SASSOFERRATO

In the 17th Century, the Virgin Mary in prayer had come into vogue, aided by the Roman Catholic Reformation that placed personal, solitary worship as one of its central tenets. Wealthy patrons, churches, and religious orders began to collect images of this scene and Sassoferrato, a committed follower of Raphael’s style, became widely regarded as the master of the genre. Looking at this work, one of many that he painted and sold over his life, it is easy to see why. There are no distractions from the subject and the action at hand. The Virgin Mary is framed by a black background, and depicted in three colours: red, blue, and white. He skin is rendered with such exacting delicacy that she seems to come to life, and the lighting offer such clarity as to seem almost hyperreal. For all the technical mastery and compositional genius on show, the star of the work is something far simpler - the Lapus Lazuli blue of her robes. A pigment made from rare stone sourced in contemporary Afghanistan, it brims with life and energy, drawing the eye in and framing the scene with infectious splendour. 

DORA BOTHWELL

A deep, lifelong passion for travel defined Dora Bothwell’s life, far more than her art or relationships. A native San Franciscan, she trained as a dancer while a teenager but, following the death of her father in her early 20s, she used a small inheritance to travel to Samoa where she was adopted by a village chief and his family. There, she learn the Samoan language, dance practices, traditional ceremonies and the artistry of the local textile designers and manufactures. For the two years she spent in Samoa, she developed a visual language and art practice that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Incorporating rigorous training and European avant-garde influences, she made work that spoke to the place she was in with insight and reverence but remained recognisably hers. Her art, then, serves as a kind of scrapbook of her travels, a visual record of the way that movement changed, informed, and inspired her. This ‘Keepsake from Corsica’ immediately conjures blue seas and iridescent shells, and the dance of sunlight as it dapples across the land.

CLAUDE MONET

For the last time, Monet lent his brush to the urban, man-made world. Almost every painting Monet was to make after this would be a natural landscape that sung the praises or showcased the power of nature. He had spent the last decade or more paying tribute to a new landscape of Paris, its grand boulevards, metal structures, glass exhibition spaces, and towering bridges, but now all of that modernity had lost its allure. It is fitting, then, that the subject of his swan song to the city and the industrialised world it represented would be this particular train. This was the terminal that linked Paris and Normandy, where Monet honed his en plein air landscapes, and the terminal that took the Impressionists to rural villages north and west of the city to escape and practice. The subject of Monet’s goodbye is the very means of his escape, and he paints it with such tenderness, as it to thank the train itself, or the invention of the steam engine, for what it has provided him: peace, solitude, and a way to connect with himself by connecting to the world around him.