'Gainsborough and the Legacy of Landscape' at Gainsborough's House (Until June 11 2023): Money Well Spent?

Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk, reopened in November 2022 after a £10.5m renovation and extension. You can literally smell the money: the foyer still has that unique tang of newness. You can certainly see it: the new extension is elegantly engineered into an awkward site; the façade employs the locally characteristic combination of brick and flint; the interior doors are so weighty you can barely open them; and their collection of Gainsboroughs are hung on a background of glorious green silk. And ultimately you pay for it: the entry fee, including temporary exhibitions is nearly £16.

Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid, (1755), Woburn Abbey

The extension allows for two temporary exhibition spaces, the larger currently occupied by Gainsborough and the Legacy of Landscape: Masterpieces from Woburn Abbey. It is in all honesty a slightly disappointing show. The first section gives prominence to Gainsborough's commissions for the Duke of Bedford, a welcome reminder that the artist who is usually seen as a portraitist who wished he was a landscapist, was actually recognised as a painter of nature from early in his career. Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid (1755), is a show-stopper in itself, in terms of scale (1m x 1.2m), execution and its intriguing narrative. The soft pinkish clouds give a rococo warmth to the artist's usual earthy, and sometimes dingy, palette. The composition is a ramshackle picturesque, Gainsborough's loose brushwork creating a countryside of exaggerated disorder, rutted lanes and knarled bark which mirrors the fluster of the milkmaid with her undone stays and her slipping shoe. The grouping of the figures and cow is almost Hogarthian in its style and innuendo and the slither of white milk just visible in the pail is a final masterful flourish. 

The Dutch examples - and there are some fine works, notably Albert Cuyp's Artist Sketching Near Elten (1655)  - clearly show both their influence on Gainsborough and on British art in general. However, the second part of the display, 'the legacy', is far less convincing. The wall text describes the family selling Dutch works in order to purchase contemporary British examples, but they might have been advised not to. The artist who most obviously picked up the baton from Gainsborough, John Constable, is overlooked in favour of Frederick Richard Lee and Augustus Wall Callcott both of whom seem stiff and contrived compared with what has gone before. Edwin Landseer, superb painter of animals though he was, seems much less interested in the generic rolling countryside behind the Deer in Coldbath Fields (1835). Instead we make the significant leap to Richard Parkes Bonington whose French influence takes art in a different direction. I can't fault the gallery space or the labelling but the exhibition fails to do real justice to its title.

What Gainsborough's House does boast is a wonderful collection of the artist's own works, some exhibited in a sensuously rich cocoon of dark wood and deep green silk, some in the intimacy of living spaces in the original house. The new gallery works well, sympathetic to Gainsborough's landscapes and making the portraits sing. One of my favourites of his early style, Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape (1750), has never looked better with the reds and whites emphasised and the youthful, bulbous nosed faces more expressive than I remember. Yet information is reduced to tombstone facts on large tatty cards strewn on a bench: they claim to be temporary but four months after opening, and given the opulence of the surroundings, they need to do better. Their own collection is boosted by loans, at present including the National Portrait Gallery's David Garrick (1770) who sparkles with urbane charm, and two head and shoulder images of his daughters, every brushstroke applied with paternal love and pride.

I wanted to enjoy Gainsborough's House but it was a frustrating experience. It seems so much less than the sum of its parts. Cedric Morris' display is crammed into a room in the old house. The silk exhibition, potentially very interesting, seems an underdeveloped afterthought. Who is going to benefit from the multi-million pound investment? I hope, though I'm not convinced, that it will encourage visitors into the town. If I lived locally I might resent the fact that this beautiful building and the art inside it was hidden behind such a significant paywall. Certainly, on the mid-week day I visited it was quiet, and it is difficult not to compare the experience unfavourably with a trip to Christchurch Mansion in nearby Ipswich, free and with an exhibition space attached, this was a bustle of engaged visitors.

'Landscape Rebels' (until April 16 2023): Passionate but not Preachy

 John Constable, Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden, (1815), Ipswich Borough Council Collection

Christchurch Mansion, in Ipswich, is an absolute treasure, one of those traditional, local museums which attempts, and largely succeeds, in giving an accessible, potted cultural history - furnished rooms, children's toys, Victorian kitchens. It's all slightly down at heel, but so warmly staffed and so obviously well-intentioned, that you forgive the deficiencies. Given the recent decimation of local amenity and arts funding it's a miracle it's open at all. 

The house itself is a stylish Tudor red brick, the roofline enlivened by a series of Dutch gables, the entrance aggrandised by columns and topped with a stunning octagonal clock face. It seems overloaded with windows, everything slightly off kilter. Once inside the entrance hall is impressive: double height, galleried, with a black and white tiled floor straight out of Vermeer and the usual array of family portraits joined by random copies of Renaissance sculpture. So far so predictable, but the house has some surprises up its sleeve. The Wingfield Room features spectacular oak panelling, not original but moved from a house in the centre of the town: the sixteenth century overmantel is quirkily and audaciously carved with nude figures of the Judgement of Paris and the Three Graces. The Upper Chamber, sagging under the weight of oak, contains sections of preserved plaster painting from several Ipswich houses. But the real treat, is the art collection: the house boasts some wonderful works by local artists, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable.

At present some of the best of these are on show as part of Landscape Rebels in the Wolsey Art Gallery, a purpose-built exhibition space within the mansion. Hats off to the curators. This is a cleverly put together show, with something for everyone and a clear but never overly didactic determination to make you think about the climate crisis. There are 1960s floral print dresses, Victorian pinned moth collections, a lethal-looking shark-tooth spear and a range of artworks from seventeenth Dutch landscapes to contemporary commissions. You can go round and simply enjoy the objects or you can read the carefully written wall texts and think about coastal erosion, forest fires and industrial pollution.

If you were being picky, you might argue that Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815), one of a pair of uncharacteristically precise paintings of his family home which Constable painted for himself and in memory of his parents, is not particularly rebellious, nor especially related to the climate crisis. The same could be said of Cedric Morris, another local lad, or indeed Walton Bridges (1806), one of those early Turner’s that harks back rather than looks forward. Equally, you could argue that the whole concept was a poor man’s version of last year’s Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool. But do I really care? This was a perfect balance of revisiting old friends - Philip Wilson Steer’s Knucklebones, Walberswick (1888-9) with its family beach holiday nostalgia of languor and awkwardness - and making new ones - Mary Warsop's Coastal Suffolk (1981) grey-green stack of landscapes in which sky and sea become interchangeable; or Guy William Eves' precise yet evocative 'tree portraits' (2020). And it gave you something to think about. In one room, with limited resources but real thought and care, the curators have put on a great exhibition. Given the wall of comments left at the end and the numbers I saw visiting, it's one which has clearly resonated with the public. I overheard people saying this was their third visit, and of course an added bonus is that it is a free show. Ipswich is a lucky town.

Islanders: A Dreamily Beautitful Show (Fitzwilliam Museum until June 4 2023)

Hellenistic statuette of a seated child holding dove (c.200BC) (© Fitzwilliam Museum)

Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean, currently showing at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is one of the most beautifully curated exhibitions you're likely to see this year. You are ushered in to the sounds the sea, calmed by a palette of blue, white and terracotta. Gauze softens the edges of the room as you meander around oval island displays. The blown-up images of Greece, like holiday brochures on the walls, are intrusively unnecessary because you have already been transported to the Mediterranean. But this is also an exhibition full of detailed scholarship, the end product of a four year research project which starts with a complex timeline of the three islands featured - Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia - and ends by challenging you with the question of what it means to be an islander in Britain today.

This duality - aesthetic versus intellectual - is a problem which the exhibition never really reconciles. The overall premise - that these are disparate yet connected communities - is slippery enough to grasp and the broadly thematic structure means it is increasingly difficult to keep hold of the complex shifts of time and space. I went round the exhibition twice, the first time carefully reading the informative but often annoyingly placed labels, getting steadily more and more frustrated by my own inability to keep all the mental plates spinning. 

Second time round, I was happy to drift; to enjoy the wonders. And there are wonders aplenty.  Figurines old beyond time which, with their clean lines and formal simplification would pass as twentieth century modernism in miniature. Elegantly carved faces which seem more East Asian than Mediterranean. A lion's head earring, so tiny and so beautifully worked that you literally press your nose to the glass of the display, entranced by the gleaming gold. Reassuringly familiar hints of Egypt, Assyria, Classical Greece. Cretan Kamares pottery with rich coloured geometry which directly resonates with the other exhibition on in Cambridge at the moment: Lucy Rie at Kettle's Yard.  Mundane practicality - copper ingots, ox-hide shaped for ease of carrying and stacking - alongside primitive mystery - an ancient Sardinia warrior figure with four eyes, four arms and two shields.

A treasure trove. And it's free. You can pay over £15 to see Labyrinth at the Ashmolean. I haven't seen this and I'm not judging. But if you have a wander round the rest of the Fitzwilliam, you can't help feeling it could do with a little TLC: some new wall coverings, some revamped displays. The museum lost out in the last round of Arts Council funding, despite the fact that the place was packed mid-week in March, despite the fact that they consistently put on fantastic, innovative exhibitions like Islanders. So go if you can, make a donation if you are able, enjoy the love, care and scholarship that has gone into it and lose yourself among the beauty of the islands.

Benjamin Williams Leader: Landscape the Victorians Loved

February Fill Dyke, 1881, Birmingham Museums Trust

You probably haven't heard of Benjamin Williams Leader (1831-1923), and if you have you probably don't rate him very highly. But the Victorians could not get enough of his large scale landscapes: he exhibited at the Royal Academy every year from 1854 until 1922, his popularity peaking in 1881 when February Fill Dyke was considered the best landscape in the show. 

Leader began painting landscape early: John Constable was a friend of his father, who stayed with the family on at least one occasion. Leader senior was a keen amateur artist who took his sons on sketching trips around the Worcestershire countryside. Having trained as a draughtsman in the family engineering business, Benjamin began studying at the Royal Academy in 1854 but dropped out before graduating, having already started to sell his paintings. Unusually, he exhibited at the summer show in his first year as a student: 'Cottage Children Blowing Bubbles' sold to an American buyer for the not insignificant sum of £50. As the title suggests his early work was full of observed detail cataloguing rural scenes around his home; small scale and with an easy naturalism they seem bland and banal to twenty-first century eyes.

On the Teme at Worcester, 1855, Worcester Art Gallery and Museum

Leader quickly developed a more romanticised approach. Travelling throughout Britain on the well-trodden artist routes of North Wales, Scotland and the Lake District, he increased the range, size and emotional impact of his canvases. In the 1870s he ventured further afield, visiting Switzerland, but he was never really interested in sublime landscape: mountains remain background features, softened by atmospheric perspective and never threatening to overwhelm the foreground with its detail and incident. The impact comes instead from the size: Autumn in Switzerland is 1.2 x 1.8m.

 

Autumn in Switzerland, 1878, Kirklees Museums and Galleries

Leader eventually settled his family in Surrey amongst the anonymous agriculture landscape he preferred. Trees, water and the effects of light were what moved him. A visit to France in 1865 when he had a painting at the Salon, gave Leader an appreciation of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's work which led to a broadening of his own style. He maintained a careful balance between the precise observation of Pre-Raphaelite landscape and the visible brush-marks of French art which was treated with suspicion by many English critics. 

Leader also trod his own path in his choice of subject, or rather lack of subject. Paintings like February Fill Dyke exemplify this. The scene is neither picturesque, nor dramatic; despite the figures and buildings there is no real focus or incident; the title is evocative but non specific - we have no idea of where this is. In fact there is little sense that this is an observed piece of nature: the mackerel sky and the carefully composed lines of recession which lead the eye into the warm glow of the horizon are deliberately manipulative. It is a very self conscious piece of elegiac lyricism which manages to create a emotional pull out of a very unpromising corner of nature. 

Seen in person today, Leader's landscapes can appear over-sized and over-painted. But they were designed to hold their own on the crowded walls of the Academy, amidst the hype and hustle of the Victorian art market; and were expected to hang on patterned walls amongst the over-ornamented clutter of contemporary drawing rooms. Equally, it is easy to criticise Leader for living too long and being resistant to change. He was still alive to see the death of his eldest son in the First World War, and, if he had chosen to visit, Roger Fry's seminal 1910 exhibition of Manet and the Post Impressionists, but his last landscapes seem resolutely rooted in the memories of his youth. Old Worcestershire Mill could easily have been painted fifty years earlier.

Old Worcestershire Mill, 1919, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery

Benjamin Williams Leader has been shunted into the basement because tastes change and because art historians are condescending towards the popular in their determination to rush towards the new. On the first charge, I recently saw February Fill Dyke, tacked onto an exhibition of Canalettos at Worcester Art Gallery: it was genuinely impressive and

painterly, and it drew the attention of everyone in the room, despite being poorly positioned in too small a space. The gallery has also taken advantage of the loan of that painting from Birmingham to hold a small exhibition of Leader's works. On the second count: for anyone  interested in nineteenth century social and cultural history, the popular art of the day is arguably more significant than that of the avant garde. Leader a well-known figure; his works were purchased by the great and the good -  including Gladstone - and, in print form, by those lower down the social scale; and, as the number of his landscapes in museums and galleries up and down the country proves, it was widely collected and exhibited. He should be taken more seriously and the centenary of his death seems like a good time to start.

My struggle with International Women's Day

Every year on March 8th we celebrate International Women's Day. Politicians offer their support; businesses jump on the bandwagon; small triumphs are bigged up; injustices have an all-too-brief light shone on them. Why? It sounds trite to say that I want every day to be international women's day. That I want to live in a world where the whole concept is irrelevant because the small triumphs are just daily realities and the injustices are the thing of the past. But I don't like women only shortlists and quotas. I don't like female artist only exhibitions. I don't want women's rights ghettoised into a day any more than I want their history restricted to a special 'Women's History Month' as if somehow we are not part of history in general. I want every day to be international women's day - without the capitals and the brouhaha - because in reality that's what life is. Women doing their best, carrying on, facing injustice, achieving small triumphs, taking a stand. Without making a fuss or needing a pat on the back. 

IWD started quietly. It also, don't mention it too loudly, was originally largely a socialist concept, with early versions commemorating the New York garment workers' strike, the Paris Commune, the 1917 Bread and Peace marches in Russia and, of course, demands for suffrage. The modern incarnation really developed out of second-wave feminist protests in the 1960s - again grass-roots, activist-based - before being formally adopted by the UN in 1977 with a resolution proclaiming an international day for women's rights and world peace.

Yet somehow we've got to here. 2023. IWD corporatised, politicised, themed, sponsored and generally debased. Internationalwomensday.com and their commercial partner John Deere. Any and every institution obliged to parade its support, social media awash with hashtags and likes. Meanwhile out in the real world we have women dying for basic rights: the last twelve months have been truly, shockingly horrific in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Ukraine. We've had anti-abortion legislation in the US and elsewhere. We've had examples of ingrained sexism within institutions like the police and fire brigade in this country. 

I accept the argument that IWD creates a focus, an agenda and a dynamic that can potentially highlight all the genuine, on the ground activism which actually drives change. But it's a dangerous tightrope to walk between that and a lot of manufactured sound and fury which signifies nothing. We're at a tipping point. Just as Poppy Day has become less about raising money for veterans and remembering the horrors of war and more of an excuse to 'call-out' anyone unfortunate enough not to be seen wearing some kind of ever more extravagant badge. Just as whether or not you fly the Rainbow flag has become a culture war issue which has very little to do with the reality of LGBTQ+ rights. Just as clapping for the NHS became politically compulsory during COVID but has made no difference to long term government attitudes to health service funding and pay. And worse of all, just as climate change has been greenwashed from a generational emergency into a minor, manageable problem by multinational vested interests. So too is IWD in danger of becoming a meaningless 'celebration' of sisterhood, a patronising 'we're all behind you, girls!'

The Secretary General of the UN recently claimed, with impeccable timing, that it would take 300 years to get gender equality. So, I'm not likely to see it. It's been well over a hundred years since women first started mobilising themselves on International Women's Day. Change has happened. More change is needed. Let's remember and celebrate everyone out there who is fighting, campaigning, writing, marching, arguing, and even putting their lives on the line to make that change happen. But let's do it everyday. Because they are.

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