| Current stock |
| Gallery tour |
| Arts & Crafts |
| The Antique Trader |
| The Millinery Works |
| Art Gallery and previous art exhibitions |
| Forthcoming exhibitions |
| Past furniture exhibitions |
| How to contact us and opening hours |
The Millinery Works Art Gallery
CURRENT exhibition
INTERIORS paintings 1982 - 2007 by Eric Rimmington page 4
There are four paintings from 1992-93 which the artist has grouped together as The Four Seasons. A Winters’ Tale was painted after Rimmington saw Eric Rohmer’s film, Une Conte d’Hiver, which came out in 1992 and is a modern parable of loss, faith and rediscovery. Rimmington also cites a reference to Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale (which itself was referenced by Rohmer in his film) and this explains why his title is in the plural. The painting employs one of his favourite visual tricks, the painting within a painting, in this case one of his own works from the 1970s, when he made several large-scale versions of classical paintings with the figures removed. Within this canvas itself is a framed section of another Poussin painting also with the figures removed – a triple illusion. With its smoking candle and carefully arranged objects, the white clothed rectangular table has the appearance of an altar. There are intimations of death, but the daylight flooding in from the left dispels them.
Clare’s Wall was painted in the summer of 1993 at his daughter’s house in Northamptonshire. It’s a stable wall, perhaps recently vacated by one of Clare’s horses. It still seems warm with animal and human presence, an effect created by the light falling on the rubbed plaster and brick, the sweet wrapper in the straw and the scrap of red binder twine. Sonia’s Tree and My Autumn Fig show the front and the back of the London house. In the former, a potted Benjamina fig has been brought into the studio, where it stands by the window overlooking the street. The window, cornice, table and a large framed drawing on the wall, create strong diagonals which converge behind its leaves. It could be seen as both a portrait of the studio and of a personage (represented by the fig tree), while the artist himself is present in the shape of the drawing in whose glass the fig tree is reflected. The last painting, My Autumn Fig is a tranquil, sunlit, backdoor scene, where the comforting gloom of a domestic interior waits behind the French windows. Another fig tree stands in a butler’s sink, which appears in other paintings of this period containing buttercups and pink daisies and even a cluster of dandelions[3] – perhaps they propagated themselves - for wild flowers suit the kind of simple container that Rimmington prefers.
Spanish Fig is a complete demonstration of Rimmington’s art and method: through an assemblage of objects from various sources he creates a web of associations which may be barely discernible to the viewer but which nevertheless give the painting its air of intrigue – there is almost always more to a Rimmington painting than meets the eye. The ochre colour of the terracotta pot - unearthed in a garden while clearing ivy - brought to mind Velasquez’s painting The Waterseller of Seville. The visual association Rimmington made with The Waterseller led to his purchase of the wine glass, whose scale, refinement and luminosity contrasts with the texture and robust, functional shape of the pot.
The fig floating in the glass came from the tree in My Autumn Fig and refers to a Spanish tradition of putting a fig in water to keep it sweet. The press cutting showing an older man in conversation with a younger one could be a deliberate echo of the old man and boy in the Velasquez painting. There is no literal resemblance whatever between the Velasquez and Spanish Fig – it is not a transcription like those he has made of Poussin - but a comparison of the two reveals the extent to which he has translated the former into a contemporary language of his own.
3. The dandelion is a common Christian symbol of grief