Press Office: Press Releases
Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics
Wednesday 5 February – Sunday 11 May 2003
Admission £8.50 ( £6 concessions)
Public information number: 020 7887 8888.
Press release: 1 September 2002
In February 2003, some of the great European painters of the nineteenth century will be united in a major exhibition at Tate Britain. John Constable, JMW Turner, Camille Corot, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix are among those artists who feature in the exhibition which investigates artistic exchange between France and Britain during the period of High Romanticism, from approximately 1816 to 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne. This is the first time that an exhibition on this subject has been attempted.
Constable to Delacroix will place a particularly strong emphasis on the influence the British artists had on their French counterparts. Many French artists during this time were fascinated with English and Scottish culture, and this played a crucial role in the development of modern French art. The exhibition will include over one hundred oil paintings and watercolours, and will cover many genres including landscape, portraits and sporting art.
Affinities between the British and French schools in matters of theory, subject and technique will be explored, and the exhibition will focus on the interrelations between a range of key artists, those above as well as Richard Parkes Bonington, Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie, Paul Delaroche, Paul Huet, Dominique Ingres, Eugène Isabey, Horace Vernet and the French landscapists who comprised the School of 1830.
The exhibition will analyse the key cultural events which influenced artists from both nations, such as the publication in Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott's historical novel, Ivanhoe, which had an immediate and profound impact on French literature and painting. It will include a reconstruction of the highly successful 1820 exhibition of Géricault's painting Raft of the Medusa - one of the most dramatic and controversial paintings in art history - in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, and includes a magnificent full scale copy of the Raft (approximately seven metres by five metres), executed by French Academicians in 1859.
While the display of the Raft will recreate for visitors the experience of a visit to a small, private exhibition involving one major work, there will also be a recreation of a large public exhibition of the 1820s. This 'grand gallery' of exhibition pictures will comprise works that were shown at the Salon in Paris and the Royal Academy and British Institution in London, as well as influential examples of contemporary painting that were accessible to artists in distinguished private picture galleries like those of the Marquess of Stafford in England and the Duc d'Orleans in France. More detailed examinations of specific genres will follow in a group of satellite galleries radiating from this central room.
Constable to Delacroix will feature loans from public and private collections around the world, including the National Gallery, London, the Musée du Louvre, Paris and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The lead curator is Patrick Noon, the Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who has worked with co-curators from Tate, Christine Riding and David Brown. The exhibition will tour to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from 8 June to 7 September 2003, and then to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, from 7 October 2003 to 4 January 2004. A fully-illustrated catalogue will be available.
Notes to Editors
For further information, please contact Ben Luke/Olivia Colling
Tate Press Office, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Call 020 7887 8730/1/2 Fax 020 7887 8729 E-mail: pressoffice.tate.org.uk
