Trumbolosophy

I am very much looking forward to our next major exhibition, Dempsey’s People: A Folio of British Street Portraits, 1824–1844 (Thursday 29 June to Sunday 22 October 2017). Dempsey’s People rests in part on the idea that there was in Regency Britain a vast mass of portrait production that has mostly been overshadowed by “the greats”: Wright of Derby , Reynolds , Gainsborough , Hoppner , Lawrence . Until recently, these, together with their most ambitious and successful confrères in the Royal Academy of Arts , have hogged the historical limelight, while a legion, a whole army of lesser artists, often hugely prolific, laboured away relatively unnoticed, under-appreciated, and have passed into obscurity, their work disbursed into the hopper of provincial auctions, junk shops, attics and land fill. In due course, some of that work and certain of those artists made the long and arduous voyage to colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. It ...

European painters always enjoyed a good deal of latitude in the representation of angels, those asexual, bodiless, celestial regiments of God, so long as they were young and beautiful. But who can fail to be startled by an oil painting in which, over his canonical pair of feathery wings, a particular, named angel wears the attire of a swashbuckling, early seventeenth-century Flemish militiaman—a broad-brimmed hat, slashed sleeves, lace collar and cuffs, a sword, black stockings, crimson garters and matching bows on his shoes—and cheerfully takes aim with a big, spluttering harquebus, the ignited match cord carefully slung from his left hand? Why is he opening fire on the heavens? And, apart from the specialist, who at first glance would place this delightfully batty Baroque picture in the vicinity of Cuzco in the Viceroyalty of Peru, or indeed date it to the third decade of the eighteenth century? For “ Asiel Timor Dei ”, ca. 1728 (“Asiel, Fear of God...