A More Unconventional Training: Slade School Artists in the West Country. Art History Day School with Dr Justine Hopkins

About

From its earliest beginnings the Slade School of Art aimed to offer young artists an alternative not only to the Royal Academy Schools, but also to Paris and Rome; when Fred Brown was appointed Slade Professor in 1892 he was chosen as the most likely of the candidates to make a success of a school of painting on the advanced lines of the thought of the day ... that those who desire a more unconventional training should not be driven to France to study.  Under Brown and his Assistant and later successor, Henry Tonks, students were encouraged to study the world around them as much or more than Classical models and painting in the open air was an established part of the curriculum.

In association with the RWA’s groundbreaking exhibition, this Day School, led by Dr Justine Hopkins, looks at the fundamental, if unexpected, importance of the light and landscape of Dorset to what Tonks referred to as the Slade’s “crisis of brilliance”: two generations of students who would form the vanguard of British modernism in the dynamic years leading up to 1914, including Augustus John, William Orpen, Vanessa Bell and Philip Wilson Steer.