A stroll around the Walker V: The 18th Century

It's been over a year since I moved to Merseyside, in the North West of England, but I am still enjoying getting to know the local museum of 'old master paintings' - the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It is also home, as it happens, to artists from the Impressionists through to the modern day - but my focus for now will be the 18th Century. 

With works by artists as famous as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough there is much to look forward to, particularly as the Hogarth is one of the greatest theatrical portraits ever. 

Joseph Wright of Derby even lived in the what was, arguably, the wealthiest city in the nation, He must have arrived shortly after completing what is now his most famous painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, one of the jewels of the National Gallery's collection, in 1868, and stayed in Liverpool for three years. The Walker's collection includes a rich selection of his portraits, as well as his lesser-known landscapes and allegories. Given that the National Gallery will host an exhibition of his work which opens this November, this talk will, I hope, wet your appetite for more.

There is also a representative selection of works by George Stubbs - who was not 'only' a painter of horses. In many ways I think he should outrank both Gainsborough and Reynolds for the subtlety of his work, with its brilliant use of colour and complex compositions. In all probability, though, we will start with two paintings by the Venetian Francesco Guardi - both evocative, cool, and sophisticated... and neither of them views of Venice. 

These examples - and more - are all in the '18th Century Room' - but other works can be tracked down elsewhere in the museum, and oddly they are in rooms dedicated to the Renaissance and Baroque... One of the things we will discuss will be the reasoning behind such choices, and one of the questions I will try to answer is, 'what was it about the 18th century that makes its art so hard to pin down?'