Art

This art work is made from broken glass collected by Manchester-based artist Ana Rosa Hopkins after riots in the city in August 2011. On 4 August 2011 29-year old Mark Duggan was shot by police in Tottenham, which triggered violent protests in London. Between 8 and 11 August there were riots in many other UK cities – including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. Ana Rosa Hopkins collected some of the broken glass from the Manchester riot and turned it into this art work. You can see this and other examples of historic and contemporary glasswork in the Harris collection.

Photograph: © Alan Sams

This ceramic can be displayed from any angle: it doesn’t have a front, back, top or bottom. It is made by melting two slip-cast porcelain rectangles together in the kiln. The intensity of heat warps the rectangles into these two interlocking shapes. This ceramic is part of the Harris’s ongoing collection of contemporary ceramic practice.

The sunny harvest scene in the foreground is a picture of rural life as it had been for centuries. Across the Ribble and Penwortham Bridge looms the darker atmosphere of industrial Preston, with its rapidly expanding streets of mills and houses.

In the early 19th century, farming was being relocated from the town centre to the green spaces outside its boundaries. The desperate need to provide housing for the rapidly expanding population meant that many of the narrow garden plots and town fields, used for centuries to grow crops, were now packed with dangerous, cramped and unsanitary houses.

Windmills are visible in the distance – Preston was an important corn-milling centre at this time – but smoking chimneys now dominate the skyline

Puck was painted by Richard Dadd, the infamous Victorian artist best know for his ‘fairy paintings’. Puck is a character from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The painting once belonged to Preston solicitor Thomas Birchall. After many years the painting has returned to Preston and is now part of the Harris’ permanent collection. This is an oil painting on canvas.

The print collection represents artists working from the 16^th century to the present day. It includes Old Master prints, engraved portraits, Victorian etchings and engravings, and modern prints including screen prints and lithographs.

This drawing by Angelica Kauffman is a study for a painting commissioned by the Earl of Derby for his London home in 1775. Based on a story in the Aeneid, an epic poem written by Virgil between 29 and 19BC about the Trojan Wars, the scene depicts Andromache who has been invoking the spirit of her husband Hector. Aeneas, who she believes might be a messenger from the dead, appears and confirms that Hector has been killed and Andromache collapses in grief.

The Harris’ collection of watercolours includes paintings by JMW Turner, David Cox, Arthur Rackham, Helen Allingham, and Laura Knight.

Kidwelly Castle has occupied its commanding position above the River Gwendreath in South Wales since the 12^th century. Turner visited Kidwelly during his 1795 tour of Wales and returned to the subject in 1835 for a series of Picturesque Views in England and Wales. In this atmospheric painting the gatehouse glows in bright sunlight while the rest of the castle emerges from a swirling river mist.

The Harris holds an important collection of paintings by artists who were born or who have lived in Lancashire that dates from the 18^th century to the present day. The collection includes mostly portraits and local landscapes.

Arthur Devis was born in Preston, he was the son of a cabinetmaker. Although he lived mostly in London, he maintained strong links with Lancashire and received a number of commissions from local families.

This portrait of the Rev. Streynsham Master, Vicar of Croston, and his wife Margaret is a type portrait known as a ‘conversation piece’. Fashionable in the 18^th century, they show family groups or friends in informal domestic or rural settings.

The Harris has a small but notable collection of Modern British art, including paintings by Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Matthew Smith, Ivon Hitchens, David Bomberg, and Lucian Freud.

After serving in the First World War, Nash suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with ‘war strain’. To recuperate, he and his wife rented a cottage at Dymchurch on the Kent coast.

His experiences during the war led him to consider the coast line as a conflict between the sea and land. The geometric lines reflect Nash’s early experiments with abstraction, and suggest a coordinated battle between the sea and the man-made defenses built to protect the land from invasion.