The best artworks for Winter lighting
Looking for a gallery to get cozy in through the cold Winter days? We've got you covered...
By
Susan Gray
November 27, 2023
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
Winter is when delicate art materials and methods come out of the shadows. Works on paper, normally held in cabinets, to view by appointment only, are set free on gallery walls, the low interior lighting a continuation of the overcast skies outside. Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse Lautrec at the Royal Academy is just such a seasonally perfect show.
Charting both commercial innovations in paper making, pastels and watercolour in the Nineteenth Century, and the freedom of expression these materials gave artists associated with Impressionism, the show gives overdue attention to less well-known members of the Impressionist circle. Opening with three landscapes by Eugene Boudin, Armand Guillaumin and Edgar Degas, and a portrait by Albert Lebourg (The Artist’s Wife and Mother-in-Law Reading a Letter by Candlelight (1879 -79)), these four works set the tone for what is to follow. With their informality, freedom and new lease of life from materials, they form a signpost to Twentieth Century art. Lebourg’s portrait, in charcoal and graphite, heightened with white, resembles a spectral photographic negative with two up-lit faces floating in a sea of grey and black. Guillaumin’s Sky Study (1869) echoes Cezanne in its use of black and powerful brushstrokes, but also points to the loose, seeping blocks of colour of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Degas’ Beach at Low Tide (1868), another pastel, but in shades of beige, French grey and grey, looks stratified by comparison.
Portraits in pastel are the shared subject and medium of the three women artists included in Impressionism on Paper. Eva Gonzales, The Bride (1879) shows pastel’s facility for hatching to create shadow, seen across the bride’s ruffed oyster grey, a technique becoming more intense in the Nineteenth Century’s final decades. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lambert (1885) Berthe Morisot - a founding member of the Impressionists and an exhibitor in all but one of the group’s exhibitions - creates an immediacy and informality with her sitter through energetic, loose strokes and by leaving much of the paper margins bare. American artist Mary Cassatt used pastels to explore colour, and the vibrant hatching in Portrait of Marie-Therese Gaillard (1894), especially across the front of the blue dress in the foreground, invites comparison with Federico Zandomeneghi’s Study of a Woman from Behind (1890 -97). The artist uses a mesh of green and white strokes to highlight the musculature of the back, lending the exposed shoulder a tactile appearance.
Texture is also the hallmark of Vincent van Gogh’s Thistles by the Roadside (August 1888). In the black and white drawing, Van Gogh uses a pen he made himself from reeds - together with a quill pen and graphite - to create a firework display of mark-making with lines, dots, dashes, circles and curlicues conveying the texture of the landscape, especially the sinuous thistles in the foreground. Conte crayon gave Georges Seurat the lustrous and velvety blacks on display in Seated Youth, Study for ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ (1893). The seated boy with the bucket hat is immediately recognisable as the figure in the foreground of the larger work, but Seurat’s unique style of strong contrasts of black and white, with dark figures silhouetted against hazy light, make the preparatory drawing an independent work in its own right.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Raphael created 10 huge cartoons (large-scale preparatory works on paper to act as a guide) for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. At the V&A, Raphael’s seven full-scale Cartoons (1515-16) are displayed in a low-lit oval court with altarpieces at each end. The cartoons are not only functional templates but works of art in their own right; with a linear perspective not seen in tapestries before, the drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles. Lost for nearly a century, seven surviving cartoons were bought by the future Charles I and brought to England in 1623 as tapestry designs for the Mortlake Works opened four years earlier. Based on scenes from the Acts of the Apostles depicting the lives of St Paul and St Peter, the first ever Pope, the sheer scale and dynamism of the colossal works on paper come alive with slow looking, distracted by neither dazzle nor shadow. Dim light is a connection to the Seventeenth Century weavers who would have reproduced Raphael's images in reverse to create tapestries with cinematic depth, influencing Northern European art for centuries. A tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, made in the 1640s for the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and depicting a solid, windswept St Peter, with contrasting delicate halo trying to keep his balance at the centre of an overladen boat, shows the enduring quality of Raphael’s designs.
London is home to three examples of magnificent interior painting, designed to be seen by candlelight, and eyes already adjusted to winter gloom make perfect viewing conditions. Installed at the Banqueting House 13 years before the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, Peter Paul Rubens’ nine ceiling paintings of James uniting English and Scottish thrones, with Solomon and Minerva, are unique in remaining on the ceiling for which they were painted. London’s other interior paintings designed for candlelight are Ruben’s great rival Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Arts at Marlborough House, originally designed for the Queen’s House in Greenwich and installed in 1638, two years after its completion. Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College was completed between 1707 and 1726, glorifying the Protestant accession of King William and Mary and political stability in 200 figures.
Winter light is a prerequisite for seeing Turner in January, a collection of watercolours by JMW Turner (1775-1839) at The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. For one month from New Year’s Day onwards, visitors can see the collection left by art collector Henry Vaughan in 1900, with the stipulation they were only shown in January, when natural light levels were at their lowest. Only coming out in winter has kept the colours of the landscapes of Scotland, Italy and the Himalayas as fresh as when they were created 200 years ago.
Inky dark skies can also lend another dimension to exterior art; David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017), part of the South Bank’s Winter Light, contrasts the synthetic colours of modern cities against a leaden winter sky. But who wants to spend too much time in the cold, when there is a warm gallery full of works looking their very best for these few months of the year?
