The Easel

9th March 2021

Pioneering Women

Studio ceramics boasts few women luminaries like Lucie Rie. Recent auction results suggest other women may soon join her. Is gender a factor here? Maybe – the practical, sometimes rough hewn pieces of Bernard Leach, have fallen from market favour. Now there is a preference for the refined, delicate forms associated with women potters. Says one writer, in this “most feline” of art forms, “these objects just are”.

2nd March 2021

The Grand Tour and the Global Landscape

Wealthy young Britons in the 18th century were sent on the fabled Grand Tour of Italy to study ancient art and literature. They learned an idealized landscape – picturesque scenes that expressed “pleasure, power, ownership, and the extraction of value”. The British Empire took these ideas global and, well into the 20th century, landscape painting remained a “contest between the everyday and the ideal, of observed detail versus inherited form”.