Gusto

 “Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music out of doors
played by someone I do not know”
John Keats

The Keats-Shelley House, the museum dedicated to Romantic culture, hosts Gusto, the exhibition of the British artist Nancy Cadogan, named after William Hazlitt’s 1817 essay "On Gusto’".

Conceived to celebrate the life and legacy of Keats and to mark the bicentenary of his death, after being displayed in Tier 2 London, the exhibition is hosted in the final home of the great English poet and expresses the learned knowledge of Keats’s work, passion for Italy, literature and Romanticism of Nancy Cadogan.

A historical coincidence bears the creation of the artworks displayed to Keats's journey in 1820. Before reaching Rome, the poet and his friend Joseph Severn spent ten days quarantined in the Bay of Naples, on the ship on which they were travelling, due to the typhus epidemic raged in London. When Cadogan herself started working on her new project, the world went into lockdown.

Described by the Evening Standard Magazine as "heaven on canvas", the exhibition features sixteen oil paintings, intense and rich in symbolism, inspired by the great romantic poets and elegantly displayed together with the permanent collection of the house-museum: paintings, portraits, busts, miniatures, relics, first editions, manuscripts and letters evoking Keat's sensuous and romantic words.

Photo Dreaming of Rome I © Nancy Cadogan ph Keats Shelley House Official Website