Love is in the Air

“Love is in the Air” was the Newcastle leg of a touring exhibition titled “Love,” the seventh in a series produced under the National Gallery Touring Partnership (2006 to 2008), a collaboration between the National Gallery, Bristol’s Museums, Galleries and Archives Service, and Tyne and Wear Museums. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Northern Rock Foundation, and the Ésmée Fairbairn Foundation, the partnership had already brought thematic loan shows to regional venues across England, and “Love” was its final and most ambitious instalment. The Laing Art Gallery presented the exhibition from 19 April to 13 July 2008, after which it transferred to the National Gallery in London.

The exhibition explored how artists from the fifteenth century to the present day have represented love in all its forms: romantic and unrequited, chaste and erotic, divine, familial, and charitable. Works ranged from Renaissance masters including Raphael and Lucas Cranach the Elder to nineteenth-century painters such as Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hunt, through to twentieth-century figures including Marc Chagall, Tracey Emin, David Hockney, and Yoko Ono. A sculpture by Marc Quinn occupied the Marble Hall, and Ono’s participatory work “Secret Piece III” invited visitors to submit pictures or messages about their own loved ones for inclusion in the ongoing piece.

Vermeer’s A Lady Standing at a Virginal (c. 1670 to 1672), lent by the National Gallery, London, appeared alongside this broader survey as one of the exhibition’s Old Master contributions to the theme. The painting, among the last Vermeer produced, shows a young woman standing at an upright virginal before a landscape painting on the wall and a framed image of Cupid above her, a conventional emblem of faithful love indicating that the woman’s affections are pledged to a single suitor. Its presence in a show spanning five centuries of amorous imagery gave visitors in Newcastle a rare opportunity to see the work outside its permanent London home.