Auckland Art Gallery hosts the Golden Age of British Painting

Wednesday, 28 February 2007 23:09

Auckland, NZ - Auckland Art Gallery celebrates the Golden Age of British Painting in a vast and sumptuous new show. Passion & Politics: Two Centuries of British Art features over 140 works by greats like Gainsborough, Hogarth and Reynolds.  Take an epic journey through this grand era, traversing emotions from passion and love to betrayal, loss and despair.  Immerse yourself in a world of elegant costumes, opulent fabrics and exotic animals in gilded frames.  On Exhibition until 15 June, 2007.

Curator Mary Kisler says British painting reached new heights under the British School of Art which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries. British painting has not played such a critical role in European culture before or since.  Paintings that might seem traditional today were at the time as radical and progressive as the society from which they came.

Colonial Britain not only ruled the waves but also dominated world politics and economics. A new wealthy class had emerged who supported modern themes. Ordinary life became a legitimate subject for art. Satirists lampooned kings and country folk in equal measure. Painters adopted a naturalistic style inspired by the spirit of scientific enquiry central to the Age of Enlightenment.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw huge changes in Britain. The nation’s power base continued to shift from the monarchy to one where Court and Parliament had a shared role. Britain became an imperial power, its dominion extending around the globe.

Known as the Age of Enlightenment, radical ideas about taste, science, economics, literature and art brought about a new understanding of the world. A specific British culture emerged, one that spoke of individual achievement, and where the new middle classes acquired land and personal wealth to match that of the gentry. Enclosure of common land brought agricultural benefits for landowners, but drove many of the poor to eke out a living in the cities. While France suffered major social upheavals through revolution, dissension in Britain never brought down the state. Queen Victoria’s long and peaceful reign in the nineteenth century occurred alongside further rapid changes in the face of industrial development.