
Coinciding with the 90th anniversary of the end
of the First World War, this exhibition features a series of
pictures produced by painter and sculptor Brian Yale in the
mid 1980s. His interest in the subject emerged when he was a
child during the Second World War years. In these works it
combines with his preoccupation as a painter with the sea, the
sky and evidence of human presence on the land. The
battlefield pictures, including views of Passchendaele, the
Somme and Ypres, depict landscapes which still show the scars
of the First World War even after 70 years.
Last modified: 28 November 2008
| Author: Rosalina Banfield
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