Virtual Exhibitions

Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter

18 October 2025 - 28 February 2026

The exhibition explores the intricate beauty of small-scale landscapes across three centuries of British art. The exhibition has a particular focus on vignette format illustrations and the changing relationship between text and illustration. Highlights of the exhibition include seven highly detailed watercolours by JMW Turner, a dramatic and diminutive drawing by John Martin, and nine intricate watercolours by Beatrix Potter.

With These Hands 

17 May - 27 September 2025

With These Hands explored the representation of craft in paintings, drawings, and prints. The process of making and mending by hand whether a domestic pastime, rural and semi-industrial labour, or essential war effort, is a persistent theme to which artists return. Yet these artworks are rarely straightforward observations of everyday activity. Instead, the act of making is used to symbolise personal and communal identity, leisure and work, tradition and progress.

 Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia

10 May - 7 September 2024

Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839), on loan from the National Gallery, was the centrepiece of the exhibition, which explored the rise of steam power and industry in Britain. The Laing Art Gallery was one of twelve partners to be loaned a masterpiece in celebration of the 200th birthday of the National Gallery, with all partners opening their exhibitions on 10 May 2024 – the Gallery’s official bicentenary. 

Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia included over 20 works by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), one of Britain’s greatest and most prolific painters. The Fighting Temeraire, one of the artist’s best-known works, is a tribute to the ship HMS Temeraire, which played a distinguished role in The Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The painting shows the final journey of the ship as it is towed along the river Thames by a modern paddle-wheel steam tug in 1838, towards its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap.

It is significant for the North East and its industrial heritage that the two steam tugboats that pulled the Temeraire in reality – the Samson and the London – were manufactured on Tyneside.

In addition to bringing together over 20 works by Turner, Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia included other important pieces by artists including Tacita Dean, Chris Killip, L.S. Lowry, and James McNeill Whistler. 

Essence of Nature

27 May - 14 October 2023

This significant exhibition traced radically different approaches to depicting the natural world, starting with the Pre-Raphaelites’ ideal of ‘truth to nature’, represented by such artists as William Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, William Dyce, John Brett and Anna Blunden. Rustic Naturalist painters also painted on the spot, but they turned away from hyper-real detail, aiming to capture the character and atmosphere of rural working landscapes. Light and colour characterise British Impressionist pictures. Sketching in front of their subjects, artists produced beautiful pictures of sunny hillsides, orchards and gardens, balancing scenes of relaxation with working farmland. Newlyn artists similarly took their easels to beaches and sunny uplands, and the exhibition included lovely scenes by Laura Knight, Samuel John Lamorna Birch, and Elizabeth Forbes.

Visions of Ancient Egypt

28 January - 29 April 2023

This exhibition examined the enduring appeal of ancient Egypt in art and design, exploring how ancient Egypt has been re-imagined across time to suit different ambitions and to construct changing identities. It used two important historic events as a point of departure – Jean-François Champollion’s 1822 decipherment of hieroglyphs and Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Including paintings, sculpture, photography, fashion and jewellery, this wide-ranging exhibition traced how processes of re-invention, appropriation, and subversion have generated multiple visions of Egypt since the Roman period. The Western fascination with ancient Egypt was explored side-by-side with Egypt’s own engagement with its ancient past.

These are Our Treasures

30 July 2022 - 11 February 2023

This display featured precious objects belonging to people of the North East. The objects and their related stories were gathered through a series of workshops in libraries with participants across the region, from Middlesbrough to Northumberland, and a public open call throughout the spring of 2022, when artist Ruth Ewan asked the question, ‘What do you treasure?’ 

At times funny, at times poignant, and always deeply moving, the objects and their associated stories form an unconventional museum display revealing local hidden histories. 

Lindisfarne Gospels

17 September - 3 December 2022

The Lindisfarne Gospels, the most spectacular manuscript to survive from Anglo-Saxon England, was on display at the Laing Art Gallery, on loan from the British Library. The exhibition explored the Gospels' meaning in the world today and its relationship with themes of personal, regional and national identity. 

Liquid Light: Painting in Watercolours

19 March - 13 August 2022

Including approximately 200 works from more than 170 artists, this large exhibition featured the Laing Art Gallery's nationally significant collection of watercolours, spanning more than three centuries of art. The show included important pictures from the 'golden age' from about 1780 to 1880, when British watercolours were established as an influential art movement. 

Portrait of an Artist 

11 September 2021 - 26 February 2022. 

Narrated by Exhibitions Officer Katie Irwin, the exhibition was brought together by renowned art dealer Liss Llewellyn. Comprising over 85 oil paintings, drawings and prints, the exhibition offered audiences an opportunity to step into the inner world of the artist, shedding light on their personal lives and creative processes.  

Challenging Convention 

17 May - 21 August 2021

This exhibition focused on the work of artists Dod Procter, Laura Knight, Gwen John, and Vanessa Bell. Keeper of Art Lizzie Jacklin narrates and explores the themes and works within the show.

 Art Deco by the Sea

17 October 2020 - 27 February 2021

Keeper of Art Sarah Richardson unpacks the first major exhibition to explore how the Art Deco-style transformed the British seaside during the 1920s and 30s. 

The following film presents an introduction to The North East Coast Exhibition, a world fair held in Exhibition Park, Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929. 

If you enjoyed Art Deco by the Sea, you may enjoy our blog post about the exhibition here.

COMING HOME: Sir Ridley Scott

These two films take a closer look at the portrait of acclaimed film director Sir Ridley Scott, created by artist Nina Mae Fowler. The portrait was on loan to the Laing Art Gallery from the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of its COMING HOME initiative, which sees portraits of iconic individuals being loaned to places across the UK with which they are most closely associated.

View the general tour below:

Find out about our learning programme here:

Explore our PORTRAIT CHALLENGE online exhibition here.

William and Evelyn de Morgan: Two of the Rarest Spirits of the Age 

10 August - 26 September 2020

This exhibition explored the exceptional work created by Victorian era’s art power couple William and Evelyn de Morgan, a pair of very different and equally intriguing 19th/20th century British artists. Curator Sarah Richardson and Conservator Ana Flynn-Young present two short films about each artist.