The Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House
Nerys Johnson – paintings ‘From the Garden’
12 to 23 May 2010 – Wednesdays to Saturdays – 10:30am to 5:30pm
The Broughton House Gallery at 98 King Street, Cambridge is once again showing paintings by the artist and curator, Nerys A. Johnson. The exhibition, ‘From the Garden Part 1′ is on show between 12 and 29 May 2010. All the work is for sale, with prices ranging from £350 to £700. Income from sales goes into the Nerys Johnson Contemporary Art Fund which – as Nerys specified in her will – supports museums and galleries to buy contemporary art. The exhibition is open by appointment with Rosemary Davidson who can be called on 01223 314960 or emailed at bhgallery@btconnect.com.
The Broughton House Gallery last showed Nerys’ paintings in October 1999, concentrating on the gouaches that she had done over the previous year. Nerys died two years later, following an operation, and the present exhibition therefore takes a more retrospective view and shows how her paintings developed during the twelve years between her retirement in 1989 and her death in 2001. The domestic scale of the space, the large window into the rear garden and the abundance of daylight make the Broughton House Gallery a very appropriate place for showing paintings and drawings that were created in a similar environment.
Nerys Johnson was born in North Wales in 1942, grew up in Nottinghamshire and studied Fine Art at what later became the University of Newcastle. She worked at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and then ran the D. L. I. Museum & Arts Centre in Durham, but continued to paint in her spare time. She suffered from childhood from an acute form of arthritis, and a recurrence of the disease prompted her early retirement. From then until her death, she devoted herself full-time to painting, producing the amazing body of work by which she is mainly admired. Her preferred subject matter was flowers, first in her garden, then brought indoors or brought by her friends when she was less able to get out.
She did not paint the traditional still-life, the bunch of flowers in a vase isolated on a table top or window ledge. In her early paintings, the edges of bunches of flowers are not visible, nor are the vases in which they stand. Nerys instead pitches herself “down among the plants”, into the middle of the action, and becomes thoroughly engrossed in juxtapositions and balances of colour and in the movement and rhythm of branches and leaves. Particularly evident in this exhibition is the contrast between a use of sumptuous colour on the one hand, and the energetic and dynamic work in black and white on the other. These two tendencies combine powerfully in paintings such as ‘Midwinter Phoenix’ (1993?) and ‘Dry Salvages II’ (1996). The conflict inherent in these paintings is then resolved in the small gouaches of the late phase, where the tangle of larger, earlier compositions is replaced by small, deceptively simple, icon-like images, where coloured shapes are outlined against dark – almost black – backgrounds.
A complementary exhibition, ‘From the Garden Part 2′ will be showing between 12 and 29 May 2010 at Isobel Johnstone’s studio in London, and can be viewed by appointment by phoning 0207 727 7559 or 07798 894 222, or by emailing isobel.johnstone@smtp.oosha.co.uk.
For further information on Nerys and her work, please visit the website: www.nerysjohnson.com
About the gallery
For 20 years the Broughton House Gallery has been showing 9 exhibitions a year of the work of living artists. For the last 7 years we have also been the home of the works of Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin and one of the most famous wood engravers of the 20th century. Not only have we managed the Archive of over 500 different engravings printed by herself, but we have under the Broughton House Books imprint, published three books reproducing her engravings (Gwen Raverat: Wood Engravings of Cambridge, Gwen Raverat in France and Gwen Raverat: A Miscellany).
We have also put on exhibitions of work by other members of the Darwin family: Sophie Gurney (Gwen’s younger daughter), Lucy Raverat, Nelly Trevelyan and Emily Pryor, her three granddaughters. In 2001 we celebrated the publication of Frances Spalding’s biography Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections, by an exhibition including oil paintings by Gwen and her husband, Jacques Raverat, never seen in public before.
The gallery has become known as the place to go and see and buy her engravings and where all the books about her of featuring her work as an illustrator can be found. It is appropriate that it should be in Cambridge, where she was born (in Newnham Grange), spent all her early years and the last 11 years of her life (in The Granary), both now part of Darwin College.
We have decided to end our 9 exhibitions a year, build on these Darwin and Raverat associations and turn the gallery into the Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House, open by appointment and invitation. The change took place in April 2008, in good time for the celebration of the 150th anniversary (2009) of the publication of The Origin of Species.
The Gwen Raverat Archive will now be permanently accessible by appointment and invitation only.