Dulwich Picture Gallery Celebrates its 200th Anniversary
Nicola McCartney, Thursday, 9th December 2010
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the first purpose-built public art gallery in England, celebrates its bicentenary in 2011 with a ‘Big Bang’. On 9 January 2011 the gallery plans to host family activities, a special concert, a day of free admission to the permanent collection and an evening display of fireworks, all to celebrate the unveiling of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Sir John Soane (1828-9) (see above), the first of 12 masterpieces on loan to the gallery to be exhibited each month on the end wall of the gallery’s enfilade.
‘Masterpiece a Month’ will feature major works by Velázquez, Vermeer, El Greco, Veronese, Rembrant, Ingres, Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Constable, Hockney, Domenichino and Lawrence. Each of the 12 paintings will also be the subject of an accompanying lecture. It is significant that the year-long series opens with Lawrence’s portrait of Sir John Soane because the gallery was in fact designed by the Georgian architect himself. The masterpieces also serve to demonstrate the strong relationship and global reputation which the Dulwich Picture Gallery maintains with much larger public museums and art galleries – they are borrowed from the Prado, The Met, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the Frick Collection, the Van Gogh Museum, the National Gallery of Art Washington, the Royal Collection, the Royal Academy, Tate and Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Throughout 2011, Dulwich Picture Gallery is also staging a number of extraordinary temporary exhibitions including ‘Norman Rockwell’s America’ (15 Dec 2010–27 March 2011). This is the first showing of the illustrator’s original works in the UK and comprises 40 paintings and all 323 of his vintage covers of the Saturday Evening Post. ‘Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters’ (29 June–25 September 2011) will draw upon Poussin’s influence on Twombly’s compositions with a comparative hanging, including Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan (c. 1636) from the National Gallery, London. ‘Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven’ (19 October 2011–8 January 2012) takes us through to the end of the year with the very first UK exhibition dedicated to this Canadian landscape artist and those he directly influenced.
Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery can visit the permanent collection, temporary exhibitions and respective lectures for free.
For more information on visiting the Dulwich Picture Gallery, see www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.
Image credit: Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 1828–29, Oil on canvas. 139 x 110.5cm, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane's Museum.
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