Fifteen years ago, a new television channel, BBC4, was launched in the United Kingdom with a remit for broadcasting on intellectually challenging subjects. From the beginning, the visual arts were prominent and after a rather wobbly start – a film on Goya by Robert Hughes is said to have had only 15,000 viewers – the channel’s numerous documentaries on art-historical subjects have often won both popular and critical esteem.
All four artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, whose work is on view at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (to 7th January 2018), are painters in some form.1 Hurvin Anderson makes saturated landscapes and interiors comparable to those of Peter Doig; Lubaina Himid paints black figures onto crockery, newspapers and canvas to create an alternative and more equitable cultural history; and Andrea Büttner is a printmaker whose installation combines her iPad paintings with reappropriated German educational boards devoted to Simone Weil.
For the purpose of this article, the story of Eliza Macloghlin starts with the death of her husband in 1904. We know very little about Dr Edward Percy Macloghlin, aside from that he was the son of a surgeon and that he passed through University College, Liverpool, winning the Bligh gold medal in anatomy in 1882 and afterwards settling in Wigan.