Printmaker's Art

The initial difficulty with this exhibition is finding it: as overlooked as the medium itself, Printmaker’s Art is hidden downstairs amongst the Scottish Collection. If the National Gallery are aiming to draw attention to their collected prints of self-professed “international importance”, one begins to wonder whether this exhibition was really their most convincing strategy.

The Gallery presents just over 30 etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and mezzotints taken from their collection of 30,000 works on paper, which date from 1400 to the turn of the 20th century. On a last name basis alone the exhibition is impressive: Dürer, Goya, Piranesi, Hogarth, Whistler and Rembrandt stand out amongst others, and the prints themselves are equally noteworthy. Hogarth’s juxtapositional ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’ etchings still provide the sharp satire and social criticism that they did over 250 years ago—albeit an optimistically beer-soaked one where gin exists solely to spread disease and disruption, but beer results in nothing but prosperity and wealth. 

Francisco Goya provides a characteristically morbid etching from his series Proverbios. ‘A woman and a horse’ is probably a depiction of an old Spanish tale in which a man is turned into a horse, falls in love with a woman, kills her husband and abducts her. The image is one of a wild, powerful horse with patent implications of brutal instinct and unrestrained sexual passion.

The exhibition does not fail on its material which, as the National Gallery consistently assures us, is of an exceptional standard. The few selected works effectively demonstrate what diverse and impressive realisations this medium can achieve. Where the show does fall down is in its execution—the vaguely clandestine nature of such an exhibition seems in some way unjust, though obviously practical in others. Bearing in mind the conditions such delicate pieces need to be kept in, and as illogical as these criticisms may be, one cannot help but feel that the best thing for this exhibition would have been to get it out of the basement.