Nancy Cadogan, the daughter of leading archaeologist Gerald Cadogan and the author Lucy Cadogan, is taking her show, Gusto, to Rome. Quite particularly, to the Keats Shelley House Museum. The exhibition is a tour de force of bright, bold colour inspired by the Great Romantic Poets and named after William Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Gusto’, written in 1817.
Nancy, herself, explains: ‘Gusto is a celebration of Keats [the English Romantic poet], and his sensuous romantic evocation of life. None of us could have known that Covid would grip the world and bring with it immediate and personal responses for every single person. For me, it made making work about Keats's last days, in the company of his dear friend Joseph Severn incredibly, almost unbearably poignant.’
The exhibition will run from Saturday 31 October all the way to 27 February at the museum, which commemorates the Romantic poets and houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of memorabilia, letters, manuscripts and paintings relating to Keats and Shelley, as well as Lord Byron, Wordsworth and Oscar Wilde. It is conveniently located just to the south of the base of the Spanish Steps and east of the Piazza di Spagna.
DREAMING OF ROME II Nancy Cadogan
The exhibition will showcase 16 new oil paintings inspired by the poets and created earlier this year, during lockdown. Cadogan 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.’ Keats very tragically died from tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Guiseppe Albano, the director of the Keats Shelley House Museum said: ‘Nancy’s work is vibrant and vital. These qualities, together with her love of Italy, of literature, and of romanticism, make the Keats Shelley House a natural home for her paintings.’
Nancy Cadogan 1/7 - Full of Sweet Dreams
Nancy CadogaN 2/7 - The Light is Outside I
Nancy Cadogan 3/7 - The Light is Outside III
