Page 18 • The HERALD • 9th October 2025 v SAY YOU SAW IT IN THE HERALD v Independent Jewellers established in 1993 vvvvvv Local experts in jewellery, watches, luxury gifts and services and repairs We buy unwanted jewellery and scrap gold and silver Visit our shop at 10-11 Marsh Parade, Hythe, Southampton SO45 6AN Tel: 023 8251 7621 • amberleyjewellers.co.uk DECORATING Interior and Exterior Established 1985 07867 528307 mark.blake.decorating@gmail.com All joinery and carpentry requirements undertaken • Bespoke wooden windows, doors and staircases • PVCu windows and doors fitted • Decking, pergolas and out buildings • Custom made wardrobes and cupboards • Fencing and gates Contact us for advice and quotes Tel 023 8066 8021• Mobile 07467 594993 fillisjoinery@outlook.com Professional quality joinery for over 25 years To advertise your business in The Herald, contact Sue on 023 8084 0815 or email: sjones@herald-publishing.co.uk Anthony Lawrence: A Retrospective e UK’s rst major survey exhibition of the work of prominent post-modern artist Anthony Lawrence opened at Palais des Vaches in Exbury on 4th October. Lawrence (1951 – 2022) was a preeminent artist whose work spanned genres of still life, portraiture, landscape, religious iconography and grand themes such as Dante’s Inferno. His works appeared in many international group shows and was the subject of a number of exhibitions during his lifetime. is retrospective, the largest of its kind at the Palais, is the rst to show the full spectrum of his career and is running until 31st October. is exhibition celebrates the evolution of Lawrence’s approach over ve decades of intensive practice. e Lawrence estate and the Palais des Vaches are working together to bring this vast collection, much of which is unseen until now, to Nick and Caroline de Rothschild’s spacious gallery at the edge of the New Forest, where Lawrence himself lived and worked near for most of his life. Known for successful portraiture, his works included sitters Yehudi Menhuin, Seamus Heaney, Sir Ian McKellen, Roger McGuinn, Nigel Mansell and Rt Rev Hassan Dehqani-Ta i, among others. A highlight came when he painted Francis Bacon, who promised to reciprocate by painting Lawrence’s own likeness a er the pair became good friends. Landscape paintings form a large part of Lawrence’s oeuvre, focusing in particular on Saudi Arabia and his home in the New Forest. During the 90s, Lawrence spent time in the middle east, focusing his practice on the notion of a ‘barren landscape’ for his Desert series - his oodlit palm trees, expressionist dunes and bright skies sing out of the canvas. ese landscapes were so di erent from those of his homeland, yet they became ones he loved and painted multiple times. Art historian Susan Gray says in her essay on Lawrence that in one such painting, e Desert Explored: Impressions of the Desert (1999), ‘the terrain is brought to life through an expressionistic, deeply outlined rendering of the dune’s near slope, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s istles by the Roadside (1881).’ Known for drawing on classical antiquity, religion and literary themes, Lawrence’s series of works inspired by grand notions and ideology are many and varied. roughout his career he returned to Dante’s Inferno as inspiration for a body of over forty paintings: his technical mastery echoing the canon of great masters, particularly focusing on Dante’s interpretation of good and evil. In the 90s Lawrence turned to Wagner and his opera Tannhauser, employing the medium of etching, last used when he studied at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Gray writes of these works that, ‘Lawrence made some of his most emotionally powerful work. Similar to a Francisco Goya etching, we are drawn into their tragedy as if it is our own.’ Lawrence’s monumental e Last Supper (1994) was cra ed upon a huge number of studies, in which friends and family posed in robes. His series e Stations of the Cross was inspired by the restoration of the display of religious imagery in the Byzantine Anthony Lawrence painting his Nigel Mansell portrait in his new forest home studio, 1992 Continued on page 19
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