• This Issue
• Subscribe
• Advertisers
• Ad FAQS
• Ad Web Sites
• About IAT
• Link to IAT

Celebration: Liverpool

Title: Peamore, 1802
Artist: John White Abbott (British 1764-1851)
Medium: Watercolour and Ink on Paper
Purchased 1947
Image Courtesy: Lady Lever Art Gallery

Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings
Lady Lever Art Gallery
Liverpool, England
June 28 - November 9, 2008

England's famed Liverpool, home to the Beatles, is enjoying it's year as one of the European Capitals of Culture for 2008. It shares the honor with Stavanger, Norway. What will the city do to bring attention to its creative scene?

The Lady Lever Art Gallery has organized an exhibition; look at Masterpiece Watercolors and Drawings to add to the festivities for their city.

William Hesketh Lever, the first Viscount Leverhulme, was a noted collector of British watercolors and drawings. These pieces were acquired to allow the noble man to decorate his homes Thornton Manor, Wirral and The Hill, Hampstead.

Lever's artistic selection included works by John Mallord William Turner, John Constable, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, David Cox and Edward Burne-Jones.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora

Hailing from Greek Mythology, the god Jupiter gave Pandora, a human woman, a casket and forbade her to open it. Naturally she didn't listen to him and let her curiosity overtake her dismissing his order outright. The box contained the evils of the world which Pandora's action unleashed on earth. The casket bore an inscription 'hope remains last', which was the only item left in Pandora's box.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London to Italian immigrant parents. His family called him Gabriel but he preferred to use Dante as a first name in his writings. He developed a friendship with a like-minded artist William Holman Hunt and together they formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. It was an artistic group of painters, poets and critics who favored the classical styles of Raphael instead of the Mannerist style popular following the Renaissance. In particular they were opposed to the Royal Academy under the leadership of its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds, a man the group loathed.

Religion was a popular theme with the Pre-Raphaelites. They favored an accurate depiction of nature. Charles Dickens was a fierce critic of their work. John Ruskin helped them tremendously with his public defense of their artistic goals.

The exhibit runs at the Lady Lever Art Gallery until November and then it travels to The Herbert, Coventry.

Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings
Lady Lever Art Gallery:
June 28 - November 9, 2008
The Herbert, Coventry:
January 13 - March 22, 2009