What’s On
Dear Shurrie
The art, influence and friendships of sculptor and teacher Francis Shurrock
One O'Clock Jump: British Linocuts from the Jazz Age
Dynamic and vibrant prints from a fast-changing world.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
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Collection
Arthur Wardle Hill Leopards
Animal studies were popular in Victorian and Edwardian times and Hill Leopards is typical of their kind. It is unlikely that Arthur Wardle would have ever seen the African leopards in their native habitat. Rather, he observed the animals at the London Zoo and placed them in an imaginary landscape. Wardle was continuing the tradition of earlier English animal painters such as George Stubbs (1724 -1806). Painted with the fine brush treatment of the Academic tradition, the silkiness of the fur, feathery grasses and smooth rock surfaces are all presented very realistically and would have been a quite convincing likeness for the contemporary viewer. Born in London, Wardle received no formal art training but was a popular artist specialising in both domestic and wild animal subjects. Although he was self-taught, he was accepted into traditional art establishments such as the Royal Academy. He was also a member of the Royal Institute of Painters and the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists.
Collection
Michel Tuffery Povi Christkeke
Michel Tuffery, a Wellington-based artist of Samoan and Tahitian Cook Islands descent, has taken cues from pop art in his use of food packaging to create the spectacular Povi Christkeke (which translates from Samoan as Christchurch Bull).
Constructed from recycled corned beef tins, this bull tells us that corned beef has become a staple food throughout the Pacific. Because of this it may be seen as a monster, an introduced beast grown powerful by replacing more environmentally friendly traditions of food production and gathering.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Graham Sutherland Armadillo
The armadillo lives in South America. Its name means ‘little armoured one’ in Spanish. Among the twenty different species of this interesting creature, the three-banded armadillo is the only one that can roll itself into a tight ball when it needs to for protection.
The painter Graham Sutherland made this print as part of a ‘Bestiary’ published in 1968, a collection of twenty-six lithographs featuring different animals, each one suggesting a particular human-like quality. Curling tight, this armadillo may be expressing fear.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Duncan Grant Collie Dog
Collie Dog is from a set titled ‘Six Lithographs’, a collaboration between Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, with each artist contributing three works. Grant’s three lithographs also included Hawk and The Cat and were produced at Miller’s Press. Grant was an active printmaker throughout most of his career, producing prints alongside his activity as a painter, designer, potter and decorator. He is a major figure in 20th century British art and was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was also closely associated with the Omega Workshops which operated in London between 1913 and 1919.
Collection
Eileen Mayo Cats in the Trees
Eileen Mayo obviously had a love for cats as seen in this personal feline study. There’s a harmonised balance in the print and the cats look as ifthey are inseparable. Mayo specialised in depicting animals and the domestic cat was one of her favourite subjects. Cats in the Tree was a favourite linocut of Claude Flight’s and he used as a frontispiece for his instruction manual The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing (1934). He described it as a linocut of good form and colour composition. Clark’s Siamese Cats is much more simplified. They lounge round, curled up with each other, against a plain backdrop. A far cry from the images of mechanisation that Flight encouraged they remain excellent examples of the way that imagery could be simplified in linocuts.
(One O'Clock Jump: British Linocuts from the Jazz Age, 7 December 2024 - 11 May 2025)
Collection
Artist Unknown, Balthazar Paul Ommeganck A Cow
This cow belongs to an ancient breed of cattle, once common in Belgium and the Netherlands, but now almost extinct. Called the Kempens rund (Campine cattle), it was bred for milk, cheese, butter and beef; its numbers were greatly reduced during World War I when the farming area where they lived became a battlefield.
This painting is probably by the Flemish painter Balthazar Paul Ommeganck. He was one of many admirers of the Dutch seventeenth-century painter Paulus Potter, who had started something new in painting by making farm animals his main subjects, rather than minor, incidental elements.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
William Hogarth The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Revd), in the Character of a Russian Hercules, Regaling himself after having Kill’d the Monster Caricatura that so Sorely Gall’d his Virtuous friend, the Heaven born Wilkes
Here’s some beastly behaviour: William Hogarth, a famous eighteenth-century British artist, trading insults with two gentlemen whom he had greatly upset. Hogarth had published an engraving attacking the journalist Charles Churchill and the politician John Wilkes, and another showing Wilkes being tried in court. Churchill, in return, published a vicious poem about Hogarth. He retaliated by making this print, picturing Churchill as a drunken bear, clutching a beer tankard and a club covered in ‘lyes’. The picture in the lower right-hand corner shows Hogarth whipping Churchill and Wilkes (as a performing bear and monkey) into line. Meanwhile, Hogarth’s pug passes judgement on Churchill’s poem.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Edwin Henry Landseer Chimney Sweeps
The son of an esteemed London engraver, Edwin Landseer displayed prodigious talent by exhibiting his paintings at the Royal Academy from age thirteen. This work, made when he was twenty, portrays the harsh reality of child exploitation in 1820s Britain, and the perilous occupation of chimney sweeping.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Compare Wellcome Collection 562349i