Our Liotard exhibition has arrived from Edinburgh. It looks wonderful in the Sackler galleries with their good height and generous proportions, enhanced by clever but low-key design by Eric Pearson with minimal red banding in the first gallery to give a sense that they are works for private rather than public space. The exhibition gives a particularly good view of the aristocracy in the late 1730s, grand tourists in Rome and Constantinople, cultivated and louche, members of the Society of Dilettanti (Viscount Duncannon was a founder member) and of the Hellfire Club (Simon Luttrell founded the Dublin Hellfire Club). Viscount Mountstuart stayed in Geneva with the Pictet family, whose bank are sponsoring the exhibition.
The poster for this exhibition is a lovely addition to current tube journeys. Not an exhibition I would generally think of going to but the poster – and the promise of beautiful depictions of textiles – is luring me in!
Joan
Yes, you should go. Beautiful and evocative images of eighteenth-century, cosmopolitan society. Charles