'Discover Constable and the Hay Wain' (National Gallery until February 2 2025): Confected Landscape

John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, National Gallery, London

The Hay Wain is much derided. Over familiar, over merchandised, it is one of those paintings which people have long stopped looking at, yet which has never quite achieved untouchable 'national treasure' status, like, say, The Fighting Temeraire. Recently it has gained new exposure in parody and satire - Peter Kennard's anti-nuclear version - but it has also become embattled as part of the 'contested landscape' debate. It is either brave, or perverse, of the National Gallery to devote one of their brilliant 'Discover' exhibitions to it. Hats off because it is a gem of a show, which should make everyone look and think again about not only this painting, but John Constable's work in general. Next year we will be approaching the 250th anniversary of his birth, to be celebrated with a heavyweight Tate Britain showdown between Constable himself and JMW Turner. This is a good way to kick things off.

The Hay Wain's big problem is that everything about it seems conservative and old-fashioned to twenty-first century eyes. It is not just the rural setting, the horse and cart, the picturesque cottage; it is the manner of execution which seems, to us, so 'finished'. In fact, Constable's real difficulty is that he falls between two stools. His work, as a telling contemporary quote on the wall at the start of the show explains, was actually considered too loose, too sketchy and too difficult to look at. The curators give us a fine wall of nineteenth century landscapes, including examples by John Linnell and Francis Danby, which prove the same point. And up close, in person, the dashes of white, the imprecision, the textured dottiness of Constable's work become impossible to ignore. Subconsciously, they are always there, affecting the way we view it.  The cosy artificiality of earlier landscapes - staged groups of figures, light and shade balanced compositions, faded distance - register as paintings and judged accordingly. Constable is assessed against nature and naturalism. Our brains link his visible hand forward to Impressionism and find him wanting, but judged against what was known and seen in the 1820s his radical technique is blatantly obvious.

The show also contextualises the Hay Wain within Constable's own work - other examples of his big, finished set pieces - The Cornfield, Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds - and preparatory sketches. There are the inevitable cloud studies, despite the fact that his interest in the sky really post-dates the Hay Wain. More interestingly, we can follow the development of the painting itself from early representations of Willy Lott's cottage through to the full scale sketch which acted as a plan - but not an identical one - for the finished work. This is landscape which is carefully orchestrated, certainly confected if not contested, in an attempt to produce something which was both personally and artistically meaningful, and yet fell within the bounds of academic acceptability. Again, the exhibition provides ample contemporary evidence that Constable was pushing the boundaries - along with the galling truth that it was the French who first saw the aesthetic value of this most English of landscapes. 

There are those who will think the National Gallery have skirted round the issue of Constable's idealisations and omissions. The show contains contemporary cartoons and one of Stubb's harvesting scenes where the sturdy labourers are presented as fine specimens in a way reminiscent of his images of race horses, but the curators avoid jumping on the 'art as social history' bandwagon. There are no starving peasants, no rampant enclosure, no radical unrest, in Constable's work but should we really expect there to be? He is both painting his own, necessarily limited, experience as a member of a land-owning family, and constructing finished canvases from memory, generating an inbuilt nostalgia which was never going to be realist reportage. Historians have been deconstructing Constable's representations of rural life ever since John Barrell's brilliant 1980 Dark Side of Landscape  - there's plenty there if you want to look for it, but please don't throw him under a bus for not being Courbet.

The National Gallery's 'Discover' exhibitions rarely disappoint, but the Hay Wain show is particularly impressive. Giving the most banally familiar of paintings space and context, quite literally makes you see it with fresh eyes. Constable is always the dull, worthy counterpoint to the Turner's bravura excitement. But underestimate him at your peril. His paint fizzes with life, dense and dazzling in equal measures. You feel the glow of the sunlight and become immersed in the barely there details. Soak it up. Enjoy.

'Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers' (National Gallery Until January 19 2025): Art in the Raw

Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This Van Gogh exhibition had to do some pretty heavy lifting. My initial reaction had been cynical - a good money spinner to help pay for the Sainsbury Wing renovation. The National Gallery might never have held an exhibition dedicated to arguably the world's most famous artist, but everywhere else has. What more is there to be said? Having queued outside in the rain and faced with a wall of bodies and the ubiquitous camera phone junkies between me and every painting, I was pretty determined to not like this. And yet, one look across a crowded room....

Van Gogh is always better in the flesh. His work sings, his colours glow, his brushwork comes alive so that the canvases dance off the walls and into your heart. This is the great irony - an artist known for his traumatic life and death story is actually the producer of some of the most joyous, life-enhancing paintings in the history of art. And the National Gallery curators have pulled off the remarkable feat of reminding you of that. By ignoring the biography and almost forcing their visitors to just look, they have given Van Gogh new life. I took their aims to heart, ignoring the accompanying booklet which does flesh out the backstory and just soaking up the paintings and drawings on the walls. Sixty one works, which seemed to end far too quickly, which banished dreary December and pre-Christmas anxiety and belied all the cliches about self-mutilation and mental instability, about impossible friendships and unsold artworks. 

The curator's premise, laid out in the opening display, of Lieutenant Milliet (The Lover), Eugene Bloch (The Poet) and The Poet's Garden, is a stretch, but a clever, convincing one. More importantly, it sets the mood, because for all that he painted the world and the people around him, Van Gogh was a dreamer, a romantic, whose representation of life was filtered through his emotional response. He has been straight-jacketed into the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist narrative but he was constrained by Paris, and rubbed up fractiously against Gauguin - there seems a far greater affinity in his work with those early twentieth century Expressionists who found love, life and community in villages like Murnau. That opening room creates a mood which successfully permeates the whole show: scrubby town parks become exotic and paradisiacal, everyday figures become iconic folk heroes.

It is not that Van Gogh is perfect. You see his weaknesses on repeat: he struggled to work out what to do with the foreground often creating canvases of two awkward halves; he was obsessed with unnecessary figures, men with splayed legs and women with angled parasols; his Japonism was often heavy-handed. He was not afraid to acknowledge his influences, rather he foregrounded them. This exhibition might only cover the period 1888-90 - the development from Dutch grunginess through anxious Impressionism is not included - but you see his homage to Jean Francois Millet, the majestic Sower, haloed by the sun who strides across a landscape sliced in two by that angled, Gauguinesque tree; you see him deliberately reference Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe; you see him working through the choice of flattened, blocked colour or hatched impasto. You see too, through much less familiar drawings, how much of a craftsman he was, walking miles to sketch, returning to the same images, experimenting with new materials. It is hard not to look at Van Gogh's drawings and feel the lack of colour but Weeping Tree, with the characteristic reed pen softened by black chalk, is boldly other-worldly, a mixture of Art Nouveau patterning and Mondrian's early experimentation. It doesn't weep so much as centre the whole landscape, the trunk like a spinal cortex connecting the canopy with the grasses.

Vincent Van Gogh, Weeping Tree, 1889, Art Institute of Chicago

The last room feels slightly anticlimactic  - perhaps inevitable after the starriness of all those celebrities - the chair, the bedroom, the sunflowers, the man himself. Both the last theme (variations) and the examples feel forced - what can we do now - and there is the inevitable sense that the end isn't the end, not quite. There are exceptions: Tree Trunks in the Grass with its two strong columns of bark reduced to patchwork patterns against a fluff of greenery and almost three dimensional white flowers. As with so many of the canvases, there is no horizon, the world reduced to this tiny corner, teeming with life. Sometimes you don't need the big picture; sometimes it doesn't help to know the context, biography, the future. Van Gogh brings you into the moment with such a raw connection that you can feel the hand holding the brush at your shoulder. No other artist manages to collapse time so effectively. There is only the here and now.

'Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504' (Royal Academy until February 16 2025)

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Male Nude seen from Behind, c. 1504-6, Casa Buonarroti, Florence

I'm sure the Royal Academy didn't intend their 1504 exhibition to coincide with the new BBC drama doc in which Charles Dance gently hams up his prosthetic broken nose as the old Michelangelo looking back on a great rivalry with Leonardo and Raphael. Having resorted to shouting at the TV screen in frustration at its inaccuracies and missed opportunities, I was looking forward to some serious curation. But RA shows are often frustrating half-successes. Three rooms, one of which is entirely devoted to a reverential display of the Burlington House Cartoon, was never really going to be enough. Like the languid historical recreations and repetitive talking heads of the screen version, this show constantly threatened to teeter over into a triumph of style over substance.

It all started promisingly with the Taddei Tondo, crisply lit and well explained. The image of the Pitti roundel alongside (and they were never going to get the original), Piero di Cosimo's iteration of a tondo and Raphael's Bridgewater Madonna - it all felt satisfying focused. But at the same time, there seemed to be so much more to investigate. The National Gallery's Raphael show of a couple of years ago, for instance, had a great exploration of how he developed his compositions to suit a roundel form. Exactly what Michelangelo was doing between is two relief attempts, yet ignored here. Equally, the similarity in pose between the Michelangelo's Christ and Leonardo's cartoon version, was pointed up, but it required strained vision across a crowded gallery to really appreciate it. 

What you could not fault was the judicious choice of drawings which balanced a focus on process with a desire to just bask in the sheer beauty which these artists could conjure up on paper. A few examples here (some from the royal collection) had more impact than roomfuls at the Kings Picture Gallery. Michelangelo's stretching male nude from the Casa Buonarroti seems to encapsulate his whole artistic practise with its tense striving. Raphael's back view of David was similarly revelatory, yet seemed marooned on a wall: the curators had thought to include an image of Michelangelo's sculpture, despite its ubiquitous fame, but it was not displayed alongside the drawing.

Similarly, the Leonardo cartoon, was an underused resource. It is familiar to most London gallery-goers and so surely needs to justify its inclusion, despite the RA's new research which has suggested, for the first time, the purpose of the drawing. From memory, I believe the National Gallery hung it lower: certainly here it felt slightly diminished here, a little high and difficult to view without reflected light. It seemed significant that despite a bench in front of it, and a fairly busy exhibition, no one was really lingering as perhaps the curators intended. In a show whose dark walls and necessarily subdued lighting generates a sense of hushed awe, this feels too much as if we are expected to worship at the altar of Leonardo's genius.

The last room was devoted to the 'battle of the Battles', a bizarre non-event which has always captured more attention that it probably deserves. You can only ever get so far with 'what ifs' and one whole wall devoted to an outline silhouette of Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina seemed particularly indulgent. That said, the exhibition actually did a very good job of conjuring up both the essence and the imagined reality of the two compositions: Leonardo's swirling, character-driven emotion which seemed strangely old-fashioned with its contorted horses and precisely rendered armour, and Michelangelo's nude-fest that increasingly seemed like a dry run for the Last Judgment. Again, the drawings were the stars, so why they were not on the wall is a mystery.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Taddei Tondo, c.1504-5, Royal Academy, London

Can you really go wrong with an exhibition entitled Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504? It will get people through the doors with the names of probably the greatest triumvirate in the whole of art history. It brings with it a compelling in-built narrative of competition and rivalry. But it is also perhaps too easy to be complacent: you already have the only Michelangelo sculpture in the country, you know the National Gallery might be quite glad to get the Burlington Cartoon off its hands during the Sainsbury Wing revamp.  Personally, I think the Royal Academy can do better. A three room exhibition needs to be tightly curated, with every choice justified and made to work. Ultimately, 1504 gets by on the beauty of the Renaissance drawings it displays. Is that enough?

'Joseph Noel Paton: An Artist's Life From Dunfermline to the Royal Court' (Dunfermline Carnegie Library until Feb 9 2025): Great Scot

Joseph Noel Paton, Queen Margaret and King Malcolm Canmore, 1887, Dunfermline Carnegie Trust

Joseph Noel Paton is one of those artists who slips through the cracks of history. Famous and popular in his day, patronised by royalty and a friend and correspondent of leading artists and writers, his work now rarely merits more than a footnote. Despite obvious affinities with Pre-Raphaelitism through his crisp, clear colours, use of symbolism, and religious, literary and historical subjects, Paton never seems to have benefited the sexy romanticism that surrounds the Brotherhood. Perhaps the fact he was a happily married, father of eleven, Scotsman has something to do with it. It is debatable whether a small exhibition in Dunfermline is really going to shift the dial - it is a great pity for instance that the show isn't touring elsewhere, preferably south of the border. But this is a strongly curated, in-depth look at Paton's life and work. 

I will confess that the first impression is not great. This is a display dominated by large and frankly fussily-designed wall texts, initially on white walls, and illuminating though they are, they are not aesthetically inviting. But the show turns out to be both larger, and more inventively displayed than those first impressions: green and red wall-colour blocks and a good mix of drawing and painting. Particularly impressive are the large scale cartoons for the Dunfermline Abbey windows which dominate one wall. The exhibition had been initially scheduled for the bi-centenary of Paton's birth in 2021 before Covid intervened, and in its original state was, I understand, to have included the artist's two great fairy paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland. These are a miss, despite substitute sketches, but it seems churlish to blame the curators for something so entirely outside their control. Paton's fairy subjects are represented here by The Fairy Raid, an unsettling cacophony of knights, fairies and magic in which meticulous observed reality collides with folklore and imagination. I'm not sure Paton was at his best with this multi-figure extravaganzas and it is perhaps his association with 'fairy' painting which is partly responsible for the dip in his reputation.

Joseph Noel Paton, Dawn - Luther at Erfurt, 1861, National Galleries of Scotland

What is on show here gives both a themed view of Paton's career and a nice insight into his personal life, with sections like History and Heritage and Royal Connections. The sketches of his children, particularly of his youngest son who died at only five, are especially poignant. He repeatedly used his family as models, and his wife features, both unexpectedly - posing as Martin Luther - and emotionally, captured with Madonna-like intensity singing a lullaby to her child on her lap. These two paintings bring Paton's Pre-Raphaelitism to the fore, with tightly controlled compositions and copious, symbolic detail. But there is an emotional connection too - something which often feels lacking in the Brotherhood. Luther's spiritual doubt is written on his features with empathetic clarity in a way which William Holman Hunt fails to achieve in the work Paton's is often compared to, The Awakening Conscience. 

Paton's enthusiasm for religious subjects links him back to both fellow Scot William Dyce, and the early nineteenth century Nazarenes. Another way in which he is often dismissed as conservative and establishment, although his choices within those subjects (Ezekiel's Vision of the Dry Bones), and his representational decisions, are often radical: the lowering Michelangelesque figure of Satan with flaming halo-like crown watching over a sleeping Christ, for instance. He was also, of course, not afraid to tackle tricky contemporary issues like the Crimean War and the so-called Indian Mutiny. His work also sits comfortably alongside the Academic style of Frederic Leighton and others, more Raphaelite than Pre-Raphaelite, exemplified by the strong colour blocks and effortless compositional group of Queen Margaret and King Malcolm Canmore. The difference, the uniqueness, which Paton brings is his Scottishness, both a sensitivity to the nation's history and folk culture, and a defiantly Romantic streak. With is boggy colours, chiseled faces and close-up intensity, At Bay is pure Walter Scott (or Outlander if you prefer your cultural references more up to date).

Joseph Noel Paton, At Bay, City Art Centre, Edinburgh

You could criticise An Artist's Life for not doing full justice to Paton. You certainly leave feeling he deserves a bigger show in a more prestigious venue. But that is a testament to the  marvellous job that the Dunfermline curators have done: working with the material they've got they conjure up the breadth, the skill and the mind behind this fascinating artist. Thank goodness, we still have local venues with the will, the expertise and the support to mount exhibitions of this quality.

'Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L S Lowry': (Bowes Museum until January 19 2025)

Norman Cornish, Busy Bar,The University Gallery, Northumbria University © the artist's estate. 

Incongruously in the grandiose and distinctly French surroundings of Bowes Museum, Kith and Kinship celebrates the work of two very English, very down to earth artists - Norman Cornish and LS Lowry. Lowry, of course, is a familiar name, one of only a handful of artists who can claim to have inspired a pop song, and something of a cliche with his 'matchstick' figures. Cornish may be less familiar: a miner in the Durham coalfields, he only became a full-time artist at forty-seven. In many respects the two men are poles apart: Cornish was a loving husband, Lowry a loner; Cornish was from a pit village, Lowry originally from suburban Manchester; Cornish was a product of the 'Pitman's Academy', Spennymoor Institute,  whilst Lowry studied under a French Impressionist at Manchester School of Art. Perhaps most crucially, Cornish was an active member of the working class community which he portrayed, whilst Lowry was always an outsider looking in. The Bowes' thorough and well-curated survey points up all these differences, whilst at the same time creating a sense of nuance. If you reduce Lowry to his crowd scenes and factory chimneys then you miss the pictorial expressiveness of his work (so well revealed in the recent Lowry and The Sea exhibition at Berwick's Granary Gallery). If you label Cornish the 'amateur' you miss his subtle referencing of artists of the past and his obvious interest in media and experimentation. 

This is an exhibition of small scale works, including drawings, prints and pastels, and they ripple along the walls, punctuated by the odd larger piece, especially by Cornish, and splashes of wall colour, with protruding flats to create more intimate niches. One such contains a line of images of Cornish's wife carrying out everyday tasks: the wall text references Rembrandt but I was also reminded of Jean Francois Millet's solid yet tender portrayals of the Barbizon peasant community. Cornish conveys the same salt of the earth eternalism. His works are balanced by two Lowry bedroom interiors, the first an age of austerity, middle class and monochrome riff on Van Gogh; the second showing a visit by the doctor. There is a hint of Munch bleakness in the apparently banal everyday scene - recovery does not seem likely.

The curators make significant use of paired images, starting with two self portraits at the start. It is an obvious choice in a dual show but here has unexpected results: Lowry's 1927 The Procession pales alongside Cornish's 1947 view of Durham Gala. It is not just that the later is larger and more colourful, it successfully conveys both the sea-like mass of humanity above which the cathedral towers black in the background and the characterful, just the right side of caricature, foreground close-ups that Cornish is so good at. Lowry's crowd are all isolated in their own space, disconnected and alienated even on a holiday. His best work here foregoes the panoramic in favour of the quirky and the intimate: Meeting Point is divided centrally by a absurdly tall thin building into which assorted figures flow, women one side, men the other. My Two Uncle makes similar use of absurdist symmetry. It's a fine line between the surreal and the just plain cruel,

Cornish's best work has deceptive emotional strength. Busy Bar, one of the largest pieces here, seems painted with beer itself, the fuggy amber warmth of the background juxtaposed with the drown-your-sorrows pints lined up on the bar. The faces are animated, weary, sour; the atmosphere ambiguous. You don't need the pen and ink sketches alongside to believe the authenticity. And you cannot help but see these same figures trudge through the grey cold of Pit Road or agonisingly bent double in Going In-Bye. Facing it Pit Gantry Steps adopts a looser style, Cornish's usual chunky figures replaced by hunched blurs of Lowry-thin miners, lost in the mesh of metal, the noise and steam, dashes of orange as their lamps swing in their hands. The accompanying text quotes the artist remembering what he 'saw and felt as a boy' starting his first shift. All the labelling, along with a wall of videos, treats these works as personal and social history as much as pieces of art and ultimately this is a glimpse into a lost world of heavy industry and smoke blackened towns. 

Kith and Kinship is in many ways an odd title. There is so little of either in Lowry's work and it suggests a nostalgic cosiness which is not at all what Cornish is about. Arguably, too, the artists rarely compliment each other, despite the curators' best efforts. Lowry, for all the fame of his matchstick crowds, excels as an artist of emptiness and oddness. Cornish emerges as an artist of strength and empathy, who deserves to be better known. I wish the exhibition was travelling to a venue down south, if only to prove that where there's muck, there's class.

'Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland': (Lower Belvedere, Vienna until Feb 2 2025): Cold Comfort

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Autumn: Five Crosses (Preliminary work for Jusélius Mausoleum)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela is not a household name in the UK, although visitors the National Gallery may well have fallen for the chilly calm of Lake Keitele with its zigzagging surface striations and weirdly anthropomorphic clouds hanging heavy in the sky. There is another version in the Belvedere's Picturing Finland exhibition which provides a short, but comprehensive account of an artist who was both isolated in his Nordic wilderness and an active participant in early twentieth century modernism. If you start the exhibition knowing little about Finnish art, and about Gallen-Kallela, you will leave wanting to know more. In truth, if you delve deeper you might find yourself disappointed: Gallen-Kallela travelled widely visiting sub-Saharan Africa and North America, and painting what he saw with mixed results. However, as an artist of Finland - the story told here - he was compelling in his use of landscape and folk culture to create poetic, nationalist and deeply personal works. 

Like many Northern European artists in the late years of the nineteenth century Gallen-Kallela gravitated to to the Academie Julien in Paris where he picked up the airy naturalism of Jules Bastien Lepage. His early work focuses on peasant and fishing communities, figures with hands and feet gnarled and oversized by a lifetime of cold, hard work and images of childhood made poignant the knowledge of what their lives would become. But you sense Gallen-Kallela was not a natural Lepageist: figures interested him less than landscape and increasingly the real world interested him less than the symbols and myths he saw represented there. At the same time he was picking up the Arts and Crafts vibe which was sweeping across Europe, linking it, as one sees elsewhere, to a sense of traditional nationhood. William Morris' appropriation of Arthurian legend mirrors Gallen-Kallela's repeated exploration of the Kalevala. Like Morris he explored printmaking, and was working on a massive project to illustrate the folk epic at the time of his death. 

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Spring, c.1900, Belvedere, Vienna

The exhibition catalogues these divergent, and almost irreconcilable, interests. There are bombastic, overblown and sometimes frankly weird reinterpretations of Finnish myths: The Forging of the Sampo is 1950s Hollywood technicolor, all big moustaches, high drama and uber-masculinity. Yet alongside this you have strong expressionistic landscapes - forests and snow - and dreamily symbolist seascapes. Arguably, Gallen-Kallela never settles to a style: stylised Japanese-inspired branches and flattened surface patterns seem to fight against the more vigorous brushwork which he learnt as a young man in Paris. Arguably too, he is often to heavy-handed: do we really need a broken fir tree to symbolise Russian oppression? But even so, there is a conviction which carries you through these works. No one makes snow as oppressively heavy, no one makes water look quite so chill, icy even when it is still liquid, no one makes spring sunshine quite so welcomely warm. The isolation of that far north, often forgotten corner of Europe, at the time fighting for its self-determination, is palpable. So too is the warmth of home and family, keeping all that literal and metaphoric darkness at bay.

Gallen-Kallela takes British viewers outside their comfort zone, to an alien world of winter darkness and deathly cold. He exploits myths which bamboozled Salon-goers and seem just as incomprehensible to us today. Yet he is a Finnish exponent of pan-European ideas, widely travelled and artistically literate. Japonism, Arts and Crafts, proto-abstraction, symbolism: these are the strands which wind their way through this exhibition. Like John Duncan in Scotland, like Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Lithuania, like any number of artists throughout Europe, Gallen-Kallela was exploring ideas of tradition through an aesthetic of modernism. It is that juxtaposition which makes this exhibition so interesting, an ultimately so universal.

Victorian Radicals (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, ongoing): Definitely Victorian, But Radical?

Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, c.1852–1859, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham

 

Birmingham has some claim to be the centre of Pre-Raphaelitism. It was the birthplace of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), who, along with William Morris (1834–1896), provided spectacular stained glass for the city’s cathedral. Its School of Art, founded to teach design in 1843, became the UK’s first public art school in 1885. Promoting Arts and Crafts principles, it taught some of the leading figures of late Pre-Raphaelitism. Birmingham’s manufacturers produced ceramics, jewellery, and metalwork, which upheld the ideals of craftsmanship and beauty that the movement championed. The city’s Victorian businessmen and industrialists were some of the first significant collectors of Pre-Raphaelite painting. Most importantly, they supported the Art Gallery, which opened in its present form in 1885, and has amassed a collection of over 2,000 late Victorian works and objects. If you like Pre-Raphaelitism, it is the place to go. Victorian Radicals toured the US as a hugely successful temporary exhibition before Covid. Now back in Birmingham, it is an odd hybrid, essentially a showcase of the gallery’s own holdings, it is being used to lure visitors back after the museum’s four year closure, raise revenue (you are being charged admission for pictures which used to be visible for free) and has already been extended into a semi-permanent display.

The curators, however, have a big idea: to explain to a modern audience just what makes these so old-fashioned and, well, Victorian, looking artworks, so radical. It’s an uphill struggle. The opening display, set against a fashionably intense blue wall colour, features some of the most beautiful images in 19th-century painting. Yet Charles Dickens, writing in 1850, declared works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to be the ‘lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.’ Despite good captioning, it is tough to look at John Everett Millais‘ The Blind Girl, William Holman Hunt’s (1827–1910) Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus or Arthur Hughes’ (1832–1915) The Long Engagement and see what he was getting at. The PRB’s back to basics ethos - pure colour, precisely observed detail, meaningful subjects – are all there and demonstrated in breathtaking style, but you also have obscure literature, complex symbolism and sentimentality. Occasionally the radicalism creeps in. Hughes’ Nativity, with its abstracted angel wings and claustrophobia, is an entirely new take on an old subject. Henry Wallis’ 1857 Stonebreaker is a furious indictment of poverty for all its lush beauty. Ford Madox Brown completely reinvents the landscape with his oval panorama of An English Autumn Afternoon. However, the exhibition could do far more than their tokenistic examples of William Etty David Cox, to show what the PRB were rebelling against.

Arthur Hughes, The Nativity, 1857–1858, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.

 

Although the PRB itself was short-lived, its influence was immediate and lasting. The following sections of the exhibition examine this by looking at graphic art and sculpture - notably with a newly acquired portrait relief of Millais by Alexander Munro - and new followers: the Sandys siblings, Emma (1841–1877), Frederick (1829–1904) and Simeon Solomon (1840–1905). The changing work of the members themselves is covered, particularly Rossetti’s shift in focus to deeply personal, aestheticist images of women, including a stunning pastel of Fanny Cornforth, Woman with a Fan, from 1870, which has an ethereal softness. There are gaps; for instance, Millais and Hunt’s careers are not followed through and Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862) is little represented, although thankfully introduced as ‘artist’ rather than muse or model. It is the perhaps inevitable consequence of relying solely on the gallery’s own collections. What is noticeable in these middle sections, is how insular the work quickly becomes: landscapes and social commentary give way to Medievalism and fantasy.

The foil to all this Art for Arts Sake and Aestheticism should be William Morris, who along with his close friend and associate Edward Burne-Jones, carried the torch of the PRB forward. Morris was a romantic socialist who championed the ideal of the Medieval craftsman, of a society that appreciated skill and individual labour rather than factory-driven mass production. While the exhibition has good examples of Morris’ designs and is particularly strong in its use of light-box stained glass, the Arts and Crafts Movement seems too big an area to cover successfully. There are dresses, jewellery, and even a carpet, but they are displayed as individual objects rather than part of a coherent narrative. They become simply more beautiful things, and again, the radicalism, indeed any real intellectual drive, is lost. 

What Victorian Radicals does showcase is the exquisite, labour-of-love book-making of Morris and his circle. Examples of Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s Poems and the Kelmscott Press’ Chaucer (1896) are accompanied by original drawings, like Rossetti’s St Cecilia: tiny, dense, and intensely erotic. An uncut woodblock of one of Burne-Jones’ illustrations gives a sense of the painstaking and time-consuming process. Although Edward Burne-Jones was a designer for Morris and Co. and produced his own pieces, like the oversized and luridly gilded Garden of the Hesperides cassone (1888), his art became increasingly detached from the real world. The Pygmalion series which tells a cautionary tale of a sculptor in love with his creation, is shown here in full, with room to breathe on a wall of rich, deep pink, and bolstered by some tenderly soft preliminary sketches. An unsettling quality is never far from Burne-Jones’ work, however, and there is an almost surreal weirdness to his late The Wizard, which seems more attuned to fin-de-siecle symbolism than the sunlit nature and exuberance of early Pre-Raphaelitism.

Kate Elizabeth Bunce, Musica (Melody), 1895–1897, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.

The exhibition’s final section takes the story into the twentieth century with artists and designers mainly from, or trained in, Birmingham. There seems to be a deliberate attempt at celebration: a pale pepperminty wall colouring lightens the mood, and these are works of joyful colour and pattern. However, it is an uneven selection: Kate Bunce (1856–1927) and Joseph Southall (1861–1944) deserve to be better known, but there is an insipid version of Beauty and the Beast by John Dickson Batten. A few judicious loans to include, say, Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919) or Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) would have helped here. It is easy to dismiss these artists as head-in-the-sand nostalgists, painting scenes of knights, working in tempera, and determinedly ignoring modernity. Yet, if you look at their curving, floral patterns and surface decoration, they display clear links to Art Nouveau and foreshadow the quirky Englishness of later artists like Stanley Spencer. And there is a direct link back to those first aims of purity and simplicity. Working at the time of, and apparently defiantly in the face of, modernist experiment, only the most perverse would describe these artists as Radical. But they are distinctive, unique, and, if you ignore the art historical obsession with 'the new', they are worth seeing in their own right.

Victorian Radicals tries hard to make Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement forward-thinking, radical and relevant – there is, for instance, a tagged-on section which looks at works like Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England as illustrations of contemporary issues (in this case migration). Here it feels like it is trying too hard; elsewhere there is a lack of context, so that if you are visiting without a background knowledge of Victorian academic art it is very difficult to see just what these artists were rebelling against. But even when it doesn’t succeed, Victorian Radicals reveals art and design of beauty, skill, and integrity: art to gladden the soul, and design you want to have in your life. Above all it acts as a potent reminder of the importance of Birmingham Art Gallery, and other local collections. There is great art here, there are unexpected gems; they have produced a spectacular exhibition entirely from their own holdings. I wish them every success with their full reopening.

This is an extended version of a review which appeared in Daily Art Magazine (3.6.24)