IN 1982 THE Tate Gallery organised in conjunction with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the National Museum Wales, Cardiff, an exhibition to mark the bicentenary of the death of Richard Wilson (1714–82). Subtitled ‘The Landscape of Reaction’, it, or rather the catalogue by David Solkin which accompanied it, raised a storm of protest. The Daily Telegraph led the charge, with an editorial under the headline ARCADIA LOST in ‘a morass of confusions and half-baked Marxist thinking [. . .] an insult to Wilson, the Tate and to art history’. Elsewhere, the judgment of the Tate’s Director was questioned for allowing such subversive ideas to invade the realm of eighteenth-century landscape painting. Yet little more than a decade later, in his magisterial introduction to the fifth edition of Ellis Waterhouse’sPainting in Britain, 1530–1790, Michael Kitson could write that ‘it is not easy to understand what all the fuss was about’, although he went on to chart the progress of that ‘revolution’ (his word) in the study of British Art which had taken place in the intervening years.
A review article of the exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation at Tate Britain, London (to 10th August).
A newly discovered portrait miniature of Louis XII (c.1498–1505) by the court artist Jean Bourdichon.
A recently restored painting of the Virgin and Child (c.1520–21) by Andrea del Sarto in Opocno is discussed as the possible original on which several later copies were based.
The Genoese merchant and collector Giovanni Bielato is discussed in relation to several paintings by Bartolomé Estebán Murillo.
A discussion of works by Jules Dalou commissioned by Queen Victoria, including a commemorative sculpture made for the private chapel at Windsor (1878).
An extended review of two exhibitions on Piet Mondrian: Mondrian and Colour at Turner Contemporary, Margate (to 21st September), and Mondrian and his Studios at Tate Liverpool (to 5th October).