 | Thomas Gainsborough's "The Cottage Door" is the centerpiece of the Yale Center for British Art's new exhibition. |
Visitors to the newest exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art can discover not only the artworks that audiences were viewing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but also how they were viewing them.
"Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's 'Cottage Door,'" which opened on Oct. 6 and continues through Dec. 31, seeks both to evoke for modern viewers the ideas and practices that contributed to Thomas Gainsborough's landscape vision, and to explore how artists and collectors of the day attempted to control the public perception of art.
The exhibition brings together for the first time Gainsborough's "Cottage Door" paintings and other contemporary works that take up the subject of the cottage and cottage life. It also features displays that recreate the viewing experience of the audiences of the day, including a sound-and-light show called the Eidophusikon and the Tent Room in which -- surrounded by fabric tenting, mirrors and glowing oil lamps -- Gainsborough's painting "The Cottage Door" (ca. 1780) was shown to great fanfare in 1818.
Gainsborough's cottage door paintings were the first in Britain to take up the subject of cottage life. They were also among the first works by a British artist to embody the 18th-century ideal of "sensibility," which celebrated the artless beauty of nature and romanticized the life of the rural peasantry.
While at the Yale Center for British Art, "The Cottage Door" will be displayed as it was exhibited in the early 19th century. The work will be shown in a recreation of the Tent Room in Sir John Leicester's Hill Street Gallery, which was built specifically to house the painting. Gainsborough preferred that his works be viewed in a subdued light, and it is believed he painted "The Cottage Door" by candlelight. The heavily draped and artificially lit Tent Room was designed to simulate the type of viewing conditions the artist had originally intended for his works.
The exhibition also features a modern recreation of the Eidophusikon, a small mechanical theater designed in 1781 by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. A Swiss artist and theater set designer who settled in London, de Loutherbourg created this miniature stage (seven feet wide by four feet high by eight feet deep) in which the scenery was moved by pulleys, and changing atmospheric effects were suggested by a backcloth of tinted linen lit from behind by lamps. Scenic illusions were accompanied by appropriate sound effects and music by well-known composers of the day.
Gainsborough was so taken with de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon that he created his own "peep box," complete with lighting and scenery that he painted on glass transparencies. As some of the original box and transparencies are too delicate to travel from the Victoria and Albert Museum where they are housed, the Yale exhibition includes modern facsimiles.
The British Art Center is the only East Coast venue for the exhibition, which was co-organized with The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. The organizing curators are Julia Marciari-Alexander, associate director for programmatic affairs at the Yale Center for British Art, and Shelley Bennett, curator of British and continental art at The Huntington. The guest curator is Ann Bermingham, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Yale University Press has published "Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's 'Cottage Door,'" edited by Ann Bermingham, with essays by Bermingham, John Barrell, Dongho Chun, Ian McCalman, Michael Rosenthal, Susan Sloman, Amal Asfour, Paul Williamson and William Vaughan.
The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. It will be open on Wednesdays until 7 p.m. through Nov. 16, and open Thursdays until 8 p.m. on Dec. 1, 8, 15 and 22. The museum is accessible to individuals using wheelchairs. For further information, call the center at (203) 432-2800 or visit the website at www.yale.edu/ycba.
T H I S
Exhibition simulates viewing
conditions intended by artists
The exhibition will also feature Edward Francis Burney's 1782 watercolor "The Eidophusikon Showing Satan arraying his Troups on the Banks of a Fiery Lake with the Raising of Pandemonium from Milton."
All told, "Sensation & Sensibility" features 40 paintings, 25 works on paper, 10 books and several optical devices. In addition to Gainsborough's paintings, the exhibition includes works by George Morland, Peter Simon, Francis Wheatley, Gainsborough Dupont (Gainsborough's nephew) and William Redmore Bigg.
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