Treasures from Compton Verney’s Neopolitan Collection are back on display after being on loan to Ritorno al Barocco (Back to the Baroque), a major exhibition project in Naples, displayed across six museums: Museo di Capodimonte, Castel Sant’Elmo, Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Museo Duca di Martina, Museo Pignatelli and the Palazzo Reale.

Sub-titled ‘from Caravaggio to Vanvitelli’ the project comprised six thematic exhibitions documenting the immense flowering of Baroque art and culture in Naples over a period of 150 years, from 1606 to 1759. More than 500 works were brought together from private collections and international museums. Eight paintings on loan from Compton Verney included works by Cavallino, Solimena, Ruoppolo and Gaspar van Wittel (Vanvitelli), featured in the exhibition of Sacred and Profane History at the Museo di Capodimonte, as well as a statue of St Michael the Archangel by Vaccaro and a Trapani coral mirror. Visitors can now enjoy these works at Compton Verney in the Neapolitan Collection rooms.
Compton Verney’s unique blend of art expertise, Georgian architecture and historic landscape makes it the ideal setting for an important new exhibition on one of Britain’s best-loved artists: the eccentric, quintessentially English genius Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959).  Stanley Spencer and the English Garden, focuses on Spencer’s gorgeous garden views and landscapes of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

The Financial Times

'Spencer was a friendly character, but once he had settled on a subject his concentration grew fierce. And the outcome of all this impassioned scrutiny is now surveyed at Compton Verney, in a well-focused show where Spencer’s devotion to the English garden is explored at every turn.

Even so, these densely observed paintings are not just lyrical celebrations of nature. Spencer produced most of them after his service in the first world war. In 1916, he wrote a letter describing how this ordeal “made me ache to go down to the bottom of our garden and look over the low wall”.'

The Daily Mail

‘Throughout the First World War, when serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, artist Stanley Spencer sustained himself with memories of Cookham, the Berkshire village where he grew up... Spencer wasn’t a gardener. In one painting he gives us a glimpse, through his greenhouse door, of dandelions and tussocky grass. Now a new exhibition, Stanley Spencer And The English Garden, allows us to peer over the garden wall at red-brick villas and workers’ cottages, or trespass into smarter gardens where manicured lawns are rolled in stripes. For garden lovers, this isn’t just an exhibition of glorious pictures; it’s also a reminder of how the English suburban garden was changing through the 20th century.’

The Daily Telegraph

'Later in life, wanting to be seen as a great religious artist, Spencer dismissed these relatively modest works as created merely for money – a remark later commentators have taken too much at face value. Indeed, looking beneath their deceptively quiet surfaces, you can learn a great deal about both Spencer’s unique vision and the spirituality of the British garden.

“Nothing in Spencer is without symbolism,” says Steven Parissien, curator of an exhibition of Spencer’s paintings at Compton Verney. “He was an inherently mystical person. For him even the most modest garden was a self-contained vision of heaven.”

Celebrated in an adjacent gallery is another quintessentially English figure, very different from Spencer: Capability Brown. Long revered as the champion of British naturalism against French formalism, the great landscape gardener is presented here as a self-serving entrepreneur whose theatrical vistas were enabled by the enclosures that brutally ousted the common people from the land.

What’s wonderful about both these exhibitions is that the worlds they celebrate are right outside the gallery doors: Brown’s in the gracious parkland surrounding Compton Verney, Spencer’s in the middle English landscape of rolling fields and higgledy-piggledy villages stretching away in every direction.’  
Set in its own ‘Capability’ Brown landscape, Compton Verney is the ideal location for the first-ever exhibition about internationally-renowned landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-83). Through a series of case studies of ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes from the Midlands, the exhibition looks at how Brown designed his natural, neoclassical arcadias and how he addressed the enormous task of moving tons of earth and creating hills, vales and lakes in an age before tractors or JCBs.
This exhibition explores the influence of Wallis on Nicholson’s work, focusing on paintings and drawings by the two artists dating from the late 1920s to the 1940s.

The work of legendary naďve artist Alfred Wallis reflects both the Cornish port of St. Ives and a particularly exciting moment in British art history, while the ‘discovery’ in 1928 of the untrained Wallis by established artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood has now taken on an almost mythical significance. Ben Nicholson recognised and admired the individual vision of Wallis, the retired fisherman who took to painting as a hobby ‘for company’ on the death of his wife. Through Wallis, Nicholson was unlearning formal methods of representation in favour of a more direct response to landscape and to the materials he was working with, all of which informed the development of his own uncomprisingly modern vision.

As well as being home to the largest collection of British Folk Art in the UK, Compton Verney has recently debated issues surrounding naďve art in a series of Symposia on Folk Art held with Tate and the American Museum in Bath.
Traditionally, many Chinese people believe that when a person dies they leave with no earthly possessions. To provide for them in the afterlife, relatives burn paper versions of personal objects including money, cars and even ipods. Kurt Tong's rich, highly-coloured photographs document the recent development of this tradition and were exhibited in 2010.

Following the exhibition, In Case it Rains in Heaven, Kurt Tong donated 4 prints from the series to Compton Verney.  These works will be displayed as part of the Chinese Collection.
Traditionally, many Chinese people believe that when a person dies they leave with no earthly possessions. To provide for them in the afterlife, relatives burn paper versions of personal objects including money, cars and even ipods. Kurt Tong's rich, highly-coloured photographs document the recent development of this tradition and were exhibited in 2010.

Following the exhibition, In Case it Rains in Heaven, Kurt Tong donated 4 prints from the series to Compton Verney.  These works will be displayed as part of the Chinese Collection.
Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson
Wool work: A sailor's art
Stanley Spencer and the English garden
‘Capability’ Brown and the landscapes of Middle England
June
March
Kurt Tong has donated prints to Compton Verney
What the folk say - contemporary artist interventions
Compton Verney's British Folk Art collection are appearing in unexpected places around the collections and the building as a whole. With artist Paul Ryan, artists and curators have been invited to choose one Folk Art work to be repositioned and taken out of its usual context.

Artists include: Tasha Amini, James Ayres, Daniel Baker, Sir Peter Blake, Sonia Boyce, Faye Claridge, Simon Costin, Jeremy Deller, Carolyn Flood, Jenny Gordon, Antonia Harrison, Susan Hiller, Alan Kane, Paula MacArthur, Mike Nelson, Martin Myrone, Paul Ryan and Sarah Woodfine.

The outcome of the online project What the folk say, is in a new display of the public's Folk Art submissions alongside the Gallery’s permanent collection.
October
Quentin Blake - As large as life
Quentin Blake is one of Britain's best-loved and most successful illustrators, having won countless awards and been appointed Britain’s first Children’s Laureate.

Recently he has been commissioned by hospitals in the UK and abroad to produce works which have a therapeutic effect on their residents. Quentin Blake - As large as life brings together over 60 works for the first time.

These include the Friends in the circus series for Ellington Ward in Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, Planet Zog for The Alexandra Avenue Health and Social Care Centre, South Harrow and others for the Vincent Square Eating Disorder Clinic, London and a maternity hospital in Angers, France.

Quentin Blake said,

“I think the very presence of pictures helps to make being in, or visiting a hospital a more normal, less alien experience. What I have tried to include is a certain amount of detail, some interesting activities, and some suggestions of the little drama of relationships, so that the viewers – especially any who have to wait – may feel the desire to go on looking and perhaps even to speculate about the stories happening in front of them.”

The exhibition has a specially commissioned family room decorated with examples of Quentin’s illustrations for Roald Dahl’s books and his recent designs for wallpapers produced by Osborne & Little.
Remember, remember: A history of fireworks in Britain
This exhibition, the first of its kind, explores Britain's November the fifth celebration through the history of Fire Festivals, the Gunpowder plot of 1605 and the astonishingly vivid advertising and packing of domestic fireworks from the 20th century. The history of fireworks in Britain will be vividly brought to life in a multi-media display. The reason for the celebration of Guy Fawkes Night is investigated and its significance to British culture is shown since the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605.