Object Lessons - Timken Museum of Art

 For Immediate Release Rebecca Heyl Rebecca Heyl Communications [email protected] (858) 748-­‐5797 Timken Museum of Art Presents the Second of its 2013 Small Displays of Art "Object Lessons: Gainsborough, Corot, and the Landscape of Nostalgia" runs through April 6, 2014 SAN DIEGO – The Timken Museum of Art, known for giving visitors a uniquely intimate experience of art in one of the most internationally significant small museums in the world, will celebrate "Object Lessons: Gainsborough, Corot, and the Landscape of Nostalgia" showcasing Thomas Gainsborough’s “A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door” on loan from the Hammer Museum at UCLA from October 4, 2013 through April 6, 2014. The exhibition of this masterpiece at the Timken represents a major partnership with UCLA to allow the public to see a painting that usually remains in storage. Admission to the exhibition and the Timken is, as always, free. “A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door” will be featured alongside the “View of Volterra” by Jean-­‐
Baptiste-­‐Camille Corot from the Timken’s permanent collection. The masterpieces, which are 50 years apart, demonstrate how landscape painting changed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. “Our Object Lessons are small dossier exhibitions that are carefully curated to enhance works in the Putnam Foundation Collection,” said John Wilson, PhD, director of the Timken. “They provide in-­‐depth comparisons of great works of art and inspire a longer-­‐than-­‐usual examination of these masterpieces. Gainsborough’s Cottage Door paintings are his most famous examples of the idealized rustic genre and the one on loan from UCLA is one of his most ambitious. Gainsborough painted a scene of happy peasants resting after a hard day of labor that never reflected reality, but was, even in the 18th century, a part of nostalgic rural lore derived from literature. Half-­‐a-­‐century later, Corot painted the approach to the Italian town of Volterra as a memory of time past. The painting is not a topographical view of the village but a peaceful recollection of an idealized hill town still rooted in a life unchanged through the centuries. Corot gave no indication of the modern world, rendering the sort of unspoiled place that his patrons traveled to see. Both artists used nostalgia to create the subject for their paintings.” Thomas Gainsborough Thomas Gainsborough (1727-­‐1788) was one of the most important artists of 18th century Europe, who painted in England at the time of the American Revolution. Known primarily for his portraits of British aristocracy and royalty, he worked in a lyrical and colorful style with dazzling brushwork and an instinctive attention to likeness in the representation of his sitters. However, Gainsborough preferred to paint landscapes and spent much of his career creating ideal views of an imaginary Britain, with hills and dales, moors and rivers, castles and cattle crossing streams, occasionally populated with lovers, shepherds and contented peasants. Gainsborough was a founding member of Great Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited his works to great acclaim from 1769 to 1784. Born in East Anglia, Gainsborough moved to London at age 13 where he trained with French émigrés. He developed a style of portraiture that featured small full-­‐length sitters, individually or in groups. He moved to Bath in 1759, where he began to paint on the scale of life, and where his flair and ability to capture for a contemporary audience the sophistication of a van Dyck from 150 years earlier made him the most fashionable portraitist in England. He moved to London in 1774, where his reputation remained among the most important in Britain. He died in 1788. “A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door” The many treatments of the Cottage Door subjects by Gainsborough are the first to examine the rustic idyll of a happy working poor in English art. Moreover, they were also among the earliest works by an English artist to embody the 18th century ideal of “Sensibility.” Sensibility encouraged a sympathetic response to the beauty of nature and the life of rural peasants. As attractive as they are, they have little basis in reality. However, they present a pastoral vision of simple country life that had great appeal. The renowned 19th century artist J.M.W. Turner described the Cottage Door painting as a work of “pure and artless innocence.” In the 17th century, northern European artists depicted rural peasants largely as crude buffoons. Gainsborough’s images reveal a new sympathy for the rural poor, as well as an imaginative idealization of their humble life. Gainsborough’s peasants have little to do with the reality of the rural poor in 18th century Britain; they are artistic creations. They reflect a type of ancient poetry, “Georgic” verse, which describes peasants ending their long day of work with hard-­‐earned rest (as opposed to Pastoral poetry, which describes a life of idle ease.) Greatly admired precisely because they excited no idea of “dirt or wretchedness,” his large-­‐scale images of cottagers were often known as “fancy pictures” because they were clearly the work of imagination and effaced the harsh realities of a peasant’s everyday life. It was said by one of Gainsborough’s close friends that the artist took on an “expression of gentleness and complacency” whenever he came upon a cottage scene while horseback riding in the countryside outside Bath. The idea of the simple virtuous life played out in rural retirement (as opposed to the racket, debauchery, and corruption of city life) was persistent to the point of cliché in 18th century Britain. Gainsborough invoked it when he wrote to a friend that he was “sick of portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gam and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint land skips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.” These words reinforce the possibility that there may have been some degree of personal identification with the fiction of the cottager. “View of Volterra” “View of Volterra” by Jean-­‐Baptiste-­‐Camille Corot is one of the treasures of the Timken. The work was painted in Corot’s studio in Paris in 1838, four years after his second trip to Italy. Following in the footsteps of all classical painters, Corot first traveled to Italy in 1825. He remained in Italy for three years. In Rome he became part of the circle of painters around Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny, who became a lifelong friend. With d’Aligny and other French artists, Corot visited the countryside surrounding Rome and produced plein air studies of sites of natural beauty and classical Antiquity. These sketches were later used to develop studio compositions, two of which he successfully submitted to the Salon of 1827. Corot traveled extensively throughout his career. His usual working method was to travel in the summer working on studies and small pictures, which provided the inspiration for the larger, more commercial exhibition pieces he produced in the winter. He made two more trips to Italy, one in 1834 and one in 1843, and visited Switzerland frequently, often in the company of Charles-­‐François Daubigny, a close friend whom he met in 1852. In 1834, during his second trip to Italy, Corot spent a month in Volterra, the town depicted in the Timken painting. Volterra, which is known for its large sandstone walls, is perched on a 1,700-­‐foot hill in the Tuscan countryside southwest of Florence. During his stay, Corot produced at least five small oil sketches of Volterra and in the years after his return to Paris, he used these sketches to compose the Timken picture as well as one other major painting that is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Thomas Gainsborough, English, 1727-­‐1788. “Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door,” ca. 1788. Oil on canvas, 77 x 62 in. (195.6 x 157.5 cm). Collection University of California, Los Angeles. Hammer Museum. The James Kennedy Collection. Photograph by the Getty Museum. About the Timken The Timken Museum of Art, located in San Diego’s Balboa Park, is the permanent home of the Putnam Foundation’s world-­‐class collection of European and American art and Russian icons. Masterworks in the collection span 700 years of history and range from 14th century altarpieces through 18th century portraits and landscapes to 19th century still lifes. The works of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, French and American painters are represented, including those of Veronese, Guercino, Petrus Christus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jacques-­‐Louis David and John Singleton Copley. The collection also includes the only Rembrandt painting on public display in the area. Known as one of the finest small museums in the world, the Timken Museum of Art is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4:30 p.m. on Sundays. It is closed on Mondays and major holidays. For more information visit timkenmuseum.org; Facebook at Timken Museum of Art or Twitter at @TimkenArtMuseum or call (619) 239-­‐5548.