Late Spring Season 2008
March 5
| A Victorian View of Childhood | Viola Jones |
The family and childhood might seem to have been an invention of the Victorians. Yet Victorian children were expected to work, could marry and be hanged if need be. How did artists depict this compromise between sentimentality and pragmatism?
| Language and Art | Fred Finney |
Is there a lingua franca in art
criticism, or is it a Tower of Babel? Should we say what we think at the risk
of appearing ignorant, or worse still, unfashionable? Fred Finney guides us round the
current exhibition with translations from his own personal phrase book.
May 7
| William Etty | William Dixon Smith |
William Etty saw art as having a religious
and moral purpose. His preoccupation with the nude, so shocking to his
contemporaries, seems at variance with his own puritanical principles. Often his
work has the greatest appeal when his intention is simply to please.
