2nd January 2017
This exhibition brings together a large selection of Dewhurst’s shimmering paintings with archival photographs and documents to reintroduce the painter to his native city. Glittering sunlight and Mediterranean warmth glows from every canvas, these paintings take you to a happy place...
A controversial figure on the Anglo-French art scene at the turn of the twentieth century, Wynford Dewhurst is most famous for his 1908 work The Picnic, in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery. He was born in Manchester in 1864 and began his career studying law. He moved to Paris at the relatively advanced age of 27 to train as an artist, returning to France throughout his life to paint in the valleys of the Seine and the Creuse in the style of Claude Monet, who became his principal mentor.
Gallery hang
The Athenaeum - Blossoming apple trees in the garden of a Norman farmhouse
Dewhurst was an art theorist as well as a painter and his 1904 book Impressionist Painting, Its Genesis and Development was the first important British study of Impressionism. The book became notorious for Dewhurst’s insistence that the English landscape tradition, especially the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, was at the root of modern French painting. Dewhurst’s thesis was that, ‘the French artists simply developed a style which was British in its conception.’
Summer mist, Valley of La Creuse', 1880-1940 shown at head of post.
“Nothing could be more delightful on a cold, dreary day than Mr Wynford Dewhurst’s landscapes imbued with sunlight,” wrote a certain tabloid in 1910.
8 out of 10.
