Collections on Tour this Autumn
There have been more of comings and goings with artwork loans recently, with some returning to the museum and others have been going out for new exhibitions.
Published: 16 October 2023
In spring earlier this year the huge oil painting 'Perseus on Pegasus…' by Frederick Lord Leighton came down from the Victorian Art Gallery at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery to go to France. The artwork has now returned and has gone back into its ornate frame. The painting has been replaced on gallery with 'The Foolish Virgins, 'Too late, ye cannot enter now'' by Frank Bernard Dicksee. One of the largest works in the museum collection, this painting depicts the parable of the ten virgins (St Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 25). The five foolish virgins are shown at midnight at the door of the wedding feast to which they had been invited but having neglected to fill their lamps with oil, they had retuned too late for admission. Dicksee painted with a sumptuous technique and a feeling for bold and unusual lighting effects.
‘The Foolish Virgins; too late ye cannot enter now’ by Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1883
On its way out of the Victorian Art Gallery, has been the 17th century Portrait of a Girl by Michael Sweerts, which has gone to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp for the first leg of a touring exhibition Turning Heads which will then travel on to Dublin next year.
This has been replaced by a rarely seen work by Harry Morley, A Stockinger at Work, 1903, which depicts a worker at the artist’s father’s factory on High Cross Street.
'Portrait of a Girl’ by Michael Sweerts
We have also seen the Nilima Sheikh tempera series When Champa Grew Up go out on tour – first to the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and then on to the Box, Plymouth next year – for the exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now.
Champa, before her marriage, and with her mother’ by Nilima Sheikh, © the artist