Study Visit: Oxford

Gerald will be leading a packed day on the 6 June. The study day looks at three exhibitions, which involve the art of drawing.
The most straight-forward of these, Great British Drawings, showcases more than 100 works by some of Britain’s best-known artists. They include watercolours by Gainsborough and Turner and outstanding draughtsmanship by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt. In the 20th-century section are works by Walter Sickert, Gwen John and David Hockney as well as an arresting portrait of Salman Rushdie by Tom Phillips made in 1993. Together they reveal not just how artists have used different materials and processes to achieve particular effects but the changes in artists’ conception of landscape and their study of the figure through portraiture and life-drawing.

The second exhibition focusses on the work of the eighteenth century caricaturist, James Gillray. Organised to mark the 200th anniversary of his death, it focusses on a period when a relaxation in government censorship coincided with an increase in literacy. This led to changes in the production and consumption of newspapers and handbills and a much more imaginative use of images and text. Among the works shown are some of the most memorable cartoons in British history from a close-up of the Prince Regent’s gouty foot to an image of Napoleon and Wellington carving up the pie of Europe.

The third exhibition, which is being shown at the Museum of modern Art in Oxford, combines graphic art with painting, film and new technology. The artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson, addresses themes of consumerism, celebrity and individual privacy, which would have been familiar to Gillray.
In the same way her exploration of technology’s blurring of the real and virtual worlds might have struck a chord with him as one of the most prominent caricaturists working at the time of the industrial revolution. Where they would have parted company, however, is in their contrasting portrayals of women. For whereas Gillray’s blowsy depictions of the Prince’s mistresses and girlfriends is typical of his scurrilous approach, Leeson’s documentary !Women Art Revolution released in 2011 has become one of the benchmarks of the feminist movement.
To reserve your place please email enquiries@oca.ac.uk
Image Credits:
Featured: The Knight’s Farewell, by Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1858 © Ashmolean Museum, University of OxfordJoseph Mallord William Turner
1775–1851
Sketch of Mackerel, c.1835-40
Watercolour over graphite on Whatman
9 x 11 inches; 224 x 287 mm
James Gillray, A Sphere Projecting Against a Plane, 1792 © Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images