This fascinating show at the Ashmolean covers works acquired during the last six years. Obviously the collection is a hotchpotch, ranging from Osbert Lancaster cartoons to Turner watercolours, but a few works stand out. Chief among the surprises is a haunting work by unlikely-named Austin Osman Spare, an official war artist of the Medical Corps during World War I. Two patients and a doctor are standing in a field hospital; facing the viewer, and depicted with remarkable compositional skill as well as a dramatic intensity. All three have drained, pallid faces, as if interrupted from some deeper, harrowing confrontation.
There is a Paul Nash drawing of Wittenham Clumps, a location that Nash painted repeatedly. The ink drawing, almost monochrome, and with no pretence of placement – the trees are plonked in the middle of the painting and viewed straight-on – becomes all the more powerful for its seeming lack of artifice.
Henry Wallis (1830-1916) is an artist I was not familiar with. His pencil drawing of Mary Ellen Meredith, a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, has an intimacy that catches your attention, perhaps from the artist showing his subject’s face in close-up, leaving little room on the paper for more than the face and shoulders.
Some of the works disappointed. For me, the Turner topographical views of Oxford were workmanlike but uninspired, and similarly uninspired was the painting billed as the highlight of the show, Samuel Palmer’s The Prospect, a late work derived, although not very obviously, from his reading of Milton. I preferred an early Palmer, Yellow Twilight, painted while he was living in Shoreham, Kent. What is depicted is fairly nondescript – rolling countryside with trees and bushes in the foreground, and darker trees in the background. But there is an intensity and urgency about this tiny watercolour that seems lacking in Palmer’s later work.
The show is well worth seeing, and what’s more, is free.
There is a Paul Nash drawing of Wittenham Clumps, a location that Nash painted repeatedly. The ink drawing, almost monochrome, and with no pretence of placement – the trees are plonked in the middle of the painting and viewed straight-on – becomes all the more powerful for its seeming lack of artifice.
Henry Wallis (1830-1916) is an artist I was not familiar with. His pencil drawing of Mary Ellen Meredith, a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, has an intimacy that catches your attention, perhaps from the artist showing his subject’s face in close-up, leaving little room on the paper for more than the face and shoulders.
Some of the works disappointed. For me, the Turner topographical views of Oxford were workmanlike but uninspired, and similarly uninspired was the painting billed as the highlight of the show, Samuel Palmer’s The Prospect, a late work derived, although not very obviously, from his reading of Milton. I preferred an early Palmer, Yellow Twilight, painted while he was living in Shoreham, Kent. What is depicted is fairly nondescript – rolling countryside with trees and bushes in the foreground, and darker trees in the background. But there is an intensity and urgency about this tiny watercolour that seems lacking in Palmer’s later work.
The show is well worth seeing, and what’s more, is free.