Royal Academy of Arts (May 27, 2023) – Writer and broadcaster Emma Dabiri explores Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.
The exhibition features Black artists who created some of the most spectacular and ingenious works of the last century. Working in near isolation from established practices, they made masterpieces that tackle issues such as enslavement, segregation and institutionalized racism. The exhibition runs until 18 June 2023.
In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Curator Aimee Ng explores the history behind Sir Thomas Lawrence’s celebrated portrait of Julia, Lady Peel. When it was shown at the Royal Academy, in 1827, this painting was hailed as Sir Thomas’s greatest portrait—and one of the great works of modern art at the time.
It’s easy to see why: the sitter projects authority, confidence, and ease despite her flamboyant, over-the-top outfit. Sir Thomas’s depiction of Lady Peel is closely related to Peter Paul Rubens’s famous “Chapeau de Paille,” which had recently entered the collection of her husband, Sir Robert Peel. In recognition of the lavish bracelets and rings worn by the sitter, this week’s complementary cocktail is the Bijou (French for “jewel”).
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known contemporarily as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.
Experience the Summer Exhibition like never before with this interactive tour. Visit each gallery with the click of a button and browse or buy the works online.
Our latest exhibition, Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces of the Ordrupgaard Collection, has humble roots in the home of Wilhelm and Henny Hansen.
In this video produced by Ordrupgaard, discover how the Hansens transformed their private home into a jewel in the crown of the Danish art scene.
The Ordrupgaard museum in Denmark is the permanent home of important works by French Impressionists as well as Danish art from the Golden Age. Learn about the lives of Wilhelm and Henny Hansen, and what circumstances led them to begin this exceptional, methodically acquired collection – part of which is now featured at the Royal Academy.
Step into our galleries to experience ‘Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection’. Explore the carefully curated collection of Wilhelm and Henny Hansen, who utilised their exceptional eye for quality to assemble works by Renoir, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Manet and Pissarro among many others.
NEWSTATESMAN (August 26, 2020) – Towne (1739-1816) was born on the fringes of London and apprenticed to a coach painter, a skill that demanded the type of precise brushwork that was to become evident in all his later work. He went on to study at William Hogarth’s St Martin’s Lane Academy, Britain’s foremost school of art prior to the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768. By a quirk of geography, the greatest British landscapist and fellow chronicler of the Lake District, JMW Turner, would be born just 100 yards away in 1775.
In 1780 he made a lengthy drawing trip to the Continent but it wasn’t until 1786 that he visited the Lake District. He proved indefatigable, making 100 drawings and watercolours over the course of two weeks: he often put brief details on the back of his work (“½ past 7 O clock/The sky a Clear warm light/mountains a solemn purple tint/the Lake reflecting the sky, the/Sun in the picture”) and so we know that on 17 August alone, for example, he made seven drawings.
Experience our Picasso and Paper exhibition from your own home in this video tour of the galleries, created before the Royal Academy had to close its doors due to coronavirus.
Picasso didn’t just draw on paper — he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for ‘Guernica’ to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this exhibition brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist’s 80-year career.
This documentary is an intimate portrait of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow during her preparation for the major survey ‘cul-de-sac’ at the Royal Academy last year. Directed by Cosima Spender, this film maps the roots of Barlow’s oeuvre, as she revisits childhood memories, domestic and urban spaces, and their subsequent role in her creative process.
Phyllida Barlow began studying at Chelsea College of Art in 1960, and went on to study and teach at Slade School of Art for more than twenty years, becoming Emerita Professor in 2009. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2011, and represented Great Britain in the 2017 Venice Biennale, where she created the ambitious installation, ‘folly’.
Watch this evolution and the artist’s influences in ‘PHYLLIDA’. ‘I want the work to be traversed in a way that your memory of it is tested, so that you keep forgetting what you’ve seen’, Barlow explains, ‘I think that is the nature of sculpture – not something that can be held as a whole image in your head, only as fragments… The spaces, the silences in between, are as much a component of the work as the thing itself.”
‘PHYLLIDA’ is produced by Hauser & Wirth, in association with Third Channel and Peacock Pictures.
Joining an already impressive collection of Scandinavian art, one of the first French paintings Hansen acquired was Woman with a Fan, Portrait of Madame Marie Hubbard (1874) by Berthe Morisot. This gently ironic work set the tone for his perceptive and adventurous collecting style.
Drawn from the remarkable Ordrupgaard Collection of the Danish insurance broker and art lover Wilhelm Hansen, the masterpieces of 19th-century French painting in this volume represent the very best of French impressionism.
A burst of acquisitions from 1916 to 1918, during which he took advice from the influential critic Théodore Duret, saw his collection grow to include works by Cézanne, Courbet, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Renoir and Sisley.
With stunning reproductions of 60 works, the authors explore the history of the collection and provide detailed analysis of the works themselves.