JMW Turner, Beatrix Potter, and more – Miniature Worlds at Laing Art Gallery

The Laing Art Gallery’s new exhibition, Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter, explores the intricate beauty of small-scale landscapes across three centuries of British art. The exhibition has a particular focus on vignette format illustrations.

Highlights of the exhibition include seven highly detailed watercolours by JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year, a dramatic and diminutive drawing by John Martin, and nine intricate watercolours by Beatrix Potter. The exhibition includes over 130 objects, 90 of which are loans from other UK collections.

The exhibition opens with works by Newcastle artist and wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), who reinvented both the wood engraving technique and the small borderless ‘vignette’ illustration. In his tiny tailpieces, made to sit in the small spaces below the text within a book, Bewick captured local landscapes and lively characters in a space smaller than the palm of his hand. This led to new iterations of landscape art made on a small scale in response or in addition to the written word.

A section dedicated to ‘Poetic Landscapes’ explores small scale works made during the Romantic Era, which saw artists emphasise emotion, imagination, and engagement with the natural world. It brings together tiny wood engravings by William Blake and his followers, a rare ‘paper peepshow’ manufactured around 1829, and a group of vignette-format watercolours by JMW Turner. At this time, artists looked to reach a wider audience through the expanding market for book illustration and landscape prints.

The exhibition also explores the world of Victorian and Edwardian children’s books, which were often produced in small, child-friendly formats. Three of John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will be on show. A highlight will be the rare chance to see seven watercolours by Beatrix Potter, including one made for her first and most famous book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and five for The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. Visitors can also see her original illustrated manuscript for The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, along with a related watercolour. These works were all produced during the ‘golden era’ of children’s book illustration. This section of the exhibition will also include a reading area in which visitors of all ages are welcome to explore a selection of relevant children’s books.

The exhibition closes with a look at 20th and 21st century works that have referenced and developed histories of the small-scale landscape in new and different ways. There are prints by artists who worked in the first decades of the 20th century to revive the wood engraving technique pioneered by Thomas Bewick a century earlier. Many of these artists were women, and works by Clare Leighton, Agnes Miller Parker, Gwendolen Raverat, Eric Ravilious, and Gertrude Hermes will be on display. More recent works include experimental prints, paintings, sculpture, and ceramics by artists including Aaron Angell, Paul Coldwell, Vicken Parsons, and Joanna Whittle.

Julie Milne, Chief Curator of Art Galleries at North East Museums, said: “This new exhibition specifically explores ‘little’ landscapes in paintings, drawings, prints, book illustration and sculpture. The ‘miniature worlds’ shown in these landscapes will delight visitors with a variety of compelling settings, whether it be Thomas Bewick’s local Northeast landscapes, JMW Turner’s Italian countryside, or Beatrix Potter’s iconic illustrations.

“I am pleased that this exhibition brings together works from the Laing and Hatton Galleries together with loans from Tate, V&A, the British Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, and regional galleries. We hope that visitors will enjoy the exhibition and marvel at the skill of the artists in creating such intricate miniature landscapes.”

Loans from Tate, the V&A, the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, Newcastle University, Newcastle City Libraries, the Natural History Society of Northumbria, and the artists Paul Coldwell and Joanna Whittle complement the strengths of North East Museums’ collections.