Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool 22 MAY — 30 AUGUST, 2008 Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) is one of the most significant and admired British artists of the eighteenth century. Prized by his contemporaries for the originality of his "candlelight" paintings, Wright was also a distinguished portraitist. From 1768 to 1771, he lived and worked in Liverpool, then Britain's fastest-growing port and a burgeoning cultural and economic center. Wright's success in Liverpool made him the first great British artist to establish a career outside of London. Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool is the first major exhibition to examine Wright's creative development in Liverpool at the start of the citys cultural renaissance and growing status as a major world port. The exhibition features approximately eighty works, including more than forty paintings and drawings by Wright, as well as works by his circle of friends and pupils in Liverpool. It also provides a look at the city during a period of economic expansion and political change. Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool has been co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. The exhibition coincides with a two-year celebration of Liverpool's cultural heritage, the 800th anniversary of its charter in 2007, and its status as European Capital of Culture in 2008. The Center is the only US venue. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Walker Art Gallery, in association with Yale University Press. Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool opened at the Walker Art Gallery, where it was on view from November 17, 2007 to February 24, 2008. Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art 10 JUNE — 17 AUGUST, 2008 Great British Watercolors brings together more than eighty outstanding works spanning a century of British artistic production, the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-eighteenth century to its flowering in the early nineteenth century. The exhibition highlights the diversity of British watercolor painting, showing both landscapes and figurative works by some of the principal artists who worked in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, John Robert Cozens, William Blake, Thomas Girtin, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable. This exhibition has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in association with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, as part of the 2007 celebrations commemorating both the Center's thirtieth anniversary and the centenary of its founder, Paul Mellon. It also traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret 18 SEPTEMBER, 2008 — 4 JANUARY, 2009 This fall the Yale Center for British Art is the first and only venue for a small but fascinating exhibition about a late eighteenth-century hoax that fooled several prominent British artists. Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret brings together paintings and documents pertaining to the hoax from several institutions at Yale and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In 1796 Benjamin West, the American-born President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, fell victim to a remarkable fraud. A shadowy figure, Thomas Provis, and his artist daughter, Ann Jemima Provis, persuaded West that they possessed a copy of an old manuscript containing descriptions of materials and techniques used by the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance. West used these materials and techniques to execute the painting Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1796-97). In truth the manuscript was fake and the story an absurd invention. West had believed it, and, through him, a number of other key artist-Academicians. Years later, having been mercilessly held up to ridicule by satirists, West painted an almost identical version of Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1804) according to his own methods and traditional studio practices. This "atonement" painting is today in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret brings together both versions of West's ambitious composition, along with x-radiographs and recent technical analysis. The exhibition also includes two copies of the fake Provis manuscript, a signed agreement in which the Academicians agreed to keep the method secret, West's preparatory drawing, Paul Sandby's rude Song of 1797, and James Gillray's satirical engraving. Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret, has been co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox 16 OCTOBER, 2008 — 4 JANUARY, 2009 This autumn the Yale Center for British Art will be the first and only U.S. venue for a major retrospective of David Cox (1783-1859). Marking the 150th anniversary of the artists death, Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox examines the work of this important figure in the development of British landscape and watercolor painting. The first significant exhibition devoted to his work since 1983, it includes more than one hundred of his watercolors and drawings and approximately a dozen oil paintings. The works are drawn from the Center's collection, as well as from public and private collections in Great Britain and the United States. Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox has been co-organized with Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, U.K., where it will be on view in early 2009. The exhibition takes its title from one of Coxs best-known watercolors, painted in 1845. Showing a farmer and his wife riding through stormy open ry as a distant train crosses the horizon, Sun, Wind, and Rain (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery) is emblematic of the concerns with the representation of light and atmosphere and weather that lie at the heart of his landscape art.