Discovering Degas - The Burrell Collection
GLASGOW. The Burrell Collection.
Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of Sir William Burrell is the first-time visitors can see all 23 Degas works from Burrell's original collection at the same time, alongside 28 further world-class paintings, works on paper and sculptures on loan from 13 of the UK and Europe’s finest national and international collections.
Set to be one of the must-see Scottish shows of the summer, Discovering Degas is the first, major exhibition to be held at the museum since it reopened in 2022, after a £68 million refurbishment.
Staged by Glasgow Life, the charity that leads on culture and sport in the city, the exhibition will explore the collecting and buying of Degas artworks by Sir William Burrell and his wife Constance, Lady Burrell, who donated one of the single greatest gifts to the city of Glasgow.
As shown through fascinating letters and other archival material, Burrell is amongst the earliest Scottish collectors to buy works by Degas. Over a 40-year collecting period he bought over 20 artworks spanning the artist’s career, far more than any other UK collector.
By bringing these together with loans from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, British Museum, The Courtauld, National Museums Liverpool Walker Art Gallery, Museums Northumberland, The National Gallery London, Tate, V&A, Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales, Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, The Hunterian, National Galleries of Scotland and Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Discovering Degas provides an important opportunity to better understand Degas and a unique introduction and fresh perspective on a hugely popular art movement.
Loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.
Pippa Stephenson-Sit, Curator of European Art at Glasgow Life Museums, who co-curated the exhibition, said: “Discovering Degas has been an absolute joy to work on. Degas is one of the finest artists the world has ever seen and one of the founding artists of the Impressionist group.
“He was very fond of Britain and travelled here several times. He cultivated relationships and recognised opportunities for selling his work to British art collectors, who were beginning to develop a taste for modern French art. Sir William had a keen eye for his artworks and collected them for about forty years.
“From modern Parisian life, to horse-racing, to ballet scenes, Degas tirelessly tackled a number of fascinating topics in a way that was entirely his own. His artworks remain extremely popular today, particularly his ballet scenes, but we hope this exhibition offers a chance to learn something new about an intriguing, immensely talented artist. This is a unique opportunity to vi
Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of Sir William Burrell is the first-time visitors can see all 23 Degas works from Burrell's original collection at the same time, alongside 28 further world-class paintings, works on paper and sculptures on loan from 13 of the UK and Europe’s finest national and international collections.
Set to be one of the must-see Scottish shows of the summer, Discovering Degas is the first, major exhibition to be held at the museum since it reopened in 2022, after a £68 million refurbishment.
Staged by Glasgow Life, the charity that leads on culture and sport in the city, the exhibition will explore the collecting and buying of Degas artworks by Sir William Burrell and his wife Constance, Lady Burrell, who donated one of the single greatest gifts to the city of Glasgow.
As shown through fascinating letters and other archival material, Burrell is amongst the earliest Scottish collectors to buy works by Degas. Over a 40-year collecting period he bought over 20 artworks spanning the artist’s career, far more than any other UK collector.
By bringing these together with loans from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, British Museum, The Courtauld, National Museums Liverpool Walker Art Gallery, Museums Northumberland, The National Gallery London, Tate, V&A, Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales, Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, The Hunterian, National Galleries of Scotland and Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Discovering Degas provides an important opportunity to better understand Degas and a unique introduction and fresh perspective on a hugely popular art movement.
Loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.
Pippa Stephenson-Sit, Curator of European Art at Glasgow Life Museums, who co-curated the exhibition, said: “Discovering Degas has been an absolute joy to work on. Degas is one of the finest artists the world has ever seen and one of the founding artists of the Impressionist group.
“He was very fond of Britain and travelled here several times. He cultivated relationships and recognised opportunities for selling his work to British art collectors, who were beginning to develop a taste for modern French art. Sir William had a keen eye for his artworks and collected them for about forty years.
“From modern Parisian life, to horse-racing, to ballet scenes, Degas tirelessly tackled a number of fascinating topics in a way that was entirely his own. His artworks remain extremely popular today, particularly his ballet scenes, but we hope this exhibition offers a chance to learn something new about an intriguing, immensely talented artist. This is a unique opportunity to vi
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:22 I'm Frances Fallon, I'm Professor of 19th Century Art at the University of Edinburgh
00:26 and Senior Trustee of the Burrough Collection.
00:28 We're here today to celebrate the wonderful career of Edgar Duggar.
00:33 He was one of the leading Impressionist artists
00:36 and the Burrough has the finest collection of Duggar's work in the whole of the UK.
00:41 So the idea behind the exhibition is to show Duggar's work in the wider context of the taste for this artist in Britain.
00:47 The reason why I've got such a strong collection is that Burrough developed a taste for Duggar very early on in his career
00:53 and he was introduced through the Glasgow dealer Alex Reed who was a real Duggar enthusiast.
00:59 He in turn was introduced to Duggar when he spent three years in Paris in the mid-1880s
01:05 and he worked for the firm of Boussin and Valladol alongside a man called Theo van Gogh
01:11 who you may recognise the surname, he was the brother of Vincent van Gogh.
01:15 And Theo was promoting Impressionism and it was through Theo really
01:21 that he was introduced to Duggar and Duggar personally and developed this real enthusiasm for his work.
01:29 The Impressionists were challenging the tenets of the French Academy.
01:33 In the mid-19th century it was expected if you were going to get your work shown at the annual exhibition
01:40 you had to paint a subject which was considered of importance.
01:44 So that would be something like a historical subject, maybe a subject from the Bible or something mythological
01:50 and it had to be painted on grand scale and with attention to detail.
01:54 The Impressionists went against all of that, they wanted to paint contemporary subjects,
01:59 modern life, what they could see when they wandered around the streets
02:03 and they also took advantage of these new pigments that were being produced all the time.
02:07 So they painted in very bright colours, they painted out of doors,
02:12 it was only recently that what was known as the portable paint tube had been invented
02:18 so they would take out their easel, set it up in the countryside and paint the landscape.
02:23 Now Duggar, people who visit the exhibition will notice that actually there aren't any landscapes in the show
02:30 because Duggar preferred to paint modern life, he preferred to go to the theatre or to the cafe
02:35 or he went to the races, watched jockeys limbering up before a horse race.
02:40 So it's everyday life in Paris at that time.
02:44 The way that Duggar's work became known in Britain was through another dealer,
02:49 Paul Durand-Royal, a French dealer who set up his gallery in London's Bond Street in 1870.
02:55 He was actually fleeing Paris during the Franco-Prussian War
02:59 and as a result of that he met two other Impressionist artists, Monet and Pissarro,
03:04 who were also in exile in London.
03:07 And so he began showing their work in these mixed exhibitions of 19th century French art
03:11 and Duggar got to hear of it and decided that he would like to also show his work in Britain
03:17 where he saw that there would be this kind of new market developing.
03:22 So the first collector in Britain to actually acquire Duggar's work was a man called Henry Hill
03:29 who was a military tailor from Brighton but who had an outlet in Bond Street,
03:35 so just up the road from Durand-Royal's gallery.
03:38 And as a result of that he obviously popped into the gallery one day
03:42 and saw these ballet paintings and decided to buy some.
03:45 And he ended up buying six ballet paintings and he also bought this very controversial work
03:51 which is known today as 'L'Absinthe' which shows a woman drinking absinthe,
03:55 this hallucinogenic drink, in a cafe in Paris.
03:59 And we know from the way that the light falls in this painting
04:03 that it was actually painted in the morning,
04:05 so she's kind of recovering from a rough night out let's say,
04:08 and she's sitting beside this bohemian gentleman who's drinking a hangover cure.
04:13 So that's one of the stars of this show, this wonderful work which is being lent by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
04:21 And it was bought, when Hill died, it was sold alongside the rest of the collection at Christie's in London
04:29 and when it was shown on the podium when it came up for auction it was hissed by the public
04:34 because they were so shocked by the subject matter.
04:37 And this is really because alcoholism was a big issue,
04:40 it was a big sort of problem in Britain in the late 19th century.
04:45 It was bought by Alex Reid, the Glasgow dealer, and he sold it to a man called Arthur Kaye
04:51 who was a partner of Arthur and Company which was a big retailing company in Glasgow,
04:56 in Queen Street in Glasgow.
04:59 And he took it home, hung it on his wall and then he got cold feet so he took it back to Alex Reid
05:05 and Reid being a very persuasive dealer, not only persuaded him to keep it
05:11 but also gave him another picture that he, say, by Duggar to add to his collection.
05:17 And Reid himself had actually at that time, the first exhibition that he held when he came back and set up his dealership in Glasgow
05:25 was an exhibition of works by Duggar and other artists.
05:29 And he succeeded in selling a third Duggar to Kaye's business partner, Thomas Glen Arthur,
05:37 who also was a partner in this company, Arthur and Company.
05:41 So he'd sold three works by Duggar to two people who knew each other really well.
05:48 So I think it's quite interesting that collectors were influenced by other collectors
05:52 and then it became a kind of fashion.
05:55 And I think in time then Burrell took an interest and he was claimed that he was the first to buy Duggar's work.
06:02 So maybe he bought his even before these three but we don't know, we don't have documentation to prove it.
06:08 So you'll be able to see all sorts of subjects, predominantly the ballet.
06:14 So there are a lot of paintings of ballet dancers often rehearsing rather than performing
06:20 and Duggar was really interested in the way that they kind of practiced in the behind the scenes kind of thing.
06:26 You'll also be able to see racehorses and jockeys warming up before a race.
06:34 There's a nice little section which is on lawn dresses and women working, a kind of modern life section.
06:42 There's a whole group of sculptures, even though Burrell didn't collect any Duggar sculptures,
06:47 they were very popular with British collectors.
06:50 Japanese art had a strong influence on Duggar.
06:53 One of the things you'll notice about the pictures when you come is he often liked to adopt unexpected viewpoints
07:00 and this was something which was also a feature of Japanese art at the time.
07:04 So often high viewpoints or low viewpoints or he'll cut the scene off unexpectedly,
07:11 so you've got like an arm chopped off or even he'll use this one wonderful painting from the Barber Institute
07:20 which has the finishing pole, the starting pole is kind of cut right through one of the jockeys, one of the horses.
07:26 So he's not afraid of doing that and just kind of showing a slice of life as you see it.
07:32 It's a really comprehensive exhibition.
07:34 You're going to see all the subjects that he addressed, you'll see in every media
07:39 and he was very experimental, he experimented with, he was equally at home with printmaking as with sculpture, as with painting.
07:46 And I think above all people will be really enchanted by the pastels.
07:51 He was absolutely brilliant at the pastel medium which is these kind of soft chalks
07:56 and Burrell also loved pastels so he collected quite a number.
08:00 So the title of the exhibition is 'Discovering Duggar, Collecting in the Time of William Burrell'
08:05 and it goes on from the 24th of May until the 30th of September.
08:09 My name is Pippa Stevenson-Sitt, I'm Curator of European Art for Glasgow Museums, co-curator of 'Discovering Duggar'.
08:16 We've been working on this exhibition for about three years and I've worked together with Francis
08:21 to really shape the exhibition into 16 different sections which allow us to focus on different aspects of Duggar's oeuvre,
08:31 different themes that come up and also to tell the story of Sir William Burrell and how and kind of why he was collecting the work of Duggar.
08:39 I think people will be quite surprised, they may have heard the name Duggar, I think most people have heard the name Duggar mentioned
08:46 but what they will see in the exhibition is probably maybe a bit of a surprise to them.
08:52 He wasn't just a painter of ballerinas, he was a painter of the racecourse, modern life, Ukrainian dancers.
08:59 He was a really wonderful sculptor, so I think people when they come to our exhibition will learn something new about a very well-known artist.
09:09 This has really been a journey for me as a curator and I thought I knew Duggar before I started working on the exhibition
09:18 but actually during the course of working with Francis I feel like I've learnt something new every day.
09:24 Duggar just keeps unravelling himself as this very complex, sometimes quite challenging man and he wrote extensively
09:33 so it's really interesting reading his own explanations about some of the works and some of the kind of aphorisms and things that are linked to him.
09:43 So I feel like it's been a real journey of discovery and actually I've come to really, really enjoy the work of Duggar
09:52 and to kind of value every chance to kind of see the workings, the techniques, to get close and it's been an exhibition that's allowed me to really explore
10:05 and I feel like I actually kind of quite intimately know Duggar and understand his art and also to really understand how Burrell was collecting
10:16 and to get to know, get to kind of like maybe see a glimpse of why he was so enamoured by the work of Duggar.
10:24 I think that this exhibition will attract a lot of people, I think people will be very interested in learning more about such an internationally well-known name as Duggar
10:33 and I think that we can really kind of ride on our success as Art Fund Museum of the Year, which we won that prize last year, it's only two years since we reopened
10:42 and I think that this will be a chance for people to kind of understand why the Burrell sits as one of the UK's strongest and most accessible art museums.
10:54 [Music plays]