Artistic harmony

If you are planning a holiday visit to Shakespeare country and fancy a change of mood and visual pace from the usual round of sightseeing and theatre-going, Compton Verney is a splendid alternative destination. Besides the remarkable permanent collections of paintings, Chinese bronzes and English folk art, there is a programme of changing exhibitions which make something of a virtue out of contrasting the historic with the contemporary. Thus an older master will be shown side by side with a modern (a previous grouping was the sculptor Messerschmidt with Van Gogh and Francis Bacon) in order to strike new resonances from each by this unexpected juxtaposition. Currently, the pairing is the French classical painter Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) with a mixed show of international artists, mostly working in film and photography, here dealing with the subject of the shadow. This combination works surprisingly well.

John Berger, in a fascinating essay on Georges de la Tour in his book About Looking (1980), concludes thus: ‘The formal aesthetic perfection to which La Tour aspired was his special solution to a religious and social problem about, precisely, the meaning of other men: a problem which, in its own terms, he found insoluble.’