The Easel

3rd May 2022

Crumbling is not an instant’s act

Architectural drawings are a niche taste, offering perspective and alluring detail but without art’s expressiveness. The Regency architect Sir John Soane was an avid collector, especially of drawings depicting “fantasies, alternative realities, and lost glories”.  Ruins were a favourite. Should we consider these “lost glories” or just ordinary structures romanticized by time? As for Soane’s own buildings, most have gone, “burned away like mist, while the ruins of Rome live on.”

Reframed at Dulwich Picture Gallery is a bracingly intelligent history of “the woman in the window”

A woman standing at a window is a familiar but enigmatic art motif. Sometimes it indicates a woman on display, hinting at “romantic possibility”. Other times it indicates capture – either imprisonment or someone trapped by economic circumstances. Such scenes go back aeons but how we perceive them has changed. And that, it seems, is the point of a London exhibition – to give a window onto “several things: one is these women, but another is you.”