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56 December/January April/May 2011 2015/16 Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today www.KCWToday.co.uk 020 7738 2348
December/January 2015/16
Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today
57
Arts & Culture Arts & Culture online: www.KCWToday.co.uk
Masters of the
Everyday:
Dutch Artists
in the Age of
Vermeer
The Queen’s Gallery
Buckingham Palace
Until 14th February 2016.
Divine frivolity and incongruity,
so often apparent in peasant life,
appealed to 17th century Dutch
Artists. They portrayed rumbustious fun
in village taverns and the contrasting
peace of domesticity. The paintings
reveal families relaxing as they played
games and enjoyed music. The subject
matter is, doubtless, unremarkable,
but the rendering is superb with
extraordinary attention to detail. These
painters were masters in the depiction of
space and light. They interwove humour
and messages of morality into their
paintings in a subtle form. Rustic charm
and coarse humour pervaded these
portrayals of peasant life. Later, some of
the advanced humour was over painted
as tastes changed.
During a conservation on Isack van
Ostade’s A Village Fair with a Church
Behind, a squatting figure answering
a call of nature was revealed. He was
later reinvented and painted over as a
shrubbery! Likewise, Jan Steen’s A Village
Revel shows drinking and brawling
outside a village Inn. The Tavern sign
sported a man exposing his buttocks.
This was later over painted as a bull’s
head.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of
the Queen's Pictures and Curator of the
Exhibition said:
“Dutch Painters often include people
or animals answering the call of nature
partly as a joke and partly to remind the
viewers of that crucial word ‘nature’, the
inspiration for their art. Queen Victoria
thought the Dutch Paintings in her
collection were painted in ‘a low style’;
two years after her death perhaps a royal
advisor felt similarly”.
During the 17th century the Royal
Families of Britain and the Netherlands
were closely connected. In 1613 James
I’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, married
Frederick V, Elector Palatine, grandson
of William I of Orange. In 1677, their
son, William III, married James II’s
daughter Mary. These two seized the
British Throne in 1688 during the
Glorious Revolution and established the
Constitutional Monarchy as we know it
today.
British Monarchs were commissioners
and collectors of Dutch art. Charles I
received the first Rembrandt to come to
Hendrick Pot, Charles I, Henrietta Maria and Charles, Prince of Wales, later Charles II, c.1632
Ludolf de Jongh, 'A Formal Garden: Three Ladies Surprised by a Gentleman', c.1676
England and George IV was particularly
fond of the Dutch art of everyday scenes.
The exhibition Masters of the
Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of
Vermeer has been created in partnership
with the Royal Picture Gallery
Mauritshuis, The Hague, where it will be
shown in the Autumn of 2016.
Some very fine works of the Dutch
painters are on display. Rembrandt van
Rijn's portrait of an old woman, The
Artist's Mother (1627-1629), was a gift
to Charles I from his Ambassador, Sir
Robert Kerr, at the Court of the exiled
King and Queen of Bohemia. Being the
first of Rembrandt's paintings to arrive
in England, it established the artist's
name.
Music is a recurring theme in Dutch
painting. Johannes Vermeer’s Lady at the
Virginals with a Gentleman, also known
as The Music Lesson, was purchased
by George III. Vermeer's mastery of
perspective draws the eye to the two
figures in the rear of the room. The
young woman's face is only seen in a
reflection in the mirror. It is hard to
say whether the subject is enjoyment of
music or romance, as they so often go
together. Again, these two themes are
represented in Gabriel Metsu’s The Cello
Player, in which a woman makes her
entrance and is greeted by her pet dog
as her suitor tunes his cello. The detail
of her dress is exquisite. There is an
atmosphere of expectation in the scene.
Jan Steen’s A Woman at her Toilet
(1663) shows how messages of morality
found their way into Dutch paintings.
Viewer becomes voyeur observing an
unmade bed and a woman not dressed. A
lute with a broken string and a flameless
candle clearly indicate the perils of
submitting to sensuality.
Several paintings in the exhibition
portray jollity and pleasure. Jan Steen’s
Card Players in a Tavern (1664) clearly
depicts pleasure with the mussels
scattered in the foreground with a
dustpan and brush is particularly
effective. Other works of tavern scenes
by Steen show how the Dutch painters
brought to life music, drinking, dancing,
and jollity in their paintings of the
Golden Age of Dutch art.
The realistic rendering of domestic
scenes is well illustrated in The Young
Mother (1658) by Gerrit Dou. The light
shining forth on a new life and the
Madonna like figure of the mother are
truly inspirational. Further portrayal of
domesticity is beautifully revealed in
Pieter de Hooch’s A Courtyard in Delft
at Evening, a Woman Spinning (1657).
Beneath a bright blue sky a woman spins
in the shadow whilst another figure
comes out of the sunlight into the shade.
The Netherlands were leaders in
commerce, art, and science during the
Golden Age; and the scenes of music,
pleasure, and domesticity in the Dutch
paintings reflects the spirit of that
glorious age.
Marian Maitland
Visitor Information and tickets for the
Queen’s Gallery :
www.royalcollection.org.uk
T: + 44 (0) 303123 7301
Pictures: Royal Collection Trust© HM Queen Elizabeth II. 2015
Artist & Empire
Tate Britain
Until 10 April 2016
Admission £14.50
tate.org.uk
Here we go again - another
‘worthy’ academic exhibition
at Tate Britain, from the same
stable as Edourard Muybridge, Victorious
Sculpture, Salt and Silver, Ruin Lust
and British Folk Art. The curators have
amassed a cornucopia of objects from
all over the globe, and there are some
remarkable works on display, including
George Stubbs’s A Cheetah and a Stag
with two Indian Attendants, but there
are also deeply kitsch and sentimental
paintings, like Millais’s North-West
Passage, Joseph Noel Paton’s In
Memoriam, Eastwood Ho! August, 1857
by Henry Nelson O’Neil, and Benjamin
West’s Death of General Wolfe. One
enormous canvas is entitled Retribution
by Edward Armitage, an allegorical
scene of a ferocious-looking Justice as
Britannia about to plunge a sword into a
Bengal tiger’s breast, symbolising Britain
taking revenge for the Indian mutiny.
There are a few gems, like John Singer
Sargent’s portrait of the caddish Sir
Frank Swettenham, and Augustus John’s
one of T E Lawrence in desert gear, and
UK/RAINE
Saatchi Gallery
Until January 3, 2016
Admission Free
http://www.saatchigallery.com
Presumably some bright spark at
Saatchi came up with the snappy
portmanteau title UK/RAINE,
which was an open competition and
exhibition, showcasing emerging artists
from the UK and Ukraine, aged between
18 and 35, living, working or born in
either country. The private view and
prize-giving was a massive bun-fight
peopled by the many artists, jeunesse
dorée, hangers-on, and liggers being
topped up with copious amounts of
champagne. The Ukrainian Firtash
Foundation funded the initiative, and
provided £75,000 in prize money to
the winners; £20,000 going to Sergiy
Petlyuk for his extraordinary best-inshow
animated hanging installation,
Tolerated Violence, which was draped
across one of the galleries. At the other
end, Mariia Kulikovska, a naked lady in
a pink wig, sunglasses and Rosa Klebb
shoes, emerged from a door and began
attacking her sculpture Homo Bulla,
which comprised three of her own bodycasts
made of soap, with a hammer. This
Johann Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s
Cock Match, but this show has an ‘oldfashioned’
feel to it, and not just because
it is stuffed with Victoriana, like a
provincial museum.
The British Empire was the largest
the world has ever seen, and yet, as
with all the others, it faded away and
is now a mere shadow of its former
greatness. One of the problems with
staging a show such as this is one of
editing some of the more controversial
topics surrounding Britain’s sometimes
appalling behaviour on the world
stage, with copious incidents of wars,
exploitation, plundering, oppression
and slavery. However, for better or
worse, the British Empire had a massive
impact on the history of the world for
over two centuries. By 1922, more than
450 million people lived in the British
Empire, which was more than one fifth
of the world’s population at that time,
and covered almost a quarter of the
Earth’s total land area, but by the end of
the 20th century, it had diminished to a
few overseas territories. Every schoolboy
knew the maxim that it was “the empire
on which the sun never sets”, as it was
so large that the sun was always shining
somewhere in it, which comprised
dominions, colonies, protectorates,
mandates and other territories.
The maps and charts are a fascinating
diversion, displaying vast tracts of red
across the globe, and were used by the
military, the navy, road and railway
Roman Mikhaylov with his
sculpture Shadows
© Don Grant
apparently echoed the destruction and
looting of the Izolyatsia Centre once
based in Donetsk, but now relocated
to Kiev, forced there by the conflict in
eastern Ukraine.
The Installation Prize of £10,000 was
deservedly won by Roman Mikhaylov,
whose ships made of charcoaled wood,
Shadows, were reminiscent of Anselm
Keifer’s U-boat display at the Royal
Mahadaji Sindhia entertaining
a British naval officer and
military officer with a Nautch,
1815-20, by a Dehli School
artist. The British Library
Board
builders and trading companies, like
the East India Company, which formed
the backbone of the empire. In the
same gallery there are some gloriously
colourful Ghanaian Asafo flag collages
by Fante artists, like union jacks on
acid, and Andrew Gilbert has installed
a tableau of life-size marching British
soldiers in military red coats under a
sun-shade, one with a kitchen knife
sticking out of his face, which is covered
in a straw African mask, others with pith
helmets, carrying cups of tea and wearing
black, high-heeled kinky boots. It is
not clear whether this is his ironic view
of how the Brits were perceived by the
colonised, or just ‘avin’ a laugh. There are
many other examples of how they saw us,
through African and South Sea Island
sculptures, so it not all about plundered
Academy exactly a year ago. There
was a public vote, which was won by a
British artist, Olivia Bax, whose Sink
or Swim structure was made from
handmade paper, pulped sticks, and
yellow sculptured sandwiches, lassoed
together with bungee cord; and the work
is installed differently each time it is put
together. The organisers must be pleased
with their efforts in providing financial
treasures, or overblown paintings of
heroic deeds in fighting, and sometimes
losing, against the indigenous hoards we
were trying to suppress and exploit.
The exhibition comes up-to-date
with a number of works by postimperial
artists from the Caribbean,
the Antipodes, Oceania, Canada,
particularly Aubrey Williams and
Donald Locke from British Guiana,
Ben Enwonwu and Uzo Egonu from
Nigeria, Avinash Chandra and Bairaj
Khanna from India, and Sidney Nolan
from Australia, who, it appears, doesn't
just paint Ned Kelly. It is not the quality
of the works on show, but the manner
in which they have been displayed,
interpreted, captioned and juxtaposed,
that makes this potentially fascinating
story so dull. Don Grant
support for young artists and help in
building a cultural bridge between the
two countries. The exhibition continues
the collaboration between the Firtash
Foundation and Saatchi Gallery as part
of the Days of Ukraine in the UK festival
and follows on from the huge success of
Premonition: Ukrainian Art Now, which
ran at the Saatchi Gallery last year.
Don Grant