So far, 2011 has been a good year for drawing. The great Pre-Raphaelite drawings show at Birmingham is still fresh in my mind as I write this review of a superb Watteau exhibition at the Royal Academy (supported by Region Holdings) and a select survey of Victorian drawings and watercolours at the Courtauld. Watercolours are often described as a form of drawing, though they are in fact made with paint. So they occupy a hybrid category, allowing rather too great a laxity of definition, as can be seen in the Tate’s current watercolour compendium. But there is no uncertainty about the Academy’s show: this is all drawings, and of a very high quality indeed.
So far, 2011 has been a good year for drawing. The great Pre-Raphaelite drawings show at Birmingham is still fresh in my mind as I write this review of a superb Watteau exhibition at the Royal Academy (supported by Region Holdings) and a select survey of Victorian drawings and watercolours at the Courtauld. Watercolours are often described as a form of drawing, though they are in fact made with paint. So they occupy a hybrid category, allowing rather too great a laxity of definition, as can be seen in the Tate’s current watercolour compendium. But there is no uncertainty about the Academy’s show: this is all drawings, and of a very high quality indeed.
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) is a key figure in the development of French 18th-century painting, an artist whose influence was felt all over Europe. He is particularly celebrated for inventing the fête galante, a kind of fashionable picnic scene which depicts elegant men and women at play in an idealised landscape. Watteau was an independent, melancholy spirit who had the gift of portraying the temporary quality of life. (Perhaps the TB that was to kill him so tragically young made him especially sensitive to time passing.) In him we see the robust swirling Baroque style metamorphosing into the more refined Rococo, elegant but not frivolous, for he kept human nature firmly within his sights rather than lapsing into the whimsical and decorative. He did this through the constant practice of drawing from life, intent on capturing a wide range of posture and expression which could be fed back into his paintings.
The Academy’s show of some 80 smallish intricately worked drawings is hung in the Sackler Galleries and is worth spending time over. If the galleries get too crowded this will be difficult, and I suspect that this show will be extremely popular, so try to time your visit cunningly. There are far too many beautiful and moving drawings to mention without reducing this review to a mere list, but do notice the rare landscape with a view of a church in the first room, as a striking contrast to the human subject Watteau usually favoured. He was as adept at the single figure as he was at groups of people interacting: actors, musicians, barbers, drapers, soldiers; all fizzing with energy in red chalk, or in the trois crayons technique (red, black and white exquisitely balanced). Watteau rightly prized his drawings and preserved them in albums, which is why there are so many in such good condition for us to enjoy today. This is a knockout show: memorable as much for its technical brilliance as for the psychological exploration of its subjects. Sheer delight.
To coincide with the Academy’s exhibition, the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square has rehung its fine Watteau collection and redisplayed it in the West gallery upstairs. And in the basement exhibition area is another show, given over to Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766), a great collector and dealer, who did much to promote Watteau’s posthumous reputation by commissioning all his work to be engraved. Both displays have substantial publications attached to them, and I hope to have space to return to a more detailed discussion of their individual merits later. (The exhibitions run until 5 June.) Suffice it to say now that the Wallace makes the perfect accompaniment to the Academy show — either visited before or after, or preferably both — and, as admission is free, it’s the sort of museum you can pop in to when you have a spare half-hour.
Meanwhile, at the Courtauld is an enjoyable small exhibition informally grouped around Frederick Walker’s ‘The Old Farm Garden’ (1871), recently presented to the gallery. The short-lived Walker (1840–75) is largely forgotten today, and rates no mention in The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists though Ruskin and van Gogh were among his admirers. His watercolour is a richly caparisoned composition, painted on a warm red-brown ground with lots of carefully observed detail. (Flowers, beehives, a cockerel atop the wall and a cat inserting a narrative element.) Note the importance of the girl’s patterned dress, which anticipates what Bonnard and Vuillard would later do with clothing patterns. It’s a lively demonstration of real experience, combining accuracy and idealisation in beguiling measures; very good to see it restored to public view.
Nearby is a vivid study of Swanage by the hugely underrated Philip Wilson Steer, one of the most neglected artists of turn-of-the-century England. This is his earliest known watercolour — he became an acknowledged master of the medium — admirably fresh and with enjoyably loose yet compact handling. Below hangs a Whistler street scene. Elsewhere are Etty’s intriguing comparison of a living model with a cast of the Venus de Medici, Rossetti’s sensual ‘Study for Venus Verticordia’, done from a cook he met in the street, a delicate and attractive graphite study by G.F. Watts of Emily Tennyson and Whistler’s broad but effective black chalk drawing of Elinor Leyland.
There are also superlative watercolour landscapes by Turner, ‘The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ being particularly enchanting, and an interesting juxtaposition of the silhouetted ruins with purple-blue shadows of Ruskin’s ‘Bay of Naples’ and Edward Lear’s ‘Quarries of Syracuse’. Lear’s drawing is in some ways very close to John Piper’s topographical studies of a century later. A Landseer lion in red-and-black chalk provides a nice comparison with Watteau, and the show comes to a fantastic end with Charles Conder, Aubrey Beardsley and moonlit dragons by Richard Doyle.
In Room XII is a further display entitled ‘Characters and Caricatures’ which focuses piquantly on Charles Keene’s pen-and-ink drawing ‘A Disappointed Patron’ from the 1880s, an amusing study of the often unavoidable gap between what an artist wants to do and what the patron expects. I’d like to see a solo show of Keene’s powerful work to remind us why he was so admired by a range of connoisseurs of drawing from Sickert to Kenneth Clark and R.B. Kitaj. Here also are Max Beerbohm, John Tenniel and Phil May, together with some of William Nicholson’s splendid London Types (the lithographs after the woodcuts) — Barmaid, Hawker and one of Queen Victoria.
The Courtauld, with its varied programme of excellent shows, should be on every art lover’s list of regular haunts.
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