After Italy and Poland, the focus of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibitions moves back home, with a new exhibition of its British collection. Anna Sayburn takes a look.
Actor Nathan Field
It’s an odd title, but then it’s quite an odd collection. Best of British, the new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, displays the gallery’s paintings of UK origin, from Elizabethan worthies to Gainsborough’s lovely ladies.
Walking to the gallery, I pondered the title. Best of British what? Luck, perhaps, in the way the collection was accumulated? For the exhibition is arranged by bequest, rather than by strict chronology, showing how serendipitous is the collection we have at Dulwich today.
In the first room, I found the best of British thespians, with a roomful of Edward Alleyn and his fellow theatricals, strangely gloomy behind their beards.
The Alleyn portrait, inscribed ‘The founder of this college’ is clearly designed to intimidate Dulwich College pupils into good behaviour. He certainly has presence, although his weighty, weary demeanor sits oddly with some of his famous roles. I couldn’t imagine him as Doctor Faustus, ardently embracing Helen of Troy, or playing silly japes with Mephistopheles.
And what to make of Richard Burbage, the actor who first played the tragic heroes of Shakespeare’s plays? Was this really the face that launched a thousand Hamlets? Maybe we’re spoiled, but Jude Law he’s not. I suppose Jude’s pretty face would have been co-opted for Ophelia, back in the 1600s. Only Nathan Field (pictured), another Shakespearian actor by an unknown artist, looks suitably romantic.
The theatrical connection continues, as actors and theatre managers contribute their private collections down the ages. Another famous Hamlet, John Kemble, painted by William Beechey, turns his intelligent gaze on the viewer. His sister Sarah Siddons, familiar to gallery regulars as Joshua Reynolds’ The Tragic Muse, is absent from this exhibition, although other Reynolds paintings arrive with the Bourgeois bequest.
It’s clear how wedded the British were to their portraits, or what the most determinedly British artist of them all, William Hogarth, called ‘phizog-mongering’. He’s represented by a tranquil little scene of a lady fishing, quirky and very English.
A whole roomful of Linleys gladdens the eye, with Thomases Gainborough and Laurence competing to paint the most lustrous hair, the most soulful gaze, the lightest of touches on silks, satins and lace. The Linleys feel to me almost like familiar friends or family, yet ones I’m always happy to see.
So are these paintings the best of British art, the best of British society, or simply the best of the British collection at Dulwich? If the latter, I miss Peter Lely’s Nymphs By a Fountain (although his arcadian A Boy as a Shepherd is included) and Reynolds’ Mrs Siddons. If the former, where’s William Blake, Samuel Palmer, George Stubbs, any of the pre-Raphaelites, or JMW Turner? So maybe it’s luck, or theatrical society, that we’re celebrating after all. Either way, this is a quirky exhibition well worth seeing, which gives a fresh view to the whole Dulwich collection.
Best of British is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 27 September.
Image courtesy of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery.
