Opulence & Anxiety From The Royal Academy Of Arts

Opulence and Anxiety charts an illuminating path through the history of British landscape painting, presenting an innovative survey of the subject from the eighteenth-century to the present day. Britain’s industrial and commercial progress in the years leading up to 1800 inaugurated an age of opulence, represented by a period of wealth and global power, yet the nation also entered an era of extreme anxiety.

These conflicting trends are explored in the period covered by this exhibition, which brings together celebrated masterpieces and rarely seen works from the RA’s collection.

The exhibition at Compton Verney features the work of over forty landscape painters. Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner are recognised world-wide as masters of the genre, but the exhibition offers an opportunity to consider them alongside the early artists of empire, William Hodges and Thomas Daniell; the Victorian naturalists Thomas Creswick and Benjamin Williams Leader; Edwardian painters Alfred East and George Clausen, and the observers of inter-war Britain including Richard Eurich, L.S. Lowry, John Nash and Sir Stanley Spencer.

The exhibition, which is presented in five distinct themes, lastly focuses on recent work by Donald Hamilton Fraser, David Hockney, Barbara Rae and Sir Kyffin Williams.

It was in the depiction of landscape that, through more than two centuries, the competing claims of opulence and anxiety found expression. The exhibition explores this paradox by displaying, in galleries situated at the heart of the English countryside, landscape paintings originally shown or created in London. In doing so, it examines the creative tension between city and country, industrial and pastoral, and between Britain’s history as a capitalist and imperial nation and its rural self-imaging.

While landscapes often represent a rural utopia located in a mythic past, they also raise important questions about national identity. By moving beyond the canon of familiar names in landscape painting, the works on show demand a reconsideration of our hierarchies of value in nineteenth and twentieth-century art.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including an essay by Tim Barringer, catalogue entries of all works and artist biographies. A two day symposium on the theme of British landscape painting takes place at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London and Compton Verney from 11-12 May.

Exhibition dates: 24 March – 10 June 2007.