Impressionism
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.Unable to “pivot” in life, but at a pivotal stage, Eve goes from job to job, is thrown out of her flat, becomes increasingly reckless and then spirals downwards in an effort to stave off the memories of the past. Initially, art – the viewing and co-creation of it – keeps her afloat, but past traumas Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In Paris on a business trip in 1916, Wilhelm Hansen was no doubt typical of many husbands in confessing to his wife that he’d been a bit reckless in his personal spending (“You’ll forgive me once you see what I’ve bought”). But he was hardly typical in his purchases: “Landscape paintings by Sisley and Pissarro, a portrait by Renoir, and Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, one of his best-known works!” he excitedly wrote home to his wife. In the space of the next two years Hansen acquired no fewer than 156 Impressionist paintings, and it’s the bulk of this collection that features in The Danish Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On first sight, Citizen Lane's appeal may seem limited to those with an Irish connection or an interest in fine art. But director Thaddeus O'Sullivan turns what could have been a dry documentary into a witty and fine-looking docudrama about Hugh Lane, a turn-of-the-century art dealer and philanthropist.O'Sullivan utilises talking heads and historical recreation to tell Hugh Lane's rather remarkable story through Mark O’Halloran’s witty script. Lane was part of Ireland's Anglo ascendency – not aristocratic, but landed and monied all the same. Born in County Cork in 1875 and educated in England Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One mainly copies the other." Most likely he was writing about Irish painter Roderic O’Conor and the younger Swiss artist Cuno Amiet who stayed on in the Breton village long after the summer’s artistic cavalcade had left.There are indeed striking similarities and borrowings between O’Conor’s and Amiet’s canvases, but what the National Gallery of Ireland’ Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National Gallery
Florence Hallett
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Of the 13 Degas pastels that form the core of this small but wondrous exhibition, most have never been seen outside Glasgow, where they are among the highlights of the magnificent art collection bequeathed to the city in 1944 by the shipping magnate Sir William Burrell.In an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painted in 1891 by Tom Roberts, A Break Away! shows us a flock of maddened, thirsty sheep careering down a hillside stripped of grass by drought, accompanied by rollicking sheepdogs and cowboy shepherds on horses. If those sheep pile on top of one another into the puny stream at the bottom of the hill, injury – even death – will occur. The perspective is vertiginous, and the scene almost visibly pulsates with energy. It is one of Australia’s best-loved paintings (main picture), emblematic of the growing prideful nationalism of a new country – well, new to Europeans who ignored, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the endless grey presence of the North Sea rolling out into the distance.This is Chatwin's second album under his own name, but his ninth if you include the albums he made as Talvihorros on a number of labels, and it is much the same that he's always done: bowed strings that shimmer and pizzicato ones that echo, grainy guitar textures rising up in Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to be shipped around the world. And so it really is a cause for celebration that an exhibition exploring Eugène Delacroix’s influence in the 50 years following his death maintains its focus, argues its case and thoroughly immerses us in his work, without actually showing us any of his best known paintings.We are left to guess at the sheer scale of The Read more ...