Eliza's One a Week: The Cultural Exploration of E: 2011-08-21

Hello world

Just a quick one today – and the last time I send an email telling people I have done a blog post I promise!! From now on I will just do them and if you want to check (which I doubt you will) just check on a Monday afternoon or Tuesday.

This week I was going to ditch the cultural pursuit and go directly to the heath but weather turned a bit iffy so did a quick search of my Timeout app and came upon an exhibition called Sir John Gilbert: Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age. ‘MY GOD!!’ Thought I, ‘this is clearly the show for me’ and it was closing next weekend so hot footed it down there (well after sitting on my bed for a further hour looking out the window) and had a quick look before heading back to the heath.

I love the Guildhall, they do so many wicked Victorian shows which would never get put on anywhere else and they are so cheap. I think the entrance fees have changed recently though – before I think you paid £2 or somet to get into the whole thing but now the main collection (and amazing 80s roman amphitheatre) is free but the exhibition is £5 full price – although it’s free to art fund members apparently!! £5 is still a good deal and seeing as it’s always empty in there am very glad to support them, where would all the random Victorian stuff go without them?? I really feel they are one of the last bastions of 19th century appreciation left in London these days and unlike Tate don’t stick to the fashionable stuff only.

Saying that I have to admit the exhibition this time was only so-so, although I don’t think that’s particularly their fault. Sir John was wildly popular during the Victorian era. He was very, very much a man of his age and consequently fell quickly out of fashion, even within his own lifetime. This show is the first major retrospective of his work and although I think very much worth having, there is none the less a sneaking suspicion prevalent throughout the exhibition that there is, perhaps, a reason why he fell so quickly out of fashion; I don’t think he was actually very good!!

Perhaps the finest examples of his work are in the first room you enter and are done in watercolours. Sir John became president of the Royal Society of Watercolours and helped raise their profile considerably during this era. He also worked in oils and was a Royal academician but I think it’s his watercolours where he is definitely at his most comfortable. These large watercolours are almost exclusively of literary subject matters, something he found great popularity for during the Victorian era. In fact his recreations were so popular that he was given the nickname the Scott of Painting; alluding to the huge popularity of historical novels at this time. I was rather intrigued by this as I have found myself with a insatiable thirst for historical literature myself recently – mainly because it provides excellent stimulus for a good old Wikipedia session. The Victorians would have been MAD for Wikipedia wouldn’t they!? He was particularly fond of Shakespearian subject matter and did something like 400 paintings of various Shakespearian scenes throughout his career as well as many, many other types of novels.

These images, which were definitely better executed that the majority of the other pieces in the show gave an insight, I think, into why he was so popular. It wasn’t simply his love of the narrative painting, something the Victorians seemed to be orgasmic about, but it’s also his whole aesthetic. His paintings were designed for the walls of the wealthy, not for the academy. His paintings mirror exactly the tastes of the Victorian bourgeois – every single inch of his paintings are covered in intense decoration – pattern, colours, swirls etc. It’s exactly like the interior of the average wealthy Victorian; every section of wall tightly packed with some form of decoration, image or artefact. They are almost afraid of a blank space in which to be allowed to think!
Whereas the majority of his oil painting is unquestionably bad and a not insignificant amount of his watercolours likewise, I was genuinely impressed and fascinated by his engraving work. Again, Gilbert was very much a man of his age and therefore was at the forefront of the illustrating revolution bought on by the serge in popular novels and more importantly the development of the illustrated press, both hugely significant developments during the 19th century. For one thing this explains the tremendous popularity of his literary subject matters, print versions of which he often produced on request for new publications. It was his work for newspapers however that would be most prolific; working for both Punch and The London Illustrated News he produced over 30, 000 woodblock images for the later alone. They had an amazing example of his work on show depicting the Plantagenet ball hosted by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with amazing descriptions of what everyone was wearing – ermine for the queen apparently. It was amazing because this was like a 19th century version of Grazia and Gilbert was the paparazzi, in a Kim Kardashian relationship with the paparazzi kind of way obviously. They also had a really interesting panel about the relationship between the artists and engraver and the process they went through for news illustrations. Gilbert was so successful in this medium, they suggested, partly because he worked so quickly – often been given only an hour or so to produce images for, or directly worked onto the wood black. An odd job to have really.

The Guildhall, for some reason, had decided to make this a sort of Works of Art as Physical Object exhibition and throughout the show they had labels about ‘the studio’ describing his technique. Fine thinks I. But then for some reason they decided to dedicate half of the ‘grand space’ to this – creating a little room made of information panels all about canvas stretching, pigments, frame making etc (he often made and gilded his own frames specifically for certain works). To be honest I found the majority of this deathly dull and oddly a bit out of place. If it had been some master then maybe it’s important to know his process etc – but really does anyone care that much about Gilbert to do a full on investigation into his process? Well I don’t anyway.

Sir John did do a few quite good military paintings, a subject that he relished apparently. Other than that there was one he did about Rembrandt which was quite good (hahaha did anyone see this AMAZING Radio Four programme about Anthony Blunt/The Courtauld with Brian Sewell? ‘GETTING TO GRIPS WITH REMBRANDT?? In my day we did not GET TO GRIPS with Rembrandt, we took Rembrandt VERY SERIOUSLY’. Amazing – see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0134z00)