Tag: Art

Rat on Mallet / Ogata Gekkō (1900s-1910s)

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Ogata Gekkō‘s Rat on Mallet (1900s-1910s).

Apparently rats are a symbol of good luck. Though this image of the print comes from the British Museum’s digital collection, I actually first saw Rat on Mallet as part of York Art Gallery’s Making Waves: The Art of Japanese Woodblock Print exhibit.

Tours of Old York #4: An Artist Visits…

And now for a slightly different tour of old York – York as seen by a visiting artist.

In 1952 the curator of York Art Gallery – Hans Hess – approached L. S. Lowry to paint a scene of York for the annual Evelyn Award. For this Lowry would be awarded the princely sum of £50 or – in 2025 money – around £1,250.

In the end, Lowery was to paint three images of York; two he offered to the art gallery to select from – ‘Clifford’s Tower, York‘ and ‘A View of York (from Tang Hall Bridge)‘ – and a third – ‘Wilson’s Terrace‘ – that he sold on to a private collector.

Of the two images offered to York Art Gallery, they selected ‘Clifford’s Tower, York‘ which, as of writing, can currently be seen in one of the upper galleries.

‘Clifford’s Tower, York’

‘Clifford’s Tower, York’, Laurence Stephen Lowry.
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