We invite you to an unusual and original Summer Show, carefully chosen by Chris Beetles and the Gallery team – featuring 160 artworks that would improve, enliven and embellish any collection. The exhibition starts mid-19th Century (despite a rumbustious guest appearance from the irrepressible Thomas Rowlandson) with all the colour, glamorous detail and fascinating narrative of the Victorian Era. Bold and self confident, its striking images still enchant us a century and a half later. A large collection of Albert Goodwin encompasses it all and excites the acquisition gene with a display of his early Pre-Raphaelitism and the breathtaking loveliness of Swiss grandeur …
The 20th Century artists celebrate the natural understated beauty of the English landscape and explore foreign lands showing us a world free from war, where the natural order of things reveal its beauty – including works by Alfred Parsons, Stanley Anderson, S R Badmin, Norman Neasom and Keith Grant.
Our contemporary gallery artists – Val Archer, Lesley Fotherby, Geraldine Girvan and Melissa Scott-Miller – take a bow demonstrating that they belong in a long tradition of recorders of the idyllic in city and pastoral views, revellers in urban discourse and celebrators of the mundane. A special feature of Jack Russell portraiture of wartime heroes finishes our artistic tour in elegiac style.
