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Painting the West Country House & Garden [details]
The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath [link]
31 Jan - 31 March 2006
An exhibition of paintings and views of many of the great houses and estates
of the West Country painted from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Assembling works both famous and unfamiliar, many are borrowed from the houses
which they depict.
Amongst the 30 paintings featured are Jan Siberecht's 1675 View of Longleat
on loan from the Marquess of Bath, and Thomas Robins's panoramic View of
Charlton Park, with its bird's-eye perspective. Alongside such seventeenth
and eighteenth century paintings will be a number of twentieth-century and
contemporary pictures including a view of Highgrove commissioned in 1985
from Felix Kelly on loan from HRH the Prince of Wales. Also included is a
View of Ashcombe Park, near Salisbury, painted in 1770, once lived in by
Cecil Beaton and now the home of Madonna and Guy Ritchie. Other loans from
private collections include a modern view of Througham Court in Gloucestershire
painted in 1997 by Jonathan Myles-Lea.
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"Jonathan presented an impressive and highly engaging lecture at the Holburne,
celebrating the exhibition Painting the West Country House and Garden, in March 2006.
He produced a wealth of fascinating and informative images which delighted the whole audience.
His grounded, perceptive approach makes a new and very useful contribution to our view of
the English country house."
Cleo Witt M A, F M A, Head of Education
The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath
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'PUBLIC TALK'
'
Jewels in the Landscape - Painting Portraits of Houses & Gardens' [details]
by Jonathan Myles-Lea
The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath
21st March 2006
Jonathan Myles-Lea explains how he builds up his house portraits from his own meticulous survey drawings and
detailed preparatory sketches. He also illustrates how he creates his paintings in layers or 'glazes' of oils
on top of a sepia under-painting. Myles-Lea established his distinctive way of depicting gardens from the air
in the early 1990s, and since then he has created bird's-eye views of more than forty privately owned properties.
He has painted views of The Laskett for Sir Roy Strong (1995), Burghley House, near Stamford (1996), and several
National Trust properties including Cliveden, Hanbury Hall and Stowe Landscape Gardens. Myles-Lea has undertaken
commissions in Belgium, Germany, Holland and the USA. The talk will last approximately one hour and will end with Q&A.
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The Hot Pink Party
Waldorf Astoria, New York City, 2004
The Hot Pink Party was a major NYC charitable event in which Jonathan was heavily involved. In addition to organisation, Jonathan's services as a painter of portraits were raffled by Liz Hurley and Evelyn Lauder for 'The Breast Cancer Research Foundation' of which President George Bush is Chairman. The event was attended by many of the East Coast elite and Jonathan was introduced to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Eleanore Kennedy, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Elton John performed with his band and the evening raised $10m for the charity.
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The Writer in the Garden
The British Library, London, 2005
This major five month exhibition publicly opened by Sir Roy Strong, explored the rich history of ideas associated with the garden from the middle ages to the present day. Using the work of poets, novelists and dramatists as well as the ideas of essayists, philosophers, designers, scientists and professional garden writers it explored the fascinating interrelationship between writers, writing and gardens. From the Garden of Eden, via Evelyn's experimental garden 'lab' at Sayes Court and Keats' suburban plot in Hampstead to Derek Jarman's beach-side space, it shows gardens as rich grounds for romance and passion, contemplation, political and social debate and consolation in the face of loss.
Highlights included:
The Illuminated manuscripts of Romance of the Rose
Milton's Paradise Lost
Alexander Pope's garden sketches
Evelyn's Elysium Brittanicum
Coleridge's manuscript of Kubla Khan
The manuscript of Sir Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
Jonathan Myles-Lea's painting of Sir Roy Strong's garden The Laskett
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The Artist and the Country House
Sotheby's, London, 1997
This major exhibition focused upon one of the most important subjects in British landscape painting: the country house and its setting. The exhibition saw Jonathan Myles-Lea's work hanging along side works by master painters such as John Constable, Paul Sandby, Jan Siberechts, George Stubbs and J.M.W. Turner.
The exhibition was staged to benefit 'The Prince of Wales Institute for Architecture' and in the catalogue, the curator, John Harris wrote:
| "The two post-war painters who have led the way as straight country house portraitists are Algernon Newton and Felix Kelly. Newton is predominantly an urban painter who has undertaken a few portraits of country houses, notably Stowe, Buckinghamshire, 1993. His are unemotional statements, in which the human presence is deliberately absent so as to avoid and commitment to contemporary events. He is precise and accurate in the delineation of the architecture. In contrast, even when viewing a house in a straight forward way, Kelly ... cannot avoid but heightening the atmospheric theatrics of the scene. His denizens take on a surreal and sometimes sinister look, and he enjoys imparting hints of mystery. Felix Kelly owes much to Rex Whistler and was the modern master of the country house capriccio, just as Whistler was in his larger mural compositions. Today, Kelly's natural follower seems to be Jonathan Myles-Lea who heightens the projection of his scene with certain mysterious overtones as we can see in Plas Teg, Clwyd, 1992 or Trewane Manor, Cornwall. ... Myles-Lea is a participant in the revival of a type of precision painting whose ancestry returns to the cartographic tradition". |
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