A Portrait of the Artist

It may not be the Uffizi, the Tate collection may dwarf it and it can’t touch the Louvre for sheer grandeur, but the Graves Gallery in Sheffield has its own attractions.

‘Art’, as Alan Bennett so concisely puts it, ‘is hard on the feet’: I vividly remember willing the endless corridors of the Uffizi to end so I could have a sit down. The Graves exhibition space spans no more than seven rooms and, Alan Bennett would be pleased to know, there are plenty of seats.

The Gallery opened in 1934 from the support of a local businessman, John Graves, who also donated his private collection. In a space high above the hustle and bustle of the city of Sheffield, the visitor to the gallery finds him or herself in a hidden treasure trove of masterpieces – ancient and modern – and with peace, quiet and semi-solitude in which to ponder them. People know about the Graves Gallery, of course, but visiting with one Sheffield resident (“I must have been before, on a school trip perhaps”) it became clear that these works – whose artists include JMW Turner, Pisarro, Gauguin, Cézanne and Lowry – remain a well-kept secret. At the more modern end, there is the well-known and controversial marble sculpture by Marc Quinn, Kiss.

These works are all in the permanent collection, but let’s turn our attention to one of the current temporary exhibitions: A Picture of Us? Identity in British Art. The exhibition organisers asked a host of writers, artists and musicians this question:

“Every picture tells a story. Which one tells yours?”

The result is a wonderfully eclectic collection ranging from a Henry Moore maquette chosen by Lisa Cheung to a drawing by William Blake chosen by one of the founders of the fashion label Red or Dead. There is no coherence to the collection – but this is no criticism – the artworks themselves are only one, rather small, part of this exhibition. This is an exhibition which examines why we like particular pieces of art, what it means to ‘like’ a painting, why and how we identify with a piece. Alan Bennett’s own view on this is that it’s ‘hard to divorce appreciation from possession, so I know I like a picture only when I’m tempted to walk out with it under my raincoat’. Kate Rusby chooses her painting (The Grey Mare, Alfred Munnings) because it reminds her of the shire horses she saw at country fairs when she was a child. Two of the pieces have been chosen by students from Sheffield: a huge mahogany Eve by Edna Manley was chosen by a student from Firth Park Community Arts College because ‘she is an African woman like me’.

The best element of this exhibition is not what the writers and artists tell us about the paintings, but what each chosen painting tells us about that particular writer or artist. Barry Hines, the author of A Kestrel for a Knave, chooses a painting of two Buffer Girls by William Rothenstein. Buffer Girls were an integral part of the Sheffield steel industry and have since become a symbol of both this history and the character of the city. Hines writes of the women, ‘they are not subservient, bucolic, or in chains, but gaze out strongly and with hope’. Hines went to school in Sheffield and, the exhibition tells us, has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Hines’ chosen picture captures something of the fabled pride, toughness and practical stoicism of the people of Sheffield; this choice, whether consciously or unconsciously, betrays a desire to tap into this strength in the face of his own personal struggle.

This exhibition runs until 5 December 2009.