Talk paints picture of art collection

A TALK will delve into Gallery Oldham’s extensive fine-art collections.

Senior Curator Dinah Winch will give a presentation on the exhibition “Making History: Stories from the Past” tomorrow at 2pm.

The exhibition showcases paintings and explores events and characters from history through the work of artists including the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, Victorian history painters like Edgar Bundy, Henrietta Ward and Andrew Gow and local favourite Helen Bradley.

Some works are on display for the first time for many years.

Dramatic
The exhibition opens with Sean Keating’s exceptional painting “Night’s Candles are Burnt Out”, an allegorical work painted in 1928 about the birth of the state of Ireland, featuring the building of the Shannon hydroelectric works.

Andrew Gow’s dramatic work “Napoleon on the Sands at Boulogne”, painted in 1898 has just returned from being conserved and reframed for the exhibition.

Paintings that explore the Victorian fascination with the Medieval period include JE Millais’s “Departure of the Crusaders” and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Last Madness of Ophelia”, two of the most important paintings in Oldham’s collection.

At the heart of the exhibition is a group of paintings about the English Civil Wars of the mid-1600s.

The exhibition includes Edgar Bundy’s large-scale masterpiece “The Puritans” and more intimate paintings including Margaret Dicksee’s “Children of Charles I” and Charles West Cope’s image of the poet George Herbert and his mother.

Oldham artist Helen Bradley was painting in the second half of the 20th century but her subject matter was her Edwardian childhood. She created a romanticised view of the period through her paintings. Gallery Oldham has her monumental work “Fire on Union Street”, and a smaller painting “A Special Treat,” which depicts Helen as a child going to watch miners going home as a special treat for being good.

Also showing is Tony Phillips’ thought-provoking series of 12 etchings called “The Benin Bronzes” which tells the story of the British looting of Benin.

The exhibition runs until March 25, 2012.