Love And Death - Victorian paintings from tate

Hello and welcome to our new exhibition Love and Death: Victorian Paintings from Tate. We've been installing the show over the last 10 days or so and we are now nearly ready to open so this seemed like a good opportunity to give you a little sneak preview of the exhibition ahead of our official opening which is this Saturday 8th September. Now this exhibition is built around the loan of 11 late Victorian paintings from Tate and there are works by Alma Tadema, Lord Leighton, John William Waterhouse and other artists too. And we are showing these works here at BMAG alongside objects from our own collection paintings drawings and also some wonderful bronzes by Alfred Gilbet and Lord Leighton and our conservator Veronika has been doing some last work on those bronzes ahead of our opening just earlier today. Now I am talking to you at the moment from our second room in the exhibition which is where things get really dark and dramatic. We have intense purple walls for intense paintings about love and passion and magic and death. And the centrepiece of this room and perhaps in some ways of the whole exhibition is this wonderful painting by John William Waterhouse of The Lady of Shalott which is perhaps one of the most popular and well known paintings in the country. And Waterhouse shows her leaving her tower to sail down the river to Camelot to her death and she is singing her last song as she lets go of the chain that will then let her boat float down the river to her death. And the 3 candles here on the prow of her boat which are blowing out one by one represent the lady's waining life and so does the dead leaf which is just nestling here on the edge of the boat. This is a wonderfully dramatic painting and I think it looks really magnificent in this gallery. We are very lucky in having among the loans from Tate 3 large exhibitions paintings from Tate by Waterhouse and it wonderful to be able to show them in this gallery which is essentially a Victorian picture gallery with high ceilings grand doorways and is the kind of room that was just made for these kind of wonderful really dramatic large scale exhibition pieces. Now the exhibition is on until 13th January and admission is free and I really hope that if you can you will come take advantage of the opportunity to see these wonderful loans in Birmingham. They look wonderful and it should be really exciting exhibition so I really hope come to see it.