Corot to Monet
National Gallery, until 20 September
In the basement of the Sainsbury Wing is a free exhibition of paintings subtitled ‘A Fresh Look at Landscape from the Collection’. I always enjoy the rehanging of old favourites in new combinations because it not only reminds us of why we liked them in the first place but often allows us to see them in a new light, too. Different paintings hung together can arouse unaccustomed resonances, but it has to be done well, or the eye can be overwhelmed and the intended effects spoiled. Although this show contains many fine things, it projects a feeling of clutter, an air of academic overkill. I wanted to enjoy it more than I did, but with over 90 exhibits there were simply too many pictures.
So the best approach is a highly selective one: don’t try to look at everything with the same degree of attention, but single out individual pictures that catch your eye. The following are some of my selections, beginning with the first room, which is devoted to views of Rome and its surroundings. And it must be said at once that Corot comes very well out of this show. Here’s a lovely early study by him of the Roman Campagna with the Claudian Aqueduct, an informal grouping of trees, sky and distant hills in marvellous blues and ochres. There’s also a fine cloudscape by de Valenciennes, a dramatic sunset by Simon Denis (also other things by him), and an intriguing unfinished Reinagle of the Aurelian Wall. A number of these pictures are on long-term loan from the Gere Collection and include many unfamiliar names, as well as anonymous or attributed items. Anton Sminck van Pitloo is not usually a name to conjure with, despite its assertive ring. And don’t miss the Welshman in Naples, Thomas Jones.
The second room contains a magnificent Turner entitled ‘The Evening Star’, superbly atmospheric despite the out-of-proportion foreground figure with dancing dog. Note the dissolving definitions of dusk: beach, water and sky, while retaining their separate identities, begin to move into each other, eliding and blurring beautifully. Next to it is Constable in a very different mood, on Hove beach, with a pale, airy Bonnington below. In this room, Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz de la Pena comes into his own, a Barbizon plein-air painter with a feeling for storm and pictorial drama. Turn to Millet’s contemplative ‘Winnower’ for contrast, or ‘Tree Study’ by Jean-Michel Cels. In room 3, there’s more Barbizon School painting and some fine late Corots, painted in quite a different style and palette. Here the silvery tones of tree trunks and foliage in puffs of grey convey a more poetic approach to landscape that some will dismiss as fey. Courbet is the antidote: an angry sunset and wonderful sky on Lake Geneva, or the ghostly modern-looking landscape by Théodore Rousseau.
The last room moves towards Impressionism and Monet’s key small painting ‘The Beach at Trouville’. Here again Corot is well represented with his four studies of ‘Times of Day’ on the end wall; the most vigorous is ‘Night’, freer in its modelling, with the trees interestingly reduced for clarity. In this room is a Monet painting of bathers, which makes a very interesting comparison with Seurat’s great Bathers, a group of three Boudin beach scenes, views of London by Monet and Daubigny (compare the different fog effects), and a deliciously free painting of a valley by the little-known Philippe Rousseau. For the discerning, a final group of Corots (there are 20 in the exhibition), with ‘Souvenir of Palluel’ so blond as almost to be disappearing in light. There was a painter who looked hard at nature but then painted from deep within himself.
By way of contrast, let me recommend a delightful show at Camden Arts Centre (until 2 August), of the pottery of Ann Stokes (born 1922). Stokes is known as the artists’ potter because of her sculptural feeling for form and her painterly application of colour. Largely self-taught, she began to make pottery in the 1960s, and has built up a substantial body of work. The display is a pleasingly simple installation of pots and cups on trestle tables, with shelves of plates, animals and objects (including a couple of clocks), and wall decorations such as tiles and mirrors. The fresh colour only emphasises the unaffected form. My favourites include the spiny puffer fish and the hoopoe box. A new book (Lund Humphries £35) celebrates her achievement: intuitive, lyrical and with a robust delicacy that is utterly beguiling.
Comments