Images in Art and Society
The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, in Coventry, maintains a permanent exhibition on the subject. The oldest painting was commissioned by the County of the City of Coventry in 1586 and produced by Adam van Noort, a refugee Flemish artist. His painting depicts a "voluptuously displayed" Lady Godiva against the background of a "fantastical Italianate Coventry". In addition the Gallery has collected many Victorian interpretations of the subject described by Marina Warner as "an oddly composed Landseer, a swooning Watts and a sumptuous Alfred Woolmer".
Colliers' Lady Godiva (above) was bequeathed by social reformer, Thomas Hancock Nunn. When he died in 1937, the painting was offered to the Corporation of Hampstead. He specified in his will that should his bequest be refused by Hampstead (presumably on grounds of propriety) the painting was then to be offered to Coventry. The painting now hangs in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.
Read more about this topic: Lady Godiva
Famous quotes containing the words images, art and/or society:
“And images of self-confusednesses
Which hurt imaginations only see—
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.”
—Fulke Greville (1554–1628)
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)