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Now Open William Henry Hunt: Country People
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Drawings Room display
Until 17 September 2017
This focused display is the first exhibition to investigate William Henry Hunt’s depiction of rural figures in his work of the 1820s and 1830s. It takes its lead from a watercolour in The Courtauld Gallery’s permanent collection, The Head Gardener, which is shown alongside significant loans from institutions and private collections.
Hunt gives us an appealing vision of a rural society of dignified individuals. Typical country characters are depicted in several key works including The Broom Gatherer, The Vegetable Man, and The Miller in his Mill.Several of Hunt’s rural figures portray staff on landed estates, such as that of the Earl of Essex. He had a remarkable talent for finding appealing textures and colours in humble interiors, fruit, and dead game as well as in homespun clothing and leather boots. But it is, above all, the humanity of his sympathetic portrayals of these country people, beautifully rendered in watercolour, that makes them remarkable. For Ruskin, a later champion of Hunt’s work, these watercolours were ‘virtually faultless’.
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Saturday 8 July 2017, 10.30 – 18.00, State Music Room,
Stowe House
Bringing together world-leading academics, art-historians, and contemporary artists, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Aganippe Artspresent a day-long symposium held at Stowe House to open the exhibition The Garden at War.
The collaborative event aims to provide a forum for exploring issues and ideas raised by the exhibition on the development and relevance of Stowe and its history of neoclassicism. The primary strand of inquiry which informs the symposium concerns the use of the gardens at Stowe as a collaborative art-form.
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