Landscapes of pleasure
from Monet to Hockney
David Hockney Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972, The Lewis Collection © David Hockney
From western France as seen by Claude Monet through to David Hockney’s Yorkshire, these paintings from the Gallery’s collection offer a journey through what critic Robert Hughes called ‘the landscape of pleasure’.
Beginning in France in the late 19th century with the light-filled paintings of impressionists Monet and Pissarro, Landscapes of pleasure also takes in the work of Scottish and English artist-travellers who visited the south of France in search of colour, warmth and luminosity. David Hockney’s renowned painting Portrait of an Artist 1972, portraying the delights of southern France but painted in a cramped London studio, offers a grand summation of – and perhaps a farewell to – this paradisiacal tradition.
Complementing these views of France are lyrically rendered British landscapes spanning almost a century, from Spencer Gore’s radiant The Icknield Way 1912 and Ivon Hitchens’ Evening pool 1947 to Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill, autumn 1984. Women modernists Frances Hodgkins and Winifred Nicholson bring near and far together in their intimate ‘still-life landscapes’. And Hockney appears at grand scale again with the first of his multi-panel landscapes of the 2000s, the collection favourite A closer winter tunnel, February-March 2006.
Note: exhibition extended to 17 July 2016