From Sky to Sea: Artists and Water
Millennium Gallery
Sheffield

 
WATER is not only a vital resource for life on our planet, it has also been a source of fascination for us since we first emerged as conscious beings.

As children we enjoy splashing in water, swimming and the exhilaration of running through the rain, but fishermen and coastal dwellers also experience it as a power that can destroy.

Water shapes, sustains and impacts on our lives in an infinite number of ways. This new exhibition explores artists’ enduring fascination with water and our relationship to it. It brings together painting, photography and works on paper by artists such as Linda Benedict-Jones, Paul Cezanne, Fay Godwin, David Hockney, Eric Ravilious, JMW Turner and many more.

The star of the exhibition, however, is a large-scale woodcut by the Italian Renaissance master Titian, depicting the biblical story of the submersion of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. Thanks to recent conservation work, it goes on display in Sheffield for the first time.
 
This exhibition of 90 historic and contemporary works takes visitors on a journey through images that follow the water cycle – from rain-swept vistas to snowy mountain peaks, along rivers that flow through our towns and countryside, to finally merge with the sea.
 
Sheffield is itself a city whose development owes much to water. Its rivers and streams provided the essential power that forged this “City of Steel,” but they also wrought devastation, ushering in the 1832 cholera epidemic and the devastating Great Flood of 1864.
 
Visitors will discover a series of historic and contemporary images chronicling Sheffield’s connection with water and its links to the industry that shaped the city.

Photographs and artworks commemorating the Great Sheffield Flood include Edmund John Niemann’s painting, River Don after the Flood (1865) and Stanhope Forbes’ cityscape: Sheffield – River and Smoking Chimneys (1915).
 
The exhibition explores artists’ fascination with water in the landscape, from icecaps and lakes to rivers and seas. The ocean and the shore are the focus of paintings including William Meltby’s Seascape, (1866), Fishing Boat Between Two Houses (about 1930) by Alfred Wallis, and Ravilious’s Drift Boat (1941). Other works depict the waterways which crisscross the land, such as Frederick Porter’s River Scene, and Henri Eugene Le Sidaner’s Nemours, Seine-et-Marne, France.
 
Visitors will also be able to see illustrations of the role of water in our everyday lives. Images of leisure and recreation activities including Hockney’s John St Clair Swimming, Jack Hulme, At the Lido, and Benedict-Jones’s Before the Bath.
 
Exhibition co-curator Paul Swales comments: “I hope visitors to the exhibition will relate the images to their own experiences when next they are walking by a river, enjoying the beach or getting wet in the rain. It has been a great opportunity to explore the city’s collection.”
 
From Sky to Sea: Artists and Water opens at Millennium Gallery on November 24 2022 and continues until March 12 2023 – entry is free.