Two recent events at the National Gallery – the opening of Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance, and the display of its new acquisition, George Bellows’s Men of the docks (1912; see Fig.85, p.271) – raise specific questions about the Gallery’s collecting policy, past and present, and a more general consideration of national schools and British taste.
‘I don’t care so much for my drawings’, Edward Hopper once remarked. When a publisher proposed a book of them, he responded that it ‘would only very inadequately express what I attempt to do in my paintings’. Now, however, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, recipient of approximately 2,500 Hopper drawings in a bequest from the artist’s widow almost fifty years ago, has organised the first major exhibition focused on this aspect of the artist’s achievement. Having been shown at the Whitney and at the Dallas Museum of Art (where this reviewer saw it), Hopper Drawing is currently at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (to 22nd June).
New identifications from the 1683 posthumous inventory of the picture collection of Le Grand Colbert.
The influence of the work of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres on the paintings of Gustave Moreau.
An album of texts and drawings by Henri Fantin-Latour and friends, discovered in the city archives of Stoke-on-Trent.
Previously neglected British press coverage of exhibitions of Manet’s work in London.
Unpublished photographs identifying the location of Alfred Sisley’s house in Louveciennes, the scene of several of his paintings made there between 1872 and 1874.
A hidden self-portrait of Seurat revealed beneath the mirror in his Young woman powdering herself (1889–90).