Poetry in beauty; Jan Marsh's latest Victorian Adventure

Jan Marsh is one of the world's leading experts on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the women associated with the movement. Her most recent exhibition focusses on Marie Spartali Stillman and reassesses her oeuvre to show her as a great and diverse late-Victorian artist, who art history has until now resigned to the status of artists' muse. Spartali was a renowned Pre-Raphelite 'stunner' best know for her sittings with Rossetti, Whistler and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Spartali's (Stillman is her married name) work has previously been unknown to the art world, due to her prolific career and commercial appeal in the USA during her own lifetime. Through meticulous research Marsh has identified works by Spartali still held in private collections today and assigned these to known works shown at the cutting edge Grosvenor Gallery in London in the 1860s and 1870s.

In addition to the known, and classically Pre-Raphaelite, female half-length portraits which Spartali is perhaps best known for, exists charming landscapes from her travels in Italy with the great Italian painter Costa, church interiors and scenes from Greek mythology, such as her stunning study of Antigone.

Marsh said that Spartali's work was often rejected in her own time for being unfinished or overworked. Following up her ideas and notes in her diaries and letters however, shows that she was nothing short of a perfectionist and would always strive for a high level of finish and that it was this rather than any lack of ability which drove her to rework paintings.

An investigation of her account books with the art supplier Roberson's - now held in the National Portrait Gallery Archive - show that Spartali preferred to use a dense watercolour on panels and boards wrapped in paper, giving her work a unique luminosity, but also sadly responsible for the delicate condition of many of her works today.

Despite her extensive career in the USA, working in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, she was friendly with and aware of the work of the British Pre-Raphaelite circle, becoming grate friends with Janey Morris and drawing and painting Kelmscott Manor in the 1870s.

This fabulous exhibition, the cumulation of about five years' research, will be on show in Delaware until January 2016, when it will travel to the UK and go on show at the Watts Gallery in Surrey.

Ten Minute Talk: Wilkie's Young Woman at a Prayer Desk

Young Woman at a Prayer Desk, 1813

David Wilkie 

The National Gallery, Bought 2014

This is just the second painting to enter the National Gallery's collection, after Raeburn's The Archers. It is also one of the Gallery's most recent acquisitions, bought with a genourous gift left my Marcia Lay, a Birmingham teacher.

The Painting depicts Augusta Phipps, daughter of the 1st Earl Mulgrave. She looks out at us in her vulnerable position at her prayers as though we have interrupted this private moment. The tiny, intimate portrait was commissioned directly from the artist and has an incredible melancholy as Augusta died later that year.

Wilkie is one of Scotland's most eminent painters. Inspired in his early career by great Dutch masters, his paintings always capture the character of those in his paintings. His first great work, Pitlessie Fair was painted when he was just 19 years old. It draws on the work of greats such as Brueghel to depict an action packed market day and all of the associated commotion. It is packed with people buying and selling, gossiping, eating and drinking and there's even a urinating dog. As well as the commotion though, Wilkie captures the character of each individual. 

Pitlessie Fair, 1804

David Wilkie

National Galleries Scotland

Following this painting, Wilkie's career exploded. He was trained at the Royal Academy, follows Lawrence in becoming the King's Painter and Raeburn's in becoming the King's Limner in Scotland, to George IV, in 1830, followed by a knighthood in 1836, famed and favourited for his vast scenes and grand portraits.

It is in this tiny Vermeer-esque piece however, that his skill for details - the carpet is exquisitely executed, reminiscent of early Netherlandish realism - and capturing a moment with the sitter is really rather expertly shown.

Hear more in November 2015 Ten Minute Talks- Room 30, Friday's in November at 4pm

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/david-wilkie-a-young-woman-kneeling-at-a-prayer-desk

Pop! A juxtaposition

Tate's current EY exhibition The World Goes Pop reevaluates the Pop Art movement as an international one, rather than the western consumer culture phenomenon we are used to associating with Pop Art.

The spaces are devoid of Blakes, Warhols and Litchtensteins and replaced with works by Russian, Polish and Chinese artists who focus their work on exploring the effects of the Sovient Revolution and the Cold War.

Upon entering the exhibition you are completely overwhelmed by cartoon imagery and bright red walls which completely overwhelm.

Ushio Shinohara
Doll Festival 1966

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art (Yamamura Collection)
© Ushio and Noriko Shinohara

Ushio Shinohara's Doll Festival 1966 is an enormous piece which forces - through it gaudy colours and block imagery - to consider 1960s materiality in an autonomous Chinese context.

There are lots of interesting works, but the exhibition does feel a little 'bitty' at times; almost like the curatorial concept is 'here's some Pop that's not by Hamilton'. The word juxtaposition features on every label and ultimately that is the idea behind the exhibition; it shows us them at the cartoon imagery of Pop can be used to address some pretty serious socio-political issues.

For £16 though you will get to see the world's weird and wonderful Pop from South America to the Middle East and back again.

Tate Modern until 24th January 2015

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-world-goes-pop

TEN MINUTE TALK: Degas' Young Spartans

National Gallery http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hilaire-germain-edgar-degas-young-spartans-exercising

Degas is best known as a painter of everyday life, who mastered a great range of media from oils to pastels.

This painting, however exemplifies Degas working within the tradition of historical painting; a much more mainstream and traditional subject taught at the academy at the time. Probably based of Plutarch's The Life of Sparta, the scene is the ancient Greek state of Sparta, with Mount Taygetos in the background, the legislator Spartan in the middle ground and the foreground is occupied with a  group of semi-naked and naked adolescents.

Sparta was a state obsessed with phyical perfection and so Degas occupies the picture space with these stretching posed youths, showing off their physical capabilities. So obsessed they were, that any inferior infant would be thrown off Mount Taygetos.

Whilst the subject would have been recognisable as traditional, the method Degas has employed is not. His brushwork is robust, but the paint is kept dry, giving a frieze like texture to the painting. The landscape orientation adds to this effect, showing Degas reference to the frieze objects of Classical civilization, as well as his knowledge of the stories. In addition, classical modelling and beauty is lost in this work and the youths appear more similar to 19th-century 'Montmartre types' rugged street children, something which has in the past drawn criticism.

A social history reading of this painting, put forward by Carol Salus, explains the composition of the group of youths as an investigation of Spartan courtship rites, rather than wrestling which is more commonly accepted by art historians.