On exhibition until 26 May 2013 at the Cleveland Museum of Art is an outstanding collection of British drawings that until now have remained hidden away in the museum’s archive. While the museum’s collections of French and Italian drawings are renowned and have been part of numerous exhibitions and permanent displays, the formerly under-appreciated British collection is now receiving unprecedented attention. The curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum, Heather Lemonedes, has selected an inspiring range of pictures that represent a period of 200 years, covering the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian eras. As part of a strategic campaign intended to build upon and revitalize the museum’s core group of British masterworks, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, also by Lemonedes, inaugurate a series of shows and publications that will continue to celebrate the museum’s permanent collection and make known its future acquisitions, promised gifts and loans.
The small but stunning exhibition, which spans the museum’s two-room prints and drawings gallery, represents a fascinating array of artistic styles. The first picture on display at the exhibition entrance is Francis Cotes’ alluring pastel portrait of The Right Honorable Lady Mary Radcliff, wife of Francis Eyre, Esq. (1755). She is dressed in an elaborate, Turkish-inspired garment. The portrait demonstrates Cotes’ mastery of technique over the medium as he manipulates the pastel such that the picture oscillates between sharp clarity and hazy softness. For this particular picture, Cotes employs a range of brilliant colours to portray Lady Radcliff’s highly decorative mantel. He captures the texture of fur, the softness of feathers, the sheen of gold brocade, the glistening of pearls and the sheerness of lace, which complement her pale, youthful décolleté. Clearly, the viewer is meant to appreciate the way in which the artist pushed the medium of pastel to its limits. The work directs viewers to one of the key themes of the exhibition more broadly, namely artists’ handling of media.
In its arrangement, the display exchanges the chronological flow employed throughout the museum’s other galleries for a creative organization that intermingles artists, genres and epochs. The visitor is thus encouraged to focus predominantly on the materials and the artists’ technical virtuosity rather than the historical progression of British drawings, biography or broader social themes. The exhibition includes fifty-six pictures, most of which are on display for the first time. While the works are pristine, they are still fragile and light sensitive; the gallery’s lighting system allows exhibition-goers to examine these vulnerable works of art without putting them at risk. Although the exhibition is called British Drawings, the pictures encompass a wide range of drawing and painting media: pen and ink, graphite, chalk, pastel, ink wash, watercolour, and gouache, among others. The exhibition includes outstanding works by well-known British artists, such as Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, Christina Rossetti, Aubrey Beardsley, John Ruskin, John Flaxman and John Burne-Jones, just to name a few. These share the spotlight with less famous, though no less talented, artists. The juxtaposition of famous and lesser-known artists blurs professional hierarchies and encourages the viewer to compare artistic styles. While the varied display enables the viewer to focus on individual pieces, it also invites one to consider the overall scope and structure of the collection.
One of the show’s strengths is that it highlights many of the preparatory sketches held in the museum’s collection. These pieces, many of which are studies for well-known paintings, provide the viewer with a glimpse of how some of the artists worked. For example, among the numerous samples of preliminary works is one exquisite study of six slumbering women by Burne-Jones for a painting entitled The Court (1870-1875), which was inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Day Dream (1842). Burne-Jones was preoccupied with the poem and used it as a source of inspiration for over thirty years. In the exhibition catalogue it is written that he drew on this subject to create three suites of oil paintings and a set of tile designs. Today, one suite is kept in the collection of the Museo de Art, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Another has been installed in the saloon at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and the last suite has been divided between Dublin City Gallery, Delaware Art Museum, and the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Such sketches position the Cleveland Museum’s collection of British drawings in relation to other important collections of British works housed in museums around the world.
Other preliminary sketches offered for inspection are William Holman Hunt’s study in graphite on paper for his oil on canvas The Hireling Shepherd (1851, Manchester City Galleries). There is also Richard Redgrave’s sketch of the young boy represented in his painting Country Cousins (1847-8, Tate, London). A rare Gainsborough study, for his portrait of the actress Mrs Sarah Siddons (1785, National Portrait Gallery, London), is also included. Gainsborough usually painted directly on the canvas; he only produced quick preliminary sketches as a way of working out composition, not the finer details. However, with this particular sketch, the artist pays close attention to specifics, as seen in the sitter’s wavy hair, feathered hat and facial expression. The sketch thus offers a rare and valuable insight into the painter’s artistic process. All the studies that form part of the exhibition are now separated from the final, finished works, but the wall texts include an image of the final work in question, which is also printed in the exhibition catalogue. British Drawings thus promotes a consideration of the conditions as well as the products of creative potential. While it is interesting to think of these works within the context of a broader art world, and for some this aspect may add to the overall value of the collection, these works also merit individual appreciation.
The exhibition showcases a wide range of foreign and local subjects that attracted British artists. Many British artists valued the opportunity to travel abroad, so they could view and copy works of art and nature. Francis Town’s watercolour is the second of three versions depicting the Swiss Alps that he made while he was on his 1780-81 tour. Likewise, William Callow’s highly detailed, grand-scale watercolour, The Temple of Vesta Falls at Tivoli (1859), was produced after some sketches he made during his travels abroad. Some of the standout works in the exhibition include renderings of Continental masterpieces that British artists were able to copy while touring Europe. One example is the highly finished gouache on brown paper entitled Jacob’s Dream (1720) by Joseph Goupy, which he produced after paintings he saw by Salvator Rosa. Characteristically, John Flaxman draws on what at the time was popular classical mythology, the story of Paris and Oenone, to create a frieze-like, pastoral scene. This ink wash and graphite picture on cream woven paper was produced in 1791 while Flaxman and his wife were living in Rome, and it conveys the artist’s aspiration to work from the antique.
At the heart of the collection, however, are works closer to British soil, including pictures by William Henry Millais, John Martin, Samuel Atkins, Charles Green, William Turner of Oxford and Sir David Wilkie. Such artists represent ruined, medieval abbeys; thick, woodland landscapes; bucolic, English countrysides; serene, coastal vistas; and scenes of everyday life in both public and private settings. Sometimes these works were drawn directly on location while others were composed from memory. Together they evoke a rich sense of the beauty of national territory and British urban and suburban life.
The exhibition British Drawings includes many superlative examples from the Cleveland Museum’s collection of British works on paper. The show is important because it brings to light works that have been stored mostly away from the public eye, and represents efforts to rescue an exceptional group of works from neglect. Strong works in their own right, these treasures provide a solid foundation on which to build and expand the collection. As expressed in the exhibition catalogue, benefactors and curators have played a significant role in shaping the collection to date, and it will be interesting to see how the collection continues to develop from here. Clearly, the show is about quality not quantity.
‘British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art’ is at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, from 8 February to 26 May 2013.