Isles be back – in New Haven

From the June 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Anthony Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montagu, is standing on a coastal cliff-top in Robert Peake the Elder’s portrayal of c. 1590. Storm clouds shadow the land, his feet are planted amid snakes and toads and in the background buildings burn and ships sink. But he is unmoved: ‘Rien m’estone,’ says a motto alongside him, ‘Nothing astounds me’. Montagu was a Catholic enduring the effects of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and he is troubled – ‘oppressed’ we might say today – and pushed to the edges of the country where it uncomfortably meets the world. He’s the inspired opening blast in the reinstalled galleries of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven – a figure for our time and his own.

Anthony Maria Browne, second Viscount Montagu (c. 1590), Robert Peake the Elder. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

The Yale Center was founded on the collection of Paul Mellon, the only son of financier and industrialist Andrew Mellon and his English wife Nora McMullen. Childhood summers spent in England made him a lifelong Anglophile, and he began collecting British art in earnest in the mid 1930s, starting with a Stubbs painting; the Yale Center was opened to display his bounty in 1977, in the home of his alma mater. The galleries are housed in Louis Kahn’s very last building, an imposing lockbox of a structure, with an interior distantly echoing the courtyards and Great Halls of English country houses. They have been closed for two years for conservation work, but reopened in March with a newly reinstalled narrative of the nation’s art, plus complementary shows dedicated to J.M.W. Turner and Tracey Emin. 

A portrait of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower from 1804–09 by Thomas Lawrence keeps company with works by Constable in a room on the fourth floor. Photo: John Hassett; courtesy Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

The ensemble of exhibitions says much about Britain past and present and it does so at times ingeniously and poetically, at others with defensive insistence. The permanent collection display is titled ‘In a New Light’, but the introductory wall text touches on time-worn tropes of national decline and imperial adventuring followed by withdrawal and guilty unease. The galleries at Yale are arranged in an uninterrupted sequence of spaces arranged around the internal courtyard, so there is more flow than punctuation. The initial pictures tour us around ports and country houses and colonial outposts like Barbados; in the 18th century, the scene shifts briefly to London, then to Italianate spots on the Grand Tour; and the 19th century unfolds in a long gallery of windblown landscapes, with Henry Dawson’s London from Greenwich Hill (1869–70) facing its Scottish rival in Alexander Nasmyth’s View of the City of Edinburgh (c. 1822), and between them English scenes such as John Constable’s Stratford Mill (1819–20). 

With his love of the country’s people and places, Mellon presumably had little desire to hold Britain to account for its crimes, yet this is work the pictures are called upon to do. And when the many charismatic and ebullient pictures won’t behave – and mostly they won’t – the curators deliver the sermons themselves in the wall texts. So, Thomas Beach’s Four Servants of Ston Easton Estate (1776) would seem to provide a warm counterpoint to a sequence of stiffer aristocratic figures and properties, but the text emphasises that any comity we feel is merely an illusion in line with the landowner’s ‘conservative politics’. And in Jan Siberechts’ view of Wollaton Hall in Nottingham (1697), the text directs us not to the charming naivety of the picture, with its persnickety detail and bungled perspective, but to the injustices of rich and poor. The problem isn’t that any of this is wrong – the arguments are a true and necessary corrective to a history that once focused on style alone – but the spotlight on the structuring social conditions of the images becomes so insistent that it can seem to ignore the pictures themselves. With Trump rampaging across the United States intent on erasing these kinds of narratives of national decline and racial guilt, they can start to look less like viewpoints and more like defensive ramparts dug down on any soil that will hold them. 

Four Servants of Ston Easton Estate (1776), Thomas Beach. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

The historical sequence comes to a close via some melancholy portraits from the early 20th century, and finally we arrive at a conclusion with a picture from 2010, a fine, smouldering painting of a Black figure by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. We’re to understand that our time shall be his. One might see a similar logic guiding the inclusion of Tracey Emin’s female figures in the exhibition ‘I Loved You Until The Morning’. But here the mood is shadowy, and the crowded social world of the historical pictures drops away, leaving pain, loneliness and transactional relationships. Emin channels Twombly, Schiele and de Kooning for grand, operatic effect, but it rarely feels persuasive. Americans have long been immune to Emin’s charms, despite her extraordinary self-advertisement in the nation’s art press, and this marks her first museum show in the country, but it isn’t likely to convince anyone that they’ve been missing out. 

A more reliable, doughty old crowd-pleaser is Turner and, happily, the Yale Center possesses the greatest collection of his pictures outside the UK, all the better to celebrate 250 years since the curmudgeon’s death. Here, the country isn’t in the dock and the mood is lighter, the pictures filled with more places than people. The theme of the show, and the title, is ‘Romance and Reality’, and that could subtitle the arguments running throughout Yale Center’s rehang. ‘In a New Light’ leans into reality and tends to reinforce the perception of Brits as brass-tacks folks, not given to flights of fancy, but Turner’s pictures remind us that fantasy can spring from the buffeting of that most disorientating British experience, the weather. Among the surprises is a spectacularly bizarre scene, not by Turner but by Robert Carrick, who assembled a series of prints documenting the progressive stages of his work on a popular chromolithograph of 1852 based on the master’s Rockets and Blue Lights (1840). In the early 19th century, flares were often used to warn ships of danger, and here the practice becomes the basis for a hallucinatory landscape of fire, wind, smoke and pouring water. It’s no place for the faint-hearted, but then neither is contemporary Britain in these interesting times.  

From the June 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.