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Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is taking part in a very special national celebration.
The Walker is one of 12 venues across the UK participating in the National Treasures project as part of the National Gallery’s 200th birthday celebrations.
Based in London, overlooking the world-famous Trafalgar Square, the Gallery turned 200 on May 10. As part of its bicentenary celebrations, and in its role as the ‘nation’s gallery’, it will be loaning out masterpieces from its impressive collection to museums and galleries around the country.
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Liverpool will be hosting ‘The Toilet of Venus’, an important work painted in the mid-17th century by Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Often called the ‘Rokeby Venus’, as it hung in Rokeby Park, Yorkshire in the 19th century, it is the only surviving female nude by Velázquez.
It’s even rarer when you consider at the time of its creation in the late 1640s/early 1650s, Spanish art was being actively policed by members of the Spanish Inquisition, making depictions of the nude form exceedingly rare.
The Rokeby Venus has famously been attacked twice. It was slashed with a meat cleaver in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson, and last year was targeted by Just Stop Oil protesters, who smashed its protective glass.
This artwork will form the centrepiece of a new display at the Walker, which aims to explore the famous piece in an unexpected way. Showing alongside artworks by women and non-binary artists from the Walker’s own collection, the idea is to challenge the traditional reading of the piece as a focus for the male gaze.
Alongside Velázquez’s masterpiece, the Walker’s display includes The Spanish Gesture by Scottish artist Ethel Walker, who is celebrated as one of the earliest lesbian artists to openly express their sexuality in their paintings. There’s also Rene Matić’s Chiddy Doing Rene’s Hair (2019), which considers race, beauty, and gender as a performance, which is being displayed at the Walker for the first time.
The National Treasures programme aims to put 12 important pieces of artwork within an hour’s journey of more than 35 million people. Alongside this, the Art Road Trip sees the National Gallery working alongside 24 local arts organisations to create community-led arts projects throughout the year, with the nearest to Liverpool being Blackpool and Wrexham.
National Treasures: Velázquez is open at the Walker Art Gallery now and runs until the August Bank Holiday weekend.
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