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Exhibitions 2: British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750–1950

This stunning, and constantly surprising, exhibition is the brainchild, or love child even, of the Flemish art historian Robert Hoozee, author of the first Constable catalogue raisonné and director of the Museum of Fine Art in Ghent. He regrets that ‘British art is still a well-kept secret on the European mainland’ — or as Timothy Hyman (with John Gage one of two specialist British advisers) puts it, ‘the least explored wing of the European treasure house’. It begins in the mid-18th century when, generally speaking, we stopped importing art and artists from the continent and began to develop an art of our own, and ends 200 years later when British art began to merge with the American and continental mainstream. Although it contains most of our great artists it is not a ‘survey’ so much as an unconventional, personal and thought-provoking take on British art, full of unexpected works and unfamiliar names as well as familiar landmarks — over 300 items gathered from collections all over the world.

The exhibition is built round Hoozee’s belief that there are two constants in British art: ‘the empirical stance, or observation, on the one hand, and the imaginative approach, or inclination towards the visionary, on the other’ — rendered more snappily in the title of Hyman’s introductory essay as ‘Between the Meticulous and the Mad’. Sometimes, of course, the two strands merge.

‘No people is more prejudiced in its own favour than the British (according to foreigners quoted by Nikolaus Pevsner in The Englishness of English Art) — except when it comes to art. ‘None of the other countries of Europe has so abject an inferiority complex about its own aesthetic capabilities.’