Art News

The Georgia Museum of Art Presents the Graphic Work of Clare Leighton

artwork: Clare Leighton - "Shire Horse" - Wood engraving - Collection of the Mint Museum of Art. - On view at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens in "Quiet Spirit, Skillful Hand: The Graphic Work of Clare Leighton" from November 19th until February 3rd 2012.


Athens, Georgia.- The Georgia Museum of Art is pleased to present “Quiet Spirit, Skillful Hand: The Graphic Work of Clare Leighton” on view from November 19th through February 3rd 2012. Organized by the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, N.C., this exhibition includes images from the Mint’s Pratt Collection, one of the largest collections of Clare Leighton’s work in the country and spans Leighton’s career from 1923 to 1965. “Quiet Spirit, Skillful Hand: The Graphic Work of Clare Leighton” provides a full survey of Leighton’s career, from her earliest prints in the 1920s that depict the labors of the English working classes to a selection of her rarely seen watercolors. Unique to the Pratt collection is a set of 12 Wedgwood plates titled “New England Industries,” for which Leighton designed the transfer-printed images.

artwork: Clare Leighton "A Lapfull of Windfalls", 1935 Wood engraving - 8 x 6 1/4" Collection of the Mint Museum of Art. - Courtesy of Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GAAmong the exhibition’s highlights are the prints that resulted from Leighton’s early visits to North America, including “The Breadline, New York” and “Snow Shovellers, New York,” as well as the artist’s entire Canadian Lumber Camp series. A full-color catalogue of the exhibition will be available for sale in the Museum Shop and online.

Clare Veronica Hope Leighton (1898 – 1989) was an English/American artist, writer and illustrator, best known for her wood engravings. Clare Leighton was born in London on 12 April 1898, the daughter of Robert Leighton (1858-1934) and Marie Connor Leighton (1865-1941), both authors. Her early efforts at painting were encouraged by her parents and her uncle Jack Leighton, an artist and illustrator. In 1915, she began formal studies at the Brighton College of Art and later trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (1921-23), and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied wood engraving under Noel Rooke. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Leighton visited the United States on a number of lecture tours. In 1939, at the conclusion of a lengthy relationship with the radical journalist Henry Brailsford, she emigrated to the US and became a naturalised citizen in 1945. Over the course of a long and prolific career, she wrote and illustrated numerous books praising the virtues of the countryside and the people who worked the land. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the world around her became increasingly technological, industrial, and urban, Leighton portrayed rural working men and women.

In the 1950s she created designs for Steuben Glass, Wedgwood plates, several stained glass windows for churches in New England and for the transept windows of Worcester Cathedral, England. Leighton had two brothers, Roland and Evelyn. The older brother Roland Leighton, immortalised in Vera Brittain’s memoir, Testament of Youth, was killed in action, December 1915. Evelyn became a captain in the Royal Navy and died in 1969. The best known of her books are The Farmer’s Year (1933; a calendar of English husbandry), Four Hedges – A Gardener’s Chronicle (1935; the development of a garden from a meadow she had bought in the Chilterns) and Tempestuous Petticoat; The story of an invincible Edwardian (1948; describing her childhood and her bohemian mother). Autobiographical text and illustrations are available in “Clare Leighton: the growth and shaping of an artist-writer”, published 2009. Clare Leighton died 4th November 1989 and her ashes are buried in a cemetery in Waterbury, Connecticut.

artwork: Clare Leighton - "The Grape Harvest", 1928 - Wood engraving - Collection of the Mint Museum of Art. On view at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens in "Quiet Spirit, Skillful Hand" until February 3rd 2012.

The Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily 19th- and 20th-century; American, European and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art. From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of an old library on the university’s historic North Campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university’s burgeoning east campus. There, 79,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection—a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook.Much of the museum’s collection of American paintings was donated by Holbrook in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. Included in this collection are works by such luminaries as Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence and Theodore Robinson. Over the years it has been impossible to separate the history of the museum from the story of Holbrook’s generosity. Numerous museum exhibitions have traveled to national and international venues. When “Adriaen van Ostade: Etchings of Peasant Life in Holland’s Golden Age” was exhibited at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, the catalogue quickly sold out, becoming a text for the study of 17th-century Dutch printmaking in classrooms across the United States. This exhibition also reflected the importance of prints and drawings in the programming of the museum, which houses one of the finest collections of works on paper in the Southeast.

The collection includes Old Master prints, Parisian prints of the 1890s and American prints and drawings of the early 20th century. Exhibitions from international museums such as the National Gallery of Scotland, the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Rembrandt House and the San Carlos National Museum in Mexico City have all been displayed in the galleries of the museum over the past decade. The museum also offers traveling exhibitions formed from its permanent collection to other museums and art institutes around Georgia and the Southeast. Since the early 1970s the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art, a support group of more than 1,200 members, have hosted fundraisers and openings for exhibitions and have sponsored exhibitions and educational programs at the museum. In April 1996, the Georgia Museum of Art opened a new building on the East Campus of the university as part of the Performing and Visual Arts Complex, which also includes the School of Music, the Performing Arts Center, and, now, the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The new building allowed for larger and more ambitious exhibitions and a new emphasis on professional practices, trends that will continue to hold true in 2011 and beyond. The museum has become a leader, in particular, among university museums, and its educational programs have been the most tangible example of the balance it strives to achieve among state, local, and university audiences as it seeks to fulfill its trifold mission of teaching, research, and service. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.georgiamuseum.org