The Holburne Museum Features Landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough

Written by Linda Spanierman Monday, 31 October 2011 22:47

Bath, UK.- The Holburne Museum is proud to show "Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations", the first exhibition in fifty years devoted solely to his landscape paintings and  drawings, bringing together remarkable works from public and private collections, many of them little known and some not previously exhibited. Accompanying Gainsborough's Landscapes will be "The View From Here: New Landscape Photographs by Mark Edwards". Mark Edwards is one of the most intriguing and thoughtful landscape photographers working today. His work responds to the tradition of British landscape painting and is the prefect accompaniment. Both exhibitions are on view until January 8th 2012.

“I am sick of portraits and wish very much to… walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness & ease.” Thomas Gainsborough. For Gainsborough, if portraiture was his business, landscape painting was his pleasure, and his landscape paintings and drawings reveal his mind at work, the extraordinary breadth of his invention and the dazzling quality of his technique. Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) sold relatively few of his landscape paintings, and none of his drawings, but he regarded them as his most important work. His paintings do not represent real views, but are creations ‘of his own Brain’, as he put it. A limited number of rural subjects exercised his imagination from one decade to the next, changing as he developed an increasingly energetic ‘hand’, or manner of painting, and becoming ever grander in conception. The exhibition includes some of his most famous and popular works including The Watering Place from the National Gallery (the most famous of all his landscape compositions in his life-time) and less well-known works such as the little-seen but ravishing Haymaking from Woburn. The paintings have been selected to represent six landscape themes; the remarkable drawings and prints show Gainsborough returning to these themes and demonstrate the longevity of each theme and the degree of experimentation that was involved in the search for the perfect composition.


The evolution of Gainsborough’s style is traced from early naturalistic landscapes in the Dutch manner, enlivened with small figures (pictured above), to grand scenery that is dramatically lit and obviously imaginary, such as the Romantic Landscape from the Royal Academy of Arts. In the Girl with Pigs, from the Castle Howard Collection, a rustic figure takes centre stage: fancy figures of this kind are, in Gainsborough’s art, closely integrated with his landscape practice.

At the same time as Gainsborough’s Landscapes the Holburne Museum will show a small selection of contemporary landscape photographs by Mark Edwards. Mark Edwards has produced a complementary body of six large scale colour landscape prints of astonishing quality and detail. Edwards’ huge colour prints mirror the scale of Gainsborough’s paintings and reveal great respect for the painterly tradition, whilst bringing into question the standard by which we measure beauty. These works, made on an 8 x 10 inch view camera, invite comparison between approaches to the depiction of our landscape over time and through different media. One of the works Edwards has produced is a large transparency illuminated in a light box, as a contemporary response to the cinematic dimension to Gainsborough’s work. Gainsborough constructed an early form of viewing box. He then painted his landscapes onto glass and lit them from behind using candles. He referred to them as ‘transparent paintings’.


These new images are centred on East Anglia and Bath, both areas associated with Gainsborough. Based in Norfolk, Edwards has always been conscious of the visual traditions of East Anglia and the paintings of both Gainsborough and Constable in particular. Mark uses a large format camera balanced on top of a tall ladder, much like the pioneering photographers of the nineteenth century, and visits places many times before photographing them. Edwards’ work is most often suffused in a cloudless grey light, but in these new works the sky is far more painterly, with greater definition and colour. Edwards’ work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and has been acquired by such collections as the V & A Museum and No 10 Downing Street, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.

The Holburne Museum is one of Britain’s outstanding small museums. Located in the historic city of Bath, it houses an important art collection formed by Sir William Holburne in nineteenth-century Bath which includes paintings, silver, sculpture, furniture and porcelain of both national and international significance. Artists represented in the collection include Gainsborough, Guardi, Stubbs, Ramsay and Zoffany. The heart of the present day Collection was formed by Sir Thomas William Holburne (1793-1874). As a second son, Thomas William (generally known as William) first pursued a naval career. He ultimately inherited the Baronetcy in 1820 following the death of his elder brother, Francis, at the Battle of Bayonne in 1814. In 1882 his collection of over 4,000 objects, pictures and books was bequeathed to the people of Bath by Holburne’s sister, Mary Anne Barbara Holburne (1802-1882). From the start, it was intended to form “the nucleus of a Museum of Art for the city of Bath”. Since the Museum opened to the public in 1893, a further 2,500 objects have been acquired. Some of the growth has consisted in filling gaps in the collection: the furniture, for instance, is almost entirely a post-Holburne addition. In some sections of the collection, however, where the original holdings were comprehensive, not much has been added since Holburne's day; this is true of the maiolica, silver and gems. In other sections, growth has taken place by building on what Sir William himself laid as sound if modest foundations. The group of early Meissen porcelain was enormously enriched by a bequest in 1963 from J. MacGregegor Duncan, one of the Trustees of the Museum during the war. A comprehensive collection of English eighteenth-century porcelain was bequeathed by another Trustee, James Calder in 1944. This complemented the existing collection of Chelsea, Derby and Worcester. Perhaps the most significant acquisitions have been pictures. These have greatly enriched the Museum's collection of British eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century paintings and miniatures. In 1955 the Museum received ten important pictures from the bequest of Ernest E. Cook, grandson of the travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook. This included works by Gainsborough, George Stubbs and J M W Turner. Fine mid-eighteenth century portraits of the Sargent family by Allan Ramsay came with the bequest of Sir Orme Sargent in 1962. With few exceptions, new acquisitions were and continue to be made only if in keeping with the character of the original Holburne collection, ensuring its continued coherence. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.holburne.org

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