Media release: Glasgow Boys exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts

Opening of a new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts reflecting the ‘Alliance’ between Scotland and France with the GLASGOW BOYS

PIONEERING PAINTERS: THE GLASGOW BOYS 1880 – 1900
The Sackler Wing of Galleries
Until  23 January 2011

Supported by Glasgow Museums

IN October 2010, the Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major exhibition in London for over 40 years to celebrate the achievement of the Glasgow Boys, the loosely-knit group of young painters who created a stir at home and abroad in the final decades of the 19th century.

Begins a spokesperson: “The exhibition features over 80 oil paintings, watercolours and pastels from public and private collections by such artists as Guthrie, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Walton, Henry and Hornel.

“Together, they presented a new art, which had a major impact at home and abroad in the closing decades of the 19th century.

“The resultant works were, from c.1880 to 1900, among the most experimental and ambitious to be produced in the UK.

“Taking inspiration from such French Naturalist painters as Bastien-Lepage and also from Whistler, the Glasgow Boys produced some of the most revolutionary painting in Britain, drawing praise in London, Munich, Vienna and further afield.

“Their symbolist pictures were admired and emulated in secessionist circles in Germany and Austria.”

The spokesperson added: “The exhibition maps the Glasgow Boys’ responses in both subject matter and technique to developments in art which were taking place in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s.

“These artists sought to liberate their art from the staid, dark toned narrative paintings being produced in Glasgow and Edinburgh in order to explore the effects of realist subject matter and the particular effects of light captured through working out of doors, directly in front of the motif.”

For information about the exhibition, visit http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

For further press information, please contact: Johanna Bennett on: 020 7300 5615, or email press.office@royalacademy.org.uk

Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J OBD.

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Contact: Johanna Bennett

Email: press.office@royalacademy.org.uk
Website: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/