Work centres on western and eastern traditions
Gainsborough’s House, the national centre for the study of Thomas Gainsborough, Suffolk, has unveiled two special exhibitions which run until March 2024.
Having formally studied traditional Japanese woodblock printing in Kyoto for six years, Rebecca Salter, the first woman President of the Royal Academy, is renowned as a painter whose work combines Western and Eastern traditions.
Rebecca Salter at Gainsborough’s House’s Sudbury Gallery (2023). Photography courtesy of Gainsborough’s House.
The exhibition, organised in collaboration with the writer and art critic Thomas Marks, presents her practice in a curated selection of large-scale paintings on display in the new Sudbury Gallery at Gainsborough’s House.
Rooted in Japanese modes of thought and art making, the exhibition’s themes of Drawing to Painting, Repetition and Attention, Surface and Depth provide entry points into Salter’s careful, meditative mode of abstraction.
In the historic building at Gainsborough’s House, Rebecca Salter couples her ink drawings and watercolours, as well as one sculpture, with 12 works from the museum’s collection. These include: Gainsborough, Cedric Morris and Rembrandt.
Each pairing generates fresh insight into historical work while opening up perspectives on Salter’s own experimental processes.
Satirist’s work being exhibited at Gainsborough House
James Gillray: Characters in Caricature celebrates Georgian Britain’s funniest, most inventive and most famous graphic satirist in an exhibition curated by Tim Clayton, author of 2022’s definitive biography.
Known as the ‘father of the political cartoon,’ James Gillray’s work has continued to influence his successors through time. These include cartoons by David Low through to Martin Rowson.
Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition brings to life the master satirist and examines how Gillray, a contemporary of Thomas Gainsborough, exposed the most notorious scandals of his time.
His style allowed him to focus on the artist’s principal characters, such household names as Emma Hamilton and Napoleon Bonaparte – along with British Royalty.
Gillray’s exceptional drawing, matched by his flair for clever dialogue and amusing titles, won him unprecedented fame.
His work, largely disseminated by women publishers, parodies artists such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli.
Gillray borrowed and wittily redeployed celebrated passages from Shakespeare (and Milton) to send up politicians in an age when truth was scarce – and public opinion was considered to be of crucial importance.
Gainsborough House: the incredible history
Gainsborough’s House is the childhood home of, and now an international centre for, Thomas Gainsborough. It’s now an international centre for his work.
One of the great figures of British and global art history, he was renowned not only for his advancement of portraiture but also for being one of the founders of the British School of landscape painting.
In 2019 Gainsborough’s House commenced a £10m building project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
On 21 November 2022, the museum re-opened to the public after a transformational refurbishment, which included introducing three new exhibition spaces to accompany the original Grade I listed building.
The museum is now the largest gallery in Suffolk. The permanent collection at Gainsborough’s House is the most comprehensive collection of Thomas Gainsborough’s artwork within a single setting anywhere in the world.
It encompasses paintings from across his whole career, including early portraits and landscapes painted in Suffolk during the 1750s, such as Wooded Landscape with Herdsman Seated (1746-1747).
The collection of works on paper includes drawings by Gainsborough and his contemporaries, as well as prints by or after Gainsborough and other eighteenth-century artists.