November/December 2003
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight
In November we visited Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, which houses a large number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as well as furniture and Wedgwood. Worthy of note is the William Hesketh Lever display, which contains ethnographic items collected during Lord Leverhulme's numerous business trips and world tours. Also in this collection are the Sunlight Soap paintings, bought specifically to advertise Lever Brothers' products. Arthur John Elsley (for Besieged, 1860) and many other artists provided images to Sunlight Soap, as John Everett Millais (Bubbles, 1886) and others did for Pears' Soap.
Port Sunlight itself is worth a visit. It is the picturesque 19th century garden village founded by the first Lord Leverhulme for his soap factory workers. It is hard to imagine such an idyllic setting existed in the industrial revolution. Doubtless it has changed since it became an Outstanding Conservation Area, renowned for its unique architecture and social history.
Pre-Raphaelite Exhibits - Fall 2003
After discovering at the Lady Lever that all its Rossetti paintings were on loan to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, I scheduled a day-trip to visit the gallery and its latest exhibition. Together with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Walker organized (fom 16 October 2003 - 18 January 2004) the first major exhibit in 30 years of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's (1828-1882) art. The 150-plus works, including paintings, drawings, stained glass and furniture, even decorative art worn by his models, visually chronicled the artist-poet's career with the more sensational aspects of his life thankfully omitted. The Walker contains an impressive collection of Pre-Raphaelite art and it's just an hour away by train.
Just one day later I hopped on another train and travelled south this time to London to take in Andrew Lloyd Webber's collection at the Royal Academy. This exhibit, which ran from 20 September 2003 - 12 December 2003, showcased a wide variety of Victorian art, from paintings, stained glass and tapestries, to furniture and ceramics. The collection reflected Lloyd Webber's taste and encompassed the romance of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, from its inception to the second generation of Burne-Jones and his followers to John William Waterhouse. Also on display were important paintings by Picasso, Canaletto and Reynolds, as well as scenes from contemporary life painted by the likes of Tissot and Grimshaw, not to forget the works of the Classicists Leighton and Alma-Tadema.