White Chapel Somerset presents recent landscape paintings by Isabelle Weir (b. 1999, Somerset), shown alongside early 20th-century lithographs by Maurice de Vlaminck, Édouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Georges Braque. Weir lives and works in Florence, where she trained at the Florence Academy of Art and teaches in its core programme. She holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge.

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Over 18 months, Weir worked daily from life across the Florentine landscape, often at sunrise or sunset, producing gestural studies that capture subtle shifts in light and atmosphere. These paintings are less about place and more about the act of witnessing—raw, immediate impressions that balance classical technique with a personal, sensory engagement. Many are titled by date and time, resembling entries in a painter’s diary.

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Alongside Weir’s work, the lithographs offer intimate scenes of interior life—Vuillard’s figures mid-gesture, Lautrec’s social caricatures, Bonnard’s domestic stillness, and Vlaminck’s bold still lifes. Together, they form a dialogue around ephemerality, memory, and the visual language of fleeting moments.

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The project also includes a collaboration with writer Simonetta Wenkert and chef Avi Reichenbach, co-founders of the London restaurant Ida. At the opening, guests shared a meal prepared from recipes in Wenkert’s memoir Ida at My Table, exploring parallels between painting and cooking as practices of memory, repetition, and transformation—where raw materials become language, and language becomes form.