Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
A. L. Egg's
Past and Present
abound, as do heavily symbolist efforts like G. F. Watts'
Hope
(once one of the most popular paintings in the Tate). More universally appealing Victorian
paintings to look out for include
John Singer Sargent
's well-known and much-loved
Carnation, Lily, Lily-Rose
and the American-born
Whistler
's portrait of the precocious
Miss Cecily
, who looks as pissed off as she clearly felt after interminable sittings.
Twentieth-century British art
You'll find works by the same twentieth-century and contemporary British artists
displayed in both Tate Modern and Tate Britain, so it's very hard to predict what will
be on show here. Works by sculptors
Barbara Hepworth
, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill,
Giacometti and
Henry Moore
usually feature prominently, while paintings by Walter
Sickert, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon crop up regularly. Vanessa Bell
and Duncan Grant, from the Bloomsbury Group, are represented more often than not,
and there are nearly always several paintings by
Stanley Spencer
,
who saw his home
village of Cookham, on the Thames, as paradise and used it as a background for all his
Biblical paintings.
Some less well-known artists to look out for include the Vorticist
David Bomberg
,
who forged his own brand of Cubo-Futurism before World War I;
Ivon Hitchens
,
whose distinctive use of blocks of colour harks back to the late works of Cézanne; and
the self-taught St Ives painter
Alfred Wallis
. There's usually a fairly good selection of
work, too, by modern painters such as
Lucian Freud
and R.B. Kitaj, as well as
established living artists such as
David Hockney
, Frank Auerbach and op-art specialist
Bridget Riley, and contemporary artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst,
Chris Ofili and the ever-popular Antony Gormley.
The Turner Collection
J.M.W. Turner
, possibly the greatest artist Britain has ever produced, bequeathed over
one hundred oil paintings to the nation, and the gallery now has three hundred, plus
a staggering 19,000 watercolours and drawings. Turner's one condition was that the
paintings should be housed and exhibited together - the original idea behind the
Clore Gallery, the strangely childish building by James Stirling from 1987. The Turner
Galleries still exhibit probably the world's largest collection of works by Turner, but
you'll also find other artists' works here, and several of Turner's major works hang in
the National Gallery. Turner was superb at depicting awe-inspiring scenes - what the
Romantics liked to call “the sublime” - particularly marine scenes, and one of the finest
examples is
The Shipwreck
. Other natural cataclysms include the
Deluge
, and, in this
case as part of a grand historical painting,
Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing
the Alps
. His financial independence allowed him to develop his own style freely and it's
worth seeking out Turner's late works, great smudges of colour that seem to anticipate
Monet in their almost total abandonment of linear representation.
Snow Storm
-
Steam
Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
is a classic late Turner, a symbolic battle between the steam
J.M.W. TURNER
1775
1851
Born in
Covent Garden
, Turner' s childhood was blighted by the death of his younger sister,
and the mental illness of his mother, who died in Bedlam in 1804. Nevertheless, he became an
extremely successful artist, exhibiting his first watercolours in the window of his father's
barbershop in Maiden Lane, while still a boy, and at the
Royal Academy
when he was just 14.
He travelled widely in Europe, but when returning to England, lived increasingly as a recluse.
He never married, but had two children with an older widow, and lived for thirty years with his
father who worked as his studio assistant. Turner's only known
self-portrait
(he had no
pretensions as a portraitist and was rather ashamed of his ruddy complexion) is usually on
display, as are his personal belongings, such as his pocket watercolour kit and sketchbooks, his
fishing rod, and his toothless death mask.
