Tim's Gallery Tours: Towards the English School of Painting (pre 19th century art)

Tim Craven is leading a guided tour of the Southampton City Art Gallery on Wednesday 14 October, from 11am to 12pm. The session is called Towards the English School of Painting (pre 19th century art), and it's part of a wider series of tours he's running through the gallery's fine art collection.

Craven is an artist and the former curator of the gallery, so he knows the walls here inside out. His tours take you up close to the works to uncover the context behind the paintings and the lives of the artists who made them. Each outing in the series takes a different era as its theme, and this one focuses on the English school before the 19th century. The whole series spans a huge range, from Van Dyck's seventeenth-century portraits through to the explosion of shape and colour of the 1960s and the art of the present day.

The tours run alongside Art Then!, the gallery's current exhibition celebrating half a century of modern British art. That one was curated by Dr David Boyd Haycock in collaboration with the Ingram Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, and it brings together over 90 works by artists like Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Barbara Hepworth, Dora Carrington, Lucian Freud, Duncan Grant and Graham Sutherland. It takes its cues from Herbert Read's 1968 book Herbert Read's Art Now.

So, if you're around on the morning of the 14th, you can catch Tim Craven leading the way through the pre-19th century stuff. The tour runs from 11am to 12pm at the Southampton City Art Gallery on Commercial Road, and it's £8.00.