Previous Exhibition 'Painting the Seasons

'Painting the Seasons – The Art of Colour'

Council Chamber
29 June to 5 January 2020
(Exhibition Organisers: Pat Woollard & John Gerry)

Virtual Tour 1 Virtual Tour 2 Virtual Tour 3 Virtual Tour 4

This exhibition examines the use of colour in art through paintings of the four seasons selected from the Museum’s collection.

Colour in art has been subject to lively debate since time immemorial, with the latest theories sparking off many new artistic movements; the more so since the discoveries of French colour chemists such as Michel Chevreul in the middle of the nineteenth century. Examples of such movements are Pointillism (notably Seurat), Fauvism (notably Matisse and Derain), Scottish Colourism (notably Peploe) and more recently Post-modernism (notably Hodgkin). The work of these colourists has always enjoyed popular interest and is often the subject of exhibitions today. Bonnard’s paintings with their stunning use of colour are a case in point, having been shown recently at Tate Modern.

Now it is the turn of Bushey Museum & Art Gallery to display the work of colourists, this time the products of talented local artists from Herkomer and Lucy Kemp Welch through to the present day. The exhibition shows the four changing seasons depicted by changes in colour through their annual cycle, in landscapes, townscapes or individual features within them. Each of these paintings has an objective character, or visual reality, and a subjective character, or mental image – what we think and store in our minds about what we see. It is instructive to contemplate how the artists transform these two parts of their thought into their medium of oil or watercolour as they apply it to canvas or paper.

Here are a few examples of the paintings which will feature in the exhibition. Do come along and see all of them!

Spring