John Virtue, 'Landscape 706' (work in progress), 2003.
Courtesy of John Virtue.

John Virtue: London Paintings

9 March - 5 June 2005
Sunley Room Admission free

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Landscape painter John Virtue is the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. His relationship to the National Gallery collection runs deep, being inspired by Turner, Constable, Rubens and other painters of the great European landscape tradition.

Virtue made eleven paintings for this exhibition. Executed solely in black and white, they are monumental works, the largest of which is over seven metres across.

Virtue began his new paintings by choosing two sites alongside the Thames. One was on the south bank, in front of the Oxo Tower and the other on the north bank, located on the roof of Somerset House. From these two vantage points, looking eastward towards the City of London, Virtue made drawings from which he worked in the Gallery's studio.

His initial plan was to make eight large-scale paintings that represented the London cityscape looking towards St Paul's. Two of the paintings were huge, sweeping panoramas made by joining two canvases together, giving the pictures a combined width of over twenty feet.

A few months into the project, Virtue added a new location from which to draw, namely the roof of the National Gallery itself, overlooking Trafalgar Square. This provided the motivation to make three more paintings showing the Square looking towards Westminster, dominated by Nelson's Column.

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