Loans to the National Museum, Cardiff
The School of Art has lent two major works from its Collection to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff which has recently seen a multimillion pound refurbishment programme, including the provision of five new gallery spaces for modern and contemporary art. Our large canvas by German émigré artist Karl Weschke (1925-2005), Floating Figure (1973-4), will be hung alongside a Francis Bacon canvas in a gallery devoted to the representation of the figure post-1950. Floating Figure was gifted to the School of Art by the Contemporary Art Society for Wales in 2006.
Banditti on the Bank of a River (1650s) by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) will be displayed in the Museum’s gallery dedicated to ‘Art in Italy 1500-1700,’ among other seventeenth landscapes by Claude, Poussin and Rosa. The subject, and Rosa’s influential style, also contributes strongly to the theme of Classical landscape painting which extends into the eighteenth-century galleries and works by important Welsh artists such as Richard Wilson.
An Italian Baroque painter of historical and religious dramas, Rosa was among the first to paint wild, ‘romantic’ landscapes that are characterised by rugged precipices, turbulent rivers and ruins overgrown with vegetation, often peopled with shepherds, brigands and soldiers. In the 18th century, his landscapes were enthusiastically acquired by British collectors for whom they captured the overwhelming force of untameable Nature, where ‘Beauty, Horror and Immensity’ are united (John Brown, 1753) in a ‘rude kind of Magnificence’ (Joseph Addison, 1712).
The School of Art’s Banditti on the Bank of a River formerly hung in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome. In 1799, it was acquired for £400 by the novelist and collector William Beckford (1760-1844) from the painter and art dealer Henry Tresham (1750-1814). When sold at auction in 1802, it was described as ‘a grand and rocky scene’ with ‘figures correctly drawn and finished with uncommon precision and smartness’ and ‘painted in a transparent and harmonious tone and colour, in the very finest style and time of the Master—truly a chef d’oeuvre.’ *
In 1926, Banditti on the Bank of a River was bequeathed to Aberystwyth University by its President, Sir John Williams.
Both paintings will be on display at Cardiff from June 2011 to August 2012.
* Christie’s, London 27 February 1802, Lot. 80: A Catalogue of a Most Superb, Capital and Valuable Collection of Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch Pictures: the Property of a Gentleman, highly distinguished for his Taste in the Arts: the Whole selected with unbounded Liberality, and now brought from his seat at Fonthill, Wiltshire.)