19th Century Exhibitions

James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain marks the first major European exhibition of Whistler’s work in thirty years. Bringing together celebrated paintings alongside rarer and previously unseen works, the exhibition offers an expansive reassessment of one of the most influential and unconventional artists of the nineteenth century. From portraits, drawings, prints, etchings and decorative art, the exhibition reveals the extraordinary breadth of Whistler’s practice while tracing his increasingly radical conception of what art could be.

An original and relentlessly experimental artist, Whistler anticipated many of the developments that would define modern art and profoundly influenced subsequent generations. As one of the leading figures of the Aesthetic movement, he rejected the Victorian expectation that art should convey a moral lesson or faithfully reproduce the visible world. Instead he championed the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, the belief that art should exist primarily as an autonomous pursuit of beauty.

Whistler was an acute observer of life from an early age. Raised in St Petersburg, he received an artistic education in the Imperial court, although his surviving sketchbooks reveal an equally strong fascination with everyday life alongside his formal studies. His later European travels intensified his fascination with Old Master painting, particularly Rembrandt and Velazquez, while simultaneously exposing him to the bohemian culture of Parisian. Venus, for instance, reveals the persistence of Rembrandt’s influence through its dramatic lighting and detailed lines, yet Whistler deliberately rejects the idealized nude in favor of a more contemporary, unidealized subject.

Whistler’s engagement with modern life was accompanied by an increasingly radical approach to landscape. Rather than attempting to reproduce nature faithfully, he believed that the artist should transform it through line and color. Chelsea in Ice exemplifies this development. Snow and fog dissolve the specificity of the landscape, producing an atmospheric image prioritizing sensation over observation. Whistler was less concerned with topographical accuracy than conveying the fleeting visual impression of a particular moment, encapsulated in his provocative assertion that ‘nature is rarely right’.

Perhaps his most famous portrait, Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, commonly known as Whistler’s Mother, similarly demonstrates his departure from conventional portraiture. His mother is presented in rigid profile against an unusually stripped-back interior. Her austere black mourning dress contrasts with the restrained grey walls and floor. The absence of anecdotal details deliberately resists Victorian portraiture’s the sentimental style. Whistler instead transforms the sitter into an arrangement of tones, emphasizing the formal structure of the composition. Delicate touches of light across her face, hands and lace cape subtly contributes to the flattening of the figure and anticipates later developments in modernist pictorial space.

A particular highlight of the exhibition is the reconstruction of the Peacock Room, commissioned by the industrialist Frederick Leyland. The room represents Whistler’s most significant surviving decorative interior and demonstrates the extent to which his aesthetic principles extended beyond the canvas. Originally engaged to decorate the room, Whistler ultimately redesigned it according to his own artistic vision, provoking a bitter rupture with Leyland. The resulting conflict was immortalized in Whistler’s creation of a pair of fighting peacocks, an allegorical representation of the antagonism between artist and patron.

Perhaps the most radical manifestation of Whistler’s aesthetic philosophy is found in his  Nocturne series. Their deliberately musical titles, for example Nocturne in Blue and Gold, signal his increasing rejection of narrative and descriptive subject matter in favor of atmosphere and mood. Whistler sought not to depict a particular place so much as to evoke a visual equivalent of music.

First exhibited in 1872, before the first Impressionist exhibition, the Nocturnes demonstrate an increasingly experimental approach to paint. Whistler moved beyond the loose brushwork associated with the Impressionists towards a more fluid and deliberately atmospheric handling of pigment. He frequently diluted his oils to an extraordinary thinness, allowing paint to drip across the surface, while carefully applied touches of thicker pigment could suggest distant lights or fireworks. The art’s apparent spontaneity belies an intensely controlled and laborious process. Whistler repeatedly reworked his paintings, sometimes for years, in pursuit of what he described as an apparently effortless harmony.

The tension between apparent simplicity and painstaking construction became central to the controversy surrounding his work. John Ruskin famously dismissed Whistler’s art as ‘ill-educated conceit’, questioning whether seemingly formless works could legitimately constitute art. The ensuing libel case pitted Ruskin’s belief in truth to nature and moral purpose with Whistler’s insistence upon aesthetic autonomy. Whistler’s testimony revealed the considerable time and labour invested in his supposedly spontaneous paintings. 

Nocturne Blue and Gold, The Firewheel, for example, might initially appear to consist of little more than freely splashed pigment. In realty, each individual burst of fireworks was painstakingly constructed with small brushes and carefully placed areas of thicker paint. The apparent immediacy of the finished work is therefore the product of considerable deliberation.

Towards the end of his career, Whistler returned increasingly to society portraiture. Yet these commissions remained experimental exercises rather than straightforward representations of status or identity. Each sitter became an opportunity to explore tonal relationships, gesture and pictorial harmony. Even after paintings had been sold and exhibited, Whistler frequently continued to rework them in pursuit of the elusive sense of effortless that characterized his mature aesthetic. Remarkably, aristocratic patrons were subjected to the same formal scrutiny and pictorial discipline as his paid model subjects.

Tate Britain’s compelling exhibition ultimately reveals Whistler as an uncompromising artist whose pursuit of art for art’s sake helped fundamentally redefine the possibilities of painting. His dissolution of subject matter to tone, atmosphere and abstraction anticipated developments that would become central to modernism. Even after financial devastation caused by the libel case during which he lost his studio and home, Whistler remained committed to his artistic principles. 

His influence on the trajectory of modern art is difficult to overstate. By insisting that painting could be valued for its formal and sensory qualities rather than its narrative, moral, or mimetic function, Whistler helped established a new conception of artistic autonomy. His legacy lies not simple in the paintings themselves, but in the radical proposition that how art looks could matter more than what it depicts.

A rare opportunity to experience Birmingham’s remarkable art collection in London. 

For a limited time, The Courtauld Gallery presents a selection of prized masterpieces from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.  Spanning from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, the exhibition brings together an exceptional range of works and is not to be missed.

The exhibition closes on 31 August, so book your tickets while you still can.

Small but mighty, The Courtauld’s 'Seurat and the Sea’ triumphs.  Limited to just 26 paintings, oil sketches and drawings, what the exhibition lacks in size it makes up for in quality and depth.  Dying at just 31 years of age, despite Seurat’s relatively limited artistic output he produced a comparatively large number of seascapes regardless.  It is baffling why this area has been so overlooked.  This exhibition marks the first of its kind to solely focus on his seascapes as well as Seurat’s first solo exhibition in the UK in 30 years.  

The works showcased span the period between 1885-1890 when Seurat toured the north coast of France experimenting and developing his Pointillist technique.  The liberating practice of painting in nature helped him test and develop his craft, playing with the interplay of light and color.  The exhibition convincingly shows his artistic progression moving from longer strokes and criss-crosses lines to precise dots applied close together.  The attention to detail, meticulous application of dots and subtle shade graduations was mesmerizing.  This is a show you certainly don’t want to miss.  Closing this weekend, tickets sell fast.  

Sotheby’s Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection featuring exquisite works by masters of 20th century figurative art will surely result in a record breaking auction.  The Lewis Collection represents the most valuable single-owner collection ever offered in a European auction and is estimated to be worth £150 million. 

It is not often a Modigliani nude comes on the market but it stuns when it does.  The last significant Modigliani nude, his 1917 Nu Couché (sur le côte gauche), sold in 2018 for a staggering $157.2 million.  His Nu Couché 1917-18 sold in 2015 at Christie’s for an astonishing $170.4 million, then the second-highest price for an artwork at auction.  One wonders what will be the fate of this auction’s Modigliani, estimated at £40-50 million.  

Another Lewis Collection prize possession is Gustav Klimt’s gorgeous 1902 Bildnis Gertrud Loew, estimated in the region of £20-30 million.  It fetched  £24.8 million in 2015 when it last went under the hammer.  Described by a 1903 critic as ‘the most sweet scented poetry the palette is able to create’, its extraordinary beauty and delicacy is captivating.  But the painting has a tragic provenance.  At the outbreak of WW2, Gertrud Loew’s Jewish ancestry compelled her to flee Vienna.  The Loew household was taken over as a Nazi headquarters and their possessions were ruthlessly sold.  Gustav Ucicky, a Nazi member and believed to be Klimt’s illegitimate son, bought many Klimt works for deflated prices.  The 2015 auction followed a settlement between Loew’s descendants and Ucicky’s third wife, the Klimt Foundation founder.  Considering last year’s record breaking $236.4 million sale of Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer, I have no doubt that Gertrude Loew will also far exceed estimates.  It is a scintillatingly beautiful sight to behold.

From Chagall’s vibrant colors, Freud’s undulating nude to the unforgettable Klimt and Modigliani, don’t miss out on the chance to see these works for what could be the last time in public.  On view to the public from 10 to 23 June with the auction 6pm 24 June and 3pm 25 June.  

The Symptomatic Surreal: Leonora Carrington at the Freud Museum explores a fascinating, though tragic, period in Carrington’s life. However, the exhibition’s frequent and sometimes forced Freudian allusions ultimately detract from what is otherwise a compelling show. Focusing on Carrington’s sixth-month stay at the Spanish Santander asylum in 1940, following a mental breakdown, the exhibition brings together rare letters, drawings and two oil paintings completed during her hospitalization exhibited together for the first time. The exhibition aims to reassess this turbulent period as a formative stage in her artistic development, rather than simply an intriguing biographical episode.

Carrington described her time at the hospital as being ‘down below’, where she felt herself, ‘being dead’. Her later memoir, Down Below, recounts her disturbing experiences there, including being subjected to Cardiazol injections that induced seizures. Yet the exhibition also makes the case that her experiences at Santander were significant to her artistic development. Her psychiatrist, Dr Morales, encouraged her to draw as a way of structuring her thoughts and calming her mind. Although her therapy drawings have been lost, the exhibition showcases her surviving Santander Sketchbook, which contains her first depictions of horses - an image she would later adopt as an alter ego or surrogate self.  

Carrington’s paintings powerfully encapsulate her disturbing experiences of the sanatorium. Down Below is set within the sanatorium’s grounds and features a cast of human-animal hybrids, some of which hold masks.  Her second work, Villa Pillar, takes its name from one of the sanatorium’s pavilions and similarly depicts exotic hybrid creatures within a lush, green environment. Both paintings explore the uncanny and convey Carrington’s sense of ‘otherness’ within an eerie and disorientating setting. Villa Pilar is particularly significant, having never previously been exhibited publicly after remaining in the Morales family for more than 80 years. 

The exhibition looses its momentum in its attempts to establish connections with Freud. Carrington’s horse drawings are compared with Freud’s collection of horse figurines, while Freud’s use of a horse-and-rider metaphor to describe the relationship between the instinctual id and rational superego is erroneously referenced. The comparison feels tenuous and, more problematically, risks imposing a Freudian interpretation onto Carrington’s imagery rather than allowing its significance to emerge from her own artistic and psychological context.

Similarly, Freud’s description of memory as an ‘entombment’ and psychoanalysis as  the process of ‘digging’ into the unconscious is weakly connected to Carrginton’s description of feeling ‘down below’. Freud’s extensive collection of Egyptian objects, many relating to ideas of life and death, is also used as an opportunity to discuss Egyptian mythology’s conception of the underworld. These connections feel increasingly contrived and ultimately distracting rather than illuminating. 

A more productive engagement with psychoanalysis might have focused on Dr Morales treatment methods and the role of drawing as an outlet for, and potential analytical tool within psychoanalytic practice. A discussion of Freud’s dream analysis could have also provided an interesting comparison with Carrington’s nightmarish and otherworldly paintings. Given Carrington’s involvement with the Surrealist group and her exposure to psychoanalytic ideas through the movement, a more substantive examination of her actual encounter with Freudian thought would likeliness have been more compelling than the exhibition’s speculative associations.

As a result, The Symptomatic Surreal can feel confused and, at times, distracting. Nevertheless, the opportunity to see these rare paintings alongside the little-seen Santander sketchbooks makes the exhibition well worth visiting. Despite its shortcomings, it offers a valuable insight into a pivotal and deeply unsettling period of Carrington’s life and artistic development. The exhibition closes on 10th August.