Art of the State: Liverpool: The Walker.

Art Let's begin. Back when I was completing the old project, I decided to leave the Walker Art Gallery until last because as I said when writing about that visit, "having worked there, being so familiar with the collection, it seemed more valuable to head out and visit the places where I’d never worked and was unfamiliar with the collections". Since this is both a new project and a continuation, I decided to begin there again knowing it would be a relatively short visit.  The permanent display hasn't changed much in the meantime.  The portrait of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia which has been in the Walker's collection since the 50s and was until recently listed as from the Studio of Van Dyke has now been confirmed as being by the master himself.  But there's little point in me repeating any of the material which was in the original post, which you can still read here.

Accessibility of Collection.

The Walker has free entry and is open from 10am-5pm Monday to Friday. Their website has an extensive collections section highlighting prominent works. The Art UK website lists all 2,255 artworks.  As with most larger art collections, there is a lot of minor works but what's on display is incredible.  That said, it would be good to have a room or two which revealed works from the pre-1900 collections in themed displays as happens in other regional galleries.  A large proportion of the gallery is currently consumed by a display of John Moores Prize winners which are usually empty when I visit even though the rest of the galleries is buzzing.  There are some items in the stores which would be star attractions at some smaller locals like Bolton or the Atkinson in Southport.



Collection Spotlight.

This is Fantine (1886) by Margaret Bernadine Hall. Illustrating the character from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, this is a devastating example of how lighting and staging can draw the viewer into the space of a subject. When Fontaine is sacked from her job because of her illegitimate child, she falls into prostitution to survive (the Anne Hathaway sequence in the film version of the musical).  What strikes you is the contrast between how the child is painted, all rosy cheeks and contented sleep and her mother in stark monochrome.  They living in different words, and Fontaine is fighting to keep it that way, to shade her baby from the darkness.

Hall was both in 1863 in Wavertree.  Her father Bernard Hall was a merchant, local politician and philanthropist, and elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1879.  In 1882, her family moved to London and from there she went to Paris for five years to study painting, a time when she would have found herself amid the Impressionists but few female artists.  It's in this period she must have produced Fantine at just 23.  Between 1888 and 1894 Hall travelled extensively to countries including Japan, China, Australia, North America, and North Africa, returning to Paris in 1894.  She died in England in 1910, at the home of the playwright George Calderon in Hampstead Heath.

In an ideal world, Hall would be lauded as one of our great painters.  But since her death, most of her paintings have apparently disappeared.  Her brother Douglas offered Fantine and and other of her works Les Abandonées to the National Gallery but they were declined. During the following year he offered them to the Walker Art Gallery, and Fantine was accepted.  I haven't been able to track down where Les Abandonées ended up, but Art UK lists another of her works at Trinity College Cambridge, a sketch portrait of Sedley Taylor one of the librarians at Trinity College.  This was a complex life worthy of further study.  But her single biography is out of print.