Close Harmony in Edinburgh-Sylvia Wishart

I visited Edinburgh on Tuesday for the last day of the annual show of the Turner watercolours in the Vaughan Bequest.Also on my schedule was the Sylvia Wishart exhibition at the RSA.
Both exhibitions were very impressive.In many of the Turners the range of values was quite narrow-and yet they were rich an colourful.I am thinking of the the Swiss scenes such the lovely glowing Verrès. So too with Wishart; her colour is very pleasing and she does not insist on a high dynamic range.Nor is she interested in heavy impasto.In the work illustrated, Reflections 11 you might see something of an affinity with Bonnard in both colour and composition but really its  in the background rather than a direct influence.


Sylvia Wishart's work is the product of a subtle artistic personality.It breathes a clean,airy clarity and transparency whether in drawing or mixed media.Her delicacy and relatively close harmonies do not reproduce well. Many will know her from George Mackay Brown's Orkney Tapestry which came out  with Wishart's superb illustrations.They reveal a fine draughtsman with a strong sense of design.

This is a small show-far less than she deserved but still we must be grateful for the chance to see it.The drawings exhibited here include a group of illustrations she made of Orkney farms and coasts for a locally produced calendar.Here the artist works with a very fine pen line (Gillot 404 or whatever) framing the simplest of subjects-a farm and its outbuildings with a patience which is never laboured,is utterly clear formally and of considerable delicacy.This sort of work is too fastidious to reproduce well.Some might call it timidity but I prefer to call it simplicity.There must be a Japanese word for this quality,surely.

You need to look at a Wishart especially when she takes up her favourite theme of the interpenetration of reflections and views from a window.This theme appears in works big and small.Here are the birds, the ship in a bottle and the studio easel.

She does not fit the Scottish cliche image of the Scottish painter as hell-bent on rich, expressive colour.The other side-the draughtsmanship is most certainly there.She was lucky enough to live at a time when Scottish art-schools were still so old-fashioned as to insist on a concern for drawing. It is incredible in one sense that she was not RSA until near the end of her life. But then again I have a hunch that she was her own person and maybe wasn't much bothered. She was content to live,study and work in the north.Lucky Sylvia I say!

Her obituary can be read here. And the RSA site accessed with this link. I first heard of her when she had an exhibition in Alnwick in 1969.The amount asked for the cheapest item would at that time have bought you a reasonable,low-end 35mm camera.But I doubt if the camera would be working now. I think the moral is that decent art is always cheap and a good investment.You can read my review of a new book about Sylvia Wishart here.

JOHN GRAHAM LOUGH

Lough working on the  Milo

The Hatton Gallery has a useful small exhibition devoted to the Northumberland born sculptor John Graham Lough.
Studying Lough's work is made the more difficult because of the many items have been lost-often in the C20 due to municipal neglect.

The exhibition comprises small marble carvings by Lough based on Shakespeare with the addition of documentation about the the major projects and large photographs of the works in situ at Blagdon. The smaller works are surely the most successful. Some of the exhibits are on loan whilst some of the smaller items belong to the Hatton Gallery. There are no drawings.

Lough's reputation is not what it was in the C19 when he produced his monuments such as the Stephenson and the Collingwood which are among his least successful projects.His work does not compare favourably with that of earlier British sculptors.But Lough was professional enough to get some major commisssions-and not just in the North-East . He was working in the period between the age of Flaxman, Chantrey or Westmacott and that of the New Sculpture .

Rupert Gunniss says that it was the Milo which convinced him of Lough's greatness. I cannot agree.The Milo is not a common subject in art and it is not one of Lough's most successful works. The anatomy doesn't quite work, it is somewhat tortured and crude.The pose may relate to the Laocoon

Laocoon

or equally to some of Blake's over defined anatomies such as The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve in the Tate.It is interesting that Blake's tortured anatomy is dated 1826-7. And the Milo is from 1827.Perhaps Lough had some influence on Blake. One would not expect it to work the other way. Blake's obscurity at that time was such that Lough would be unlikely to know much about him.The showing of the Milo and other works in Maddox Street, London was apparently something of a sensation. Haydon was enthusiastic. Wellington attended. Did Blake? Could he have afforded the shilling entry fee?

William Blake: The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve (circa 1826-7)

Lough's widow had intended his work to be preserved as a kind of study centre and this was the intention behind her donation to the City of Newcastle.Lough's celebrity was greater then than it is now and the City was fulsome in its appreciation. But as the years drew on municipal and public interest declined The works long festering at Elswick Hall were given away, placed in public parks and so on. Marble sculpture-I ask you if that was wise? It is far too easily vandalised.




The exhibition ends on February 18 2012.
For further information about Lough see: John Graham Lough,1798-1876 a Northumbrian Sculptor; by John Lough and Elizabeth Merson,The Boydell Press, 1987.

post updated 16/11/13.

Ford Madox Brown at Haltwhistle

My photograph of the Brazen Serpent Window at Haltwhistle has appeared in the book of the current Brown exhibition at Manchester . I am sure that a reassessment of Ford Madox Brown's curious art is long overdue. I don't really think he improved with age and there is a certain world-weariness about the later art which seems slightly depressing.The  decorative side is seems to come into greater prominence. The Manchester Murals are striking in this respect.

Bosanquet window

We went to Rock the other day.I had not been there since I was young. It was a delight to see the church again . It is a fairly decent,small Norman building with many artistic and intellectual associations.(David Jones, Ben Nicholson etc from the time when Helen Sutherland lived here). The intellectual links come from the Bosanquet family who were archaeologists, administrators and active in charitable work.The church has an excellent late window by Leonard Evetts from 1991.This window commemorates four members of the Bosanquet family.Robert Bosanquet and his wife Ellen, his son Charles and his wife Barbara.The older Bosanquets are remembered in the left hand panel where you can see a Minoan double axe, a Greek temple and a circular Greek motif-RCB excavated in Crete.In the right hand panel reference is made to CIB's activities as first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle by display of the university's coat of arms.CIB's birth in Athens is hinted at by the appearance of the owl from the rebverse of an Athenian tetradrachm.I have not worked out the significance of the eagle yet It may relate to Barbara Bosanquet who was American. In that case the images at the top of the left hand panel would relate to her mother -in-law.(PS Will get a better picture when I visit next).Here is a detail of Athena's owl-it gives abetter impression of the window.

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland: Window by Burne-Jones

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland, a photo by James Holland on Flickr.

I have just read Fiona MacCarthy's book on Burne-Jones. What I like about Burne-Jones is his work s a designer (sort of)and his humorous drawings. But there isn't that much on the stained glass-we hear that he made some but nothing significant about the manufacture-can you imagine B-J grozing away? I cannot. As a painter he is alien to me -it is more like heraldry than art.We do have one of his better works in Newcastle but all those people with their pointy chins are boring. The female portraits with their huge eyes are quite repellent. This is a kind of historicist, hot-house painting which I cannot admire.
The book is a typical MacCarthy production and is perfectly readable.The index is decently done. She uses the word mouvementé like a new toy-too often.She is maybe a bit credulous about the use of ox-gall and might have been clearer about the position of Legros in the Victorian art world. Steer is named with Sickert as being a painter of urban squalor-a very odd duo they would be. Sickert yes, Steer, no (page 298).The place name Assonan should most likely read Assouan the French name for the place in Egypt which we call Aswan.

The BM has recently published a selection of Burne-Jones' funny drawings (and also a book on Eric Gill). Both seem to be nicely produced and the price is reasonable. You can read about the Burne-Jones here.
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Immagination
Fona MacCarthy,Faber&Faber 2011.