Category: Exhibitions

Botticelli Drawings is the first exhibition ever dedicated to the drawings of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445 – 1510). Exploring the foundational role drawing played in Botticelli’s work, the exhibition traces his artistic journey, from studying under maestro Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406 – 1469) to leading his own workshop in Florence. Featuring rarely seen and newly attributed works, the exhibition provides insight into the design practice of an artist whose name is synonymous with the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli’s drawings offer an intimate look into the making of some of his most memorable masterpieces, including Adoration of the Magi (c. 1500), which will be reunited with its preparatory drawing, surviving only in fragments. From Botticelli’s earliest recorded drawings through expressive designs for his final painting, the works on display reveal the artist’s experimental drawing techniques, quest for ideal beauty, and command of the line.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the port city of Genoa was one of Italy's major artistic centres. Nicknamed 'La Superba' ('the proud one') by the Medieval poet Petrarch, it was among the wealthiest cities on the Italian peninsula, with strong trade links across Europe and beyond. 

These links and the riches they brought made Genoa a desirable destination for painters and sculptors wanting to study or find lucrative work. Superb line opens with works by the first major arrival, Raphael's pupil Perino del Vaga, who transformed the artistic scene when he came in 1528, introducing a new, modern manner seen in drawings like the Venus and Aeneas, which typifies his distinctive blend of graphic confidence and courtly stylishness.

Other prominent artists soon followed Perino's lead and, over the next 150 years, the city continued to attract even bigger names like Rubens and van Dyck. This constant injection of new blood kept Genoa at the cutting edge of artistic trends, creating a nurturing environment for homegrown talents to develop in their own right. In the following centuries the city produced a steady stream of internationally renowned painters, among them Luca Cambiaso, Bernardo Strozzi and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, who were especially feted for their innovative, often experimental graphic works, wowing collectors with dazzling displays of line. Featuring highlights from the British Museum's longstanding holdings of Genoese prints and drawings, this display celebrates the virtuosity and originality of the city's artists.

In addition to devoting herself to pastel portraiture, Rosalba Carriera was an outstanding painter of miniatures on ivory; in fact she pioneered this genre, elevating it from a craft to a true art. Using an innovative technique, she succeeded for the first time in bringing the fluid, vibrant brushstrokes of painting on canvas to tiny ivory supports. Her success was immediate. There was no visitor to Venice who did not aspire to have a miniature portrait made by Rosalba. Today, however, these small images are rare, in fact their number is much smaller than her pastel work.

It is to Rosalba Carriera the miniaturist that this retrospective is dedicated, with thirtysix works on display, together with the pastels from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and from private collections. The exhibition offers a very rare opportunity to admire these works of extraordinarily delicate refinement, now classic examples of Rococo art, in the year that marks the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s birth.

Spanning 400 years, this exhibition follows women on their journeys to becoming professional artists. From Tudor times to the First World War, artists such as Mary Beale, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Butler and Laura Knight paved a new artistic path for generations of women. They challenged what it meant to be a working woman of the time by going against society’s expectations – having commercial careers as artists and taking part in public exhibitions.

Including over 150 works, the show dismantles stereotypes surrounding women artists in history, who were often thought of as amateurs. Determined to succeed and refusing to be boxed in, they daringly painted what were usually thought to be subjects for male artists: history pieces, battle scenes and the nude.

At the dawn of the 18th century, Venice was a magnet for visitors from across Europe, drawn by its architecture, history, and cosmopolitan atmosphere. Many of the artists featured in this exhibition produced works for an international clientele, who avidly collected images of the city, its inhabitants, and its colourful traditions. Landmarks such as St Mark’s Square and the Grand Canal set the stage for Canaletto’s celebrated views of the city’s lively streets and waterways. Piazzetta’s evocative head studies and Giambattista Tiepolo’s playful caricatures depict an early modern metropolis populated by a myriad of characters of different social backgrounds, while Guardi’s panoramic Feast of Ascension Day records the formal splendour and ceremony of the city known as La Serenissima – the most serene.

The exhibition, which boasts prestigious international loans, is an opportunity to present the work of the Cretan artist in the light of the latest research on his work: El Greco in fact proposes a profound and innovative historical-critical reflection, whose strengths are from the careful reconsideration of the impact of Italian models in the artist's training and from the proposal of an interpretation of the results of El Greco's activity in the last Toledan period in terms of conscious recovery of a compositional setting in the broader Byzantine sense.

The exhibition itinerary is divided into sections designed so as to keep constantly in focus the artist's relationship with the places where he lived in order to offer visitors a precise historical-biographical reconstruction with great clarity and immediacy of impact, at the same time establishing a series of stringent comparisons with the great Roman and Venetian painting, bringing out the powerful theme of the labyrinth to underline how El Greco's life was a sort of immense bildungsroman that took place among the cultural capitals of the Mediterranean.

Hans Holbein was one of the most talented artists of the 16th century.  From his arrival in England in search of work he rose to royal favour, chosen to paint the portraits of Henry VIII, his family and leading figures, among them Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More. By his death, Holbein’s work was as admired by his contemporaries as it is today. His portraits inspired the next generation of artists in their depictions of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

This exhibition showcases one of the most important surviving collections of his work, and includes drawings, paintings, miniatures and book illustrations. Celebrating Holbein’s artistic skill, it explores the career of the artist and the lives of those who commissioned portraits from him, bringing us face-to-face with some of the most famous people of 16th-century England. 

In portraits by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), sitters assume elegant stances, the fabric of their dress richly depicted in broad, sensuous strokes of paint. Sargent brought his subjects to life, but he did much more than simply record what appeared before him. He often chose what his sitters wore and, even if they arrived in his studio dressed in the latest fashions, he frequently simplified and altered the details. Exploiting dress was an integral part of his artistry.

Organized with Tate Britain, “Fashioned by Sargent” explores the artist’s complex relationship with his often-affluent clients and their clothes. The exhibition reveals Sargent’s power over his sitters’ images by considering the liberties he took with sartorial choices to express distinctive personalities, social positions, professions, gender identities, and nationalities. Alongside about 50 paintings by Sargent, over a dozen period garments and accessories shed new light on the relationship between fashion and this beloved artist’s creative practice.

In the summer of 1819, the landscape artist J.M.W. Turner set off on a journey to Italy that would have a profound impact on his life and work. Visitors to Turner’s House this summer will be able to enjoy an exhibition of evocative watercolours capturing some of Turner’s first impressions of the place he was to later call the ‘land of all bliss’, and which provided inspiration for the rest of his career.

Seeing the Light represents an exciting opportunity for the public to see some of Italy’s most well known and loved sites – Venice, Rome, Naples – through Turner’s eyes, in the unique setting of his then rural retreat in Twickenham.  Visitors to this tightly-focussed exhibition will also be able to appreciate Turner’s evolving use of colour and light before and after 1819,  thanks to generous loans from Tate, the Guildhall Art Gallery and a private collection.

For almost 20 years in the late 17th century the Queen’s House at Greenwich was the studio address of the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son, Willem the Younger. Although the building itself bears little trace of the Van de Veldes’ presence, in the 20th century the Queen’s House once again became a home for their work, as the dedicated art gallery of the National Maritime Museum, custodian of the world’s largest collection of works by the Van de Veldes. Spanning scores of oil and pen paintings, a tapestry and some 1,500 drawings, the collection is unique in what it can tell us about how a 17th-century artist’s studio functioned. The physical evidence provided by this collection proved invaluable for the evocation of the Van de Velde studio that forms a centrepiece of the current exhibition, The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea, marking 350 years since the Van de Veldes moved to England from the Dutch Republic. Showcasing major conservation projects on important works in the Greenwich collection that have their origin point in the Queen’s House studio, and notwithstanding a select number very generous loans, the exhibition was also a pragmatic solution to some of the challenges facing museums as they emerged from Covid: how to make an event out of a permanent collection.

Interest in the tronie, the old Dutch word for ‘face’ surged in the 17th century, when artists like Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer poured their talent into painting the human face. The results are often small, but stunningly painted, drawn or engraved: intimate works that bring us closer to the artist than ever. Never before has the genre been covered so comprehensively. Turning Heads at the KMSKA brings together no fewer than 76 of the most eloquent masterpieces from Belgian and international collections.

"Erwin Olaf is one of the most important photographers of the last quarter of the 20th century. His work is strongly rooted in the visual tradition of Dutch art and history."