British Drawings: 1600 to the Present Day, V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington is mostly understood as a design, applied art and fashion storehouse. But this autumn, it’s one of the best fine art destinations. British Painters from 1600 to the Present Day is a quiet gem of a show, somewhat tucked away in the huge rambling museum and well worth the hunt.

It’s a survey of 400 years of British drawing – from court painter Anthony van Dyck in the 17th century to David Hockney in the late 20th and early 21st century – and makes a strong case for the lineage and exceptional quality of the national drawing tradition. As such it goes a small way to address Britain’s long-standing inferiority complex of artistic isolation – that ‘island nation’ thing.

In 17th century Britain, a new prestige was ushered in to the art of drawing through a greater openness to Italy and France under King James I. One of the earliest pieces here, a study of an old man by famous miniaturist Isaac Oliver (1610) is an early example of this new art. 

Back then, Britain’s two great artistic traditions were portrait and landscape art (or ‘landskip’ as it was mistranslated from the Dutch in the late 16th century) – both influenced by Protestantism and its shunning of religious themes. The two great Suffolk painters Constable and Gainsborough exemplify both of these strands: the former making great studies of nature; the latter making portraits of the gentry. Both were influenced by earlier Italian painters, but made something very British. Look out for Constable’s Elm trees in Old Hall Park, East Bergholt (1817) for a typical example of the way he examined the natural world. 

The exhibition also explores the great 18th century move towards Romanticism, which informed the work of visionary polymath William Blake, and the return to mythical and religious themes in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its leading light, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

So important did drawing become that in the 19th century it was the staple discipline in art schools, with all students dutifully copying from plaster casts and sculptures. Indeed, the V&A’s Cast Courts would once have been full of them, sketching away. But today, there remains a huge debate about whether art students need to ‘learn to draw’. David Hockney, whose work is in this show, is one great believer, whilst other eminent names are unsure. But make no mistake: drawing should in no way be written off as a conservative art form. Take a look at the The Courtesan (1912) by Percy Wyndham Lewis, doyen of the Vorticists, and of course the lacerating drawings of Lucian Freud if you’re in any doubt. They convince, whatever your artistic intent, that drawing is the mother art.

Ticket price: FREE

Address and map: Cromwell Road SW7 2RL

Neareast Tube Station: South Kensington on the Picadilly line