Into the Fields: The Newlyn School and Other Artists

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Into the Fields: The Newlyn School and Other Artists

Summer at the RWA - A celebration of rural life featuring the world-famous Newlyn School artists alongside renowned photographer James Ravilious

Into the Fields: The Newlyn School and Other Artists

The Royal West of England Academy

20 June – 6 September 2015

In celebration of Bristol’s year as European Green Capital, the RWA is proud to present a major exhibition of rural realist paintings by the world famous Newlyn School artists (1880 - 1930) and their contemporaries.

Predominantly focusing on our of the region’s most notable artistic enclaves, Into the Fields also includes associated artists such as George Clausen and Henry La Thangue. The RWA’s history includes a rich relationship with Newlyn, so it is fitting that the show includes RWA Academicians such as Dame Laura Knight, Stanhope Forbes and Thomas Cooper Gotch, as well as regular exhibitors including Walter Langley, ‘Lamorna’ Birch and Frank Gascoigne Heath.

Like their Barbizon School forebears, the Newlyn School represented rural workers as timeless and heroic, resourceful and sustainable. They captured the farmworkers with earthy hues, representing in visual form their symbiotic relationship with the land. These noble workers are shown alongside representations of the soil’s fruits, from farming and gardening to mining and quarrying.

With subjects drawn from rural life – often painted en plein air – the exhibition explores a multitude of themes and rural locales, from the darkened cowsheds of Harold Knight’s Milking the Goat (c.1907, oil on canvas) to the farmhouse steps of Albert Chevallier Tayler’s Feeding Time (1884, oil on canvas). From here we gently step out to cross outlying meadows and cornfields, such as in George Clausen’s The Orchard (1881, oil on canvas), before exploring the furrowed fields of Harold Harvey’s Hoeing Parsley, Mounts Bay (1913, oil on canvas) and the panoramic landscape of Dame Laura Knight’s epic vista in Spring (1916-20, oil on canvas) (see below).

Vist the website for more details.

James Ravilious: Rural Life

The Royal West of England Academy

20 June – 6 September 2015

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James Ravilious: Rural Life features over 30 photographic images, composed with the eye of an artist, capturing subtle qualities of light to reflect the rural life and landscapes of North Devon in the 1970’s and 80’s. Taken for the Beaford Archive, to which he contributed well over 70,000 images, his photographs reveal real life in the fields, farms, and villages, portraying the traditional countryside on the brink of change. What started as a short-term project grew into a seventeen year obsession, depicting all aspects of country life with his warm and sympathetic eye. The resulting historical span which he gave to the Archive makes it probably the most intensive record of any rural area in England.

Visit the website for more details.

The RWA is an established venue for the fine arts and embraces an artistic awareness of the widest nature. The exhibition programme provides a showcase for one-person and mixed exhibitions in a variety of media, attracting large numbers of visitors nationwide. The Academy is situated in the academic heart of Bristol at the Clifton Triangle opposite the Victoria Rooms.

Closed Mondays

Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm

Sunday 11am – 5pm

Adults £5 inc. gift aid

Concessions £3.50 inc. gift aid

Under 16s, University of Bristol, UWE and SGS students FREE

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