ALTHOUGH THE MAIN attraction of Dulwich Picture Gallery is the collection of works of art by famous painters, there is a small but fascinating feature that should not be missed. And that is the mausoleum. This small chamber houses the sarcophagi containing the remains of the gallery’s founders, Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois, Noel Desenfans, and his wife Margaret.
Like the rest of the gallery, the mausoleum was designed by Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Working in an age before electric lighting was available, he was a master of maximising the use of natural illumination to get light into his buildings. The galleries at Dulwich are provided with clear glass ceilings that are sufficient to provide adequate lighting of the artworks. However, this is now supplemented with electric lighting. Light enters the mausoleum through glass windows at the top of it. Instead of plain glass, he used amber coloured glass. The light passing through this gives the mausoleum a warm glow, making it feel a spiritual place.
The mausoleum was badly damaged during an air raid in WW2. However, it was restored and is said to look exactly as it did before the war. Although it was designed as a final resting place, it is occasionally used to house art installations and films about temporary exhibitions being held in the galleries.
RACHEL JONES IS an artist who was born in London in 1991. She trained at Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal Academy Schools. There is an exhibition of her paintings, “Gated Canyons”, at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 October 2025. I must admit I had never heard of her before visiting the show in August 2025. So, I went to see it without knowing what to expect.
Rachel’s colourful paintings on display vary in size and shape. All of them are more abstract than figurative, but not completely abstract. The artist uses colours well, producing appealing images. Many of them interested me as a retired dentist because most of what was on display included somewhat abstract depictions of jawbones, teeth, lips, and tongues. The artist regards the mouth as being important as it is a portal through which we interact with the outside world, express our feelings, and explore psychological landscapes. If I understand it correctly, Rachel regards the mouth as a gateway to both our inner selves and the outside world. Having read the informative labels that tell viewers about her work, I began seeing, or even imagining, elements of her paintings that might be interpreted as features of oral anatomy.
The exhibition occupies three rooms, one of which I felt was too small to properly view the three large pictures within it. Otherwise, the paintings were nicely displayed and well-lit. I am glad I saw the show, but I would be reluctant to recommend it to most people I know.
RECENTLY, WE HAVE viewed two exhibitions, one in Cambridge and the other in Dulwich (South London), which contain site specific works. The website of New York’s Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org/artwork/movement/site-specific-artenvironmental-art) defines site specific art as follows:
“Site-specific or Environmental art refers to an artist’s intervention in a specific locale, creating a work that is integrated with its surroundings and that explores its relationship to the topography of its locale, whether indoors or out, urban, desert, marine, or otherwise … No matter which approach an artist takes, Site-specific art is meant to become part of its locale, and to restructure the viewer’s conceptual and perceptual experience of that locale through the artist’s intervention.”
It seems that site-specific art is the name given to a relatively recent artistic trend or movement.
By Megan Rooney
In Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard, we saw a room whose walls were entirely covered by paintings created by the artist Megan Rooney. She spent several days painting on the walls. When the exhibition is over (on the 6th of October 2024), the walls will be whitewashed, and her site-specific creation made especially for the room will disappear. At Dulwich Picture Gallery, there is a room whose walls have been decorated by the Japanese artist Yoshida Ayomi. Her beautiful evocation of cherry blossom was made specially for the room in which it can be seen. Her site-specific work will be removed when the exhibition is over on the 3rd of November 2024. These two artworks, like those of the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), who temporarily covered buildings with sheets of various materials, are classed as site-specific. Currently, it seems to me that site-specific artworks are usually temporary in nature.
Michelangelo covered the walls and ceilings of Rome’s Sistine Chapel with paintings. Likewise, the ceiling in the Residenz, a palace in Würzburg, were covered by paintings created by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his sons specially for the room. Should these examples and many others like them be considered ‘site-specific’ art, or is the term only to be applied to creations of artists made during the 20th and 21st centuries? Probably not, because those who commissioned frescoes and murals for rooms many centuries ago, usually hoped that the artworks would outlast them and their creators. The artists who have made site specific art currently and in the recent past do not always expect them to last for as long as those made several centuries ago.
THE DULWICH PICTURE Gallery is the oldest building in Britain designed specifically to display art works. It was designed by the architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) and opened to the public in 1817. Completed long before the advent of electric lighting, the rooms of the gallery were illuminated by daylight that entered them from windows on the roof. Nowadays, it is illuminated by modern lighting. It would be interesting to see how it looks when it is lit solely by daylight. The institution houses a magnificent collection of works by famous ‘old masters’ and puts on temporary exhibitions, one of which is on until November 2024. The current show is dedicated to colourful woodblock prints created by three generations of a Japanese family: the Yoshida dynasty.
Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) was married to Yoshida Fujio (1887–1987). They were both printmakers. Their sons, Yoshida Tōshi (1911–1995) and Yoshida Hodaka (1926–1995), also made prints, as did Hodaka’s wife Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017). Chizuko and Hodaka’s daughter, Yoshida Ayomi (b. 1958), continues the family’s tradition of printmaking. She has created a site-specific installation (based on cherry blossom trees) for the exhibition. Examples of all these artists’ fine works, which range from figurative to abstraction, are displayed in the exhibition. Each exhibit is a feast for the eyes.
For me, the highlight of the show are the prints by Yoshida Hiroshi. Each one is exquisitely executed and brilliantly composed. Several of his prints on display depict scenes in Japan, ranging from a view of Mount Fuji to the interior of a shop. Hiroshi and his wife also travelled extensively: through Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. When in London in 1901, Hiroshi paid a visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery. His signature is on a page of the Gallery’s visitors book, which is shown in the exhibition. I was particularly fascinated by the prints he made after seeing sights in the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Egypt. The exhibition includes two beautiful depictions of the Taj Mahal in Agra (India).
Although the rest of the exhibition was fascinating, I was intrigued to see famous tourist sights so beautifully depicted by a traveller from the Far East – a man with great powers of observation and immense artistic talent.
The woodblock prints on the display are without doubt masterly creations. A short video described how they were created. The artist draws the scene to be depicted. A wood carver carefully transfers this image by carving it in reverse on a wooden block. Then a coloured ink is applied to selected parts of the block. Paper is placed on top, pressed down, and a print is created. The process is then repeated using another colour on different or the same parts of the block. This adds the second colour to the print. This process can be repeated carefully well over 30 times (up to 100 in some cases) until the desired coloured image is completed. At each stage the paper must be accurately positioned on the inked block to ensure it is placed in exactly the same place as on all the previous ink applications. The artist supervises the carver and the printer throughout the production. The process must require supreme concentration and dedication, but the end justifies the means.
One might wonder why bother with such a complex and labour-intensive process, when a scene could more easily be depicted using a brush and paints or pen and inks. I cannot answer this, but will say that the results in the hands of the Yoshida family are remarkably and delightfully distinct from pictures created by other means. If you can visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Yoshida show, then do not miss it.
THE ARCHITECT JOHN Soane (1753-1837) was skilled in designing buildings with features to permit natural light to reach parts of them that were far away from their exteriors. Good examples of this were the two homes he designed for himself, one in Lincolns Inn Fields, now the Soane Museum, and the other in Ealing, the recently restored Pitzhanger Manor. Another superb example, which we visited recently (December 2021) is the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London. Completed and opened in 1817, it became the first picture gallery in England that was open to the public.
Light enters Soane’s galleries at Dulwich from above via overhead sky lights. These were placed in such a way that they illuminate the hanging spaces without allowing direct sunlight to hit the paintings on the walls. This system has since been adopted in many other art galleries. Newer rooms, lit entirely by artificial lighting, are used for temporary exhibitions including that of the woodcuts of the American artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), which we saw on our latest visit. Compared with Soane’s galleries, these newer ones are far less impressive, and despite the modern lighting they feel claustrophobic and rather gloomy.
The permanent collection of old masters, which is hung in Soane’s original galleries, is fabulous. Some of the paintings were parts of collections made before the 19th century. Others were supplied by the artist Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811) and his business partner, the art dealer and collector, Noël Desenfans (1744–1807). Together they ran an art dealership in London and were commissioned in 1790 to purchase a collection of paintings for the then King of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732-1798). It took them five years to do this but by 1795, the Commonwealth had been dissolved. The collection remained in England. After Desenfans died, Bourgeois inherited the collection and then commissioned Soane to design a gallery to house it. The superb gallery at Dulwich came into existence. Soane included within it a small circular mausoleum in which the remains of both Desenfans and Bourgeois have been placed. Rather irreverently, I felt, it was being used to screen a video about the artist Helen Frankenthaler.
In 1944, during WW2, the western façade of Soane’s gallery was badly damaged by bombing (a German V1 flying bomb) but it has been well-restored. Later, in 1999, a new café and other facilities in a modern style were built to the designs of the architect Rick Mather (1937-2013).
As for the exhibition of works by Frankenthaler, this was a delightful surprise. It is a collection of colourful abstract woodcuts that are the result of years of the artist’s complex and imaginative experimentation. Many of the works reminded me of, but were not identical to, the subtleties of Japanese ceramic glazes. Despite being displayed in galleries far less satisfactory than those designed by Soane, this as an art show well worth visiting before it ends on the 18th of April 2022.
yamey 