Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes,
'Cow-sheds and Houses on the Palatine', about 1780.
Permanent loan to the National Gallery from the Gere Collection.

Alexandre Dunouy,
'Panoramic View of Naples', about 1783-9 or 1810-15.
Permanent loan to the National Gallery from the Gere Collection.

A Brush with Nature: The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches

12 September - 12 November 2000, Frick Collection, New York
12 January - 25 March 2001, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester


In the 1950s, John Gere, Keeper of Drawings at the British Museum, and his wife Charlotte, a writer, began to collect small-scale landscape oil sketches on paper, created by 18th- and 19th-century artists working out of doors. This was a type of painting that had hitherto been little noted by art historians, as it was relatively unknown that artists had gone out into the countryside with palettes and easels to paint directly from nature prior to the Impressionists. Today the Gere Collection numbers some 70 works, and these intimate and compelling documents of artists at work form what is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of its kind. The exhibition represented an important milestone in the study and understanding of the painted oil sketch in the European tradition. Following the tour, the paintings came to the National Gallery on long-term loan.


Back to Past Exhibitions