Calendar

Location

Country: Belgium
City: Brussels
Place: British Embassy, UK representation to the EU & UK delegation to NATO

A calendar dated 1976 hangs below a framed image of an English landscape. Both are set against highly decorative wallpaper. The landscape is a reproduction of John Constable’s painting The Cornfield (1826, National Gallery, London). In Constable’s painting a young shepherd boy drinks from a stream on the left-hand side, while his sheepdog is left following a flock of sheep down a country lane. In the distance a bright yellow cornfield can be seen through an open gate in the hedgerow.

Millington’s image marks the 150th anniversary of the creation of Constable’s painting. Combining the 1976 calendar and Constable’s painting, Millington compresses time and suggests that Constable’s art is as relevant now as it was at the time of its production. An impression of Calendar can be found in the Tate Collection and forms part of a portfolio entitled For Constable. The work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery alongside a major Constable exhibition in the 1970s.

Calendar dates from the first decade of Millington's artistic career and combines the two art genres for which he has become famous: still life and landscape. Millington said of his work: 

My images are drawn from the familiar, commonplace subjects. I consider each as a separate entity with a particular ingredient rather like a portrait.

Born in 1942, Terence Millington studied painting at the Birmingham College of Art in the 1960s where he was awarded the Jackson Travelling Scholarship. He later undertook a postgraduate course in printmaking at Manchester College of Art. He established an etching workshop in 1970 and his first colour etchings were published by Editions Alecto. He has taught courses in the graphic arts at Birmingham, Bath, Leeds and St Albans’ Schools of Art. Millington's aquatints and engravings have been exhibited widely, and his work can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Tate Collection and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Places

Subjects

calendar, domestic interior, wallpaper

Materials & Techniques

etching, aquatint

Artist

Terence Millington (1942 - )

Title

Calendar

Edition

67/100

Date

1976

Medium

Etching and aquatint

Acquisition

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, February 1977

Inscription

below image: 67/100 / Calendar / Terence Millington 76

GAC number

12958