Steve_Bamlett_blog

Blogging on Bishop: The Origins of British landscape Exhibition (The Trevor Gallery, The Bishop’s palace, Bishop Auckland, Sat 1^st June – Sunday 8^th Spt. 2019)

https://www.thisisdurham.com/whats-on/the-auckland-project-the-origins-of-british-landscape-p994631

Having lived in south-west Durham for 30 years or so I never expected Bishop Auckland to be a place of artistic pilgrimage (a short pilgrim on a short pilgrimage for me) but this exhibition changed my mind. I had been waiting for the arrival of the Poussin ‘Triumph of Pan’ next year but this exhibition has already satisfied my need to see great art without travelling many hundreds of miles (in fact I travelled only six miles). In Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the main character rejoices in ‘infinite riches in a little room’. The Trevor Gallery is a suite of small newly-restored rooms in the Palace each stuffed with treasure – speaking qualitatively rather than, like Volpone does, quantitatively. It opens with two great small ‘Claudes’ that combine human assemblies with landscape. That theme can be followed through in some tremendous pictures that comment on the relative evaluation of the human and the ‘natural’, the scene against the expression of interior feeling, nature into human art. You see that in late eighteenth century ignored-masters like Towne (what a treat that picture is), George Smith of Chichester and on to an eccentric and highly romantic Reynolds landscape with more than a taste of Salvator Rosa’s baroque-romantic darkness in it. One small room holds a noble Gainsborough seascape and a tremendous early landscape that I had never before seen but which was entirely satisfying. From there to a room of Stubbs where noble landscapes of enormous still grandeur struggle with the vicious but dynamic assemblies of the nineteenth-century aristocratic hunt of animals representing the viciousness that human beings introduce into nature.

I need to see it again – this time with a notebook in hand. Do take a visit to Bishop. It is more than worth it.