Notes
Urban fauna

Urban fauna

Notes
When is a dog a mouse?

When is a dog a mouse?

Throughout the centuries man has delighted in creating representations of his canine companions.

Collection
Living Large 6

Bill Hammond Living Large 6

There’s no big break. It’s just a slow game. —Bill Hammond, 2002

Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)

Exhibition

Menagerie: Animals from the Gallery's Permanent Collections

Menagerie brings together 17 historical and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the Gallery's Permanent Collections, all of which feature an animal of some description, from cats, dogs and birds to horses, bulls, fish and even a hippopotamus!

Collection
Collie Dog

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
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

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
Chimney Sweeps

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

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