While some of us used lockdown to perfect our sourdough and whipped coffee recipes, British artist and Loughran Gallery favourite Nancy Cadogan went one better and made an entire exhibition.
In late 2019, the Keats-Shelley House in Rome commissioned Cadogan to create a series of paintings to celebrate the life and legacy of poet John Keats and to mark the 200th anniversary of his death.
Created as the world went into a global lockdown, Gusto represents Cadogan's personal and immediate responses to the crisis, as well as her close ties with Italy, a country she’s been visiting for the past 20 years and that has been ravaged by Covid-19.
The collection of 16 oil paintings that has emerged is deeply grounded in Cadogan’s love of literature and her admiration for Keats’s work as well as her hope for the future.
She says: “As my contact with the outside world shrank, I started to think about how Keats must have felt when he was in confinement. I started to imagine how it would feel to write and imagine things you cannot experience. During lockdown the days and nights morphed into one and time took on a whole new meaning. As we started to emerge, so too did my understanding of Keats’s work and Gusto become an entirely more uplifting and hopeful show.”
Gusto opened on 31 October 2020 – Keats’s birthday – at Rome’s historic Keats-Shelley House museum and library, which is dedicated to the great Romantic poets who lived in, and were inspired by, Italy. It joins the paintings and portraits, busts and miniatures, relics and first editions, literary manuscripts and letters from the museum’s permanent collection until the end of May 2021.
