Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, March 4, 2013 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC.

British art from Vanderbilt University’s Fine Arts Gallery Collection is the focus of an exhibit titled Four Hundred Years of British Art, which will open on Wednesday, March 13, in the Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Hall with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

This comprehensive survey—the first of its kind in more than two decades to draw on the nearly 300 British objects held by the Gallery—is presented in honor of Robert L. Mode, associate professor of art, who will retire after forty-six years of teaching art history at Vanderbilt. Much of his research and teaching focused on British art.

Four Hundred Years of British Art will include examples of eighteenth-century English portraiture by such noted artists as Benjamin Wilson and George Romney, along with a work attributed to the school of Sir Thomas Lawrence; a selection of engravings by the pictorial satirist and social critic William Hogarth; two biting satires of the English upper class by Thomas Rowlandson; early nineteenth-century prints by Joseph Mallord William Turner, and the master mezzotint printmaker Richard Earlom; and paintings from the founder of the Norwich School of landscape painting, John Chrome.

On view through June 15, the exhibit also features works by several artists associated with the late nineteenth-century etching revival: Sir Francis Seymour Haden, Richard Samuel Chattuck, and Samuel Palmer; selections from the Gallery’s large collection of etchings by Gerard Brockhurst, one of the premier portraitists of the early twentieth century; and modern and contemporary works by such noted artists as Patrick Caulfield, Bernard Cohen, Michael Craig-Martin, Lesley Foxcroft, Elisabeth Frink, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, Henry Moore, and Roland Penrose.

Curated by Joseph Mella, director of the Fine Arts Gallery, the exhibit features the research and writing of Fine Arts Gallery interns Caroline Passano and Emma Trawick. The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody campus. Gallery hours (March 13-May 4) are noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday; noon to 8 p.m., Thursday; and 1-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, with the exception of Sunday, March 31, when the gallery will be closed. Gallery hours (May 5-June 15) are noon to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; and 1-5 p.m., Saturday.

For more information, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery or call 615.322.0605 (gallery) or 615.343.1702 (office).

*Thomas Rowlandson (British, 1756-1827), Glow Worms, etching with watercolor, 1805-1812