From 15 April to 20 July 2014, the Fondazione Roma Museo at Palazzo Sciarra will host the exhibition “Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. English painting towards modernity". The exhibition, curated by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi, intends to offer the public an overview of the artistic and social development, which took place in the eighteenth century hand in hand with the hegemony conquered by Great Britain in the historical, political and economic.
To this end, a corpus of over 100 works has been brought together, coming from the most prestigious museum institutions such as the British Museum, the Tate Britain Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London, the Galleria degli Uffizi which is joined by the nucleus of works from the important American collection of the Yale Center for British Art.
“Following the positive response from the public and critics obtained by the exhibition dedicated to the role that Rome played as a cultural center of the XNUMXth century - declares the President of the Rome Foundation, Prof. Avv. Emmanuele FM Emanuele - I thought it appropriate to look beyond the borders of our nation to retrace those exceptional events which see England as the center of an economic and social evolution which will allow it to develop its own original artistic language and which in the XNUMXth century will become a model for all of Europe.
The exhibition, created thanks to the collaboration with the most important international institutions, such as the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, represents a further testimony of my well-known belief according to which the private sector, especially if not for profit, constitutes a an inescapable resource for the development of high-profile cultural projects and at the same time it is able to provide a new and innovative management model in the culture sector.
The exhibition, which follows almost half a century from the last one that the city of Rome dedicated to eighteenth-century English art, represents a further step in the cultural project that the Fondazione Roma, which I have the honor to preside over, has undertaken since 1999 and which has allowed to create over 42 exhibitions, enriching the cultural offer of our city with always innovative and culturally stimulating proposals.”
By the eighteenth century London had become the beating heart of the English empire, with a population growth of over 700.000 in the first 50 years of the century. The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to this context, in which the works of artists such as Scott, Marlow, Sandby are collected, to which is added the mastery of the Venetian Canaletto, who through their views bear witness to a city in constant evolution and which it will soon become the emblem of the modern metropolis.
The second section is dedicated to the so-called New World where the distinctions between the aristocracy and the middle class are thinning, both socially and culturally, and artists can count on a new class of patrons, made up of professionals interested in promoting those painters and those issues capable of affirming their new status. The effigies created by Zoffany, Hodges, Wright of Derby thus become protagonists of the exhibition, portraying emerging figures of industrialists, traders, scientists, explorers, alongside musicians, actors and sportsmen, who have become the darlings of an increasingly demanding and participates in collective life. The section therefore becomes the interpreter of the passion for the arts and for sport, of the consecration of industrial development and of the interest in science and finally of the enthusiasm for the epic of the exploration of the new continents.
The development of bourgeois patronage and the birth of an art "market" aimed at an increasingly wider public will play a fundamental role in the radical transformation of the relationship between national culture and the visual arts. For the first time England conceives its own national art school, lagging behind other European countries.
In the third section we therefore want to deepen the context that will lead Towards a national iconography: Hogarth and Füssli. The contribution of both painters, the first English by birth and the second by adoption, will prove to be essential for the affirmation of a purely British art.
The section includes a selection of Hogarth's most important engravings, such as the Marriage à-la-mode cycle or Election Day in which the artist documents with a critical and disenchanted eye contemporary scenes of social and political life that will have great success over the century.
In the English cultural life of the time, the theater occupied a dominant position, enthralling all social classes. In this context, therefore, one of the most emblematic directions of Anglo-Saxon art will mature, painting of the theatrical genre. Interpreted first by Hogarth, who will pause to depict famous actors in the act of acting, it will later be developed, in extraordinary paintings by Füssli, a young Swiss artist who moved to London, destined to become one of the most famous painters of Shakespearean theatre.
In the British context, strongly permeated by the Protestant religion which rejects painting of religious subjects, the portrait reaches a popularity that will have no equal in any other European country. The importance assumed by this genre in the English sphere is made evident, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the writings of Jonathan Richardson who assign portraiture the task of transmitting to posterity the virtues of the greats.
In the fourth section, The Heroic Age of Portraiture, the works in particular by masters such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Ramsay and Zoffany, enhance the results achieved by English portraiture which is expressed with a distinctive style, bringing admirable original compositional solutions. The section consists of a gallery of elegant noblewomen, generals and family groups, which invites you to observe a world pleased with its conquests and goals.
The portrait will not be the only genre that will find fortune in eighteenth-century England. The love for the landscape on the part of the English, collectors of Italian and Dutch landscapes since the seventeenth century, in fact favored the attention of English artists towards this subject throughout the century.
Like the portrait, landscape painting also reflected the political and public aspirations of the client, portraying castles and manor houses that stand in the middle of their estates. Also contributing to the success of the genre were the writings of Alexander Pope and James Thomson who, through lyrics inspired by the model of Virgil's Georgics, managed to give life to a poetic vision of the English countryside as a modern Arcadia, custodian of beauty and harmony.
The works in the fifth section, Landscape “on the spot”, refer to this sphere, dedicated to the watercolor technique which in the eighteenth century would find extraordinary diffusion in England. The most representative artists dedicated to this technique are present in the section with refined and intense images of English and Italian landscapes captured at dawn or dusk, under sunny or leaden skies.
In the sixth section, Variations on the landscape, the oil paintings in large formats of the most famous artists who will deal with this genre are reviewed. Here we find works by Richard Wilson, the first great exponent of British landscape painting, who became passionate about this genre during the formative years spent in Italy, but who will then be able to develop his style independently, basing his compositions on climatic conditions and typically English nature. The debt to the Italian landscape will be found in the superb view of the Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno by Wright of Derby, a superlative painter in expressing luministic effects in moonlight that will become one of his favorite subjects (Snowdon in the moonlight, Victoria Gallery, Liverpool).
To close the exhibition we find the last section dedicated to two artists, Constable and Turner, champions of international fame, admirable representatives of the evolution of English landscape painting in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The art of the two great landscape masters is the result of an elaboration of the figurative tradition of the eighteenth century, but which at the same time opens up, thanks to tireless experimentation, towards what we could define as the age of modernity. This research path succeeded in imposing a new figurative language which allowed for the first time, throughout the nineteenth century, to look at England as a model.
After the success of the Roma e l'Antico. Reality and vision in the 700th century, created in 2010, which focused attention on the role played by classical antiquity as an inescapable model for the development of the arts, erudition and taste, which spread from the papal capital throughout Europe , the exhibition Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. English painting towards modernity, intends to turn attention to the British context, where the alternative to the classicist language leads to the definition of its own artistic identity capable of interpreting that modernity that will become the common language for the entire continent in the nineteenth century.
Promoted by the Rome Foundation, in collaboration with the Special Superintendence for the Historical, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museum Complex of the City of Rome, and organized by the Rome-Art-Museums Foundation, the exhibition Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. English painting towards modernity will be hosted at the Rome Foundation Museum, in the Palazzo Sciarra headquarters from 15 April to 20 July 2014.
Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. English painting towards modernity.
Rome, Rome Museum Foundation - Palazzo Sciarra (via Marco Minghetti, 22)
April 15-July 20, 2014
www.fondazioneromamuseo.it
