Museum invites animals to sit for pet still-lives to mark its centenary
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Version 0 of 1. The Holburne Museum in Bath will celebrate its centenary next year with spectacular exhibitions of paintings and silver, featuring loans from the Tate, the National Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery as well as many private collections – and a reckless invitation to the public to bring their pets to be immortalised at still life painting sessions. Although it often houses touring shows, director Jennifer Scott said they decided to mark the centenary by creating a year of exhibitions based on their own collections and including major loans. Scott is curating the first herself, Impressionism: Capturing Life, which opens in February, featuring artists who exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne – and a painting from the Tate of Monet painting by John Singer Sargent, which she said she had only just realised was done in imitation of his friend’s style. The season will continue in June with Stubbs and the Wild, including some very wild horses by the most famous of all English equine artists, and some very pussy cat-like lions. The museum will organise still life sessions for the public, at which all pet dogs (but probably not lions or horses) will be welcome. The year will end with Silver: Light and Shade, drawing on the vast metalwork collection of Sir William Holburne, whose bequest founded the museum. It opened in 1916 in one of the grandest vistas in Bath – a former Georgian hotel magnificently sited between the pleasure gardens and the sweep of Great Pulteney Street. The building looked much grander than it really was, and only gained the extra space it desperately needed in an admired extension by Eric Parry in 2011. The museum is also fundraising to acquire an oil sketch by the 18thcentury painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, of a handsome pink-cheeked 19-year-old, Arthur Atherley. The painting is now in the Los Angeles County Museum, but the sketch of a boy only a few years younger than the artist was described by curator Amina Wright as “bewitching”. Although the Holburne has a renowned collection of 18thcentury portraits, one of the few big names missing is Lawrence, who lived and worked in Bath for seven years from 1780 when he was forging his reputation. Atherley, the son of a wealthy banker who had just left Eton college when his portrait was painted, later became MP for Southampton. The finished portrait was an instant hit when Lawrence exhibited it in London, and it helped win him royal patrons. The Holburne has grant offers from the Art Fund and the V&A purchase grant fund – and it hopes to win Heritage Lottery funding as well – but has to raise £61,209 by January. |