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Saturday 30 August 2008

Fluff and granite

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September

Alan Green: Joan Miro
Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July 

I can never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the noble proportions of Hertford House. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are crammed into two smallish rooms in the basement, which just goes to show that apparently we value our stomachs over our hearts. Luckily, the Wallace regularly mounts high-quality exhibitions in its subterranean galleries (rather as the National Gallery occasionally does), and the current one is no exception. Boucher and Chardin are chalk and cheese, fluff and granite, but this show brings them together to considerable effect, and to our definite advantage. A series of loans from such eminent collections as the Frick in New York and the Hunterian in Glasgow makes this display an unmissable event.

If you take my advice, proceed through the first gallery without pausing, into what the Scots are wont to call ‘the body of the kirk’. In this main room are several surprises. On the end wall facing you are two Chardin paintings, possible pendants (i.e., painted to hang together), certainly reunited for the first time since the 1760s: ‘Lady Taking Tea’ from the Hunterian, and ‘The House of Cards’ from the Rothschild Family Trust at Waddesdon Manor. If that conjunction isn’t enough to justify the show, turn 90 degrees for Boucher’s ‘Woman on a Daybed’ (1743) from the Frick, the other focus of this display. A fine painting, but not nearly as sumptuous as the ‘The Milliner (Morning)’, the first panel in a projected quartet devoted to times of the day, lent by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Look at the handling of drapery in this painting, it has a loving intricacy of surface and texture that is missing from the harder-edged and slightly more forced treatment to be found in ‘Woman on a Daybed’. For even more distinctions of quality, turn to the version of ‘The Milliner’ hanging nearby (from the Wallace’s own collection) and ascribed to Studio of Boucher. This is dull in comparison and has none of the beguiling delicacy of the Stockholm picture.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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