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Eastlake & the Gallery Revolution Wednesday Eastlake & the Gallery Revolution Wednesday 21 November 2012 Kerry Messam & Jamie Ruers Introduction Welcome to the ‘Eastlake & Gallery Revolution’ Art Bite led by us: Jamie Ruers and Kerry Messam. We are both Young Explainers working alongside the Arts and Heritage Engagement Team at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and are beginning our second year studying Art History BA (Hons) at Plymouth University. We hope that you will enjoy looking around with us at the art works that surround us in the gallery and that you will go away having learnt a little more about Charles Eastlake and what he did to professionalise the display of art. The reasoning’s behind why certain paintings are chosen to be collected or hang side-by-side, and the interesting clues as to a paintings background and culture are some of the reasons that really drew us both into studying Art History at degree level, and makes us always want to know more. The topic of our Art Bite is ‘Charles Eastlake and his revolutionary methods of displaying artworks in museum and gallery spaces’. This was something which Charles Eastlake thought about in his work as one of the first museum curators and as one of the first scholars interested in the evolving discipline of art history. When we walk around the gallery observing the many types of art works in terms of when and where they were painted and what they show, it is also interesting to consider why they are there, why they hang beside each other and what this tells us about art on the larger side of the spectrum of art history. We’d like to introduce his ideas to you and get you to go around the current exhibition thinking about some of the historical points we are drawing attention to in our talk. This Art Bite is about the gallery revolution which began with Eastlake as the first Director of The National Gallery. We’re going to be looking at the exhibition today with this gallery revolution in mind and we’re going to include today four examples of art purchased by Eastlake. We will use these four examples to try to show why they reflect his ideals within his collecting policy. Traditional hang In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public museums and galleries began to emerge in countries such as France and Britain as they began to build up their own national collections. The Louvre in Paris was originally a palace and its princely collections became a national art museum in 1793. By contrast, The National Gallery in London was first open to the general public in 1824. Its original location was at 100 Pall Mall, the town house of John Julius Angerstein, whose collection of 38 paintings was bought by the British government – it was only in 1838 after William Wilkins’s purpose built gallery was created that it moved to its current location of Trafalgar Square. These collections were a part of a nation's identity, as it was a privilege for the respective country to own such pieces of work. Other national museums include Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands and the Museo del Prado of Spain. The decision to make these open to the public was in part a nationalistic gesture and in part an attempt to improve national design for manufactured goods as well as to encourage a native school of art. Traditional methods of showcasing collections were through the mosaic hang. This consisted of walls filled, from the floor to the ceiling, with paintings arranged not by year or country of origin. None of the paintings had labels to inform the public of the artist, the name of the painting, its year or the medium used. This lack of information excluded many people, mainly of the lower classes who were not educated in art, because it was very difficult to interact with something of which they knew nothing about. Educated gentlemen used this lack of labelling to prove their status and knowledge to their peers and lower classes. By identifying the artists themselves, remembering the key dates and perhaps even telling of the stories that the paintings imagery told this would establish their status in society among their fellow peers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, educated men collected various sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian, Flemish, Dutch and French art to hang. It was down to the men of taste and class, to learn key critical terms and concepts that distinguished particular artistic qualities from each other, starting with the Italian Renaissance and onwards. This knowledge was a sign of aristocratic breeding and often only for the upper classes. Eastlake wanted to allow the paintings to speak for themselves. Hence he started to think in radical new ways about the layout of galleries. What Eastlake was saying was in line with new government directives that were made clear in the report of various Select Committees notably that of 1853, when it was decided that in the future The National Gallery should no longer be a treasury of select and acknowledged masterpieces reflecting the tastes of the conservative aristocratic trustees, who tended to favour sixteenth century Italian art and at seventeenth century French art, but rather that it should aim to become a survey collection, capable of telling the whole story of Western European painting from origins to the present day. Eastlake’s influence A mosaic hang, which it was called in England, Italy and France, would group together on one wall or close by, contrasting examples from opposing schools as we will show you today. Charles Eastlake wanted to change the way that artwork was displayed, to allow everyone, from all backgrounds and classes, to actually be able to see the pictures properly and hence to enjoy them. To do this he started the process – on paper at first and later in a few experimental galleries where space allowed, of hanging paintings by their country of origin and in chronological order, to help the public gain a better understanding of the history of Western art. Instead of hanging walls full of paintings from top to bottom, Eastlake endeavoured to move the pictures closer to the viewer by hanging them at eye level. Eastlake also introduced labels to go alongside the artwork, so that everyone had the chance to learn about the art displayed. With more empty space on the walls, he was also the first person who really thought about the colour of the walls against which the pictures should be hung. Eastlake decided that red, rather than the greyish green colour of previous public exhibitions, was best for enhancing the majority of the paintings. All of these interesting innovations are crucial because these things are very much still in the Gallery’s interest today and are continuously improving and developing the public’s relationship and interpretation of art, old and new. As you look around the gallery today, you can see how these changes are apparent and help your experience with art. You could say that tour guides and Young Explainers like us are aiming to help the public of all backgrounds and educations to interpret, engage and experience art on a completely new level, which is some way is Eastlake’s legacy and heritage. There is more space for the paintings, clear labels and introductory panels and ultimately the environment to learn and appreciate art. Although we are in a temporary exhibition, the same forces are at work in the permanent galleries at The National Gallery and many other art galleries too. Eastlake himself was ‘Catholic’ in his tastes after fourteen years spent in Rome and Italy observing the works of Old Masters from the Italian Renaissance. Eastlake appreciated all schools of painting for their innate merits such as the French, the Italian, the Dutch and the British too. After 1859, Eastlake thought The National Gallery had enough examples of early Italian art, the type of art that he had been specifically directed to purchase originally by the writers of the report of the 1853 Select Committee. Therefore, he wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to say he would be starting to concentrate from that point onwards on purchasing for the nation examples of pictures by later Italian artists as well as painters from different countries and ages. Now let’s turn to the five pictures which reflect Eastlake’s choice and influence. Art movements such as the Dutch Golden Age and the Romanticists took a great deal of inspiration from nature so this was a popular topic in the nineteenth century. Eastlake was purchasing Dutch landscapes as a way of promoting the importance and significance of this new style of art. During this time British tastes were changing due to Industrialisation which in turn created a need and want for this rural art. ‘A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape’ by Jacob van Ruisdael, circa 1660-70 We will begin with Jacob van Ruisdael’s ‘ A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape ’ painted in-between 1660-1670, oil on canvas. Already, as you can see, there is a clear label identifying this information to you, the title of the artwork also clearly states the genre. Ruisdael painted many waterfalls from the late 1650’s onwards. He was greatly inspired by the Amsterdam landscape painter Allart van Everdingen who had visited Scandinavia in 1644 and had made a number of drawings of rocky mountainous scenes with torrents and waterfalls. This is a clear example of the classical phase of Dutch landscape painting. Eastlake endeavoured to collect work from Northern Europe – especially after 1859 – the year he acquired this particular work.
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