Both show enormous skill in organising complicated canvases and huge technical facility. Each is spattered with comic asides: a libidinous Indian grabbing his young male lover, a doughy nabob who could be the model for Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair, a red-faced grandee sneaking a quick but appreciative look at Titian's naked Venus of Urbino, incidents that give life as well as psychological truth to the pictures. What Zoffany didn't try to master was either Reynolds's grand manner or Gainsborough's feathery naturalism; unfortunately these became the modish styles and his precision soon came to seem dated.
Ironically perhaps for an outsider, Zoffany's closest antecedent was the quintessential painter of Englishness William Hogarth, with whom he shared a sense of humour and a fascination for the mores of society. Unlike Hogarth, however, Zoffany's most obvious skills were for the depiction of surface appearances which is why his work, unlike that of some of his peers, does not transcend its time. Nevertheless, for a true flavour of those times, his pictures are the very first place to look.
Surface is also the primary concern in the Courtauld Gallery's imaginative exhibition Mondrian Nicholson: In Parallel, which describes the collaborative friendship between the two modernists. When Ben Nicholson first visited the older painter in Paris in 1934 he was still turning his own art towards pure abstraction — careful compositions of squares and rectangles, sometimes in plain white and at others in colour. Mondrian confirmed his new path and Nicholson recalled that after visiting his studio he sat "at a café table on the edge of a pavement ... for a very long time with an astonishing feeling of peace and repose". It was the mood he wanted for his art.
The two men fed off each other: Mondrian's experiments with grids and a palette limited to the primary colours inspired Nicholson to make complementary works of his own (without the bold lines and with more shades). In return Nicholson arranged for Mondrian's work to be exhibited in Britain for the first time and his enthusiasm spurred his mentor on. With the rise of fascism it was also Nicholson who facilitated his friend's move to London in 1938, into a studio next to his own in Hampstead.
The alliance lasted ten years until Mondrian's death in 1944 but, as this exhibition shows, it was a friendship that left its measured and geometrical imprint on the work of them both.
