Product Description
It will appeal both to those who love Yorkshire and those with a general interest in British art.
The beauty of Yorkshire’s landscape moved the great British painter JMW Turner to tears ? and he understandably features extensively in these pages. Some artists came before him, and many came after him. Art and Yorkshire looks at the activities of the provincial portrait painters; the art patronage of Yorkshire’s aristocratic families and the wealthy industrialists of the Victorian age; through to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth carving their monumental sculpture inspired by the rough-hewn landscape, and then David Hockney painting vividly-coloured trees beside a road near Bridlington.
Yorkshire is a vast county with a diversity of landscapes that seem to define the characters of the people who live in them. There are areas such as the Dales that have attracted artists from far afield with their sheer beauty, and others that have sent creative natives packing, in search of brighter colour and a more benign light. The people of Yorkshire celebrated in this book, in portraits, figure studies and narrative scenes, may not have spent their whole lives in the county, maybe they were not even born here, but in some way or other they have been defined by Yorkshire.
This book is illustrated with some 120 images, gathered from numerous sources. It is arranged in a series of thematic chapters covering landscape, city and industry, the sea, and people. Setting the content in context is an inspirational and evocative preface by Alan Bennett.
Jane Sellars BA MA FMA is Curator of Art at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate. She has previously been Principal Curator of Harewood House and Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
Jane was born in Yorkshire and educated at Tadcaster Grammar School. She studied the History of Art at Manchester University and began her museums and galleries career as an education officer at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Here she wrote and curated Women’s Works (1988), her exhibition and book about women artists in the Liverpool collections.
Books that Jane has written on the Brontës include The Art of the Brontës (with Christine Alexander ? 1995) and Writers’ Lives: Charlotte Brontë (1997). Her contribution to the 2007 book William Powell Frith: Painting in the Victorian Age looked at the role of women in Frith’s personal and professional lives. In 2011, she wrote for and edited Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight, published to coincide with a successful exhibition at the Mercer Art Gallery and the Guildhall Art Gallery, London.