7 September 2011 to 27 November 2011
Boughton House in Northamptonshire and the Handel House Museum have come together to mount an exhibition which celebrates the rococo musical pictures of Marcellus Laroon, ‘The English Watteau’.
Laroon’s musical paintings are exhibited in London for the first time in over 40 years. With elegant, almost Hogarthian precision and a Venetian palette of colours, this English singer, soldier, cellist and painter gives us a rare window onto domestic music making in Georgian England. He deftly records musical gatherings in grand homes, which were far from stuffy, and where the atmosphere of tea drinking, flirtations, asides, and general ‘business’ is just as important as the music.
Fittingly, the exhibition will be hung in the domestic setting of Handel’s own music room.