#: locale=en ## Action ### URL LinkBehaviour_C95EDF9A_C5F4_6AC1_41A1_54643B431252.source = http://www.loremipsum.com LinkBehaviour_C98EAF54_C5F4_6A41_41B8_8129D61E67C3.source = http://www.loremipsum.com LinkBehaviour_938F80C3_89DC_27A3_41DB_E32959E4456F.source = http://www.loremipsum.com WebFrame_939F00AA_89DC_27ED_41DF_3A2967E56853_mobile.url = https://maps.google.com/maps?output=embed¢er=51.5081836,-0.1290675&z=17&q=Trafalgar+Square WebFrame_198A3B12_1666_89B6_41B5_4C2585EFD00E.url = https://maps.google.com/maps?output=embed¢er=51.5081836,-0.1290675&z=17&q=Trafalgar+Square WebFrame_9107B91B_892C_E6A3_41D9_63C2C45577EB.url = https://maps.google.com/maps?output=embed¢er=51.5081836,-0.1290675&z=17&q=Trafalgar+Square WebFrame_198A3B12_1666_89B6_41B5_4C2585EFD00E_mobile.url = https://maps.google.com/maps?output=embed¢er=51.5081836,-0.1290675&z=17&q=Trafalgar+Square LinkBehaviour_1A50DD9B_0D44_8682_41AA_DC3598D26E05.source = https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/make-a-donation LinkBehaviour_D048338E_C8FF_309D_41E6_01F77A55473A.source = https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/make-a-donation PopupWebFrameBehaviour_16285FA0_1B30_6436_41A6_86094D3C85FF.url = https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/floorplans/level-2 LinkBehaviour_C95F6F9A_C5F4_6AC1_41B2_A92FC210B88F.source = https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/plan-your-visit LinkBehaviour_C98F9F54_C5F4_6A41_41AD_C02ECDE016C7.source = https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/plan-your-visit ## Hotspot ### Text HotspotPanoramaOverlayTextImage_2EC41C9B_0711_E269_4181_55A42D17BEB7.text = Click Drag the Mouse to move around. Scroll-wheel to Zoom. 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HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_0E5B541B_1D50_640A_4151_12EBA74C86AA.toolTip = Move further Up Room 34 HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_0DE9BFC4_1D71_E47E_41AB_789969CC057D.toolTip = Onwards to Room 34 HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_0DFC53A7_1D70_5C3A_41B7_2370213B723D.toolTip = Onwardss to Room 41 HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_0E6186C7_1D70_E47A_4171_08C52E6635AD.toolTip = Progress to Room 29 HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_2045D1B7_3B1D_DF5D_41A1_BC9D1ED2AE00.toolTip = Progress to Room 29 HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_0DE0300D_1D71_DC0E_41A9_F95C21088A67.toolTip = Restart The Tour HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_C5FB2FF5_D237_0BD2_41E8_98A4B3D468AA.toolTip = Self Portrait by Jan Lievens ## Media ### 360 Video ### Audio audiores_2F7D6767_053D_3146_4148_58A46FA51602.mp3Url = media/audio_2C51FA38_0533_52CB_418E_FDA3B01C1FB4_en.mp3 AudioResource_8348FC8F_9002_45C4_41E3_521F1990B1FB.mp3Url = media/audio_D58D718F_C9A5_309B_41E2_23AA587D3EC1_en.mp3 ### Image imlevel_2EC872CA_0712_27EB_41BF_5C14522E7939.url = 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VirtualViewing360
152 WD25 0HH
info@vv360.co.uk
https://www.vv360.co.uk
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A bearded bishop, dressed in his episcopal regalia, stands over a child lying in a street in Florence. This is Saint Zenobius, fourth-century bishop of Florence and one of its patron saints, bringing a boy back to life. According to his fifteenth-century biographer, the saint had been entrusted with the care of a boy while his mother made a pilgrimage to Rome. While the saint was taking part in a procession at the church of San Pier Maggiore (visible in the background), the child was run over by a cart. The mother, returning the same day, picked up his body and ran to find Zenobius. She met the procession on the Borgo degli Albizzi, and laid down her son’s body at Zenobius’s feet, ‘full of tears, rending her garments, and tearing her hair with grief’, whereupon the saint restored him to life.
This large picture, which was clearly meant to be seen from below, must have been an important altarpiece. It was painted for Bilivert’s great friend Giuliano Girolami, along with a life-size image of Saint Charles Borromeo in prayer. The Girolami were a prominent Florentine banking and mercantile family who claimed to be related to Zenobius: the family’s coat of arms appears on the saint’s morse, or clasp. The Girolami associated themselves with the saint both through art – Botticelli’s Two Spalliera Panels were perhaps made for them – and through religious ritual. Banners decorated with their arms hung on his shrine in the cathedral on Zenobius’s feast day (25 May) and they owned what was thought to be his ring.
Bilivert was born in Florence, the son of a Dutch goldsmith employed at the Medici court. He was the most successful pupil of Lodovico Cigoli, the leading exponent of a distinctively Florentine Baroque style whose luminous colours and intense emotionalism Bilivert adopted.
This was a favourite Florentine miracle and was portrayed by numerous other artists, including Lorenzo Ghiberti, Benozzo Gozzoli, Domenico Veneziano, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli.
Bilivert may have known some or all of the earlier interpretations of the miracle. Like his predecessors, he focused on the moment of highest drama, with the desperate mother at the bishop’s feet as he appeals to heaven. Bilivert’s composition reflects the new artistic priorities of the Counter-Reformation Church. Faced with the threat of Protestantism, Catholic patrons and artists sought to glorify the reinvigorated Church and to convey its dogma and the miracles of its saints in the clearest possible fashion.
Bilivert has reduced the story to its essentials. The Florentine setting is indicated by the tower and east end of San Pier Maggiore (demolished in 1784), and the great procession consists of just five onlookers. The monumental figures of the saint, mother and child fill the foreground. The success of Zenobius’s intervention is assured: the child raises his head to look up at the saint, and at the divine light appearing in the sky behind his crosier and the distant bell tower.
Characteristically, Bilivert has paid great attention to fabrics and textures. Zenobius and his deacons are superbly dressed as contemporary clerics, their robes embroidered with saints and scenes from the life of Christ. Their luxurious robes contrast with the white of their linens, Zenobius’s old age with the youth of his companions. The sacred is brought vividly to life, showing that miracles can happen in the streets of Florence.
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In this vast canvas Orazio Gentileschi depicts the Old Testament story of the Finding of Moses (Exodus 2:2-10). When Pharaoh decreed that all newborn sons of Hebrews should be killed, the infant Moses was placed by his mother in a basket and hidden in bulrushes to ensure his safety. Moses’s sister Miriam hid nearby and watched as Pharaoh’s daughter came to bathe in the River Nile, accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting. Upon finding the basket, and the infant inside, Pharaoh’s daughter proposed to take him back to the palace. Miriam came forward and, having offered to find someone to help nurse the baby, fetched her own – and Moses’s – mother. Pharaoh’s daughter named the infant Moses, which means ‘to draw out’, since she had drawn him out of the water.
This monumental painting is composed of nine life-size female figures who crowd around the basket at the heart of the composition. Just plucked from the water, it is in this basket that we see Moses, plump and wriggling, on a crumpled white sheet. Several of the women lean forward to gaze at this surprising discovery: two at the right gesture towards the river, indicating where the basket was found. The woman in the magnificent yellow gown embellished with jewels is Pharaoh’s daughter. The diminutive figure kneeling respectfully at lower left is Miriam, and beside her – dressed in red and white, and drawing a protective arm around her – is her mother.
Having enjoyed an international career, working in cities such as Rome, Genoa, Turin and Paris, Orazio arrived in London in 1626 to assume a position at the court of the newly crowned King Charles I. It was here, in the early 1630s, that he was commissioned to paint The Finding of Moses for Charles’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. The painting was almost certainly intended to celebrate the birth of their son and heir, the future Charles II. The Finding of Moses certainly had special significance for Henrietta Maria since she reclaimed the painting as her personal property after the Restoration and kept it in her private apartments. A closely related variant – today in the Museo del Prado, Madrid – was sent by Orazio as a gift to Philip IV of Spain in 1633, probably to commemorate the birth of Philip’s own heir in 1629.
Together with Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, Orazio was one of the leading international painters who came to work at the court of Charles I in England. The paintings he produced in London are characterised by their rich colouring, skilful rendering of luxurious fabrics and courtly elegance. Of all his royal commissions, The Finding of Moses is the most ambitious and displays unparalleled refinement and beauty. Indeed, the women’s gowns are so exquisitely depicted here that they almost eclipse the painting’s narrative content. The idyllic landscape on the right, with its gentle slopes and lush green trees, is more evocative of the English countryside than Egypt where the story of Moses is set. This was a deliberate decision on Orazio’s part, for the painting originally hung in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, on the banks of the River Thames.
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The courage and beauty of the Jewish heroine Judith are celebrated in this painting, which expresses both the sensuality and the gore of her legend. When her hometown of Bethulia was besieged by Assyrian forces, Judith infiltrated the enemy camp. Disarmed by her looks, the soldiers believed her when she offered them assistance. She gained entry to the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, and when he was drunk after a banquet she seized his sword and cut off his head.
Liss shows the moment immediately afterwards, with Judith placing Holofernes‘ head into a sack held open by her maid; the white of his upturned right eyeball is just visible. Her gaze is steely and resolute as she turns to look at the viewer, but her cheeks are flushed, her skin shiny with sweat and her fleshy lips glossy. Tendrils of hair in a spiral have escaped from her turban and rest against the smooth flesh of her neck. Judith’s body is partly bare – the exertion has loosened her chemise, revealing her back and shoulders. Holofernes is half-naked, with only his wrinkled bed sheets covering the lower part of his body. These hints of sensuality reflect the intimacy of the murder, which took place when the two were alone at night in the tent: Holofernes believed that Judith was trying to seduce him, not kill him.
It is impossible to avoid the streams of blood, so thick that they catch the light, gushing relentlessly from Holofernes’ mutilated neck, depicted more squarely than Judith’s face. His muscular torso is cast partly in shadow by her body, highlighting the juxtaposition of their brightly lit left arms. His muscles are echoed by the billowing folds of her voluminous sleeves, emphasising the victory of feminine guile over masculine strength.
Their limbs and bodies are positioned so that they create a continuous circle up through the sweeping curve of Judith’s body, through the three heads – Judith’s, the maid’s and Holofernes‘– and down to Holofernes’ bloodied wound, along his right arm and back to Judith. Her thick silk draperies and the creamy texture of her thickly painted turban contrast with the yellow sheen of Holofernes' corpse and the glint of his cold armour at the very bottom of the picture. Contemporary viewers would have known that, according to the Book of Judith, she remained pure and undefiled, the chastity of her conquest making her victory all the more righteous. This composition and the variety of textures enhance the narrative, juxtaposing delight with horror and tricking the viewer just as Judith tricked Holofernes.
The drama of the composition, the powerful gestures and the use of strong contrasts of light and shade are typical of the Baroque period and particularly reflect the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio, whose paintings Liss must have seen while he was in Rome in the 1620s.
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The infant Christ stands on the lap of the Virgin Mary, reaching forward to give her a kiss. She turns her cheek to receive her son’s embrace, supporting him as he seems to be a little unsteady on his feet. Strong lighting emphasises the smooth, pale skin of both figures as well as Christ’s golden hair, though it leaves much of his face in shadow. Sassoferrato has given great attention to the folds of drapery, both in the Virgin’s blue cloak and in the deep green curtain behind the two figures. Through an archway, we see Saint Joseph coming towards the house and, behind him, a view of distant mountains.
Sassoferrato was born Giovanni Battista Salvi and took his nickname from the town of his birth, but he spent the majority of his career working in Rome, where his immaculately polished paintings were consciously anachronistic. This composition is based on an etching by Guido Reni, a seventeenth-century painter from Bologna whose work deeply influenced Sassoferrato. However, Sassoferrato’s style, with its intense colours, soft modelling of form, and highly finished, enamel-like quality, is most deeply indebted to earlier artists such as Raphael and Perugino. We know that he produced copies after these masters' works (the National Gallery owns a copy after Perugino that is probably by Sassoferrato: The Baptism of Christ), and used elements from their paintings and drawings in his own compositions. Sassoferrato was so closely linked to these artists that his popularity in the nineteenth century was in part thanks to a renewed interest in the work of Raphael. He in turn may have influenced the Pre-Raphaelites.
Like his contemporary Dolci, Sassoferrato produced multiple versions of his smaller paintings, which could be sold to private patrons. The relatively small size of this picture, the tender relationship between mother and child and the intimate, somewhat domestic nature of the setting suggest that it was intended for private devotion. It may never have been delivered to its patron, however, since it was probably one of a group of late works left in Sassoferrato’s studio at his death in 1685. The painting is thought to have passed to his son, Alessio Salvi, and then to Salvi’s granddaughter, remaining in the family until the early nineteenth century.
This picture and The Virgin in Prayer were both acquired by the National Gallery in the mid-nineteenth century, when Sassoferrato’s star was high in the London art world. The bright colours of both pictures were initially toned down by the Gallery using tinted varnish and overpainted with cobalt blue to better align with the Victorian taste for more subdued colouring. When this picture was cleaned in 1986, these layers were removed, and the Virgin’s dazzling ultramarine robe and the vivid green curtain can now be appreciated as the artist originally intended.
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The subject of Rosa’s painting – the story of the honest woodsman – is extremely uncommon in European art. It is taken from Aesop’s Fables, a collection of ancient Greek tales with moral lessons. In the story, the god Mercury takes pity on a woodsman who has accidentally dropped his axe into a river. He retrieves two axes from the water, one gold and one silver; the woodsman claims neither as his own and, as a reward for his honesty, Mercury gives him both, along with the original axe. On hearing this a dishonest woodsman threw his own tool in the river and pretended that it was made of precious metal. Rosa’s painting shows Mercury in his winged helmet emerging from the water holding a golden axe, and the woodsman dashing forwards to claim it. The god, disgusted by the man’s dishonesty, denied him the axe.
Like many themes selected by Rosa, this one has a strong moral message: the virtue of honesty, even at the price of self interest. Rosa was familiar with many of Aesop’s stories; he included references to the author’s work in his satirical poetry, and a volume by Aesop is depicted in his painting Moral Philosophy (private collection). Rosa became increasingly interested in classical philosophy through the group of intellectuals he befriended in Rome during the 1650s and 1660s. He longed to be accepted as a painter of philosophical subjects and greatly resented his reputation as a specialist in landscape and genre scenes. But his dark and awe-inspiring late landscapes, like this one, are among his most powerfully inventive works.
During the 1660s, Rosa’s style became increasingly dramatic and turbulent, characterised by stormy clouds, rushing torrents of water and windswept trees that loom threateningly over small figures. In contrast to Rosa’s earlier landscapes, which took inspiration from the balanced and harmonious work of Claude and Nicholas Poussin, his contemporaries in Rome, this untamed and hostile scene is theatrical and dynamic. The figures seem tiny and insubstantial beneath the dark, voluminous clouds and masses of dense foliage.
This picture was commissioned around 1663 by Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a major collector of landscape painting in Rome. In the dramatic posing of the figures and the contrast between the dark foreground and blue distant mountains, there are similarities with the late works of Dughet, such as Landscape with Elijah and the Angel, which also entered Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna’s collection during the early 1660s. Rosa’s painting – for which his patron supposedly sent a blank cheque, allowing the artist to name his price – was, unusually, paired with a biblical work, The Finding of Moses (Detroit Institute of Arts).
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This devotional painting makes us feel as if we are in the same room as the Virgin Mary, who appears almost life-size, praying in quiet devotion. The background is so plain and dark that nothing distracts us from her bowed head framed by a white headdress and her radiant, porcelain-like skin.
This picture is remarkable for its simplicity, making use of swathes of just three colours – red, white and blue – with no extraneous details to distract us from the praying figure. The Virgin is so strongly lit and her skin so flawless that she takes on an almost sculptural quality, and feels like a real presence in front of us. The bright lighting combined with the impenetrable dark background makes the blue of the her robes especially brilliant. Sassferrato has used ultramarine for these. Made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mined in north-eastern Afghanistan, ultramarine was the most expensive of blue pigments, and highly prized for its intense colour.
Sassoferrato specialised in this kind of deeply felt devotional image and, despite also painting large-scale altarpieces, he is now known as a master of painting the Virgin at prayer. He produced at least four different designs on this theme, which exist in several versions both by his hand and by his studio assistants. Sometimes the Virgin has her hands pressed together and her head directed downward towards the left, as we see here; other designs show her facing frontally, turned to the right in a blue headdress or gazing upward. The subject of the Virgin alone and at prayer was developed in the fifteenth century, but it grew in popularity as sixteenth-century reformers of the Roman Catholic Church advocated a more personal approach to worship, placing greater emphasis on individual devotion and contemplation. Sassoferrato capitalised on this growing market, producing relatively small pictures that appealed to private collectors.
Despite his popularity, we know relatively little about Sassoferrato’s career and work. He was born in the Marches and baptised Giovanni Battista Salvi, taking his nickname from the town of his birth. He spent much of career in Rome, where he was influenced by contemporary painters like Guido Reni. His characteristic style, however, is indebted to artists such as Raphael and Perugino (both of whom had died around 120 years earlier). In this picture – and in The Virgin and Child Embracing, which places more emphasis on the Virgin’s connection with her son – the similarities to Raphael are striking in the elegantly coloured robes and sculpted facial features. The National Gallery acquired its two paintings by Sassoferrato in the mid-nineteenth century, when there was a renewed interest in his work, as well as that of Raphael.
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This portrait is full of gentle curves and lustrous surfaces: an ornate silver ewer stands behind a woman whose shimmering drapery falls in folds around her. She fixes us with a piercing gaze as she leans against a table and toys with the closed fan in her right hand. We don't know the woman’s identity, but her elegant costume alludes to her wealth and status. She is outdoors, or possibly standing at the edge of an architectural portico or archway, and the sky behind her is cloudy.
This portrait was long attributed to the celebrated Neapolitan artist Francesco Solimena, but this changed when it entered the National Gallery’s collection in 1955 – it was thought instead to be the work of an anonymous painter from Naples. However, recent conservation and cleaning revealed the painting’s high quality, and it has now been reattributed to Solimena. Another picture, A Female Figure resting on a Sword was accepted as being by Solimena when it entered the Gallery’s collection in 1926, but it is now thought unlikely to be by him or his studio.
Solimena was not only a portraitist but a painter of mythological and allegorical subjects, such as Dido receiving Aeneas and Cupid disguised as Ascanius and An Allegory of Louis XIV, both painted much earlier on in his career. This portrait can be dated to about 1740, when Solimena was around 80 years old. Though he adopted a darker, more sombre style in his later works, rich colouring heightened by light effects characterised his paintings throughout his career.
The portrait once belonged to the Hungarian art historian Frederick Antal, who fled to Britain from Germany when the Nazi party took power in the 1930s. It was bequeathed to the Gallery in his memory by his wife.
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Two women retrieve a baby from a basket floating in a river, while three others look on from the bank and a fourth peers around a dead tree. This is the story of Moses in the bulrushes. According to the Old Testament (Exodus 2: 5), Moses was born in Egypt, where the Israelites were enslaved. The Egyptian Pharaoh ordered all male Jewish children to be drowned in the Nile but Moses’s mother set out to save her son: ‘And when she could hide him no longer, she took a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and pitch: and put the little babe therein, and laid him in the sedges by the river’s brink … And behold the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself in the river: and her maids walked by the river’s brink. And when she saw the basket in the sedges, she sent one of her maids for it: and when it was brought she opened it and seeing within it an infant crying, having compassion on it she said: This is one of the babes of the Hebrews.’ Pharaoh’s daughter took pity on the child, and sent Moses’s sister, Miriam – seen here watching from behind the tree – to fetch a wet nurse. She brought her mother, who took back the baby and raised him until Pharaoh’s daughter later adopted him as her own son.
The elongated proportions of the figures, facial types and the sensitive use of colour are all characteristic of Antonio De Bellis. They are also closely related to the works of his Neapolitan contemporary Bernardo Cavallino, to whom this painting was once attributed. According to the eighteenth-century biographer Bernardo de' Dominici, De Bellis was a pupil of Massimo Stanzione.
De Bellis seems to have left Naples in the mid-1650s and gone to Dubrovnik. There are two monogrammed works by him there: The Holy Family (about 1657; Madonna of Sunja, Lopud ) and The Virgin in Glory with Saints Blaise and Francis (about 1657–8; Dominican Monastery, Dubrovnik). He then probably returned to Naples and this is one of four pictures thought to date from the late 1650s, after De Bellis’s time in Dubrovnik.
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This crowded banquet scene shows Christ’s first miracle (John 2: 1–10). He, his mother and the disciples were invited to a wedding feast at Cana in Galilee. When the wine ran out, Mary told her son. Although protesting ‘my time is not yet come’, he nevertheless asked to have six stone jars filled with water which, when tasted, was found to be wine of the finest quality. Christ is seated at the right next to his mother, who has told the servants to do his bidding. The astonished steward – probably the man in red on the left – exclaimed: ‘Thou hast kept the best wine till last ’.
Mattia Preti vividly conveys the emotional drama of the episode. In the foreground servants are decanting the miraculous wine, while the man seated next to Mary lifts his hand in astonishment. In the centre of the composition an exquisite goblet is held out by the steward, into which a black servant pours a golden liquid. In the background, the party goes on, the guests oblivious to the astounding event that has just taken place.
Preti travelled throughout the Italian peninsula in search of appreciative patrons. From 1653 he was in Naples, where he filled the void left by the death of the painters Jusepe de Ribera, Bernardo Cavallino and Massimo Stanzione. Preti’s work was a sophisticated blend of Venetian, Lombard and Roman art and he introduced the Neapolitans to innovations from other artistic centres. At the same time he kept the dramatic contrasts of light and shadow that had originated with Caravaggio and had remained popular in Naples well after Caravaggio’s death, much later than elsewhere in Italy.
Intended for a private picture gallery, not a church, this is one of a number of adaptations of the Marriage at Cana which Preti painted while in Naples. Indeed, Preti made a speciality of grand banquet scenes throughout his career. They were largely modelled on the paintings of Veronese. The group on the left – the bride and groom, the dog, the servant with his back to the viewer and the boy holding the glass – are all inspired by Veronese’s large-scale Marriage at Cana (Louvre, Paris), though transformed under the influence of Caravaggio and Ribera. Also influential was Rubens’s acclaimed painting The Feast of Herod (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), then in the collection of Preti’s patron Gaspar de Roomer, a wealthy Flemish merchant resident in Naples.
Executed with a quick and masterly touch, this is a picture of Preti’s maturity, in which problems of composition, lighting and the arrangement of figures are all cleverly resolved. A number of pentimenti are visible in the architecture on the right and in the red jacket of the figure on the left, showing the artist making changes to the composition as he painted.
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Jacques-Louis David painted portraits throughout his career, but family portraits, including those of mothers and children, are rare. Portrait of the Comtesse Vilain XIIII and her Daughter dates from 1816, the first year of David’s exile in Brussels following the fall of Napoleon, whom David had supported. Images of motherhood and maternal affection had been popular in French art since the 1780s. However, unlike such precedents, David’s picture does not depict a full embrace or kiss, but is an unsentimental scene of restrained affection rather than overt emotion.
The Comtesse, Sophie, and her five-year-old daughter, Marie-Louise, form a simple triangle set within a shallow space. A number of subtle echoes and contrasts are at work within this basic format: mother and daughter have almost identical hairstyles and wear similar dresses. The seated Comtesse is static and contemplative, her gaze focused on a distant point beyond the viewer. Marie-Louise’s pose, however, hints at movement. Standing, she leans back into her mother’s lap while tilting her head slightly in the opposite direction. Unlike her mother’s, her gaze directly meets our own. This combination of complementary active and passive elements is particularly evident in the hands. As Marie-Louise clasps her mother’s right hand with her right hand, the gesture is reversed on their left where it is Marie-Louise’s hand that is being held.
Despite the physical connection between mother and daughter, their interaction is subdued. David reinforces the impression of the Comtesse supporting her young daughter by draping the orange cloak over the chair and around the Comtesse’s right arm. The orange cloth complements the deep Prussian blue of the dress and brings warmth to the picture. These vivid and intense areas of colour, laid down in thin glazes, also reflect the impact of David’s renewed acquaintance with Flemish painting during his Belgian exile. David includes a variety of materials and fabrics, such as lace, linen and velvet. However, the absence of jewellery is noteworthy. Tellingly perhaps, given the political climate after Napoleon’s fall, the Comtesse does not wear the lavish necklace he had given her.
Like David, the Comtesse Vilain XIIII was connected to the Napoleonic cause. Her husband, Philippe Vilain XIIII had been Mayor of Ghent and was ennobled by Napoleon in 1811 (the numerals XIIII originated from an ancestor who had presented the keys to Ghent to Louis XVI). The Comtesse herself had formerly been lady-in-waiting to the Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, after whom she named her daughter.
The Comtesse most likely commissioned the portrait directly from David, and five letters she wrote to her husband between May and July 1816 provide a rare insight into David’s working method. Complaining about the long sittings, typically over four hours, in the painter’s studio and of David’s meticulous approach, the Comtesse – who was pregnant with her fourth child – noted, ‘I must admit that the whole things is becoming boring’ and that she did not find the ‘wretched’ David appealing. Significantly, the letters make no mention of her daughter. Close examination of the painting reveals that she was a late, but easily accommodated, addition. Despite the lack of rapport between sitter and artist, the Comtesse declared that she was very pleased with the finished picture.
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By the late nineteenth century hybridisation had created almost 200 different varieties of iris. The flowers had originated in Japan and featured in the Japanese prints Monet so admired – we know that he owned a print of Irises by the Japanese artist Hokusai. He would also have been familiar with the paintings of irises that Van Gogh made in the year before his death in 1890. Monet cultivated many different varieties of iris, and in 1913 his head gardener even published an article in a horticultural magazine detailing the different types that grew in the garden, including one that was named ‘Mme Claude Monet’, after Monet’s wife.
Irises were planted beneath the trees in the ‘Clos Normand’ flower garden in front of Monet’s house and around the banks and along the paths of the lily pond in his water garden. Clumps of them can be seen bordering the pond in an earlier view of the water garden, The Water-lily pond. The irises made an impressive sight. Georges Truffaut, a great horticultural expert who visited Giverny, wrote: ‘The edges of the pond are thickly covered with irises of every kind. In the spring there are Iris sibirica and Virginian irises with their long petals and velvety texture; later on the Japanese irises and the Kaempferi irises grow here in quantity.’
This painting is one of approximately 20 views of irises in the water garden that Monet painted around 1914–17. One striking characteristic of these canvases is the experimentation with unusual and unexpected viewpoints. It looks as though the bird’s-eye view here is painted from a vantage point on the Japanese bridge.
Most of the iris pictures of this date are exactly two metres high, the same height as Water-Lilies, the large panel also in the National Gallery’s collection. The pictures were painted in the large studio Monet had built at Giverny in order to work on huge canvases of his water garden. The National Gallery’s iris painting was rapidly executed, with the garden path laid in first and the flower border worked over its edges. The most fluid section is the swirling blues and greens in the lower right corner. Like Water-Lilies, it is painted on a luminous white ground, which is left uncovered in places, particularly in the lower right corner and along the lower edge, and the brushwork is very loose and open at the right edge of the picture. Monet applied thick purples, blues and greens using bold, even crude strokes. The effects may have been partly the result of the double cataracts which were altering his vision by this date.
It is not clear whether Monet regarded the picture as finished since it remained in his studio (along with Water-Lilies) at his death. It is possible that the large pictures of irises were intended as studies, and that Monet may at one point have been thinking of including irises in his Grandes Dėcorations series of paintings of the water-lily pond. The final series, which he donated to the French state, and which is now on show in the Musėe de l’Orangerie in Paris, does not include irises, but a photograph taken in 1920 of the Grandes Dėcorations in progress suggests that Monet may have considered featuring them in the scheme.
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During the final two decades of his life Monet devoted himself to painting the water garden he had created at his home in Giverny, producing around 250 innovative canvases. Around 200 of these represent just the water-lilies floating on the surface of the water, while the remainder show the Japanese bridge at the northern edge of the pond, the weeping willow trees, wisteria, irises, agapanthus and day lilies on its banks.
From 1902 to 1908 Monet concentrated on an extended series of views of the water-lily pond that marked a radical departure in his work. He gradually did away with the banks of the pond and the traditional horizon line and abandoned the depiction of the Japanese bridge and trees (which can be seen in earlier paintings such as The Water-Lily Pond) in order to concentrate on the subtle modulations of light as it transformed the water and the reflections of foliage and clouds. The exercise was challenging and at times frustrating, and Monet even destroyed some of the canvases because he was dissatisfied with them. But in May 1909 he exhibited 48 paintings at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris with the title ‘Water lilies: Series of Water Landscapes.’ The critical response was overwhelmingly positive, and by the end of the year 19 of the pictures had been sold. One commentator wrote that ‘Monet has reached the final degree of abstraction and imagination allied to the real that his art of the landscapist allows.’
In this painting we are looking down on the surface of the pond. We see reflections in the water, but not the sky and trees that are being reflected. The only hint to help situate us is the clump of plants in the bottom left corner, which indicates the approximate position of the bank. These plants may have been added after the main body of the painting was completed in about 1907, as a photograph taken in Monet’s studio at around that date shows the picture without them. The leaves are sketched in with quickly applied, almost calligraphic brushstrokes that recall Japanese brush painting. Pink and yellow light from the setting sun shimmers on the still surface of the water in which the water lilies float. Monet conveys the flatness of the water surface while at the same time indicating its depth. There is an intriguing interplay between the horizontal lily pads and the dark vertical reflections of the weeping willows.
Another person who saw the exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s was Marcel Proust, who was starting his monumental 12-part novel In Search of Lost Time (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu). His description of the waterlilies on the river Vivonne in the first volume, Swann’s Way, is based on Monet’s pictures: ‘…the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there, on the surface, floated, blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of white petals.’
Monet kept this painting in his studio until 1923, when he may have reworked it.
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In the years after he settled in Giverny in 1883, Monet began exploring the nearby area looking for subjects to paint. He was increasingly interested in making series of paintings showing the same subject in different light and weather conditions. In 1890 he painted 25 pictures of haystacks in the nearby fields; 1891 he painted 23 pictures of poplars which lined the left bank of the river Epte south of Giverny; and about the time this picture was painted he was working on a series of views of the Seine in the early morning light, as seen from his studio boat on the river.
While this painting shows the same concern with weather effects and atmospheric harmony as the series pictures, it was not conceived as part of a series. It is a record of the extensive flood caused by torrential rain that fell in the autumn of 1896, when the Epte burst its banks and overflowed into the meadow next to Monet’s property. Obliged to remain close to home, Monet painted the waterlogged landscape that he saw in front of him, including the row of pollarded willows that stood on the edge of the meadow which he had only recently painted bathed in the glorious spring sunshine.
The picture appears to be unfinished, and may have been produced on the spot. It is almost as though Monet was trying to find a pictorial equivalent for the watery subject matter. The palette is restricted to pale greys, greens and mauves; the tree branches are brushed in with fine, rapid strokes and the sky and the water are conveyed in fluid sweeps and washes. The canvas has been left bare in areas at the top and bottom, adding to the impression that this is a quickly made sketch. It may be a study for another picture, perhaps painted in the studio, now in a private collection in Switzerland. That work is painted from a similar viewpoint but shows more of the foreground and the upper parts of the trees, and the reflections in the calmer waters are more prominent.
Ironically, it was the waters of the Epte that fed the pool that Monet had dug three years previously to create his water garden at Giverny. Designed to feature aquatic plants, to delight the eye and provide him with an inexhaustible subject to paint, it would eventually feature a Japanese footbridge and a lavish display of waterlilies.
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A boy has paused from the thirsty work of herding sheep at noon to lie flat on the bank of a pool and drink its cool water. This vision of a Suffolk lane in high summer was painted in January to March 1826 in Constable’s studio in London.
The lane winding into the cornfield was based on Fen Lane, along which Constable had often walked as a boy from his own village of East Bergholt to Dedham, where he attended school. The lane still exists but the countryside shown beyond it was largely conjured up in Constable’s studio. The church tower and cluster of red-roofed houses ‘never existed’, as the artist’s son Charles Constable was later to point out – Constable invented the village to provide a distant focal point beyond the bend of the river. His resolve to be a ‘natural painter’ did not mean that he depicted everything faithfully.
Constable completed the painting by 8 April 1826, when he dispatched it titled ‘Landscape’ to the Royal Academy for the exhibition opening to the public on 1 May. Shortage of time had forced him to work quickly. He had intended to exhibit his large Waterloo Bridge but had to lay it aside on account of ‘the ruinous state of my finances’. Although not as large as his ’six-footers‘, The Cornfield was of a sufficient size to continue Constable’s bid for attention at the Royal Academy for his monumental scenes of the Stour Valley.
A wooded lane leading to a more sunlit landscape was a recurrent feature of Constable’s compositions, and is reminiscent of the work of both the Dutch painter van Ruisdael, and Suffolk-born Gainsborough, which Constable admired. His first idea for The Cornfield is expressed in a very free oil sketch now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He then produced an oil study of just the landscape (now on loan to the City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham). The finished picture closely follows the landscape contours of the Birmingham study and echoes its light. The detail of the boy drinking was taken from an oil sketch made some 15 years earlier, probably also in Fen Lane.
Constable remarked to his friend Fisher: ’I do hope to sell this present picture – as it has certainly got a little more eye-salve than I usually give them.‘ By ’eye-salve' he probably meant picturesque details such as the drinking boy, the donkeys grazing the bank dotted with poppies and cow parsley, the flock of sheep, distant village and meandering river. The cornfield itself is painted with masterly economy: just a few vertical brushstrokes at the field’s edge suggest the tall wheat, while broader brushstrokes convey the undulating sweep of the field.
Despite receiving critical praise, the painting failed to sell, either at the Royal Academy or at any of the four other exhibitions to which Constable sent it. It was named The Cornfield by the committee of friends and admirers that finally bought it and presented it to the National Gallery in 1837 after Constable’s death. It was the first picture by Constable to enter the national collection.
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A group of musicians is gathered around a table in a grand neoclassical loggia – it is difficult to identify them with certainty. André Bouys worked for a number of musicians, several of whose portraits he exhibited. The man standing on the right is probably Michel de La Barre (about 1675–15 March 1745), as the sheet music is an exact copy of his work published in 1707. It is inscribed: TRIO DE M. DE LA BARRE / SONATES EN TRIO / POUR LA FLUTE TRAVERS[IÈRE] / PREMIER SONATE’ (‘Trio of M. de La Barre / Trio sonatas / for the transverse flute’), and on the sheet music on which the flautist on the right rests his hand is written: LIVRE III DES…DE / SONATES EN TRIO / POUR LA FLUTE TRAVERSI [ÈRE] / PRIMIÈRE SONATE (‘Book III of../ Trio sonatas / for the transverse flute / First sonata’).
La Barre was a member of the French Académie de Musique; he published two opera-ballets and was an instrumentalist in La Musique de la Grande Ecurie, a group of musicians paid by the king to play ceremonial music on formal occasions. Bouys had exhibited a now lost portrait of La Barre at the 1699 Salon. The sheet music featured here includes the first trio sonatas written solely for flutes and bass to be published in France.
The bass viol player is probably Marin Marais, the composer of four tragic operas and numerous compositions for bass viol, including the first trio sonatas published in France. The identity of the two flute-players is less certain. Based on their ages, they are most likely to be Pierre Danican Philidor and his cousin Anne Danican Philidor (Anne used here as a man’s name), both of whom played flute for the Grande Ecurie. The figure at the extreme left might be a posthumous portrait of Jacques II Danican Philidor, Pierre’s brother, who was also a musician and was killed in combat on 25 June 1709. His position outside the circle of musicians and his sombre clothing would support this suggestion. It is difficult to see what he is holding, but it may be a flute pointing to the earth.
However, it is equally possible that the two flautists are Philibert Rebille and Rene Pignon Descoteaux, who were both members of the Grande Ecurie and are known to have played together in 1725. The seated figure with the ivory flute may perhaps be Jean-Baptiste(?) Chauvet, a patron of La Barre, or the principal musician of the ensemble.
Another possibility is that the standing figure on the left may be a self portrait by the artist. The man’s features and expression do look a bit like a self-portrait of Bouys, shown with his wife, painted in 1713 (Musée National, Versailles). Bouys rarely signed his work and the fact that he chose to sign this painting at bottom left, below this figure, suggests that it may indeed be him.
The costumes indicate that the picture was probably painted around 1710. It was definitely painted after 1707, when La Barre’s music was published, but before 1722, when flutes began to be made in four pieces rather than three as shown here. There is a smaller slightly different and possibly slightly later version of this portrait at the Musée des Beaux Arts, Dijon and another smaller version, the current location of which is unknown.
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A horse-drawn cart trundles along a woodland path on the way to market. Two small boys and their dog walk alongside its giant wheel, while two girls sit perched on top of the produce. Carrots spill out of a basket, and turnips, potatoes and cabbages are loosely piled in. It is easy to imagine some of the vegetables tumbling out as the cart lurches through the water ahead. The older girl raises one arm, perhaps to shade her eyes from the flickering sunlight as they pass through the woods, or in response to the woodsman gathering fallen branches for firewood. Two weary travellers rest beside the road with their baskets, bundles and dog.
Gainsborough shows accurately how the horse is harnessed to the cart – there are no reins, as this is an old horse who has made the journey to market many times and all he needs to keep him on the path is a tap from the young boy’s fresh-cut stick. The original position of the horse’s head, which was nearer the cart, can now be seen through the paint which has become translucent with age.
The canvas is six feet high and as large as some of Gainsborough’s grand full-length portraits. It was painted at the end of 1786, about 18 months before Gainsborough died. The landscape elements – the position of the trees, and the angle of the gently sloping, uneven track – are based on a very freely painted unfinished oil sketch (private collection) that Gainsborough probably made in the same year. The solitary herdsman in the sketch, following his cows to a watering place, is replaced in the painting with the heavily laden market cart.
Gainsborough frequently drew and painted such ordinary country carts, as seen in his two versions of The Harvest Wagon of 1767 and 1784–5 (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). The horse and cart here are based on a black chalk and grey wash study probably made not much earlier than the painting. Gainsborough painted a slightly larger landscape, Peasant smoking at a Cottage Door (University of California, Los Angeles), in 1787, shortly after The Market Cart, and contemporaries considered that the two paintings went together as ‘companion pictures’.
The Market Cart is neither an accurate representation of rural life in 1786 nor an idealised landscape. If the painting can be said to have a meaning, perhaps it is about transience. We glimpse the market cart as it passes with its glowing carrots, dark-curled cabbages and pearly turnips, which the pretty young girls will have to sell in the market if they are not to be brought back home in a wilted state. Perhaps at the end of his life Gainsborough was fondly recalling days of his Suffolk boyhood, all too quickly passed.
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A man sits at a table, leaning forward slightly as he writes on a document. He pauses, as if to think for a moment or to acknowledge someone, his subdued but intense gaze producing an effect of great presence. He is elegantly dressed, but his plain clothes are not ostentatious. Unlike an aristocrat, he does not wear a wig; instead, it is his own hair that is powdered.
The simple format of this picture is similar to portraits David painted just a few years earlier, during the initial years of the French Revolution, in which an isolated figure is placed before a neutral background. However, the sparseness of those portraits is tempered here. Various objects – an inkwell, a gilt box, a quill pen – create a recognisable, everyday environment. David also paints Blauw’s clothing and accessories in meticulous detail: you can see traces of hair powder on the jacket’s collar and a hint of red reflected in its gleaming buttons. David’s skill with colour is especially evident as he coordinates the deep blue of the coat, turquoise-green of the tablecloth, pink handkerchief and hint of red chair fabric against a plain grey-brown background.
Jacobus Blauw was an important figure in the Dutch Patriotic movement, which helped establish the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. Although short-lived, it contributed to the transformation of the Netherlands from a confederated structure into a democratic unitary state. Soon after the Republic’s formation, the French army invaded the Netherlands. Blauw was sent to Paris as the Dutch representative to negotiate a peace settlement – the Treaty of The Hague of 1795 – by which France recognised the new republic. While in Paris, Blauw most likely commissioned the portrait directly from David, as both shared a commitment to the republican ideals of the French Revolution. Their bond is evident in the relaxed intimacy of the painting, which makes this more than just a formal portrait of a civic official. Blauw’s new political status, following the treaty, is indicated on the paper, which bears the words J. BLAUW, ministre Plènipotentiaire aux États Généraux des provinces unies (‘J.BLAUW, minister Plenipotentiary to the Estates General of the United Provinces’).
David was the most important artist and propagandist of the French Revolution. Elected a Deputy to the National Convention, he had been instrumental in the abolition of the Académie and had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. A supporter of Revolutionary leader Robespierre, he was imprisoned twice after Robespierre had been deposed and only narrowly avoided execution himself. His signature, ‘L. David 4’, dates the work using the calendar created by the French Republic, revealing his continuing endorsement of the Revolution. You can see it within the folds of Blauw’s cape, in the lower left corner of the painting.
For David, the diplomat-intellectual Blauw, who was not yet 40, represented a new type of post-Revolutionary citizen – someone who maintained the aspirations of the Revolution and whose achievements were based upon ability rather than inherited status. Blauw, writing to David, thanked him profusely for bringing him to ‘life again on the canvas’.
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A pencil description on the reverse of this painting identifies it as a landscape near Annecy, a medieval town adjacent to a large lake in the Haute-Savoie region of France. The exact location has not been identified, however, and the scenery depicted in the view bears little resemblance to the lake itself, which is several miles long, half a mile wide at even its narrowest point and surrounded on both sides by the Alpine foothills. Renoir has either adapted what he saw to suit his own purposes or found an unusual viewpoint (the area around Talloires on the north shore has been suggested) – or perhaps this is a smaller lake, somewhere in the hills outside the town.
Whichever is the case, there is a sense of secrecy about the view he has chosen. We glimpse the lake through a gap in the thick vegetation around its banks, but slightly masked by a thin veil of high grasses. It is a view that creates a deep perspective and that hides as much as it reveals. There are no people to be seen and – apparently – no buildings, just the contrast between the trees and bushes surrounding the water and what seems to be sparser growth on the slopes of the higher ground in the distance.
As was usual in his landscapes, Renoir has used strong colour combinations, offsetting the bright greens with contrasting shades of red (pinks, ochre and rusts) to increase the vibrancy and intensity of the pigments. Here he also seems to be mirroring the optical effects we experience when we look into the distance. Things that are close to us or in our peripheral vision – in this case, those grasses and the foliage on either side of the foreground – go out of focus as our eyes see beyond them. So instead of painting what is closer to the viewer in more detail, Renoir has used broad dabs of the brush to create an impression of blurring, tricking the eye into looking deeper into the picture.
He was also experimenting with other effects produced by different brushwork. To evoke the reflections on the still surface of the lake, he has used mostly smooth, horizontal strokes, whereas the sky has been described with longer streaks of blue, pink, grey and white paint which are broadly vertical but slant down slightly from right to left. For the hills in the distance he has worked his brush to create a mix of angles in the thick paint.
Aspects of Renoir’s style in this painting are reminiscent of techniques used by his friend, Paul Cezanne. In particular, Cezanne’s influence is apparent in the short, intense brushwork describing the trees and foliage in the right background. It isn’t unusual to find Renoir working in this way – seeing what he can learn from his contemporaries.
The painting is undated and there are no records confirming when Renoir visited Annecy, but it is close in style to the artist’s landscapes of the second half of the 1880s. The apparent influence of Cezanne suggests that it may have been made after Renoir had stayed with his friend in Aix en Provence. He made two visits there, one in 1888 and the other in 1889.
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A steam engine rushes towards us as it speeds along a bridge through the rain. The bridge is the Maidenhead Viaduct, which crosses the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead on the newly laid Great Western line to Bristol and Exeter. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the viaduct was completed In 1838 and in use from July 1839. We are looking east towards London as the train heads towards the west of England. The arched bridge on the left is Taylor’s road bridge, built in the 1770s. The engine, of the ‘Firefly’ class, pulls a train of unroofed open-goods wagons in which passengers, paying the cheapest rates, could travel. Average engine speed on the Great Western Railway (GWR) in 1844 was 33 mph, but on long level stretches, such as the Maidenhead Viaduct, an unprecedented 60 mph could be reached – faster than any galloping horse.
The 1840s was a period of ‘railway mania’, and by 1844 the GWR had already constructed over 100 miles of line, which Turner could have travelled on during the previous six or seven years. We cannot be certain if this picture was inspired by a recent journey, or if he had travelled on this stretch of track. However, in an account told to the critic John Ruskin, Jane O’Meara (later Mrs John Smith) related how, as a young woman aged eighteen, she had been travelling to London on that line during a stormy night in June 1843. A fellow passenger – ‘with the most wonderful eyes’ – had leaned out of the train window for almost ten minutes when the train had come to a halt at Bristol during the storm. On seeing Rain, Steam and Speed at the Royal Academy, she claimed the passenger must have been Turner.
Even if Turner had not travelled on this line, he would have known contemporary engravings of trains moving diagonally and at speed through the landscape. These engravings may have given him the idea for a railway painting based upon the principles of perspective he had taught himself through his study of Poussin and Claude, and which he had included in his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. Turner had previously used this type of diagonal recession with great effect – for example, in the dramatically foreshortened perspective of Westminster Bridge in The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Here he uses the exaggeratedly abrupt foreshortening of the viaduct, which our eye follows to the horizon, to suggest the speed with which the train bursts into view through the rain. Turner further accentuates this effect by reducing the double rail track across the bridge to a single narrow line.
The art historian John Gage observed: ‘the title of the picture makes clear that Turner was painting not a view of the Great Western Railway, but an allegory of the forces of nature.’ These forces of nature include the rain, which falls steadily but not so heavily as to entirely obscure the view or the gleams of sunlight that fall on the woods and fields either side of the bridge. Steam is represented by the three small puffs emerging from the engine’s funnel – in 1844 engines did not produce the great clouds of steam often associated with steam locomotives. Speed is most obviously embodied by the train itself, but Turner included another detail – a hare, running along the track ahead of it. A late addition, the hare was lightly brushed on top of the existing paint, roughly midway along the rail track, and is now invisible because the paint has become transparent with age. It can be seen in an 1859 engraving of the painting by Robert Brandard, who specifically sought to clarify details in the painting. According to the artist George Leslie, who as a boy had watched Turner putting the final touches to the painting the day before it went on public exhibition in 1844, the hare, not the train, was meant to represent speed. Turner further emphasises the theme of speed by including two small details. On the river on the left, you can see a small boat and, barely visible near the right edge of the picture, a man drives a horse-drawn plough. Both the boat and the plough are examples of relatively slow, non-mechanised activity. As in The Fighting Temeraire, Turner contrasts the pre-industrial with the modern.
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A supremely poised young woman is painted in three-quarter view. Her right hand curls around the handle of a mirror, while she appears to be caressing a lock of hair with her left. She wears a white blouse under a black velvet bodice which is trimmed with red ribbon, and over her arms yellow detachable sleeves, decorated with a blue bow from which three blue ribbons fall. This study is one of a number that Corot painted during the last years of his life, many of which are characterised by an air of introspection and melancholy.
According to an early biographer, Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, he would take a week out from painting landscapes to concentrate on capturing on canvas the special qualities of a particular model, the identity of whom is often not known. The origins of these studies lay in his first visit to Italy in 1825–8, when he not only painted the landscape but also made studies of the people, including several of women dressed in traditional costume.
The different pieces of clothing included here also appear in other paintings by Corot. The black bodice actually belongs to a dress which can be seen in its entirety in The Reader (1868, Minneapolis Institute of Art), and the sleeves, sometimes minus their blue ribbons, can be seen in a number of studies of women, of which the earliest is The Woman with a Pansy (1855–8, Denver Museum of Art). These sleeves were part of Italian traditional costume, and were tied over an undergarment allowing it to show, and in some cases billow out over the top. Corot kept assorted articles of dress in his studio with which to clothe his models. He was particularly interested in Italian costume, and in 1857 he asked for items to be sent from Albano, near Rome. In his depictions of such dress he was not interested in authenticity, but took delight in mixing up the different pieces to create a pleasing juxtaposition of colours and textures.
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A wealthy family enjoy coffee beside a fountain in parkland. The mother offers a spoon from her cup to her little daughter, while the father sits beside them holding the tray as their servant pours coffee from the pot into his cup. The painting is more likely to be a genre scene than a portrait as none of the figures shows any awareness of the viewer, as would be usual in a portrait.
This painting used to be known as ‘La Tasse de Chocolat’ (‘The Cup of Chocolate’) until it was noticed that the pot is one generally used for serving coffee. This suggestion is supported by the presence of the sugar pot on the tray. Sugar lumps, as shown here, would be added to coffee rather than hot chocolate. When sugar was added to chocolate it was always in powdered form rather than in lumps. As further evidence, when a version of the painting was shown at the 1742 Salon, it was described as: ‘A lady in a garden having coffee with children.’
Drinking coffee was advised in the morning and after lunch. The direction of the light in the painting suggests that this is a morning scene. People who drank coffee for pleasure rather than for medical reasons usually had it served on coffee trays in cups made of porcelain, glass or faience. In this painting, the sugar bowl and the cups and saucers appear to be of early eighteenth-century Saint-Cloud soft-paste porcelain. It has been suggested that the subject matter of this picture indicates the importance that wealthy families attached to educating a child’s taste in coffee drinking.
It is possible that the painting was intended as part of a set for a decorative scheme by one or more artists, but we do not know for certain if this was the case. If so, the picture may have been intended to represent Taste in a series of the five senses.
The fashion for painting Parisian society at leisure had been boosted by the exhibition of Watteau’s Gersaint’s Shop Sign (Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin). The poses of the father and mother in Lancret’s painting are similar to those of the woman leaning on the counter and the sales lady in Watteau’s work, while the servant holding the coffee pot resembles in reverse Watteau’s shop owner. However, it is unclear whether Lancret was consciously borrowing from Watteau at this late stage of his career. If so, he did it with great imagination to create a painting entirely different in tone and subject matter from anything by Watteau.
The sentiment displayed by the figures, their solid positioning in space, the compositional balance between the triangle made by the family group and the circular form of the fountain and the play of strong colours across the picture’s surface make this one of Lancret’s most accomplished paintings.
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A weathered but picturesque watermill sits in a landscape that includes several idealised peasants engaged in tasks such as fishing, collecting water and washing clothes.
Although this landscape has an air of decorative artificiality, even theatricality, Boucher includes sufficient detail to suggest it may have some basis in his direct observation of an actual place. These details include a net hanging to the left of the mill door, a makeshift outdoor privy to the right of the door, and a small tower at the end of the bridge that seems to be a dovecote or a tollgate. Other details that add to the sense this is based on a real scene include the weeds hanging from the millwheel and a low dam that we can just glimpse further upstream through the arches of the bridge. The bridge’s central arches also frame two poles or stakes that may support fishing nets, reinforcing the impression this is a working landscape. White doves gather around a dovecote in the mill’s thatched roof.
Many of these elements also appear in a drawing by Boucher in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although signed, this drawing is undated and it is not possible to say if it was made before or after the painting, which Boucher has signed and dated (on the boat to the left of the picture). Although it is unlikely that the drawing was made on site, it may be based upon a study or sketch of somewhere that Boucher had visited. One potential clue is provided by an engraving made in 1772 after the drawing, which has the title Moulin près de Chatou (Mill near Chatou). On the right bank of the Seine, a few miles west of Paris, Chatou would become a favourite haunt of painters around 1900. However, its watermill was replaced by a windmill in 1684 and throughout the eighteenth century its bridge was made of wood rather than stone. If, as the print’s title suggests, the mill in Boucher’s drawing was near Chatou rather than in Chatou itself, the scene may be based on a neighbouring hamlet. One possibility is Mauport, also on the right bank, which in the late seventeenth century had a watermill and stake net. These may have still existed in the 1750s. Mills appear in other landscapes by Boucher, including the mill at Quinquengrogne, near Charenton, on the south-eastern outskirts of Paris. The mill in this picture has similar architectural features to the Quinquengrogne mill, but it has a simpler structure and lacks the striking elevated position of the site at Charenton.
Watermills were a popular subject among eighteenth-century French artists, who particularly looked to pictures of them by Dutch painters of the previous century such as Jacob van Ruisdael. Boucher owned a large chalk drawing by Ruisdael that featured cottages and a watermill. But there are also echoes here of Claude, particularly in Boucher’s use of tall trees to frame the scene as if it were a stage set. Against a pale sky, the entire landscape is suffused with silvery-green tones which Boucher counterbalances with areas of brighter colour, most notably the red items of clothing. The painting shows his characteristically fluid handling of paint.
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A young child is being taught by an older girl, perhaps in her early teens, who is possibly an elder sister or another relation such as a cousin. Given the girl’s youthfulness, it is unlikely she is a governess. She is wearing an indoor nightcap decorated with a ribbon, known as a dormeuse, and a scarf and pinafore over her dress. The younger child is probably a boy, although we cannot be entirely sure. He wears a protective headdress known as a bourlet, which is also worn by children who are clearly boys in other paintings by Chardin.
Despite the picture’s title, this is a private lesson, taking place at home rather than at school. Both children lean forward slightly over a night table with a double door compartment, as the ’schoolmistress‘ points to the pages of the book open before them. The book is partly hidden by a loose sheet of paper covered in marks. It is impossible to make out what these marks are – partly due to Chardin’s distinctive method of keeping objects slightly out of focus – but as they are most likely letters, this is probably a reading lesson. The schoolmistress uses a sharp metal pointer, perhaps a knitting needle, positioned near the centre of the composition, her gesture repeated by the tiny hand of her young pupil.
The children appear to be from a middle-class family, which is well provided for but not ostentatiously wealthy. Their clothes and the undecorated table locate them within the domestic space of a middle-class home. They belong, perhaps, to the growing French bourgeoisie that particularly admired Chardin’s pictures, which they often knew and owned as engravings of his original paintings. This class particularly valued education, especially literacy, which was no longer confined to the nobility and professional classes. Education was available to girls, even if it was to prepare them for motherhood and domestic duties. But Enlightenment thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also extolled the importance of childhood and cultivating young minds.
Chardin’s pictures of children and adolescents combine aspects of portraiture and genre painting. This painting has been linked to several Dutch paintings including Caspar Netscher’s A Lady teaching a Child to Read. Netscher’s painting was in the Orléans Collection in the Palais Royal in Paris when Chardin painted his picture, and it is likely he knew of it. Not only was Netscher’s painting titled La maîtresse d’école (The Schoolmistress) in the collection’s catalogue, but both paintings include a similar gesture of the young child’s right hand and the use of a pointer by the teacher. In Chardin’s painting, however, the teacher is an older sister or cousin, and not a mother or governess. Instead, the young teacher adopts the role of an ‘ideal’ mother educating her young child, perhaps in preparation for when she herself will be a mother. In effect, both children in the painting are learning.
Dutch genre paintings often have a didactic message, but although Chardin is extolling work and study over playful time-wasting, any moralising purpose to his painting is very low key. Instead, his attention is on a quiet moment of interaction between two individuals, whose relationship he conveys brilliantly not just through details of gesture, expression and clothing but also through the handling of the paint itself. The slightly out-of-focus treatment of the young child’s face suggests a self that is still emerging in contrast to the sharper definition of the older girl.
Three versions of The Young Schoolmistress exist. This version and one in the National Gallery of Ireland were painted by Chardin, although it is unclear which one was exhibited in the Salon of 1740. A third, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is a copy after Chardin. It has been suggested that one of these versions was intended to be a companion piece to The House of Cards, and the National Gallery’s versions of the two paintings are often hung together. However, the slightly different sizes of the canvases and the absence of any documentary evidence from when either picture was exhibited at the Salon mean this is unlikely. As The House of Cards shows the son of Chardin’s friend, Jean-Jacques Le Noir, it has been suggested that The Young Schoolmistress includes other Le Noir children. However, it has not yet been possible to confirm the two children’s identity. If The Young Schoolmistress was meant to be paired with another painting by Chardin, sales catalogues from the time point to Soap Bubbles (Les Bulles de Savon), of which there are three signed versions, as the most likely contender. This painting shows an older boy idling away his time as a younger child looks on, its implicit warning against time-wasting complementing that of The Young Schoolmistress.
Several engravings were made of The Young Schoolmistress. The first, which reversed the composition, was published by François-Bernard Lépicié in 1740. Titled La Maîtresse d’Ecole, this print included the following verses beneath the picture: ’If this charming child puts on so well / The serious manner and imposing appearance of a schoolmistress / May one not think that artifice and subtlety / Are granted to the fair sex no later than at birth.' These lines significantly alter the painting’s meaning by presenting the older girl as a wily, perhaps even mischievous, young adult, who is merely acting the part of a teacher. Subtle changes in the print itself heighten this transformation – for example, the strengthened definition around the eyes and greater emphasis to the eyelids and lips. In a later engraving, produced in 1752, the lips of the young schoolmistress were even coloured crimson. Whereas Chardin creates mystery by withholding narrative information, the engraving’s introduction of psychological clues and personalities, particularly to the schoolmistress, undermines the painting’s open-ended quality, where it is left up to us to speculate on the connection between these two young people.
The painting was a favourite of the British artist, Lucian Freud, who included it in his 1987 Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National Gallery. A few years later, following an invitation from the Gallery to produce a painting in response to its collection, he also made two copies in oil and two etchings of the painting. For these Freud slightly modified the composition – for example, removing the schoolmistress’s pointer and placing us at the table with the two children
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A young woman sits on a stone bench in a garden. She leans her elbow on a plinth as if trying to be at ease but her bodice, stiffened with whalebone, forbids her to relax. She sits upright, her eyes alert as if expecting someone. Who this might be remains a mystery, since we don‘t know her identity or her family circumstances.
Soft auburn curls surround her face and hang in ringlets that fall on to her bosom; her breasts are pushed up and almost exposed by the corset top. Her neck is encircled with pearls that show off her almost startlingly pale complexion, and her pale, languid arms appear from a froth of fine white linen. The slender fingers show the influence of the Flemish portrait painter Anthony van Dyck – look at his Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and Dorothy, Viscountess Andover for example – and demonstrate the gentility of the sitter: these hands don’t take on any menial tasks.
Over one shoulder a length of rich blue satin contrasts deliciously with the deep russet colour of the gown and a tiny pointed slipper peeps out from her heavy skirts. The light catches the gleaming fabric, drawing attention to the little bunch of orange blossom on her knee. And here we can begin to find at least a hint of her history.
Orange blossom may suggest that she was a supporter of the House of Orange (in effect the rulers of the Netherlands) but it has a long tradition as a symbol of purity and chastity, and of marriage and fertility. In the seventeenth century orange blossom was usually shown in paintings as a small bouquet, as in this picture. Later on in the nineteenth century it often appeared as a bridal headdress.
Behind the young woman is a stone cherub holding an urn over his head, while two more cherubs, tangled in an embrace, are carved onto the wall. They could also be a symbol of the delights of marriage, though arranged marriages were common among the aristocratic families of Europe at the time, often diplomatic contracts that didn't always guarantee happiness.
Oddly, although she’s sitting in a garden, a heavy curtain billows down next to her. It’s a theatrical moment that adds a little more atmosphere to Caspar Netscher’s portrait of the elegant young woman – whoever she may be.
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According to his son, Cézanne spent several months over the summer of 1888 working in and around Chantilly, some 24 miles north of Paris. This is one of three similar oil paintings of the park surrounding the chateau at Chantilly that Cézanne produced during his stay there. The two other paintings are in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio and the Berggruen Collection, Geneva. There is also a watercolour of the same view, most likely a page from a sketchbook, in a private collection.
In all these paintings, Cézanne focused on the avenue or path running through the Chantilly forest rather than on the town’s famous castle, which, although framed by an arch of trees, remains largely undefined. This vista, with its innate geometrical format, may in part have appealed to Cézanne not for its historic associations, but because it reminded him of the avenues of chestnut trees at the family home, the Jas de Bouffan, in Aix-en-Provence.
Both Chantilly and the Jas de Bouffan offered Cézanne views with clearly defined structures that he sought to describe in paint. The problem of how to represent three-dimensional space and volume on a flat surface was one that engaged Cézanne for much of his career. He has addressed this challenge here by choosing an overtly symmetrical view of a landscape that itself had already been designed – with an avenue cutting through the trees. Human presence is further represented by the wooden fences that cross the avenue in the middle distance and by the single post in the centre foreground (standing in for both the artist and the viewer). Cézanne created an effect of depth by building up the landscape as a mosaic of carefully organised coloured patches whose relation to each other is affected by the size and direction of the brushstrokes and by Cézanne’s control of colour and tone.
Colour, for Cézanne, was the basis of perception, and by the 1880s both his use of it and his oil painting technique had been shaped by his experience with watercolour. The method Cézanne developed in his watercolours is evident in the looser, more open technique of his oil paintings from this time and in his use of overlapping planes of colour. For this picture Cézanne has lightly sketched in the composition with pencil lines, which were then overlain with areas of colour. Some of these areas were reworked, particularly near the centre of the picture, but elsewhere he has left the creamy beige primer visible so that it forms part of the overall colour scheme. Warm colours (for example, the terracotta red of the roof near the picture’s centre and the ochre of the avenue) contrast with cooler blues, greens and greys, and variations of tone suggest the play of light on foliage. Alternating bands of light and shade create an effect of depth, and darker touches of blue and green define the structure of the trees and fences.
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According to the Old Testament, God instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham’s only son by his wife Sarah, as a test of his faith and obedience (Genesis 22: 1–19). Abraham and his son make their way to the place of sacrifice. Abraham strides up the mountainside with steely resolve, his eyes on the path ahead. Isaac carries a bundle of wood for the altar fire on his back, while his father holds a lighted torch and a knife. When Isaac asks his father where is the lamb to be sacrificed, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide.
In the next episode of the story, Abraham places Isaac on the altar and is about to kill him when an angel appears and tells him not to harm the child. God sends a ram in a thicket to be sacrificed as a burnt offering instead of Isaac and the boy is saved. This episode in the Old Testament is frequently interpreted as a precursor for God’s sacrifice of his own son, Jesus, recounted in the New Testament.
The style of the painting is deliberately old fashioned, with precise outlines and odd disparities in scale, while the figures of Abraham and Isaac recall the simplified forms of a medieval woodcut. The landscape background is drawn with meticulous care and is loosely based on Olivier’s studies of the countryside around Salzburg, which he first visited in 1815. The distant mountain peak may perhaps be the Watzmann, to the south of the city. However Olivier’s approach to depicting the landscape, with slim feathery trees and pink tinged clouds in the blue sky, also recalls the backgrounds of Italian Renaissance paintings, such as those by Giovanni Bellini.
In 1817 Olivier became a member of the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, an artistic brotherhood (later known as the Nazarenes) founded in Vienna in 1809 by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr. Olivier shared the Nazarenes' enthusiasm for northern medieval and early Renaissance art and their interest in the revival of religious painting.
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Aelbert Cuyp was one of the most famous and successful landscape painters of the seventeenth century and the National Gallery owns an important collection of his work. But he also painted a small number of portraits of which this is a rare example.
Aelbert Cuyp is famous for his landscapes but he also painted a small number of portraits, of which this is a rare example. For some time it was believed that the sitter might be Cuyp’s father, Jacob, a portraitist who taught his son to paint. However, it is now believed to depict Cornelis van Someren (1593–1649), a prominent Dordrecht doctor who was 56 years old in 1649, the age and date inscribed on the picture. This suggestion seems to be confirmed by a pendant portrait of a woman whose age is given on the picture as 49 years old, matching that of van Someren’s wife, Anna Blocken (1599–1671). It was very common for married couples to have separate portraits made which were then hung together as a pair.
In this painting, the focus is very directly on the face of the sitter. Cuyp has paid close attention to the texture and details of the skin – the pores and colour variations, the shadowy folds above and below the eyes. In the man’s pupils we can just see the reflection of the individual panes of a window. The neutral background was a very common device but the way the sunlight streams in from the left, creating such a strong and clear shadow, gives a greater sense of depth to what might have otherwise been a rather flat image. This illusion is also enhanced by the great care with which the beard has been painted. As the individual hairs catch the light from the window, it seems to project forward, as do the white tufts of the tassel beneath. The black and white clothes help frame the sitter’s face without distracting us from it. He is dressed quite simply, and, following the conventional style of the time, he wears a skull cap, giving the painting a sense of domestic informality.
At some stage after it was painted the picture seems to have been reduced from a rectangle to its current, much more unusual, octagonal shape. There are two clues which point to changes in its shape and size. At the bottom, on the right, you can see a small part of the cuff of a glove – something which typically featured in portraits of the time and is likely to have been shown more fully in the original design. Then, on the left side, the present edge of the panel cuts through the ‘A’ of Cuyp’s signature, so this must have been trimmed.
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An effeminate youth with curling locks, full lips and a rose tucked behind one ear, recoils in surprise at being bitten by a lizard, which clings tenaciously to his finger. With a startled expression etched across his face, the boy is caught mid-motion, snatching his hand away from the unexpected pain. In the foreground is a magnificent still life of cherries and plums, with a rose and sprig of jasmine arranged in a glass vase. Look closely and you can see the reflection of a room in the curved surface of the vase.
The precise meaning of this striking image is not clear, though it may be allegorical. The scene might refer to the pain that can derive from love – a warning against the perils of love and the unexpected dangers that lurk behind beautiful things. It could be intended as a vanitas, with the rose symbolising the transience of life and beauty, or perhaps one of the senses (Touch). It might equally be a study in extreme expression, whether copied from a live model or (as some have suggested) from a mirror image of the artist himself. It is certainly very unusual for a late sixteenth-century painting to show such a moment of action, but Caravaggio was anything but conventional. He painted directly onto the canvas from live models, without preparing numerous studies on paper beforehand, and this innovative practice set him apart from classicising artists such as Annibale Carracci. Skipping a whole stage in the traditional artistic process was highly controversial, but it gave Caravaggio’s works an immediacy and intensity which made them instantly popular.
This picture is the earliest of our three Caravaggios – the others being The Supper at Emmaus and Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist. It was probably painted in the mid-1590s in Rome, where Caravaggio had moved to as a young man, initially specialising as a painter of still lifes in other artists' studios. Still-life painting was considered inferior to figure painting in Caravaggio’s own day, but he elevated the depiction of fruit and flowers to new heights, declaring that painting objects required as much artistry as painting figures. Here Caravaggio’s still life is placed prominently in the foreground, as the artist transforms the boy’s impulsive movement into a narrative drama. It was highly compelling and innovative paintings such as this, rooted in the world around him, that brought Caravaggio to the attention of influential patrons such as Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, in whose household the artist resided from 1595.
Caravaggio’s biographers describe a painting of a boy being bitten by a lizard and it was almost certainly made for the open market, without a specific patron in mind. At around the same time he produced a number of works showing everyday subjects – youths, musicians, lute players, cardsharps and fortune tellers – the originality and popularity of which led to increasing demand among collectors and countless imitations. Numerous early seventeenth-century copies and derivations of Boy bitten by a Lizard exist, including a high-quality replica in the Fondazione Longhi, Florence, considered by many to be by Caravaggio himself.
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An old man in an exotic costume is reading a young lady’s palm. She is accompanied by a young man in a turban who leans towards her and rests his hand on her shoulder, but the nature of their relationship is unclear.
The objects that surround the old man tell us that he is a magician: an alembic (a still to make alcohol), an incense burner, several reference books and a magic wand. His rich brocade gown, the coins on the table and the upholstered chair indicate that he is successful. But perhaps the appearance of wealth is only to make the two visitors trust him. The young pair look as if they are entirely convinced by the magician’s words.
The title ‘The Necromancer’ is a translation of that given to the work, or a version of it, when it was exhibited at the 1775 Paris Salon. In the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise a necromancer is defined as either someone who evokes the spirits of the dead in order to predict the future, or simply a magician. However, the elderly man here is not practising necromancy but chiromancy – the occult art of reading the future from the palm of the hand. Practising chiromancy was a criminal offence punishable by exile during Le Prince’s time. It was not illegal to consult a chiromancer, those who did so were regarded more to be pitied than blamed.
Le Prince went to Russia in 1757, and following his return to Paris in 1764 he exhibited numerous pictures of the people and places of Russia. Some have assumed this painting to be among his Russian subjects, although this is unlikely as Russia is not included in the title, and the costumes appear to be exotically oriental rather than specifically Russian. The woman’s dress with its striped underskirt resembles contemporary French fashion, but her long coat and sash are Turkish elements. The young man’s tall cap and turban drapery are shown in Le Prince’s print The Turkish Officer (Officier Turc). The coat worn by the old man is Chinese, as are his shoes and trousers. At his death, Le Prince owned a number of items of Chinese, Turkish and Russian clothing, and the costumes in the painting may be based on these. Le Prince’s painting may have been a conscious response in reverse to two earlier compositions: Caspar Netscher’s The Fortune Teller, of about 1666–70, which was then in the Orléans collection; and his own painting of 1773, The Physician (Le Médecin Clairvoyant), now in Baltimore Museum of Art.
There are three known virtually identical versions of this picture. Ours is signed ‘L Prince’. The version in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is signed lower right ‘Le Prince’ and may have been the version exhibited in 1775 at the Paris Salon, meaning it is probably the original. There is another unsigned version in the Graham Collection, Texas. The painting was also etched and engraved by Isidor Stanislas Helman in 1785. Unusually, the engraving is the same way round as the painting – normally engravings reproduce the painting in reverse.
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An older man sits, legs crossed and head bowed, absorbed in his reading. This is Cézanne’s father, Louis-Auguste. He was probably in his early sixties when his son painted this portrait directly onto an alcove wall in the salon of Jas de Bouffan, the country residence outside Aix-en-Provence that Louis-Auguste had bought in 1859.
A photograph said to have been taken in 1905 shows the portrait still in place, flanked by four paintings of the seasons (Petit Palais, Paris).
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An opulently dressed man with glossy clean-shaven skin and clear blue eyes gazes directly at us with a slight smile on his lips. He wears a rose-gold coloured jacket with exotic gold tassels, covered with a gorgeous teal silk-velvet cloak lined with embroidered gold silk damask. His soft velvet cap matches his cloak and is decorated with a spray of black herons’ feathers in a gold setting, from which dangles a huge pear-shaped baroque pearl.
The man was previously identified as the painter Jean-Baptiste Forest (1613–1712), but he does not resemble the portrait of Forest by Largillierre in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille. It has also been suggested that he is the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671–1741), based on the identification of a version of this portrait in the Uffizi, Florence, with the date 1710 inscribed on the back. Although the sitter’s costume would support a date around 1710, Rousseau’s own life and words suggest that this cannot be him. Rousseau was originally training to become a lawyer but was dismissed for insolence. His first comedy, Le Café, was performed in 1695. Although his plays met with a mixed reception, in 1705 Rousseau was elected a full member of the Académie française. The poetry said to be by him caused such a scandal that he took refuge in Switzerland at the end of 1710 before going to Vienna. He was banished from France in 1712 for his allegedly scurrilous publications.
In a letter of 1735, the marquise de Châtelet called Rousseau ‘an old snake’. Even after his death he was described as ‘naturally restless, capricious and vindictive. He let himself be led by that spirit of spite and harassment [which is] the scourge of societies.’ A letter which Rousseau wrote to the lawyer Brossette in 1716 claims ‘I shall be painted for the first time in my life’, suggesting that it is extremely unlikely that he had already been portrayed in 1710. The following month, Rousseau wrote again to Brossette to say that the portrait had been painted by Jacques van Scuppen – a pupil of Largillierre – and that it was a good likeness. It is possible that Rousseau may have been joking when he said he had not previously been portrayed, but there is still insufficient evidence to support the identification of the sitter here as Rousseau.
Whoever the man may be, the oriental appearance of the gold tassels on his coat and the rare herons’ feathers set in gold with a large baroque pearl on his cap suggest that he embraced the luxurious and exotic. The opulent, tactile velvet, lace and embroidered silk, with their gorgeous gold and teal colours and the soft quality of the sitter’s dimpled flesh create an extremely sensuous and engaging portrait. However, it is unlikely that the man owned the clothes or feathered jewel himself. There is a portrait of the actor Michel Boyron, called ‘Baron’ (Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan), by or from the studio of Largillierre, which shows the sitter clothed in the same costume as this man, and the heron’s feathers and pearl also appear in Largillierre’s portrait of Mme de Souscarrière (?) and her page. Another copy of the National Gallery’s portrait, described as a self portrait of the artist, was featured in the sale of 29 January 2013 at Doyle, New York.
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Anne 2nd Countess of Albemarle was born Lady Anne Lennox on 24 June 1703. She was the younger daughter of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond (1672–1723), who was himself the illegitimate son of King Charles II and Louise de Keroualle.
On 21 February 1722, she married William-Anne Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, who was a courtier, Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, Knight of the Garter and Groom of the Stole. She became a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline and a favourite of George II, and in 1743 escorted their youngest daughter, Princess Louisa, to Denmark to be married. Anne’s husband, the Earl, was famously extravagant, squandering his own fortune of £90,000 as well as his wife’s dowry of £25,000. They had 15 children, but only four sons and two daughters survived childhood. Albemarle was appointed ambassador to Paris, where he died on 22 December 1754. George II awarded Lady Albemarle a pension of £1,200 a year and she lived for a further 35 years.
Lady Albemarle is approaching 60 in this portrait, and the swirling rococo design of her dress would have been slightly old-fashioned by the end of the 1750s. She holds a shuttle and is engaged in ‘knotting’ – a pastime involving making knots in thread which could then be sewn as decoration onto other items. A pair of scissors and a workbasket lie on the table beside her. Knotting required less skill than embroidery but gave the impression of a useful activity. However, not a single knot is visible in Lady Albemarle’s thread.
She was a robust woman, who managed to scare off her muggers in 1750, when nine men ambushed and robbed her in London. By 1786 she had outlived all of her children. She died in 1789 at the age of 86. Her face in Reynolds’s portrait is almost dead-white as the paint has faded. The red lake pigment has been bleached from the flesh paint by the light. Other areas, such as the edge of the chair back, have also faded.
This portrait was probably commissioned by her eldest son, George 3rd Earl of Albemarle, but the idea that Lady Albemarle should be painted by Reynolds almost certainly came from her second son, Augustus Keppel, a Commodore in the Royal Navy. Reynolds portrayed Keppel at least seven times, and his second dynamic full-length portrait of the Commodore (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) made his name as a portraitist. During Reynolds’s long friendship with Keppel, he also painted 13 portraits of other members of the family.
Lady Albemarle sat for Reynolds 11 times between 26 September 1757 and 28 June 1759 and the portrait was finished by 1760, although Reynolds was not paid for it for a further 12 years.
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Antoine Paris (1668–1733), also known There is a swagger, even an arrogance, in the bearing of this man who meets our eye so directly and seems so at ease with himself. This is an undated self portrait, and going by what his contemporaries said about the artist – Jan Lievens – we shouldn’t be surprised at his self-confident air. In the 1650s, when he was painting a portrait of Sir Robert Kerr, the English ambassador, Kerr wrote a letter describing him: ‘he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the 17 Provinces [of the Low Countries].’
Lievens‘ confidence isn’t just apparent in his bearing. His dress is that of a man of wealth and fashion. The padded silk gown (known as a japonse rock) was expensive and probably imported from Japan. The gown and billowing shirt, sleeves tied back with wide black ribbons, first came into fashion in the early to mid-1650s, which was also the time that gentlemen started to wear their hair long and loose, as Lievens does here. That date also fits with the style adopted by Lievens for the landscape in the background.
This portrait in particular reflects how Lievens’ style, once close to that of Rembrandt, had changed after he was exposed to other influences. From 1635 to 1643 he worked with Flemish artists in Antwerp. And before that, in the early 1630s, he was in London, painting at the court of Charles I, where he met Anthony van Dyck. In fact we know that this is a self portrait in part because the face and features closely resemble a painting Van Dyck made of him in London about 1632 (now lost, but known through an engraving after it).
His chosen dress is interesting in this context. In the seventeenth century self portraits were a way for artists to demonstrate their skills to potential clients, but they were also a way of claiming higher social and artistic status. Rembrandt tended to do this by posing in antique-style clothes, aligning himself with the great Italian painters of a century and more earlier. But Lievens’ experience working with the dashing Van Dyck at the English court made him far more interested in emulating the aristocracy’s latest fashions, and also providing them with a more impressive setting than, for example, the shadowy brown background favoured by Rembrandt. The landscape behind Lievens – which unusually appears to be a moonlit rather than a day-time scene – includes a long avenue suggesting the formal grounds of a country estate. The aristocracy were, after all, among his most important customers, and he needed to be able to paint them in a suitable style. But the confidence of his pose suggests that he may have considered himself their social equal too.as ‘Le Grand Paris’, was born in the village of Moirans, about 23 km north-west of Grenoble. Antoine’s parents ran an inn in the village, which Antoine inherited on his father’s death. Antoine and his brother Claude helped their father to provision French troops, eventually controlling all land and water transport supplying soldiers from Burgundy and the Auvergne. In 1693, when grain supplies were scarce, Antoine was placed under the control of a court official for allegedly monopolising the region’s grain transports.
It was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) which made the brothers’ first substantial fortune. In 1704 Antoine was made responsible for food supplies to the army in Flanders. Antoine’s brothers Joseph and Monmartel joined the family business in 1707 and 1711. The Paris brothers’ reputation was based on their ability to raise large sums of money at short notice to provision the army. They subsequently rewrote their ancestry to acquire noble status, which was granted in 1720, and in 1722 Antoine was appointed Royal Treasurer to Louis XIV.
During the period 1721–6, Antoine was at the height of his influence and Rigaud was the most prestigious portraitist in France, known for his elegant and realistic portrayals of members of King Louis XIV’s court, aristocrats and financiers. Antoine is portrayed seated in a library beside an elaborate table with the base of an immense column to one side and a vase to the other. Clutching a blue velvet drapery he turns to the right as though greeting an unseen visitor. The gesture of his right hand is the one described by Quintilian (an ancient authority on oratory) as most becoming for eloquent speech in public. The fine characterisation of the head, a hallmark of the work of Rigaud and of his contemporary, Largilliere, seems almost eclipsed by the grandeur of the setting and the dramatic, showy manner in which the draperies are painted.
However, Antoine’s period of power lasted only about five years as the economy experienced a severe depression, and the 1724 and 1725 harvests were disastrous. The increase in the price of bread, for which the Paris brothers were said to be responsible through their speculations, resulted in famine and riots in the French capital. Antoine and his brothers fell from favour and were banished in 1726 when Cardinal Fleury became Louis XV’s first minister.
The portrait was probably painted in 1724, when Rigaud recorded payment for it, and it is still in its original frame. There is a second portrait of Antoine Paris for which Rigaud was paid 3,000 livres in 1724, which may be the Portrait of an Unknown Man by Rigaud now in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
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Artemisia Gentileschi, the most celebrated female artist of the seventeenth century, appears in the guise of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a Christian saint who died for her faith in the early fourth century. She leans on a broken wheel studded with iron spikes, on which she was bound and tortured, and which became her standard attribute in art. Her right hand, delicately holding a martyr’s palm between thumb and forefinger, is brought to her chest.
Artemisia was born in Rome, the only daughter of the artist Orazio Gentileschi, under whom she trained. At the age of 17 she was raped by Agostino Tassi, a family friend and Orazio’s artistic collaborator. During the infamous trial that followed, Artemisia testified and was tortured. After the trial she married and moved to Florence, where this painting was probably made. Saint Catherine’s facial features, the turn of her head and three-quarter pose, are all closely related to those in Artemisia’s Self Portrait as a Lute Player of about 1615–8 (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut).
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At first glance, the rather formal pose and opulent setting might suggest this is a portrait of a wealthy individual or perhaps an aristocrat. But as is often the case with Ingres, there is more going on in this painting than might at first appear. The sitter, Monsieur de Norvins, had been appointed Chief of Police in Rome (then under French rule) in January 1811, the year in which the portrait was painted. However, subsequent political events led him to make changes to it. Clues to these changes are visible in the picture – but only if we look closely.
Monsieur de Norvins is presented as a reserved and rather forbidding figure. Leaning on a chair, his pose is immovable, its rigidity echoed by the vertical line of the curtain on his right. His arms are held tight against his body, and he does not smile. Instead, his thin lips, framed by a hint of stubble, are slightly pursed, as if he is thinking or coming to a decision. His large eyes look directly at us, holding us in his sidelong gaze. Norvins’ black suit further adds to the severe mood of the painting, but it also creates a sharp contrast with the brilliant white of his collar and shirt cuffs. The only colour on his clothing is from the vivid band of red ribbon indicating he is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. This flash of red also picks up on the deep maroon of the damask fabric on the wall and chair. Ingres confidently displays his skill in rendering the qualities of different materials, such as the shadows in the folds of the jacket’s black cloth and the ribbon’s sheen.
Norvins was a supporter of the Emperor Napoleon – and later wrote a very successful four-volume biography of him – and his political allegiance is shown by the Napoleonic gesture of placing his left hand inside his jacket. Following the fall of Napoleon in April 1814 and the return to power of the Bourbon monarchy, any evidence of overt loyalty to the former Emperor would have been potentially harmful to Norvins’ political career and to Ingres, as an ambitious young artist. Ingres responded to this new political situation by repainting parts of the canvas. In addition to minor reworking around Norvins' collar and head, which was originally slightly higher, he painted a length of red drapery, which spills over the chair, on the left of picture. This was to hide a bust, resting on a tall pedestal, which had originally been placed in the upper left corner. The bust was most likely of the King of Rome, the infant son of Napoleon, born in March 1811. Because oil paint thins over time, the bust is now visible as a ghostly presence beneath the drapery.
As if to compensate for the lost bust, Ingres added a bronze sculpture – copied after a marble in the Vatican – of the Roman goddess, Minerva, on the right of the picture. On the pedestal beneath it, the letters ROM refer to Norvins’ position in Rome. As Ingres painted within the limited space available, both the bust and inscription are awkwardly cropped. The red wallpaper is also now clearly visible through the thin overpainting.
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Before the 1880s Renoir painted very few nudes. The National Gallery owns a rare exception, A Nymph by a Stream, which depicts his lover at the time, Lise Tréhot, as one of the mythical nymphs or naiads described in classical art and literature and also eighteenth-century French painting. But the artist’s journey to Italy in 1881, where he was absorbed by Roman sculpture and Renaissance painting, rekindled his interest in depicting nudes in a way that echoed the classical tradition. He began painting them far more often and this intimate picture (which is only about 39 by 29 cm) is probably one of a series made during the second half of the 1880s.
His attraction to the nude coincided with that of Edgar Degas, his friend and fellow artist. Degas had explored the form for many years and in 1886, in the last Impressionist Exhibition (in which Renoir also exhibited), he showed several new pastels depicting naked or partially clothed women washing themselves.
The tradition of depicting the subjects unaware that they are being watched went back to ancient Greek myths, such as that of Diana and Actaeon and to biblical stories of Bathsheba and Susannah. But Degas and Renoir differed in their approaches to it. Degas masked the link to earlier traditions by focusing on depicting ordinary women in contemporary interior settings, sometimes viewed from a strikingly unusual angle. His After the Bath, Woman drying Herself was probably made a few years later, but it is typical of the sort of poses he preferred. It is also very similar to the pose Renoir has chosen in this painting (and one which is reminiscent of other Degas pastels). He has also added some recognisably contemporary touches, such as the striped fabric of the towel or discarded dress that the model is sitting on, and the fact that her hair, which she is fixing (or unfixing), is in one of the fashions of the time. The depiction of hair under her arm is something which would have been seen only rarely, if at all, in such paintings before the mid-nineteenth century. But by showing the figure seated on a rock by a pool or a stream – suggested here by the flash of bright blue on the left-hand side of the picture – rather than a contemporary interior, Renoir is reflecting the longer tradition of classical nudes much more explicitly.
Renoir was also fascinated by how best to capture the sensuousness of his subjects. He wrote: ‘I look at the nude; there are myriads of tiny tints in flesh. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.’ In this painting, he sets the predominantly pink flesh tones against the greens of the background, which makes them appear all the more vibrant – these are complementary colours, which seem more intense when placed together. The sense of quiver or vibrancy he sought comes perhaps from the blurring effect of his brushwork, which suggests rather than precisely delineates the model and her surroundings.
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Belshazzar’s Feast was painted somewhere between 1636 and 1638, when Rembrandt was about 30 years old. He had to make his way in Amsterdam, a city crowded with artists all vying for a share in its new prosperity and the seemingly insatiable desire of the middle classes for paintings. We don’t know if the picture was commissioned to hang over a rich merchant’s fireplace or whether Rembrandt simply painted it as a way of establishing himself as an outstanding history painter, hoping to go on to more large narrative pictures of episodes from ancient myths or the Bible.
The man in the picture wearing a gold cloak with an enormous turban and tiny crown is Belshazzar, King of Babylon. His story is told in the Old Testament (Daniel 5: 1–5, 25–8): Belshazzar’s father, King Nebuchadnezzar, had robbed the Temple of Jerusalem of all its precious, sacred vessels. These ill-gotten gains sit on the table; using them to serve food at a feast, as Belshazzar does, was seen as sacrilege. In the middle of the feast came a clap of thunder, and a hand appeared in a mysterious grey cloud. The hand wrote on the wall in Hebrew script: ‘Mene, mene tekel upharsim.’
Belshazzar sent for the wise men of Babylon to translate the words for him, but they didn’t understand them either. So the Jewish prophet Daniel was brought in. He told the King that the meaning was clear and that there was no escape: ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.‘ Within hours, Belshazzar was dead.
Deep shadows and shafts of brilliant light capture the drama: the sharp intake of breath from the people at the feast, the rattle of Belshazzar’s chain, the clank of metal as he upsets a dish and the splash of wine as the gold goblets tip over. Rich textures that suggest the opulence of the gathering glow in the candlelight: sumptuous furs and long, silky hair; pearls and velvet; creamy lace and soft flesh. Belshazzar’s cloak, with its exquisite embroidery and intricately jewelled clasp, almost weighs down his out-thrust arm, making it seem weak and useless against the might of God’s message up above.
The expressions on the faces of the onlookers – wide, fearful eyes, gaping mouths – and the figures tipping away from the bright light all heap up the drama. Who is looking at who? Can they see the message or just the back of the King’s head? Do they know what has frightened him? Although it’s a large picture, Rembrandt has made the figures fill the canvas. We look down on the scene almost as if we’re part of it, with a bird’s eye view of the woman spilling her wine on the right. In this way, Rembrandt has created a claustrophobic atmosphere that accentuates the feeling of there being no escape – which we share.
Why didn’t the wise men of Babylon understand the writing on the wall? It was written in Hebrew, a language they would have known, and which is read from right to left. Rembrandt’s neighbour and friend, a Jewish scholar named Menasseh ben Israel, published his interpretation of the letters. According to him, the Hebrew letters had been written from top to bottom as well as right to left, thus confusing the wise men. In the painting, Rembrandt followed Menasseh’s formula.
Rembrandt called in friends and family to pose for him, and they dressed up in exotic clothes to model as the different characters, as they often did for his paintings. The man posing as Belshazzar appears in several of his other paintings. He wears very similar garments in Man in Oriental Costume (’The Noble Slav') (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was not a portrait, but a tronie, a type of painting popular in seventeenth-century Holland, showing an exaggerated facial expression or a stock character in costume. This man was perfect for the overindulged, slack-jawed King Belshazzar.
For the woman next to the King – her eyes wide with shock, pearls a little askew, twisting anxious fingers – Rembrandt probably used his first wife Saskia as his model. You can see her in another picture in the National Gallery’s collection painted about the same time as this one – Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Costume – in which she probably represents Flora, the Roman goddess of spring.
Rembrandt’s Amsterdam was a Calvinist (a strict form of Protestantism) city. Churches were plain, but people had pictures, some of them religious, in their homes. Encouraged to read the Bible, they would have been familiar with Belshazzar’s fate and with the cautionary message of the story of a wicked king watched by heavenly eyes – like the piercing eyes of the recorder player looking out from the shadows.
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Calais Pier is based upon an actual event. On 15 July 1802, Turner, aged 27, began his first trip abroad, travelling from Dover to Calais in a cross-channel ferry (a packet) of the type shown here. The weather was stormy, and Turner noted in his sketchbook: ‘Our landing at Calais. Nearly swampt.’
In the painting, a ferry (centre left), fully laden with passengers and flying a British flag, is approaching the port of Calais on the northern French coast. Around it, small French fishing boats head out to the open sea. In his title, Turner refers to these fishing boats as ‘French poissards,’ which appears to be his own idiosyncratic adaptation of the French word poissarde (‘fishwife’). The sea is rough and dark storm clouds gather, although a shaft of sunlight breaks through to illuminate the white sail in the centre of the picture. The entire scene looks chaotic and there is a risk of a collision. In the lower right foreground, a small fishing boat is trying to get away to avoid being battered against the pier.
Full of incident and detail, this is one of Turner’s largest and most complex maritime paintings. Its dramatic storm scene was also a significant milestone in the development of British maritime painting. The critic John Ruskin, an early supporter of Turner, described it as ‘the richest, wildest and most difficult composition'. The painting also includes one of Turner’s most ambitious figure groups, as he shows the French fishermen attempting to cast off while agitated women look on from the windswept pier. The number and variety of animated figures combines the activity of Dutch genre painting with an almost comic element that recalls Hogarth – for instance, a departing sailor holds up a flagon to be filled by a woman holding a bottle. Dutch maritime painting was an important precedent for Turner, and he may have been stimulated to paint Calais Pier when, towards the end of his trip, he saw (and sketched) Jacob van Ruisdael’s A Storm at Sea off the Dykes of Holland (1670) in the Louvre.
When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803, Calais Pier met with a mixed reception that marked the beginning of the critical disapproval of Turner’s work that would continue until his death. Criticism of the picture focused especially on his method of painting the foreground and the sea. Viewers more accustomed to the smooth translucent glazes of traditional marine paintings were particularly resistant to Turner’s visible brushwork and his impasto (thickly applied paint), often laid on with a palette knife. You can see this clearly in the white foam of the waves. Although acknowledging Turner’s precocious talent, critics compared his use of paint to blots, batter, pea soup, smoke, a mix of soap and chalk, and the veins on a marble slab. The painting was unsold and remained in Turner’s possession.
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Constable was determined to be recognised by the Royal Academy for his monumental paintings of the Stour landscape that he‘d known since he was a child, elevating the scenery of his native Suffolk to the same status as the classical landscapes of Claude and Poussin he so admired.
Stratford Mill was a water-powered paper mill on a little island in the River Stour outside the village of Stratford St Mary, about two miles west of East Bergholt, where Constable was born. This was the second of the six so-called ’six-footers’ – or six-foot-wide paintings – which Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy between the years 1819 and 1825, the third of which was The Hay Wain.
Constable shows the paper mill in shadow, while shafts of sunlight play between the trees and on a narrow wooden gate beside the meandering river. A dying willow leans its yellowing leaves over the glassy water and we glimpse a distant sunlit farmhouse. An unladen barge is being moored to the far bank. Near the mill, a girl watches a kneeling boy cast his fishing line into the water, and it looks as though the angler to their left has just got a bite. An uprooted tree trunk lies moldering on the ground, while the dark clouds in the distance suggest showers further off.
The composition for Stratford Mill developed from an oil sketch now known as Anglers at Stratford Mill (private collection), made in the summer of 1811. Constable took the sketch with him when he settled in London in 1817. He began thinking about painting a large picture of the scene and returned to details he‘d drawn in Suffolk and Essex during 1813 in his pencil sketchbook.
In a small and swiftly painted oil sketch (private collection), Constable roughed in his developing ideas for the composition of a large painting, four times its size. He followed this by making a full-scale preparatory oil sketch (Yale Centre for British Art).
Constable’s finished painting of Stratford Mill was selected to hang in the Great Room at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1820, where it received generally good reviews but failed to sell. Constable’s friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, who had bought Constable’s A View on the Stour, ’The White Horse‘ (Frick Collection, New York) from the 1819 Royal Academy exhibition for himself, asked if he could buy Stratford Mill as a gift for his solicitor, John Pern Tinney. Constable agreed to sell the painting for 100 guineas, which Fisher thought too low a price.
When the painting was returned by the Royal Academy, Constable continued to work on it. Tinney eventually received Stratford Mill by mid-July 1821 but Fisher reported that in Tinney’s house it looked like ’an emerald in a dish of rubbish‘. To the Tinneys’ annoyance, Constable borrowed the painting back three times, first so he could work on ‘toning it down’, then for inclusion in the British Institution’s exhibition of works by living British artists, then after Tinney’s death, for it to be engraved by David Lucas. Lucas’s mezzotint was eventually published in 1840 after Constable’s death with the title The Young Waltonians, a reference to Izaak Walton’s book about fishing, The Compleat Angler, of 1653.
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Delacroix depicts a moment described in Gospel of John, when Christ addresses his mother, the Virgin Mary, and one of his disciples, John, just before he dies (John 19: 25–30). Christ’s mother, dressed in distinctive blue and yellow robes, collapses into the arms of Mary Cleophas and John. At the foot of the cross, Mary Magdalene prays as she looks up at Christ. Judas Iscariot is not normally shown in such scenes, but Delacroix includes him in the lower right corner. Judas now understands the consequences of his betrayal of Christ. Two Roman soldiers in the mid-distance on the left observe the scene.
Despite the relatively small size of the canvas, Delacroix achieves great dramatic effect by placing the viewer at the same level as the figures compressed together in the lower right-hand corner as we, too, look up at Christ’s body. By reducing the landscape to a narrow band, Delacroix gives further emphasis to the human drama of their reactions. The greenish-grey pallor of Christ’s body is particularly striking and is amplified by the greys and pinkish-browns of the stormy sky that fills most of the picture. The red robes echo the blood flowing from Christ’s wounds. In many of Delacroix’s later paintings, rigid distinctions between a sketch and a finished painting can be blurred. In this picture, the agitated quality of the brushwork – which ranges from thin wisps to thick clots of paint – gives the painting the immediacy of a sketch and an expressive energy that animates the entire canvas.
Throughout his life, Delacroix studied and made copies of Old Master paintings. Most pertinent to this picture was the The Coup de lance by Rubens (1620, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp) which Delacroix copied twice from memory, possibly following his second trip to Belgium in 1850. This admiration for Rubens was part of Delacroix’s wider appreciation of the often deeply expressive religious paintings of Northern European artists, including Jacob Jordaens and Rembrandt. The critic Théophile Gautier also noted a more contemporary reference, to Christ on the Cross (Louvre, Paris) by Pierre-Paul Prud‘hon, that had been exhibited at the Salon of 1822.
Delacroix depicted stories and incidents from the Bible many times, but the Crucifixion was a subject to which he often returned, especially in his later years. He had previously exhibited a larger version of the Crucifixion, showing Christ between the two thieves (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Vannes), at the Salon of 1835 and had exhibited another Crucifixion at the Salon of 1847 in which a more centrally placed Christ is the primary focus (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). Several oil and pastel sketches were also produced in the late 1840s. This version of the Crucifixion shows that Delacroix was still exploring new ways of rendering the subject in the 1850s.
The critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix’s greatest champion and most perceptive contemporary viewer, claimed that Delacroix created genuinely authentic religious art because of the affinity between his temperament and the true sentiment of Christianity: ’perhaps he alone, in this century of nonbelievers, has created religious paintings that were neither empty nor cold, like some works created for competition, nor pedantic, nor mystical, nor neo-Christian... the genuine sadness for which he had a flair was perfectly suited to our religion, a profoundly sad religion.'
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During the 1860s Cézanne divided his time between his family home in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, where this picture was probably painted. It evokes the privation of his Bohemian existence in the capital. Cézanne has rearranged the objects in his studio, and we see them from a high viewpoint, as though he is looking down on them from his easel. On the right a single flower stands in a vase on a table. Behind the stove is a canvas on its stretcher frame, while a palette and what may be a small picture hang on the wall at the left.
Cézanne spent a great deal of time in Paris sketching in the Louvre, where he would have been able to study the work of Chardin. The scrutiny of everyday objects and simple frontal composition are particularly reminiscent of Chardin’s Copper Cistern, which was acquired by the Louvre in 1869.
The first owner of this work was Cézanne’s boyhood friend, the writer Emile Zola.
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Elegant couples rest after the hunt in an idyllic sunlit landscape, reflecting the traditional association of hunting and courtship. The gushing fountain, the woman holding flowers and the flirtation between the man holding a falcon and his companion add to the light-hearted romantic atmosphere. Falconry was a popular aristocratic pursuit. In the background, a man attempts to engage two women in conversation; one of them points away from him towards the landscape or the riders at the fountain, as if finding a reason to leave.
Dogs stare longingly at a group of dead animals in the bottom left corner. While the hare and duck were presumably victims of the falcon, the deer and boar allude to an earlier scene depicted in The Boar Hunt, a companion to this painting, also owned by the National Gallery. The bugle – a type of horn – placed beside the animals is the instrument used by a male figure in the earlier painting to gather the hunting party. The figure in the background holding a parasol may be derived from a similar figure in Antonio Tempesta’s (1555–1630) engraving of a Lady observing a Stag Hunt (Metropolitan Museum, New York).
This popular subject was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch scenes of everyday life. The bright colouring and visible brushstrokes suggest the influence of the celebrated Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. This painting and its pair, painted around 1700, set a precedent for later depictions showing groups of figures in countryside settings, known as //fêtes galantes//.
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Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s life spanned a tGoToRoom34-1umultuous period of French history. Born in Paris in 1755, she was the daughter of a portrait painter, Louis Vigée. His early death in 1767 left her without a teacher, so she was largely self-taught. Her husband, the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, played a significant role in her early career by providing her with important contacts and commissions. She adopted his name but eventually left him – the marriage was formally dissolved in 1794.
In the years preceding the French Revolution in 1789, Vigée Le Brun enjoyed great success, particularly at the Versailles court. One of the most successful society portraitists of her time, she was also one of only four women admitted to the Académie royale de la peinture et de sculpture during the eighteenth century. She became the preferred painter of Marie-Antoinette and painted over 30 portraits of the Queen and her family. A portrait of Marie-Antoinette wearing a simple white cotton chemise and holding a rose caused a scandal when exhibited at the Salon in 1783 because of its informality. Following the arrest of the royal family in October 1789, Vigée Le Brun fled Paris and did not return until 1802.
Self Portrait in a Straw Hat is a signed copy by Vigėe Le Brun of a very popular self portrait she had painted in Brussels in 1782. The portrait was exhibited in the same year at the Salon de la Correspondance in Paris and at the 1783 Salon of the Académie royale. It is now in the collection of the baronne Edmond de Rothschild. The pose is deliberately modelled on Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (?), which was formerly, but incorrectly, known as Le Chapeau de Paille (The Straw Hat) – ‘paille’ (straw) may be a corruption of ‘poil’ (hair), as the hat is in fact made of beaver felt. Vigée Le Brun had studied and copied paintings by Rubens and saw his portrait of Susanna when she was visiting Antwerp. The portrait was well known in France, at least by reputation, and several writers had commented on its depiction of light. In particular, they noted how the hat’s broad rim cast the face in shadow, which, as a result, was lit solely by reflected light. In a letter to Princess Kourakin included in her Memoirs (published in 1835), Vigée Le Brun similarly commented, ‘its great effect resides in the two different lights, ordinary daylight and the glow of the sun.’ She continues, ‘This painting delights me and inspired me to make my own portrait in Brussels in search of the same effect. I painted myself wearing a straw hat with a feather and a garland of wild flowers, and holding my palette. When the portrait was exhibited at the salon, I dare say it greatly enhanced my reputation.’
Despite its apparent informality, Vigée Le Brun offers us a highly calculated image in which she also explicitly associates herself with a great artist and his sitter. Looking at us directly with an open expression as she holds the tools of her profession (a palette and brushes), she presents herself as an elegant society lady and as an accomplished professional artist. By posing outdoors – and not, for example, in a studio – she replicates the contrasting light effects in Rubens’s portrait by combining ordinary daylight with direct sunlight. Although wearing a plain straw hat (in keeping with the original title of Rubens’s painting), Vigée Le Brun wears a low-cut dress unlike Susanna, who crosses her arms above her waist while peering out from under her hat. In keeping with the effect of naturalness, Vigée Le Brun’s hair is her own – rather than a wig (which she would be expected to wear for a formal portrait) – and is unpowdered. Her hat is decorated with fresh flowers and a white ostrich feather, whose textures echo the hair and clothing. The hat and flowers were consistent with contemporary fashions in the pastoral mode and especially recall pictures of shepherdesses – a favourite guise also of Marie-Antoinette, who even had a fake rustic village built in the grounds at Versailles.
Although the National Gallery’s version of the self portrait is a copy that Vigée Le Brun herself made of her original portrait (the copy was probably also painted in 1782), there are some minor, but significant, differences between the two paintings. In light perhaps of her comment that the original portrait had ‘greatly enhanced my reputation’, the National Gallery’s version presents a more assertive and self-assured image. This self-assurance is in part achieved by slight changes to the face – in the copy, for example, the eyebrows are heavier, the shape of the eyelids is given more emphasis, the lower lip is fuller, and the mouth more smiling. Vigée Le Brun has also changed the colour of her satin dress from a shade of lilac to a rose pink. Perhaps in response to comments by Salon critics that the unbroken blue sky of the original painting was too basic or just too blue, she has broken up the sky in the copy by adding wispy white clouds.
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Five drinkers gather in the shadowy depths of a tavern in Zarauz, the Basque coastal town where the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla spent the summer of 1910. One, more drunk than the others, stares through watery eyes at the artist. Sorolla understood the man’s name to be Moscorra but, as the word means drunkard in the Basque language, he may have misunderstood something the locals told him. To Moscorra’s right a man pushes a glass of cider towards him, egging on the inebriate to further excess. A younger man throws a threatening glance towards the painter so that cruel fun is heightened by suspicion and menace.
The painting is a large-scale, improvisatory and rapidly executed sketch. Paint is applied in relatively thin layers while light and shadow are precisely evoked with bold sweeps of the brush. The canvas edges abruptly cut off two figures at upper left and right; adept in photographic technique from youth, Sorolla here exploits the haphazard spontaneity of an amateur’s awkward snapshot. This is one of a half dozen such impromptu tavern scenes he painted that summer, several featuring Moscorra, as Sorolla confronted the problem of alcoholism among the Spanish underclasses, and the baleful role taverns played in their lives. Particularly satisfied with it, Sorolla chose to include The Drunkard in his second major American exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1911.
The picture marks a turning point in Sorolla’s career. For the first time in ten years he again took up a dark theme. Throughout the previous decade he had depicted carefree urchins and elegant, carefree women and children of the upper middle class on sun-dappled beaches; such beguiling images had served to establish his international fame and considerable fortune. Around 1910, however, Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, offered Sorolla the commission to paint a monumental cycle on the peoples and customs of the artist’s homeland. Vision of Spain would be installed in the Society’s New York headquarters in 1926, four years after Sorolla’s death.
Vision of Spain presented a dual challenge. Sorolla would need to depict peasants in the sometimes grim reality of their lives and, speaking to an international audience, he was called on to exploit signifiers of Spanish art he had used only sparingly in the past decade, not least the blacks, greys and browns of Velazquez’s and Goya’s palettes. The Drunkard shows the artist with a new sense of purpose gearing up to take on the challenges his commission posed. He identified a theme representative of Basque peasant life. He entered wholeheartedly into the troubled world of Moscorra where he and the drunkard exchange direct gazes. He set himself a complicated visual and psychological challenge to paint quickly, in low light, and to capture unsparingly the fetid air of a peasant dive. Here, Sorolla created one of his saddest works: a penetrating assessment of mockery, cruelty and addiction at the lower depths which is at the same time a bravura exercise in passionate and compassionate observation.
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Gainsborough painted this portrait of William Hallett (1764–1842) and Elizabeth Stephen (1764–1833) shortly before their marriage on 30 July 1785. The couple are shown arm-in-arm on a morning walk with a Pomeranian sheepdog. Gainsborough has suggested the dog’s thick soft coat with sparse, light brushstrokes which he also uses for Mrs Hallet’s dress.
The style of the portrait draws on the work of earlier painters Watteau and Van Dyck, and has a delicate poetic quality, which has been likened to a lingering fragrance. This effect is largely achieved through Gainsborough’s feathery brushwork, which is typical of his late style. The picture is as much a portrait of the romance of young love as it is a likeness of William and Elizabeth Hallett. It was commissioned by the groom who paid Gainsborough £126 for it on 4 March 1786.
The couple may be wearing their wedding clothes. Elizabeth’s gown is of fine ivory silk, caught at the waist with a black silk band. Her breast is covered with a frilled muslin kerchief with a knot of pale grape-green ribbon under it, which is repeated in the extravagant bow on her hat. The three downy ostrich plumes crowning her hat resemble the colour and texture of her powdered hair. The gauzy silk stole draped over her arms echoes the contrived carelessness of her hairstyle and dress. Gainsborough’s slanting brushstrokes in the sky and foliage give the impression of movement, as though there is a light breeze. William Hallett wears a black silk velvet frock-suit, his hair is powdered and he carries a round black hat.
William Hallett was brought up by his grandfather William Hallett I, who had made a fortune as a fashionable cabinet maker and died in 1781. While a teenager, William inherited his grandfather’s villa and estate at Canons in Middlesex. After travelling through Europe for two years on the Grand Tour, William recorded, ‘I returned home, and was married on 30th day of July 1785 to Miss Elizabeth Stephen with a fortune of nearly £20,000’. The wedding took place at the richly decorated church of St Lawrence, Little Stanmore. Bride and groom were both 21. Elizabeth’s background is a little uncertain but she seems to have been the daughter of Elizabeth and James Stephen, a wealthy surgeon who had died before his daughter’s marriage. She is described as resident at Breakspears, an ancient house not far from Canons, then owned by the Partridge family. John Partridge witnessed the couple’s marriage – he may have been a friend or relative with whom Elizabeth was staying.
Some have seen the portrait as a universal statement about wedded bliss. However, William Hallett may have been more preoccupied with speculation about which horse was likely to win the next race. Betting and gambling were to be his downfall. We learn from his will, which he wrote in an informal autobiographical style shortly before his death, that horse racing was his chief interest even before his marriage. Living in the country bored him and he and his wife never lived at Canons. Hallett had let the estate to a racehorse owner and breeder in 1783, two years before he married, and sold it in 1786. It is not clear where the Halletts lived immediately after their wedding. In 1788, Hallett purchased the estate of Little Wittenham, near Wallingford, Berkshire, where he built a ’small house‘. Soon after that they moved to Faringdon House in Oxfordshire, where they lived for 20 years.
In 1807 Hallett made two disastrous property deals and by 1830 there was nothing left of his fortune. His will records that he lived with his wife Elizabeth ’most happily for nearly 48 years, as it was impossible to do otherwise with such a woman‘. We know nothing of the life Elizabeth led after she was painted by Gainsborough sauntering in her filmy dress though a glade aged 21, but it can’t have been an easy one. She had two sons and four daughters and when she died aged 69 she was buried in the Hallett family vault in the same church where she had been married.
William Hallett remarried the following year and sent Gainsborough’s portrait of himself and his first wife to Foster’s sale room, where it did not sell. He wrote his will in the same year and in it lamented the fact that he had no riches to bestow on his children, but added that they ‘will enjoy all my late wife’s fortune’ (which had presumably been tied up in trust funds). He was in debt and had little left to leave. He bequeathed ‘my picture of my late wife... painted before I married July 30th 1785’ – presumably Gainsborough’s double portrait – to his daughter, Lettice Elizabeth. He left another painting and a few religious and law books to his other children and their spouses, money for a ring to his friend and the ‘rest and residue’ to his second wife Mary Jane, ‘hoping sincerely that it may turn out better than expected’. His funeral plans were very modest: ‘I should like to be taken in a concealed manner (for the sake of cheapness) to the Crane Inn at Edgware and from thence by ten poor labourers such as the clergymen of the Parish of Little Stanmore may name... to be buried in my family vault near my late wife’, adding, ‘where my present wife may like to join the party if not better engaged.’
When the portrait was shown at the British Institution’s Gainsborough exhibition in 1859, the reviewer for The Times commented that ‘it would be difficult to conceive a more perfect realisation of youthful elegance and high breeding’, then adding, ‘before the world had withered the young wife’s roses, before the turf and the bottle had soured the husband’s brow, and reddened his nose, or the gout stiffened and swelled those shapely legs of his.’
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George Bellows is perhaps best known for his pictures of boxing matches, which he began painting around 1904, shortly after his arrival in New York City from his native Ohio. However, he painted across a diverse range of genres – portraits, landscapes, seascapes and city scenes, such as this one – although he usually addressed more contemporary subjects in the drawings and lithographs he produced for left-wing and social reform publications.
In common with an informal group of older American artists, nicknamed the Ashcan School for their supposedly squalid subject matter, he focused on the realities of contemporary life, especially everyday life in the cities. Bellows had been a student of Robert Henri, the unofficial leader of the Ashcan School, who taught at the New York School of Art. An admirer of Manet, whose work he had seen in Paris, Henri rejected academic painting and what he regarded as overly genteel American Impressionism. He told his students to ‘paint the everyday world in America just as it had been done in France,’ asserting that artists should have ‘a Dickens-like interest in the people and their life’.
This picture is the last and most ambitious in a series of wintry river landscapes that Bellows painted between 1908 and 1912. He had initially focused on views of the Hudson and East River, but in the final group of paintings, which includes this one completed in February 1912 (just two months before the scheduled arrival of the Titanic in New York), it is the riverfront that provides a stage for human activity. Bellows’s choice of a large canvas suggests he regarded Men of the Docks as a major painting, and it was his only submission to the National Academy of Design annual show in 1912. The painting subsequently toured the Midwest and was awarded the Sesnan Medal for best landscape at the Pennsylvania Academy.
Positioned on the waterfront of the East River, near Brooklyn Heights, we are looking across the partly frozen waters towards the tall buildings of Lower Manhattan. On the right, the massive hull of an ocean liner is flanked by a tugboat that is almost a scaled-down version of it. The liner and the warehouse in shadow on the left form two powerful diagonals that meet at the sunlit Manhattan skyline, which rises from the water like a cliff face. The repeated use of blue helps draw us into the picture. Waterfront views of Manhattan’s architecture towering above the river were already a popular subject in photography. Perhaps the most well-known image was Alfred Stieglitz’s The City of Ambitions, first published in the October 1911 edition of his magazine Camera Work. His view of Manhattan swathed in steam and smoke rising from the shimmering water was among the first of many photographs to present New York as an example of the modern sublime. Just above the liner, Bellows has included the top of Brooklyn Bridge, another iconic landmark of modern New York. Completed in 1883, it was the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge. On close examination, the cables running from the top of one of its turrets are visible; curiously, Bellows has painted the neo-Gothic arches of the turret as rounded, rather than pointed.
Seen from a relatively low vantage point, the warehouse, liner and skyline form three sides of a box, the fourth wall of which is formed in part by the group of longshoremen, who are most likely waiting to unload the liner. Longshoremen (the dockers or stevedores who manually loaded and unloaded ships) were casual labourers, often newly arrived immigrants whose employment was frequently controlled by corrupt union bosses. Their livelihood was precarious and they had a poor reputation. By placing the men against the Manhattan skyline, Bellows ironically contrasts the dynamic centre of modern capitalism – the great ‘city of ambitions’ – with the harsh reality of the people whose labour kept it functioning.
Wearing thick jackets, their hands deep in their pockets and their collars turned up against the cold, the men seem to be listening to an announcement, probably a roll call of who will be working that day. Bellows shows the moment as the inactivity of waiting is about to transform into the physical exertion of heavy work. On the left of the picture, a hunched man, his head bowed, appears to be leaving, perhaps having been told he has not been chosen. His isolation from the group is emphasised by his distance from them and by his being completely in shadow. Although Bellows has painted the men in some detail, their faces and bodies are reduced to essentials. Some are close to being caricatures: the brute physical presence of the largest man on the right, for example, becomes a human version of the powerful dray horses behind him.
Terms such as ‘brutal’, ‘rough’ and ‘wallop’ were often used, approvingly, to describe Bellows’s painting technique and they seem particularly appropriate for his treatment of the men here. These descriptions of a violent or aggressive application of paint perhaps reflect an emphasis on manliness and physicality during the era of President Theodore Roosevelt. As one critic noted, evoking Roosevelt’s well-known love of hunting, Bellows ’slams on his colour most indecorously with splendid effect … He shoots with both barrels of his gun but he bags his game.‘ These descriptions perhaps overlook the astonishing dexterity of Bellows’s exuberant brushwork, but they are also indicative of a distinctly masculine aesthetic in his work, which combines a ’brutal‘ handling of paint with images of men’s bodies, particularly those defined by physical labour (longshoremen) and violence (boxers). A similar use of masculine terminology to describe painting technique would occur again in the 1950s with Abstract Expressionism, and Bellows might be seen as an early forerunner of the movement.
Bellows was hailed ‘the Millet of the stevedores,’ and his depiction of working people had precedents in French art. But it is Courbet rather than Millet who is the precursor here – his Burial at Ornans of 1849–50 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), especially, is perhaps distantly reflected in Men of the Docks. Courbet sought to create a French popular art, and Bellows’s focus on contemporary everyday subjects was often framed in nationalist terms. The artistic influences may have been French but, following Robert Henri’s example, this is distinctly American imagery.
When bought by the National Gallery in 2014, this was the first major American painting to enter the collection. Its purchase signalled a broadening of the Gallery’s remit from collecting European paintings to collecting paintings in the ‘European tradition’.
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In the summer of 1867, the German artist Adolph Menzel stayed in Paris for nine weeks. It was his second visit to the city and it coincided with the Universal Exhibition, which ran from April until October. While in Paris, Menzel almost certainly visited Manet’s pavilion. Manet had not been invited to participate in the official fair but, following the example of Courbet – who had set up his own ‘Pavilion of Realism’ when his monumental canvas The Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was rejected by the 1855 Universal Exhibition – he set up his own pavilion nearby. It displayed around 50 of Manet’s paintings, including Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862). A pencil drawing in Menzel’s Paris sketchbook of the crowd at the Tuileries Gardens affirms that he had seen Manet’s picture and that it made a deep impression upon him.
Menzel began work on his own painting of the Tuileries Gardens as soon as he returned to Berlin. Not only was it a response to Manet, but it was also the first of what was to become a series of modern urban scenes. Half the size of Manet’s picture, Menzel’s work directly quotes from it. For example, the man in a top hat seen in profile leaning forward, partly covered by a tree, replicates Manet’s brother Eugène, and in both pictures a child crouches down in the foreground. Manet’s self portrait on the left edge of his picture is countered by Menzel placing himself, his top hat held behind his back, in the lower right corner of his. But Menzel’s picture is no copy or pastiche of Manet’s. The differences between the two are more telling than their similarities, and Menzel’s painting might be viewed as a rejection of Manet. Significantly, when first exhibited in Berlin in 1858, Menzel’s work was titled Sunday Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens, from Memory, and he also added an abbreviation for Berlin after his signature to emphasise that it was not painted from life in Paris. Instead, the picture is a synthesis of vignettes or impressions, perhaps based upon observation, assembled in his studio to form a single scene.
There are important differences between the two pictures. While Manet used a frieze-like composition, Menzel has created deep paths through the trees at sharp angles to the picture plane, which open up the space and also allow him to include more figures. The foreground also tilts forward slightly to offer us an aerial view across the park towards its entrance on the rue de Rivoli. Menzel ’s emphasis on illusion and depth is very different from Manet’s on the flat surface of the canvas. In contrast to Manet’s lack of modelling, Menzel has maintained an effect of atmospheric recession, as figures in the foreground are painted in minute detail and almost tip out of the picture, while those further back are painted more freely. Manet’s picture shows people drawn mainly from a single class – the Parisian haute bourgeoisie – whereas Menzel’s picturesque realism, full of busy detail and anecdote, shows a heterogeneous crowd of various ages, classes and nationalities. Seen together, the two pictures show there was more than one way to depict ‘modern life’.
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Ingres was commissioned to paint this portrait in 1844, two years after the sitter, Marie Clotilde-Inès de Foucauld, had married the wealthy banker, Sigisbert Moitessier. He was initially reluctant to accept the commission, but changed his mind after meeting the 23-year-old Madame Moitessier, whom he described as ‘beautiful and good’. Nonetheless, it took him 12 years to complete the painting. The delay was partly caused by the need to finish other commissions and by the death of Ingres’s wife in 1849. The death of Madame Moitessier’s father, also in 1849, and her pregnancy with her second child further extended the delay.
During this time the painting underwent major revisions, often with the active collaboration of Madame Moitessier. The initial plan was to include the sitter’s four-year-old daughter, Catherine, leaning against her mother’s knees. Frustrated by the child’s inability to keep still, Ingres removed her from the composition and also moved Madame Moitessier to the picture’s centre by realigning the canvas on its stretcher. While these extensive changes were being made, Ingres painted a second portrait. Completed relatively quickly in 1851, this is a more solemn picture of Madame Moitessier wearing a black ball gown as she stands at a mantelpiece (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Despite these delays, it’s likely that Ingres decided upon Madame Moitessier’s pose right from the start. It is adopted from a Roman mural, Herakles finding his son Telephos, which includes the goddess of Arcadia seated upon a throne. The mural had been discovered in Herculaneum in 1739 and was subsequently moved to the Museo Borbinico in Naples. Ingres almost certainly saw it when he visited the city in 1814, and he also owned engravings of it. In the portrait, he uses the gesture of Arcadia’s right hand, with its index finger raised, supporting her head. Preparatory drawings show how he gave great attention to the precise positioning of Madame Moitessier’s right arm, hand and fingers.
Women’s fashions had undergone significant changes in the time it took to complete the portrait, and Ingres had to make several revisions to Madame Moitessier’s clothes to prevent the portrait from looking dated when he finished it. Having first selected a dark and then a yellow dress, he finally chose one of lavish floral chintz made from Lyonnaise silk. Its pinkish-reds and blues are echoed in the vase on the left, and its distinctive floral design repeated in the ornate flowers, buds and leaves of the picture’s elaborate gilded frame. The dress is supported by a crinoline – a stiffened or structured petticoat that increased its volume. A radical innovation in women’s fashion that had only been introduced the previous year, the crinoline spread the dress out, enabling Ingres to fully display the material. Madame Moitessier’s hairstyle, with the hair pulled back off the brow to reveal her full face, was also new and, by revealing a glimpse of the ear, provocative too. Ingres skilfully depicts the tones and textures of different fabrics, while the impression of opulence is amplified by the Renaissance – and Byzantine-style jewellery. Ingres paints these jewels in meticulous detail, the purple and red of the amethysts and garnets in the bracelets, brooch and headpiece echoing the reds and pinks used throughout the picture. Here, especially, the oil paint has the smoothness and brilliance of enamel.
Madame Moitessier’s fashionable dress and hairstyle are complemented by the room’s furnishings. A revival of the highly decorative earlier Rococo style was at its height in mid-nineteenth century France. This was the era of the Second Empire, which saw the restoration of the imperial throne and an extravagant display of wealth. The room has the ambiance of a luxurious eighteenth-century salon with its Japanese Imari vase, silk hand-screen, ornate fan, Louis XV console table, gilded mirror frame and padded damask sofa (with a tiny cupid peeking over Madame Moitessier’s left shoulder). This is a picture of flowing lines and curves, as the sinuous line extending from Madame Moitessier’s right elbow to her seemingly boneless hand and fingers is echoed by the table leg, just as its contour is repeated by the curved back of the sofa. Her languid left arm is echoed by the ribbons that spill down the dress.
Madame Moitessier herself is placed high within the painting. This not only allows Ingres to fill almost a third of the picture with her sumptuous dress – and display his virtuoso skill in painting it – but it also gives her an aura of majesty as, self-assured and serene, she calmly gazes upon us. By posing her against a dark mirror, Ingres also offers us a double portrait: one that is frontal and one in profile. However, closer inspection of the mirror reveals some oddities. The reflection is not entirely consistent with her actual position. It also lacks the detail and luminosity of the figure, its dull surface contrasting with the opulence of Madame Moitessier and her surroundings.
Further scrutiny reveals other inconsistencies in the picture’s construction. The area containing the mirror, sofa and table is too cramped for them, while the reflection does not match what we would expect to see. For example, the small cupid has no mirror image, but the decorative carving on which it is mounted does. The reflection of the room’s doors and panels and, yet more confusingly, the reflection of the mirror facing Madame Moitessier in the mirror behind her, further add to this ambiguity. These ‘distortions’ are part of Ingres’s deliberate manipulation of pictorial space.
Madame Moitessier is a fine example of Ingres’s late style in its combination of sumptuous visual display, extraordinary technical skill, compositional complexity and psychological presence. However, Ingres often complained about the numerous requests he received for ‘wretched portraits’, claiming they prevented him from pursuing what he thought was more important – historical and allegorical paintings. Madame Moitessier presented a possible solution to this dilemma, as the painting enabled him to combine contemporary portraiture with elements of history painting, in particular its classical forms and references. Indeed, for Ingres, Madame Moitessier was a living embodiment of the classical ideal. A modern-day goddess enthroned in luxury, she sits impassively, fully confident of her place in society.
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It is night in a grand private house: through the window the moon gleams behind a cloud. A travelling lecturer, with all the drama of a magician, fixes his gaze upon us. An audience of men, women and children are gathered around him to watch the experiment he is conducting. The room is lit by a single candle that burns out of sight on the polished table behind a large rounded glass containing a diseased human skull. The candlelight is diffused through the murky liquid and illuminates the faces of the observers, casting deep, dramatic shadows – every furrow of the lecturer’s brow and curl of his silver hair is heightened.
A rare white cockatoo has been taken from its cage and placed in a glass container from which the air is being pumped to create a vacuum. The cockatoo convulses in distress as it struggles to breathe. With one hand raised, the lecturer has the god-like power over life or death – he can either expel the air completely and kill the bird or allow the air back in and revive it. A gentleman times the experiment on his pocket watch, while the youth seated beside him leans in for a closer view. The lecturer points to the ticking watch and, with his other hand on the air valve, looks to us as though the decision is ours.
The little girl observes the bird with fascination, but her elder sister cannot bear to watch and covers her eyes. Her father places his arm around her shoulder, perhaps to reassure her, or to explain that all living creatures must one day die. The boy beside the window waits, rope in hand, to see whether he will need to lower the cage for the reprieved bird. The young couple beside the lecturer only have eyes for each other. They are Thomas Coltman and Mary Barlow, friends of the artist who were to marry in 1769 and sit for their double portrait, Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman. The elderly man on the right contemplates the skull, lost in thought. The skull and candle are emblems of mortality, but Joseph Wright’s painting leaves us uncertain of the outcome for the bird.
Paintings such as this fitted into none of the generally accepted categories of British art. Its subject was not from literature, it was too modern to be a history painting and too serious to be a conversation piece. The Air Pump captures the drama of a staged scientific experiment but it is also a modern-day vanitas – a reminder of the passing of time, the limits of human knowledge and the frailty of life itself.
During the 1760s Wright painted a series of ‘candlelight’ pictures of increasing complexity. A Girl reading a Letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man peering over her Shoulder (private collection) of about 1760–2 was probably the first. In it, Wright has observed the dramatic effects of light thrown upwards by candlelight onto the girl’s face and the more shadowy face of the man behind her. Wright’s use of strong directional light and deep shadow to create drama was new in British art. Three Persons viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, exhibited in 1765 (private collection), shows three men studying a copy of one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, the Borghese Gladiator, conveying the excitement of the acquisition of knowledge. The following year, in 1766, Wright exhibited A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun (Derby Art Gallery). The ellipses of the candlelit orrery demonstrate the movement of the earth around the sun. Wright had realised that a scene communicating ‘the Pleasures of Science’ to men, women and children with different levels of knowledge could be made into a dramatic painting on a large scale.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, exhibited two years later, is even larger than The Orrery and the most ambitious and theatrical of all Wright’s candlelight pictures. The experiment was not new in 1768 as it had been invented over a century before, but what was new was showing its impact on ordinary people. The public probably only encountered ’science‘ in the form of demonstrations by travelling lecturers, usually in town halls or, as here, privately by invitation. In The Air Pump, Wright celebrates the new appetite for learning.
His first idea for the picture is painted in oils on the back of his Self portrait of about 1767–8 (private collection). In the oil sketch there are fewer figures: the father and girls are present, as is the older man and the gentleman with the pocket watch. However, the lecturer is less dramatic, positioned to the side of the air pump and demonstrating the experiment on a small bird, primarily to the girls. Wright’s final version, with the air pump in the centre of the canvas, gives much greater prominence and power to the lecturer and heightens the drama of the scene.
In The Air Pump, Wright carries out his own experiment into what happens to colours as they recede from the light. The lecturer’s showy red robe is of light red damask woven with arabesques; salmon pink in the candlelight, but darkening to magenta as the eye travels further from the light. The girls’ dresses transform from pale lilac to purple and then to black. The little girls are the most brightly lit figures, and their reactions to the bird’s fate the most extreme. The polished surface of the table reflects the light and the objects on it and surrounding it. The younger girl’s arm can be seen through the glass bottle of translucent amber liquid lit by the candle, and shadows loom across the walls. Where the light does not reach – beneath the table – colour and form disappear altogether into blackness. Light and dark – as much as life and death – are the subjects of Wright’s dramatic, monumental canvas.
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Jacques Cazotte (1719–1792) is best known as the author of Le Diable amoureux (‘The Amorous Devil’), a tale about a devil disguised as a beautiful woman trying to take possession of a man, and other fantastical fiction. He was also a colonial administrator, a maker and supplier of fine wine, an amateur painter, a collector of old master paintings and a dabbler in counter-revolutionary circles.
Born in Dijon, Cazotte worked in Martinique until ill health forced him to retire. In 1760 he inherited a chateau at Pierry near Châlons-sur-Marne, including vineyards, which allowed him to live in ease and concentrate on producing and marketing his wines. In 1761 Cazotte married Elisabeth Roignan. The couple had three children.
From 1760 Cazotte began writing regularly, although an early work, his romantic fairy tale La Patte du Chat, had been published in 1741. His epic prose poem Ollivier, based on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, was published in 1763 to immediate success. However, Cazotte’s life was to be cut short by the French Revolution. He saw the rise of Revolutionary fervour in France as a fight between Good, represented by Louis XVI, and Evil, represented by the Revolution. He wanted the monarchy to be strengthened and a return to the laws of the past to correct current abuses. Cazotte set out his political views in a series of letters, which turned out to be his undoing. After the letters were discovered in 1792, he was arrested and imprisoned for counter-revolution. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. On 25 September 1792, he was executed on the guillotine, where he met his death with great courage, exclaiming to the crowd: ‘I die as I have lived, faithful to God and to my king.’ All of Cazotte’s property, including his library and collection of 104 pictures (some, he claimed, by Poussin, Titian and Lesueur), was confiscated, leaving his widow and daughter destitute.
Perronneau’s portraits are known for their strong colours and bold mark-making. He uses sophisticated combinations of colour – for example blue and green in the flesh tones and pink, yellow and blue streaks in the sitters’ powdered hair. Perronneau’s portrait is unusual in showing the sitter turned away from us, as though in lively conversation with someone to his right. Cazotte appears relaxed and amused, with his hat tucked under his arm. He wears a coat and waistcoat of salmon pink silk lined with white. The vivacity of the expression is matched by the brilliant handling of the pink costume. In these respects the portrait contrasts with the more direct approach of La Tour as shown in his portrait of Henry Dawkins. The Flemish lace of Cazotte’s shirt frill, which matches his ruffled cuff, is thrown into prominence by the black silk ribbon, known as a solitaire, tied round his wig at the back with the ends brought round and pinned under his lace frill.
The portrait may have been commissioned in 1763 to celebrate the success of Cazotte’s prose poem, Ollivier, or perhaps in 1753 when Perronneau became an Academician, which would be more consistent with Cazotte’s age here.
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Jan Brueghel the Elder is seen as the founding father of the genre of flower still lifes, in which flowers are not merely decorative or allegorical accessories but the sole focus of the painting. This major example of Brueghel’s pioneering still lives shows an impressive bouquet from a high viewpoint to make sure that all the carefully rendered flowers and insects are clearly visible.
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Johan Christian Dahl probably visited the waterfalls at Labro (Labrofoss) when on a sketching trip in Norway, his country of birth, in 1826. This picture was painted in his Dresden studio the following year and was sold in 1828 to a Mr Bracebridge, a British businessman and trader from London.
Around 80 kilometres west of Oslo, the Labrofoss are among Norway’s major falls. Dahl shows the lower part of the rapids, placing us on flat rocks directly facing the torrent surging through a narrow gully. He applied the white paint thickly to suggest the power and roughness of the water as it cascades over the rocks. In the background, tall pine trees, interspersed with deciduous trees, are silhouetted against a darkening sky. The low clouds are tinged with violet as dusk descends.
Although a rugged landscape, this is not untamed wilderness. Look closely and you can see a large wooden hut on the left and two woodcutters, one holding an axe, near the centre of the painting. Despite being dwarfed by the trees and massive boulders, the woodcutters’ presence, together with the logs that tumble down the falls and gather at the bottom of the picture, show that this countryside is harvested for its resources. This practice continues today: Labrofoss is now the site of a hydroelectric power station.
Born and raised in Bergen in Norway, Dahl lived most of his life outside of the country, although he regularly returned there later in life, beginning with the trip he made in 1826. In 1811 he had moved to Copenhagen where he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and formed a friendship with Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. Seven years later he relocated to Dresden, where in 1825 he was made a professor at the city’s art academy.
While in Dresden, Dahl formed a close friendship with the German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. Dahl shared Friedrich’s Romantic view of landscape, stating in a letter of 1818 to Prince Christian Frederick (who later became king of both Norway and Denmark) that, ‘most of all I am representing nature in its freedom and wildness’. However, despite his interest in mood and drama, Dahl’s landscapes are not infused with the spiritual significance and still intensity of Friedrich’s. The single tree that stands alone on the left bank in this picture does not, for example, have the symbolic overtones of Friedrich’s Winter Landscape. Instead, Dahl’s romanticism is tempered by detailed naturalism and anecdotal detail, such as the woodcutters and their hut that we see here.
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Joseph-Hyacinthe-François de Paule de Rigaud, comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817), was only eighteen when his portrait was painted by Drouais in 1758. He was the son of the governor and commander-general of Saint-Domingue, at that time a French colony on the western end of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is why he points to it on a map.
Vaudreuil was in France by 1757, having left Saint-Domingue (his father ceased to be governor the same year). When his portrait was painted, he was a junior army officer and had already been at the Battle of Rossbach (5 November 1757) in Saxony during the Seven Years War, when the French had suffered a disastrous defeat by the Prussians. Although he is not in uniform, the armour at the bottom right of the painting and the map, titled (in French) ‘the German Empire,’ behind his head allude to his military service. The reference to Germany was not just personal but also contained a political message: by turning his back on the map of Germany and partially covering it with a map of the Caribbean showing Saint-Domingue, Vaudreuil asserts the importance of the colony for French interests and its importance relative to continental Europe. The fall of Guadeloupe to the British on 1 May 1759, just weeks before the opening of the Salon, where the portrait may have been exhibited, would have made this message even more pointed.
Instead of his uniform, Vaudreuil wears a blue velvet coat lined with squirrel fur and a brocade waistcoat with festoons of gold and silver lace. His wig is tied in place by a black silk ribbon fastened in a bow at the neck. The red heels on his shoes indicate his aristocratic status. Behind him is a giltwood Louis XV chair covered with red damask on which he has placed his black tricorne hat and leather gloves. This meticulous attention to detail, especially the depiction of luxurious fabrics, was typical of Drouais’s style and can be seen in his portrait of Madame de Pompadour. Drouais’s idealising portraits, which often flattered his sitters, were hugely popular with the French elite. Although still only a young man and hardly in need of flattery, the count has a flawless complexion with rosy cheeks and lips and large bright eyes. Despite Vaudreuil’s status, the portrait has an air of informality and, rather than military stiffness, his long slender body has a slight tilt.
The count continued his military career while also amassing great wealth through inheritance and from his sugarcane plantations at Saint-Domingue. A collector and patron of the arts, he was a close friend of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who claimed he had ‘every quality and grace which can render a man attractive.’ Vaudreuil was part of the circle around Queen Marie Antoinette and, like many aristocrats, fled France within days of the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, at the start of the French Revolution. With the restoration of the French monarchy in 1814, he returned to France, where he died in 1817. In 1791 a slave rebellion broke out on Saint-Domingue. The new French Republic abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794, although it was temporarily restored by Napoleon in 1802. The French finally withdrew in late 1803 and the following year western Hispaniola declared independence as Haiti, its indigenous name.
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Lady Jane Grey reigned for just nine days as Queen of England following the death of Edward VI in July 1553: she was deposed by the faction supporting Edward’s half-sister and heir, the Catholic Mary Tudor. Tried for treason, the 17-year-old Lady Jane was beheaded at Tower Hill on 12 February 1554.
In the catalogue for the 1834 Salon, where the painting was first exhibited, Delaroche quoted from a text about Protestant martyrs, Martyrologe des protestants, which was published in 1558. Describing her final moments, the excerpt tells how the blindfolded Lady Jane pleaded, ‘What shall I do? Where is the block?’ It is this moment that the painting shows, as the helpless Lady Jane is guided to the execution block by Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower. Her outer clothing has already been removed and is gathered in the lap of a lady-in-waiting, who has slumped to the ground. Behind her, a second lady-in-waiting stands facing the wall, unable to watch. To the right, a fifth figure, the executioner, stands waiting.
Delaroche uses a dark monochrome background of Romanesque architecture as a foil for the illuminated life-size figures – in particular the group in the centre-right – and the rich reds, browns and blacks of their clothing. Lady Jane is the visual focus of the painting, as the bright sheen of her satin petticoat (its radiant whiteness symbolising her innocence), pale skin and gleam of her wedding ring stand out from the oppressive gloom. No one in the picture looks at us, and nothing, except for the brightly-lit straw laid down to soak up the blood, comes between us and what is about to happen. The smooth finish of the paint and its lack of visible brushwork further enhance the illusion.
The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the spread of new forms of visual spectacle. These included panoramas, in which enormous paintings that completely surrounded the viewer were displayed in rotundas, and dioramas, where paintings were shown within a rotating cylindrical auditorium with the added drama of spectacular light effects. Delaroche was almost certainly aware of these immersive optical experiences when he composed this picture. He had also previously explored the techniques of creating visual spectacle himself when he made preparatory models while planning his paintings.
Another popular entertainment in French theatres, which Delaroche would have seen, was the tableau vivant – ‘a living picture’ in which actors, appropriately costumed and theatrically lit, silently held poses. Delaroche had close connections with Paris theatres, and the small cast of life-size figures, raised platform and historical props give this painting the look of a tableau vivant. The likely model for Lady Jane was a famous actress from the Comédie–Français, Mademoiselle Anaïs, who was well known for her blonde hair and slight figure, and with whom Delaroche was romantically involved. Delaroche creates a highly theatrical stage-like space at which we have a front row seat. Forced to acknowledge what is about to happen, we must make a choice between looking or looking away. This choice is already taking place in the painting itself, as the three women either turn away or are unable to see, leaving only the two men as witnesses.
Delaroche’s extensive preparatory drawings reveal how he reduced the composition to its core elements, trying out a variety of poses. These include seated, standing, kneeling and leaning figures who are variously presented frontally, half-turning or else fully turned away, displaying a range of emotional responses – horror, fear and pity. The drawings show how Delaroche was particularly preoccupied with Lady Jane and the executioner. Taking his cue from the historical source he cited in the catalogue, Delaroche specifically focuses on Lady Jane’s moment of faltering hesitation as, ‘crying piteously,’ she tentatively searches for the block, her outstretched arms gently guided by Sir John’s hands. Hands play an important role in the picture, as Delacroche uses expressive gestures to give insight into the psychological state of each character. In a highly finished watercolour sketch of 1832, a stockier version of the executioner, who holds a large broadsword, stands to the side, as if merely waiting to complete his task. However, in the painting the sword has been replaced by an axe, and the figure of brute state authority had evolved into one whose pose and facial expression suggest some degree of compassion.
When first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1834, the Execution of Lady Jane Grey was an immediate sensation. Although not historically accurate in many details – for example, the execution actually took place outdoors not inside, as shown here – the painting’s combination of intense melodrama and realism proved extremely popular with the public. Crowds gathered in front of the picture and pressed forward, eager to get close to it. Some critics were less enthusiastic, however, claiming it was too theatrical and that Delaroche had based the composition on another painting, John Opie’s Mary Queen of Scots, which he knew from an engraving. This division between public and critical responses shows the mixed reception the painting has always received. Despite its original fame, the picture was forgotten for much of the twentieth century. For decades, it was thought to have been destroyed in the Thames flood of 1928. Following its chance rediscovery in the basement of the Tate Gallery in 1973, it was exhibited two years later at the National Gallery, where it continues to be one of the most popular paintings.
Delaroche’s choice of British subject matter reflects the French fascination with English culture in the 1820s and 1830s. He had visited Britain at least twice before 1834, and in 1831 had painted a violent episode from English history that took place in the Tower of London: the murder of the two young sons of Edward IV on the order of Richard III in The Children of Edward (Louvre, Paris). Contemporary French viewers would also have been alert to the parallels between Tudor history and relatively recent events in France after the Revolution of 1789 – most obviously, the similar fates of Lady Jane Grey and the French royal family (including Marie-Antoinette), who had faced the guillotine in 1793. Delaroche turns an event from British history into a compelling visual spectacle that also served as a commentary on France’s recent and bloody past.
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Located just outside Copenhagen, the Citadel (Kastellet) was a former military fort surrounded by moats and ramparts. Last used during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, it still housed around 600 soldiers and their families. Christen Købke and his parents lived there from 1819 to 1833. Købke’s father was the Citadel’s master baker, and the family moved out when he retired. Købke often returned to the Citadel over the next four years. He painted several views of it including this one, which he may have given to his mother as a souvenir of their former home.
In this picture, Købke has painted a drawbridge outside the Citadel’s north gate. From a vantage point at the foot of the rampart beside the bridge, he is looking across the moat looking towards a guardhouse on the other side. Although the drawbridge no longer exits, Købke’s preliminary sketches and oil study allow us to follow the choices he made in selecting this particular point of view. In an initial sketch (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen) he placed himself to the left of the bridge. However, realising perhaps that the bridge seen from this location would block the view, he reversed the composition in a later, highly detailed drawing (Vejle Art Museum, Denmark) and an oil sketch (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen). The oil sketch would have been painted outdoors, on site, most likely in May 1837. The revised vantage point, to the right of bridge and slightly further from it, allows the bridge to lead our eye into the picture and gives a clear view of the guardhouse.
Købke worked on the final painting in his studio at home, signing and dating it in September 1837. In contrast to the spontaneity of the oil sketch, he returned to the detailed precision of the compositional drawing. The intricacy and complexity of the manmade structure recalls the work of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, his teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen – for example, Eckersberg’s View of the Forum in Rome. Bathed in an evening light, rather than the bright daylight of the oil sketch, and with a hint of pink in the sky, Købke’s view is suffused with tones of the complementary colours red and green. Other changes included adding two soldiers fishing in the canal and replacing a soldier on the bridge with a sailor with his back turned towards us, who gazes at the scene before him, as we do. Købke also enhanced the effect of depth by placing a small group of figures at the far end of the bridge and by adding a thick band of rushes along the picture’s lower edge.
One viewer, the theologian W.F. Wiborg, pointed out that the withered rushes indicated autumn although the new leaves on the trees suggested spring. Wiborg also claimed it was impossible to identify the exact type of poplar tree and that, ‘the sky has an evening light, while the earth has midday light'. Although such demands for accuracy were typical of art criticism at that time, Købke was perhaps more interested in creating a specific mood – one infused with a fond nostalgia for the place where he grew up.
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Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1805–1899) was an artist who exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon from 1831. He later inherited the title of baron. His friendship with Delacroix, seven years his senior and under whom he may have trained, lasted until Delacroix’s death in 1863. Significantly for this painting, both shared an enthusiasm for England and they may have travelled together to London in 1825, the year before Delacroix began work on the portrait.
French interest in English culture and history was at its peak in the 1820s and 1830s – a fine example of this is Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. The cultivation of English style is evident both in Schwiter’s clothes and in Delacroix’s emulation of contemporary English portraiture. British artists often exhibited at the Paris Salon and Delacroix would also have seen examples while visiting London. Delacroix especially admired the portraitist, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830). He wrote enthusiastically in his Journal of portraits Lawrence had exhibited at the Salon of 1824, and met him in England the following year.
For this portrait, Delacroix adopted Lawrence’s preference for presenting elegantly dressed figures within a parkland setting. He also sought to recreate what he saw as Lawrence’s ability to capture ‘the most delicate shade of melancholy or of gaiety.’ Although not an overtly melancholic portrait, the sombre evening sky, setting sun and dark landscape – partly painted by the landscape painter Paul Huet (1803–1869) – contribute to the effect of approaching dusk. Schwiter himself is depicted as a pensive and somewhat guarded young man who appraises us as much as we do him. Holding his top hat, with its flash of bright red lining, he wears a simple but fashionable black frock coat, which sets off his cream gloves and brilliant white cravat. Pale, elegant, and slim, he is a distinctly modern figure with a hint of the dandy about him.
Delacroix was also an enthusiastic admirer of the English poet, Lord Byron (1788–1824), whose poems provided subjects for many of his paintings and prints. In his Journal of 1824 he extensively praised Byron’s ability to express the sense of isolation that can accompany genius. Delacroix’s identification with ‘the poet who lives in isolation’ is perhaps projected onto Schwiter. As they shared similar physical features, the painting may in part be viewed as a self portrait.
As his first full-length portrait, this painting was an important step for Delacroix. But despite his ambitions for it, the painting was rejected for the Salon of 1827. The reason for this is not known, but dissatisfaction with the perspective of the balustrade may be the explanation; Delacroix later reworked this section. The painting was eventually bought by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in 1895 for his own private collection, a few years after Schwiter’s death.
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Many portraits were painted of Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), the mistress of Louis XV and one of the most famous figures of her time. Although the grandest, this portrait by Drouais is also the most naturalistic image of her, which avoids the rigid formality or mythological trappings of much court portraiture. Instead, we encounter Madame de Pompadour as a homely woman accompanied by one of her dogs, a black King Charles spaniel, in her salon (a living or drawing room) at her apartment in Versailles as she works at a tapestry (tambour) frame. Rather than the international celebrity she had become by the end of her life, when this portrait was painted, she is presented as an almost matronly figure embodying bourgeois virtue and industry.
Madame de Pompadour was born plain Mademoiselle Poisson. In 1741 she married Charles-Guillaume Le Normant des Etioles, the nephew of her mother’s rich lover. She began to entertain artists and intellectuals at her salon, where she attracted the attention of Louis XV. After separating from her husband, she was ennobled to marquise and moved into Versailles. Although regarded as an upstart Parisian bourgeois by her rivals and enemies, she retained the king’s favour, and continued to live at Versailles even after she had ceased to be his mistress by 1751.
The marquise was an important patron of the fine, applied and performing arts. She particularly supported the artist Boucher and protected the porcelain factory at Vincennes, transferring it to Sèvres, near one of her houses, where it flourished. Visitors to her salon in Paris had included the writer Voltaire, the most famous of the liberal philosophes (intellectuals). She remained sympathetic to Enlightenment thinking and maintained an extensive library. A leader of taste in matters of fashion and style, particularly Rococo style, the marquise also had some influence in government and public affairs, and supported the king’s extensive building projects. She was the subject of numerous biographies, and remains one of the most well-known historical figures of the eighteenth century.
Close examination reveals that the portrait, which was begun in April 1763 but not completed until May 1764 (a month after the marquise’s death aged 43), is in fact made up of two canvases. A smaller canvas – including the head, shoulders and right forearm – has been incorporated into the larger full-length portrait. It was not unusual, particularly with important sitters, for artists to work on a smaller portrait from life and to complete the rest in the studio with a model using the sitter’s clothes and accessories. It is not a court dress with unwieldy wide hoops, but a gown worn over small side hoops with a train gathered behind consisting of an overdress, petticoat and stomacher. The sumptuous fabric is possibly painted silk but is more likely a hand-painted floral pattern chintz garnished with French needle lace. The choice of material was itself a patriotic statement of support for the thriving industry in France of printing on cotton cloth, sourced from the French West Indies, which by the 1760s rivalled England’s production. Patriotic sentiment – and self-interest – may also have prompted the commissioning of the portrait to mark the ending of the Seven Years War (1756–43). Madame de Pompadour had helped promote the Franco-Austrian alliance, which had proved disastrous for France. Drouais’s portrait may have been intended to project an apolitical image of the marquise as a benign and respectable lady of arts and letters in order to downplay her implication in French military defeat and her identity as the king’s former mistress.
To the right in the picture, there is an elaborate worktable (with Sèvres plaques), which has a folio of drawings or engravings and a mandolin resting against it. These objects, and the books in the bookcase, testify to the marquise’s interest in the arts. However, it is the tapestry frame that, with the dress, is the most distinctive object on view. In his memoirs, one courtier later noted that in 1756 the marquise stopped receiving visitors in her dressing room but instead received them while at her tapestry-frame: ‘she went from make-up to making.’ Embroidery was regarded as a virtuous activity for women and it was not uncommon for them to be portrayed engaged in it. Most tambour frames were circular – the word comes from the French tambour (drum) – but wider rectangular frames, such as this one, allowed for larger pieces that could be stretched and wound on a roller as the work progressed.
Placing Madame de Pompadour at her tambour holding a hooked needle as she works on her embroidery creates a domesticated, even homely, image of respectability and relative informality. Although no longer a young woman, and stoically enduring deteriorating health, the marquise looks up from her embroidery to calmly acknowledge us with, as one admirer described, her ‘wonderful complexion … and those eyes not so very big, but the brightest, wittiest and most sparkling.’ But the tambour frame also creates a series of horizontals and verticals that provide a solid base supporting the triangle of her upper torso and head, which we see from slightly below. Almost exactly a century later, Ingres was to use a similar elevated pyramidal structure to create a powerful but discreet effect of social status in his portrait of Madame Moitessier, a picture also filled with the display of a luxurious dress and objects.
The portrait was well-received. One commentator who saw it in Paris at the Palais de Tuileries in August 1764 noted: ‘The resemblance is most striking, and the picture’s composition is as opulent as it is well understood.’ For another, Drouais was ‘the only man who knows how to paint women … I am persuaded that all our women will henceforth wish to be painted by Drouais.’
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On the third day after the Crucifixion two of Jesus’s disciples were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus. On the road they met the resurrected Christ, but failed to recognise him. He questioned them about what had happened, and explained that Christ had to suffer in order to enter into his kingdom. That evening he joined them for supper and ‘... took bread, and blessed it, and brake and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight’ (Luke 24: 30–31).
Painted at the height of Caravaggio’s fame, this is among his most impressive domestic religious pictures and perhaps his most famous. It was commissioned from Caravaggio in 1601, following the sensation caused by the public unveiling of his first major religious works – the paintings of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The painting was made for Ciriaco Mattei (1542–1614) who, along with his brother Asdrubale (1554–1638), was an enthusiastic patron and protector of Caravaggio, commissioning three works from him in just two years (1601–2): our picture, The Taking of Christ (on indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), and Saint John the Baptist (Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome). The Supper at Emmaus soon left the Mattei collection and entered the possession of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, remaining in the Borghese collection in Rome until the early nineteenth century. It is one of three paintings by the artist in the National Gallery – the others being Boy bitten by a Lizard and Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist – and was the first to enter our collection in 1839.
Caravaggio captures the dramatic climax of the story, the moment of revelation when the disciples suddenly see what has been in front of them all along. Their actions convey their astonishment: one is about to leap out of his chair, his elbow jutting out towards us, while the other throws out his arms in a gesture of disbelief. Typically for Caravaggio, he has shown the disciples as ordinary working men, with bearded, lined faces and ragged clothes, in contrast to the youthful beardless Christ who, with his flowing locks and rich red tunic, seems quite literally to have come from a different world.
Although the picture seems to capture a fleeting moment it is nevertheless carefully staged. The artist uses contrasts of light and shade (known as chiaroscuro) to heighten the drama. A strong light from the left falls on the faces of Christ and the disciple on the right, who is often identified as Saint Peter. It casts a shadow on the blank wall behind Christ, almost like a reverse halo, and illuminates the hand which the disciple thrusts towards the viewer, in a pose evoking Christ on the Cross during his crucifixion.
The geometric structure which underlies the composition helps guide our eye around the picture. The back view of the disciple on the left, thought to be Cleophas (the only apostle named in the Gospel), and the other disciple’s outstretched arms, shown in extreme foreshortening, act like tram lines focusing our attention on Christ’s serene face. He and the disciples form an inward-facing triangle, united in the moment of miraculous revelation. Unmoved, and standing outside it, is the innkeeper: his thumbs are tucked into his belt and he looks on impassively with his face in shadow, implying that he has not yet ’seen the light' – a metaphor for spiritual understanding.
The same light illuminates the astonishingly detailed and realistic still life laid out on the crisp white tablecloth – loaves of rustic bread, a chicken, and a basket of fruit teetering dangerously on the edge of the table – and is both reflected in and refracted through the carafe of water and wine glass. The tangibility of these objects draws us into the scene, and because the food and drink seem so real to us, so does the miracle.
As well as attracting the attention of wealthy and influential patrons, Caravaggio made a deep impression on contemporary artists, both for his evocative use of chiaroscuro and for his practice of painting from life. One of his most controversial techniques was painting directly onto the canvas, rather than following the traditional method of working out a composition through numerous preparatory studies. Indeed, not a single drawing that can be firmly attributed to Caravaggio survives. Caravaggio’s paintings were carefully composed, however, and technical examination has revealed that he sometimes drew outlines with a brush (known as abbozzo). Here, there are traces of brushed drawing in dark brown paint, slightly above the finalised contour of the base of the wine glass on the table, suggesting that Caravaggio used underdrawing to lay out the design of the elaborate still-life arrangement.
For the figures, however, Caravaggio only needed a rough guide to place forms. Where the sash of the disciple on the right joins the tablecloth, there are two rapidly executed, highly impastoed diagonal brushstrokes, a kind of summary indication he often used. In many of his works he also incised freehand lines into the still malleable priming (or undercoat) to mark out where figures were to be placed, and presumably to allow models to resume their poses. Although no incisions are visible here, they might well have been faint to begin with or simply obscured by layers of paint – after all, this is one of the artist’s most highly finished works. The lack of significant pentimenti also suggests a high degree of preparation and planning: the only significant change is the repositioning of the same apostle’s left knee behind the carpet, rather than in front of it, clearly done to enhance the thrust of his outstretched arm and the projection of the basket of fruit.
The fact that Caravaggio planned his paintings so carefully does not take away from their startling immediacy and accessibility. Many of his more unusual practices, such as basing his figures on real models taken from the world around him, were aimed at bringing a more convincing realism to history painting, and it was his technical innovations and dramatic capabilities that brought his stories so vividly to life.
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Reynolds portrays Banastre Tarleton (1754–1833) aged 27, in action as commandant of the British Legion cavalry in the War of American Independence. Tarleton was known for his reckless bravery as well as his vanity. He later became MP for Liverpool and defended the slave trade, on which his family’s fortune and those of other Liverpool families had been founded. He was made a general in 1812 and a baronet in 1816. The portrait was commissioned by one of Colonel Tarleton’s brothers on behalf of their mother.
Tarleton wears the uniform of the British Legion, which was constantly in action, mostly in South Carolina, in many skirmishes and raids. His savagery was legendary and he was known as ‘bloody Tarleton’ to the Americans. He lost two fingers from a musket shot in his right hand. The war and the American colonies were effectively lost on 19 October 1781 when Lord Cornwallis had to surrender all the forces under his command to George Washington at Yorktown.
Reynolds recorded that Tarleton had nine sittings for his portrait, the first only ten days after Tarleton landed in England at the end of the war. When the portrait’s head and shoulders were sufficiently finished, an unknown engraver produced a picture for publication with a lengthy account of Tarleton’s wartime exploits. About this time, Tarleton began a scandalous affair with Mrs Robinson, previously the mistress of the Prince of Wales. They may have met in Reynolds’s studio as he also painted Mrs Robinson’s portrait as ‘Perdita’ (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle) and Reynolds’s records show they had sittings on the same days.
Reynolds shows Tarleton momentarily dismounted on a battlefield, with gun smoke swirling behind him. Two horses, their reins held by a trooper, are seen behind a gun carriage. Tarleton props one leg up on a cannon to re-fix his sword to his belt before changing horse. Reynolds frequently drew on ideas from old master paintings and drawings and antique sculpture for his own compositions. Tarleton’s pose appears to be based on a combination of different sources: Rembrandt’s Tobias and the Angel at the River (a drawing owned by Reynolds), a detail from Tintoretto’s The Washing of the Apostle’s Feet in S. Marcuola, Venice (Reynolds owned a painted copy of it), and an antique sculpture of Hermes. A replica cast of the Hermes was at the Royal Academy Schools, of which Reynolds was president.
The portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, and mostly received praise from the critics. However, Reynolds had to wait nine years after painting it for payment from the Tarleton family.
The condition of the portrait has suffered due to faults in Reynolds’s technique which are also apparent in his other paintings, such as Lord Heathfield. When this portrait was painted, oil paints were not sold ready-made in tubes: artists and their assistants would make up the paints themselves using pigments and drying oils, such as walnut or linseed. Reynolds used experimental combinations of oils to make up his paints, including linseed, poppy and walnut oils as well as a conifer resin in this portrait. This has resulted in lasting problems with the paints themselves. Reynolds used non-drying or poor-drying oil glazes between many other layers of paint made of differing media when he reworked an area of the portrait, making the whole of the paint structure unstable.
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Saint-Aubin was primarily a graphic artist, who earned his living from making etchings and engravings and illustrating books. His career prefigures that of Daumier, the nineteenth-century illustrator and caricaturist. Both artists portrayed everyday life in Paris, including aspects of it overlooked by more established artists. Less satirical than Daumier, Saint-Aubin made humorous sketches of the Parisian scene and contemporary manners which often showed recognisable locations. This rare painting from 1760 is typical of his choice of subject and lively treatment.
Framed beneath an arch of tall trees, a small crowd watches two characters from commedia dell’arte (a popular form of comic theatre), possibly a Neapolitan Scaramouche and Harlequin, engaged in a duel. They are performing what was known as a parade – the painting was once titled Le Parade du Boulevard. As described in a contemporary theatrical dictionary, a parade was a ‘farce or little comedy with no rules whatever … very free and very satirical, that the buffoons stage on scaffolding above the entrance to their plays in order to attract the public.’ Given the relatively low height of this stage, the theatre entrance would have been to the side, rather than below it. Although these fencers are acting out a mock duel, the tips of their swords are uncovered and neither wears a mask, adding an element of danger to the show. The man at the window with his arms raised may also be part of the act.
An assortment of male and female characters from various social classes, and ranging from young children to the elderly, watch the performance. Saint-Aubin creates a series of vignettes within the picture. Near the centre, for example, you can see a waiter (identifiable by his apron) whose braided hair suggests a connection with the Far East. His arm is around his female companion. A child at her feet, unable to see the stage, tries to attract her attention. In contrast to the people absorbed in the duel, a boy on the right, perhaps exhausted from sounding the drum roll to announce a performance he has seen many times, sleeps astride a bass drum.
This street performance is very likely taking place in the boulevard du Temple, which by the 1760s was filled with cafés, inns, shops and permanent theatrical venues. Despite the hostile view of one commentator, who in 1754 complained about the ‘multitude of common people who assail you with rough talk … vendors of poor beer, charlatans, games with dogs, parades which make idiots laugh’, the boulevard du Temple attracted people of all classes. It even received royal endorsement when it was visited in June 1756 by members of the royal family.
Saint-Aubin’s painting met a growing taste for images of crowd activities in recognisable places in or near Paris. Although he may have exercised some artistic licence – for example, the decorative arching trees that perhaps suggest an attempt to bring the imagery of the fête galantes into a modern urban scene – contemporary viewers would have recognised this as a credible portrayal of the boulevard du Temple. It has been suggested that this is a companion painting to The Meeting on the Boulevard (Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan), which shows a strolling aristocratic couple rather than ordinary street folk, but the two pictures were never hung as a pair and never belonged to the same owner.
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Scenes of couples making music have a long tradition in European art, especially in Northern and Venetian painting. The subject was also a familiar one in pastoral poetry, and the associations between Watteau’s paintings, music and poetry were recognised by his contemporaries.
The guitarist here is dressed in a theatrical costume. Watteau may have chosen its old-fashioned style to distance the scene from his own time. The woman’s informal clothing is not specific to any period, so it also helps set the scene in an undefined time. She looks at the guitarist’s left hand as he is about to play a note, their collaboration on the musical score perhaps providing an opportunity for flirting. The portrayal of the couple also shows Watteau’s skill in composition and as a colourist – look, for example, at the diagonal that runs upwards from the woman’s foot, across the musical score and along the neck of the guitar and at the warm harmonies of pinks, reds and russet browns.
At the top of the picture, Watteau has included a herm (a squared stone pillar mounted by a carved head that often served as a signpost or boundary marker). The bearded man may be Pythagoras, who is credited with discovering a musical scale based upon a mathematical ratio. A reference to Pythagoras would relate to the title of the painting, which comes from a print of it made several years after Watteau’s death. The Scale of Love (La Gamme d’Amour) may evoke the musical scale, the various stages of flirting and seduction, or the music which facilitates these. The word gamme had other secondary meanings (such as knowledge, ability and custom), perhaps reinforcing the notion here of love or seduction as a skill or technique.
To the right, another couple are seated on the ground, and in the background a third couple leave the scene. A woman with a child leaning into her lap sits between the guitarist and the seated couple. She may be the same woman who is leaving with her male companion, but later in life. The possibility that a child could be the result of their liaison is implied in verses added to an engraving of a similar painting by Watteau in which the children in the picture are referred to, perhaps slightly ironically, as the fruits of tender love.
Although the guitarist is dressed in fantasy costume, his guitar is an accurate representation of a type made by the Voboam dynasty of instrument makers in Paris from 1650 to 1730. The musical score is not a genuine piece of music. A possible title at the top of the left-hand page is illegible, the music itself is a single line melody rather than a score for a singer and guitar accompaniment, and there is no numbering denoting the chords typical of guitar music.
The principal couple in the painting are similar to the male guitarist and his female companion in another work by Watteau, La Récréation galante (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). It is likely that Watteau worked on the two pictures simultaneously, completing them by 1718. Although smaller, the National Gallery’s picture is a fine example of Watteau’s work on a more intimate scale.
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Several of Frans Hals’s portraits show his sitters leaning slightly backwards like this. It’s an unconventional pose, but one which gives a strong impression of immediacy and informality: the man here seems to have just pushed back his chair and turned towards us.
The sense of spontaneity is enhanced by the way Hals has manipulated our gaze. He didn't want viewers to get lost in the detail of the sitter’s costume, for example: his concern was to suggest rather than define. The billowing ruff is depicted not with polished precision but with a combination of short darts of the brush, with a few delicate touches to evoke its transparency as it rumples up around the sitter’s cheek and chin. The seams, tailoring and textures of the jacket or mantle are evoked with bold, broad strokes of black, white and grey paint. These effects help to trick our eye – we interpret the blurring as movement, and we can almost hear the rustle of the fabric as the sitter turns towards us. But Hals did use detail where it counts. The upward flick of the sitter’s moustache, the four precise white highlights that glisten on his lower lip, and the strands of flattened hair that seem to stick to his forehead – as though he has just taken off his hat – are all crucial touches that help to bring his face to life.
The sitter has not been identified but his age and the year he sat for Hals (1633) are inscribed beneath the artist’s monogram on the right-hand side of the painting. However, the canvas has been cut down slightly on the right edge, and the second digit of the sitter’s age has been lost – we know only that he was in his thirties. It is extremely likely that he was a citizen of Haarlem, where Hals lived and worked for most of his life. Apart from that his identity is not known.
It was once thought that this picture might be a pendant to Portrait of a Middle-Aged Woman with Hands Folded, with the suggestion that the two sitters were a married couple. But there is no concrete evidence for this and uncertainties over the original size of both paintings (the other may also have been cut down slightly) make it impossible to make a convincing argument.
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Shepherds kneel and stand in order to praise the baby Jesus, watched by Joseph and the Virgin Mary (Luke 2: 15–16). The stone archway frames an earlier episode: the same shepherds fall over in surprise as an angel appear in the clouds to announce Christ’s birth to them (Luke 2: 8–14).
Following an old tradition in painting, Poussin includes both parts of the story and paints them as if they are happening at the same time. The architecture separates the foreground scene from the activity in the background. The stable is built within the ruins of a classical building with columns that frame the scene, symbolising the collapse of paganism and the triumph of Christianity.
The shepherds and women eagerly await their turn to meet the baby Jesus. Their poses and gestures reveal their excitement: one shepherd prays while another moves towards him and is about to kneel, and a woman holds her hands against her chest. Behind them, two men point towards the foreground scene.
A young lady enters the scene carrying a ‘birth tray’ of fruits as a present to the new mother – these were popular in Italy, and appear in Renaissance paintings of the Nativity. She hurries forwards, her flamboyant drapery billowing behind her as she moves. Its vivid blue, and that of Mary’s clothing, stands out against the men’s ruddy skin and the copper stone of the buildings. Poussin’s interest in classical antiquity is clear in the rigid drapery folds and the shepherds‘ muscular appearance, which are based on ancient statues. This scene includes many intricate details: Christ’s straw bed, the cherubs’ flowers and each feather of their wings, and a variety of fruit.
This subject was painted frequently during the seventeenth century. The National Gallery owns several examples by the Le Nain Brothers, Barent Fabritius, Giovanni Baptista Spinelli and Guido Reni.
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The Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will bear the Son of God (Luke 1: 26–38). A dove of the Holy Ghost hovers above her in a bright circle of light. The Virgin, with her eyes closed and arms outstretched, accepts her role as mother to Christ. In the Bible, the Virgin responds to the angel by saying: ‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’
In other paintings of the Annunciation in the National Gallery, we see winged putti surrounded by clouds and the angel holding lilies as a symbol of purity. Poussin’s work is unusual, showing the Virgin sat cross-legged on a cushion. Her cloak is traditionally painted blue, as a symbol of heaven, but here it is yellow which may signify hope and purity. Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation and the Master of Liesborn’s Annunciation panel for the Liesborn altarpiece show her traditional appearance.
A trompe l'oeil wooden plaque fixed to the stone parapet or low wall contains Poussin’s signature, the date 1657 and the name of Pope Alexander VII Chigi (1599–1667), who may have commissioned the painting. However, it is not mentioned in any guidebooks to Rome that describe the Pope’s houses and collection. The Virgin and angel are carefully arranged on the parapet as if the painting were intended to be part of a building. Poussin’s patron and mentor Cassiano dal Pozzo died in 1657, and was buried in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. This work could have been painted as a memorial for his tomb.
The 1650s represent Poussin’s late career, when he had developed a personal style inspired by his study of classical antiquity and Renaissance art. The figures are idealised and their rigid poses and stiff drapery recall ancient statues. The raised stone floor and column at the right give us an idea of the depth and size of their surroundings. Despite the room’s rather plain appearance, the clothing shimmers in the light shining from the left and the angel’s wings are decorated with three vibrant colours.
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The Friedrichsgracht was a canal that ran though the centre of Berlin. While it still survives in present-day Berlin, much of the area has been rebuilt since the Second World War. This striking composition, dominated by the geometrical precision of the zinc roof in the foreground, is typical of Gaertner’s work. His style is naturalistic and precise, scenes resemble snapshots of everyday life in the city but also reflect a preoccupation with atmosphere and light that has led to him being called ‘the Prussian Canaletto’.
The building in the foreground was the property of a prominent art collector in Berlin, Pierre Louis Ravené, who may have commissioned Gaertner to paint this view. He moved his business to these premises in 1833, and it is possible that the picture was painted shortly afterwards. Although the style is similar to Gaertner’s work of the 1830s, Ravené was mainly active as a collector after 1845, so the picture could have been painted later. The relatively small scale of the work and the lack of signature suggest that it may be a study for a larger painting but no other picture of this view by Gaertner has survived.
Gaertner began his career with an apprenticeship at the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin and later took drawing classes at the Academy of Arts. In 1821, he started work in the studio of Carl Wilhelm Gropius, the court theatre painter, where he became increasingly attracted to architectural painting. After a trip to Paris, he developed his skills in the manipulation of light and atmosphere, and was inspired to devote himself almost entirely to painting architectural views.
On his return to Berlin, he started painting views of the buildings of the city, such as this one, and also produced a series of scenes depicting the castles in Bellevue, Charlottenburg and Glienicke, mainly for royal customers. In 1833, he was admitted to the Academy and designated a ‘Perspective Painter’. The following year, he began his most famous work: a six-panel panorama of Berlin that was purchased by the King of Prussia – a second version was bought by the King’s daughter, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, leading to a trip to Russia.
However, when King Friedrich Wilhelm III died in 1840, his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who preferred Italian-style paintings, bought very little from Gaertner. As the century progressed he was also under direct competition from the new medium of photography. It is believed that he made use of a camera obscura to sketch the layouts of his paintings. Infra-red photography has revealed an extremely precise pencil underdrawing for this particular painting with the entire composition mapped out in great detail. Gaertner also possessed a collection of photographs, but there is no evidence that he used these as models.
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The New Testament recounts how, after his crucifixion, Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his apostles. One of them, Thomas, was absent and refused to believe Christ’s resurrection without witnessing it himself. This painting shows their encounter, when Christ instructed Thomas to touch the wounds he had suffered on the Cross.
The action takes place in semi-darkness before a wall, its plaster crumbling at the top to reveal the brickwork beneath. Fingers outstretched, Thomas tentatively reaches towards Christ, clutching his other hand to his chest; we can sense his nervousness. Two men lean in behind him, craning their necks to see, while Saint Peter looks on over Christ’s shoulder. Guercino has built a powerful sense of anticipation and tension through the picture’s tight crop and dramatic lighting. The figures, transfixed by Christ, watch and wait to see what will happen.
Cropped at three-quarter length, the figures crowd the space, bringing us closer to the action and focusing our attention on the interaction between the protagonists. Guercino has chosen to illustrate the most dramatic moment in the story, and the one which evokes the most powerful emotional response: Thomas coming into physical contact with Christ. Time is suspended at the crucial moment just before Thomas’s realisation; it is as if we – and the onlookers – are holding our breath.
Christ, his right arm drawn back to reveal his wound, looks benevolently at Thomas. In his left hand he holds a wooden standard with a white flag, a symbol of his resurrection. The strong vertical of the pole divides the image in half. On one side we are presented with the steadfast, knowing Christ; on the other, in a hunched pose and with his face cast in shadow, we see doubting Thomas. The illuminated Christ acts as a beacon within the dark composition and the use of light is symbolic: Thomas, who hasn’t yet ‘seen the light’, is about to experience a revelation.
This picture’s sense of drama, lighting and naturalism owe much to Caravaggio, whose influence was widely felt in the early seventeenth century. Painted in 1621, this work was made by Guercino just prior to his move to Rome in May of that year. It is one of a pair of pictures painted by Guercino for Bartolomeo Fabri, its pendant being The Betrayal of Christ in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Originating from Cento, the town near Bologna where Guercino was born, Fabri was an important early patron for the artist. He commissioned other works from him, including The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, also in the National Gallery’s collection, which dates from just two years later.
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The lady in Bartholomeus van der Helst’s portrait may be unknown now, but she appears to have been a woman of some status. Standing out against a severe, plain black background, her clothes announce this status, her wealth – and little else. Although she appears modest and unassuming, her gaze is direct and steady.
With no attempt at flattery, van der Helst painted her wispy hair hanging unfashionably straight under a long lace cap, accentuating her high forehead and the length of her face. He highlights her deep-set brown eyes with a flick of white paint, echoed in the glistening pearl earrings hanging above her collar.
The ring on her finger looks like gold. It’s on the fourth finger of her left hand, but that doesn't prove she’s married – it simply suggests she’s rich. (It would appear that, at the time, Dutch women could wear a wedding ring on any finger of either hand, or not at all, according to choice.) The black satin of her gown was fashionable and costly, the handmade lace prohibitively expensive – especially lace of such quality and quantity (there are three tiers to her wide collar). In this, van der Helst’s lady bears a resemblance to the sitter in Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Woman with a Fan, whose costume is remarkably similar, and is also an obvious sign of status and wealth.
The lady in van der Helst’s portrait holds her delicately decorated stomacher out towards us, for our admiration perhaps. The embroidery incorporates silver thread and pearl beads, making this uncomfortable, restraining garment appear sparkling and almost frivolous. She also presents her fan, its bow – like the one at her breast – made partly of silver thread; the fan would have been hand painted, perhaps with flowers or a scene from a Greek myth. With a little smile, the woman in Hals’s portrait daintily holds out a gold chain and an ostrich-feather fan; another, in Portrait of a Woman (Marie Larp?), displays the complex and opulent gold embroidery on her stomacher by framing it with her fingers. The anonymous lady by van der Helst seems much less anxious to impress.
Painted around the same time, all three portraits seem to be as much about the cost and opulence of the clothes as about the women portrayed. Two of them seem quite content to make a feature of their wealth and sense of fashion, but van der Helst’s lady seems disengaged from her gestures of display.
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The monumental figure in this painting is Elijah, an Old Testament prophet who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century BC. Having predicted that a terrible drought would ravage the land, Elijah was instructed by God to hide on the banks of the stream Cherith. Here, ravens delivered bread and meat to him every morning and evening. The over life-size form of Elijah dominates the scene, filling almost the entire picture space. This has the effect of bringing him closer to the viewer, and his massive form towers over us.
While Elijah’s story embodies piety, Guercino’s representation is profoundly human. The prophet sits awkwardly, his right leg jutting out from beneath his cloak and his body twisting as he turns his aged face expectantly toward the ravens. He clasps his cloak out in front of him, preparing to catch the food brought by the birds – they represent both physical and spiritual nourishment as Elijah places his faith in God’s commands. A bowl lies empty at the prophet’s feet and his clothing is torn at the shoulder, reminding us of his hunger and hardship in the wilderness. His isolation is underlined by the inclusion of two small figures walking away in the distance.
Guercino has explored textures and contrasted lighting in this painting. The still, reflective surface of the Cherith stream is visible on the left. Its water runs alongside the cold stone on which Elijah rests his weathered feet, and laps close to the paper scroll lower right. Elijah’s fluffy grey beard and cloth lined with animal hair contrast with the heavy swathes of drapery cascading over his lap. The form of Elijah’s body can be sensed beneath the fabric – although we cannot see his left leg or torso, we have a good idea of how his body is angled and posed.
The strong directional light used to cut across the form and the subdued colour palette are both typical of Guercino’s early painting style. Although he was largely self-taught, Guercino’s style was inspired by the artistic centres of Ferrara and Bologna, close to his native Cento. He was particularly influenced by the prominent Bolognese artist Ludovico Carracci. Ludovico advocated the close study of nature, as demonstrated in Guercino’s treatment of Elijah in this painting. The inclusion of the landscape in the background of this picture is typically Bolognese.
This picture is one of a number of works Guercino made for the papal legate of Ferrara, Cardinal Jacopo Serra (1570–1623), an early and enthusiastic patron of the artist. It was painted in 1620, before Guercino travelled to Rome. By 1655 the painting had been acquired by the powerful Barberini family in Rome and, remarkably, it still retains its Barberini frame.
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The sitter in this portrait is Misia Sert, née Godebska, who was the darling of the highest artistic circles in France at the turn of the twentieth century. It is hard to overstate quite how glamorous and influential a figure she was. At a time when the city was the art capital of the world, the local newspapers dubbed her the ‘Queen of Paris’.
The granddaughter of a famous Belgian cellist and daughter of a Polish sculptor, Misia (a diminutive of Maria) was an accomplished pianist in her own right and was always surrounded by creative people. The composer and pianist Franz Liszt was a friend of the family and as a teenager she took piano lessons from Gabriel Fauré, also an extremely influential composer. She decided against a professional career, but often played at private soirees, once accompanying Enrico Caruso, the most famous singer of the day.
In 1893, aged 21, Misia married Thadée Natanson, who was from a wealthy banking family and was a director of the influential literary and artistic review, the Revue blanche. The couple moved from Belgium to Paris, where Misia’s charm and beauty intrigued some of the greatest artists, writers and musicians in the city. She sat for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (who portrayed her playing the piano), Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard as well as Renoir. The novelist Marcel Proust used her as a prototype for two characters in Á la recherche du temps perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’) and the poet Mallarmé wrote poems in her honour. Maurice Ravel composed at least two pieces for her, including Le Cygne (‘The Swan’), and it was to her that Éric Satie dedicated the piano music for the avant-garde ballet Parade. She was instrumental in persuading Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, to stage the production, which was written by Jean Cocteau, with Picasso designing the set.
According to Misia’s memoirs, Renoir painted her portrait seven or eight times, each of which required three day-long sittings per week for a month. This is one of the best known. It is dated 1904, when she turned 32 – this was also the year in which she divorced her first husband. She married the wealthy Anglo-French newspaper baron Alfred Edwards the following year.
Renoir has captured the shimmering glamour and poise of Misia as she leans against the bolster of her chaise longue, the society hostess at home and at ease. However, there is a strange tension in her posture. The lower half of her body seems sinuous and relaxed, and she cradles the head of her sleeping dog affectionately against her thigh. But there is also an awkwardness to the pose. It is not clear how her legs are supported – they seem too far forward from the front edge of the chaise longue. The upper half of her body leans slightly stiffly to one side, although she holds her head upright and alert. Her gaze is also hard to interpret – she seems to be looking directly at the viewer yet not quite focusing. Perhaps Renoir had captured something of her emotional uncertainty in the face of her divorce.
Her marriage to Edwards failed and in 1920, after an 11-year affair, she married the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert. Coco Chanel, the fashion designer, was one of her closest friends and joined them on their honeymoon in Venice. When Misia died in 1950, the portrait was still in her possession.
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The sitter looms out of this painting in a rather imposing way. She fills much more of the picture space than do the figures in most of Frans Hals’s portraits – these usually allow their subjects rather more room to breathe. However, since it was first made the picture seems to have been cut down at the sides and the bottom, amplifying the sense of the sitter’s size relative to the framing of the portrait. The impression we get today may be different to Hals’s original design.
But Hals was clearly always concerned with underlining the sitter’s rather solid appearance. The pose alone does this: by setting her hands in her lap and her forearms at right angles in front of her body, Hals has created a wide base for her triangular form. And within that triangle, he has focused on broad, sweeping curves – the roundness of her shoulders, the circular white ruff, the curling frame of her bonnet and the swell of her double chin. This sense of roundness and solidity also underpins an impression of impassive self control in the sitter. Her hands rest easily one over the other and she looks down on the viewer from a slight height. The soft light, the lack of sharp shadows and the muted palette of browny blacks and greyish white also contribute to the atmosphere of calm composure (though some of this may have been caused by the ageing of the paint).
Unfortunately we don’t know the identity of this apparently composed and collected woman. Like nearly all of Hals’s subjects, she is surely a citizen of Haarlem, the town where he lived and worked for most of his professional life. Although she is not wearing – or at least showing – betrothal or wedding rings, past attempts to identify her have included suggestions that this may be one half of a marriage portrait. Couples typically commissioned two separate paintings to be hung together as pendants; it has even been suggested that this may be pendant to a Portrait of a Man in his Thirties or Portrait of a Man holding a Book (private collection). But there is no supporting documentation, and uncertainties over the original sizes of all three paintings also undermine such speculation (marriage pendants would have been the same size).
We also can’t be sure of the date of the picture: none is marked on the canvas. Sometimes the style of dress can be used as a dating aid, but it isn’t reliable for older sitters because – as they might today – some men and women continued to wear the fashions of their youth as they grew older. The costume we see here was in vogue in the early 1630s, though the large and cumbersome millstone ruff was still being worn by women in Haarlem in the mid- to late 1630s – see Portrait of a Woman (Marie Larp?) – and even into the 1640s.
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The story of the death of Saint John the Baptist is related in the Gospel of Mark (6: 16–29). John had criticised King Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias, and she sought revenge. At Herod’s birthday feast, her daughter – not named in the Gospel but later identified as Salome – so delighted the King by her dancing that he promised her anything she asked for. Encouraged by her mother, she asked for the Baptist’s head; reluctantly the King agreed to keep his promise and had John beheaded.
This is a late work by Caravaggio, probably painted towards the end of his life in Naples, where he resided in 1606–7 and again in 1609–10. With an economy typical of his mature works, Caravaggio has reduced the story to its essentials, focusing on the human tragedy. He has moved away from the broader colour range and descriptive detail of his Roman works, such as The Supper at Emmaus, and conveys the scene’s emotional power through a more muted palette, pronounced chiaroscuro and dramatic gestures. The brutish executioner places John’s head on a salver held by Salome, whose serious expression and sidelong glance are enigmatic: is she turning away from the head in disgust or shame, appalled at the horror of what she has brought about? In contrast to the young and beautiful Salome is the elderly maidservant beside her, her face wrinkled with age and her hands clasped together in grief. The half-length format brings the figures up close, enhancing the dramatic impact of the scene. Although the composition appears simple and straightforward, it hides a sophisticated physical and psychological interplay between the main protagonists. Salome and the executioner are subtly linked by their poses – the angles of their heads echo each other and a strong raking light falls across their faces – but their role is very different. The executioner’s face is impassive as he thrusts the head towards Salome: he may have wielded the sword but the guilt for the Baptist’s death lies with her.
Caravaggio returned to the theme of John’s beheading more than once in his later years. As well as a vast canvas in St John’s Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, he produced a scene closely related to ours showing Salome with the Baptist’s head (Palacio Real, Madrid). The Madrid painting is the earlier of the two, probably dating from the artist’s first stay in Naples (1606–7), while the looser handling and pared down colours in our version – which lacks the bright red drapery enveloping Salome in the Madrid picture – suggests that it was painted in the final months of Caravaggio’s life.
Technically, this painting is typical of Caravaggio’s late style. The handling of the paint is freer than in his earlier works, with a broad application in place of finely modelled gradations, and the dark ground left deliberately exposed in several areas to provide the mid-tone in the shadows. The marked chiaroscuro and dramatic naturalism of Caravaggio’s late style, and his use of people drawn from the streets as models, had an enduring influence on painters in Naples such as Battistello Caracciolo, Mattia Preti and especially Jusepe de Ribera.
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The terrified boar is surrounded on all sides by riders on horseback and men on foot with spears. This moment has been chosen for dramatic effect: the fleeing boar is trapped and about to be killed. The rearing horses and snarling dogs add to the intensity of the action. Forced into a narrow space, animals and people collide into one another; a dog has been knocked to the ground. The loose, visible brushstrokes create a feeling of hurried movement.
Hunting was a common pursuit of the wealthy in seventeenth-century France. The figures on horseback enjoy the chase rather than directly participate in the act of killing, which is being carried out by the men on the ground. The male figure on the grey horse raises his sword in triumph; his costume is appropriately theatrical in style. Behind him a man blows a bugle, a type of horn. Two woman in elegant seventeenth-century dress and riding side-saddle watch from their horses. One of them holds a spear, imitating those held by men attacking the wounded animal.
Parrocel was surely influenced by earlier hunting scenes, such as Wolf and Fox Hunt (Metropolitan Museum, New York), painted in about 1642 by Peter Paul Rubens. His influence can be seen in the bright colouring and lively brushwork, and the twisted positions of the rearing horses. The men surrounding the boar with spears in Parrocel’s painting are similar to those in Antonio Tempesta’s (1555–1630) A Boar Hunt (Royal Collection, London) of about 1608/12. Parrocel’s training in Rome with Jacques Courtois, the leading battle painter of the seventeenth century, was also good preparation for the complex scenes featuring figures and animals that he produced in the 1660s and 1670s.
The painting’s companion, The Return from the Hunt is also owned by the National Gallery. This is more playful and light-hearted, and shows the influence of Dutch scenes of everyday life. The pair were painted in around 1700 and were intended to be hung together.
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The young girl in this portrait seems a little shy and tentative. Her eyes are wide and enquiring, her eyebrows slightly raised. She holds out the fan a little awkwardly as if uncertain what to do with it. The hand placed on her stomach almost appears to steady her – she’s not presenting her glittering, beaded stomacher for admiration as women in other paintings of the time do.
The girl’s identity is unknown, as is her age. To judge by her dress and jewels she comes from a wealthy, probably noble, family. At one time it was thought she was from the Braganza family, who were related to Portuguese royalty, but no confirmation has been found. Whoever she is, Bartholomeus van der Helst has certainly done justice to her elaborate costume, from the silk damask of her gown and the translucent organza over the tiers of her expensive lace collar to the softly glowing pearls at neck and wrists. Particularly striking are the four rows of pearls that stretch from beneath the blue bow on her chest to a second bow on her shoulder, an unusual and seemingly purposeful way of showing them off. Natural pearls like these were as expensive as diamonds.
Is there a picture of an intended husband in the pendant locket on her chest? Does the ring on her finger mean she’s betrothed? Girls as young as eight could be promised or even married at the time. But while the ring is prominently displayed, wearing it on the fourth finger of the left hand didn‘t necessarily mean such an arrangement. These questions, though easily answered when the portrait was painted, can’t be answered now.
Van der Helst was one of the leading portrait painters in Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century, taking over from Rembrandt, whose style was becoming less fashionable. Van der Helst’s smooth style with invisible brushstrokes became more popular than Rembrandt’s increasingly free brushstrokes and use of impasto (raised ridges of paint that catch the light) to create glittering braid and beading. Van der Helst’s delicate, detailed portrayal of the unknown girl’s finery is so realistic it seems almost possible to hear the swish of her skirts and the tinkle of her long earrings.
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The young man in this portrait leans on a stone ornament, confident and at his ease. Dressed fashionably in black, with large amounts of expensive lace on show, he has a falling collar – a relatively new trend in Holland – and a multitude of tiny buttons down the front of his coat. His hair is also on trend with the time, with long waves and an artfully casual stray lock over one eyebrow. The black satin gleams, and the coat sleeve is slashed to display the fine silk and lace cuff of his shirt. The portrayal of the extravagant folds and creases of the sleeve is particularly eye-catching; taken in isolation, they almost make a small abstract painting on their own.
The man rests the back of a gloved hand on his hip. The second glove is held lightly between two long, elegant fingers, as if it is about to drop to the floor. We don't know who he is. His dress, his full moustache and tiny beard imply he’s a man of fashion with money to spend. His florid complexion, slight paunch and sturdy legs in their satin breeches, and the suggestion of a smile, imply an enjoyment of the good life. But the falling glove may hold the smallest of clues to another side of his character. Gloves were fashionable items, but could sometimes symbolise love and friendship, or sometimes, if one is shown removed from the hand and especially if allowed to drop, could mean the end of a valued friendship or the letting go of authority. In his case, we shall probably never know.
Bartholomeus van der Helst was considered one of the leading portrait painters in Amsterdam, becoming very successful and, after a while, overtaking Rembrandt in popularity. As Rembrandt’s style became looser – and rougher and more unfinished in the eyes of the time – van der Helst developed a much smoother, perhaps more classical, way of painting, with brushstrokes less visible.
In this portrait, van der Helst has shown his familiarity with the Flemish style made popular by Anthony Van Dyck – the long slender fingers, the nonchalant but sophisticated pose and the fine detail of dress and features. He also placed the young man against a curtain looped back to reveal a stone wall, with the suggestion of a view of a garden outside, a device that had originated with Van Dyck. The plant close behind is quickly sketched in just one colour, with quick half circles of paint seemingly hanging in space, making it, whatever it might be, as anonymous – but not as earth bound – as the young man himself.
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There is a swagger, even an arrogance, in the bearing of this man who meets our eye so directly and seems so at ease with himself. This is an undated self portrait, and going by what his contemporaries said about the artist – Jan Lievens – we shouldn’t be surprised at his self-confident air. In the 1650s, when he was painting a portrait of Sir Robert Kerr, the English ambassador, Kerr wrote a letter describing him: ‘he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the 17 Provinces [of the Low Countries].’
Lievens‘ confidence isn’t just apparent in his bearing. His dress is that of a man of wealth and fashion. The padded silk gown (known as a japonse rock) was expensive and probably imported from Japan. The gown and billowing shirt, sleeves tied back with wide black ribbons, first came into fashion in the early to mid-1650s, which was also the time that gentlemen started to wear their hair long and loose, as Lievens does here. That date also fits with the style adopted by Lievens for the landscape in the background.
This portrait in particular reflects how Lievens’ style, once close to that of Rembrandt, had changed after he was exposed to other influences. From 1635 to 1643 he worked with Flemish artists in Antwerp. And before that, in the early 1630s, he was in London, painting at the court of Charles I, where he met Anthony van Dyck. In fact we know that this is a self portrait in part because the face and features closely resemble a painting Van Dyck made of him in London about 1632 (now lost, but known through an engraving after it).
His chosen dress is interesting in this context. In the seventeenth century self portraits were a way for artists to demonstrate their skills to potential clients, but they were also a way of claiming higher social and artistic status. Rembrandt tended to do this by posing in antique-style clothes, aligning himself with the great Italian painters of a century and more earlier. But Lievens’ experience working with the dashing Van Dyck at the English court made him far more interested in emulating the aristocracy’s latest fashions, and also providing them with a more impressive setting than, for example, the shadowy brown background favoured by Rembrandt. The landscape behind Lievens – which unusually appears to be a moonlit rather than a day-time scene – includes a long avenue suggesting the formal grounds of a country estate. The aristocracy were, after all, among his most important customers, and he needed to be able to paint them in a suitable style. But the confidence of his pose suggests that he may have considered himself their social equal too.
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These are the four children of Daniel Graham (1695–1778) by his second wife, Mary Crisp. In order of age they are Henrietta Catherine (aged 9), Richard Robert (aged 7), Anna Maria (aged 5) and Thomas the baby in a gilded carriage decorated with a bird. They are portrayed at home at 11 Pall Mall, London. Their father was Royal Apothecary to King George I and King George II and was very prosperous.
In this very large picture – one of the largest Hogarth ever painted – the Graham children are portrayed life-size. At first sight they seem to be merrily at play, with high spirits and evident health. There are no conventional toys here. Instead, Hogarth uses various objects to tell us about the children and about the nature of childhood itself.
The extravagant baby carriage has a carved and gilded bird upon its handle, which perhaps flapped its wings when the carriage was pulled along. Beside the carriage is an elaborate silver dish full of fruit. Thomas, the seemingly lively baby, had already died while Hogarth was working on the picture. His death may have been the reason the portrait was commissioned. Hogarth drew a chalk study of the baby’s features after death from which to work (British Museum, London). In the painting, Thomas clutches a partly nibbled rusk and reaches out to grasp the cherries in his sister’s hand, which traditionally symbolise the fruit of paradise. The silver basket of fruit and the crossed carnations (funeral flowers) beside the baby’s chariot become a tender memento mori, a reminder of death. A table-clock surmounted by a winged cherub holding an hour-glass and scythe – symbols of death – shows the time to be about 1.45pm, maybe the hour Thomas died.
Seated beneath a goldfinch in its gilded cage, Richard Robert balances a bird organ on his knee and little Anna Maria starts dancing, holding out her pretty silk brocade skirts. This type of small domestic barrel organ was a device used to teach caged birds to sing. The side of the box is decorated with a scene of Orpheus with his lyre. In ancient Greek myth, Orpheus attempted to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld with his music – reminding us of lost baby Thomas. The goldfinch is a traditional symbol of Christ’s Passion, and here also a metaphor for baby Thomas in his gilded carriage. The cat startles the goldfinch by scrambling with its claws up the back of the chair in the same way that death suddenly snatched one of the Graham children from their wealthy home. The goldfinch and cherries express the hope for Thomas’s resurrection through Christ. Only the Almighty and Hogarth – through the immortalising power of portraiture – can bring the baby ‘back to life’.
Henrietta, the eldest child, guides her lost baby brother’s hand towards the cherries. Her long muslin apron tucked over her arm falls in a long s-curve embodying Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty.’ She later married at 19 and had seven children of her own. Hogarth captures the transience of childhood and of life itself in this charming and moving portrait.
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This full-length portrait of Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1585–1642) celebrates his powerful position within the French Church and government. He is dressed in the robe and skull cap of a cardinal, a position granted to him in 1622. His left hand lifts the robe to reveal a delicate layer of lace, also visible on his sleeves, beneath the great expanse of sumptuous red fabric. Richelieu is painted larger than life size, although his small head is out of proportion with his body. His tall and imposing appearance is accentuated by the block of colour of his robes and their generous folds. Around his neck hangs the cross of the Order of the Holy Spirit, symbolised by a dove. On the right, a highly ornate chair with a deeply padded cushion signifies his high-ranking office as France’s Chief Minister, a position he held from 1624 until his death.
Richelieu is shown standing, a pose usually seen in seventeenth-century portraits of secular figures such as kings and princes, in celebration of his outstanding achievements as a politician. Members of the clergy were traditionally shown seated. The richly embroidered golden curtain has been opened to reveal the terrace to the left and garden beyond which may be a view of the Cardinal’s château at Rueil, near Paris. Richelieu’s face, which stares out at the viewer, was repeated in Champaigne’s Triple Portrait of Cardinal Richelieu of around 1642, where it is flanked by two profile views.
This is one of seven versions of the full-length portrait painted between 1633 and 1640 which show Richelieu in various settings. In each the cardinal either holds or wears a biretta, a cardinal’s hat. In this painting, and another in the Royal Collection, the artist places Richelieu in the same pose, holding the hat at arm’s length. The act of removing the hat embodies his dual role within the Church and state.
This is the most finished and carefully-painted version, one of only a few works that the artist signed. It may be the last version, painted in around 1640, which remained in the artist’s studio as a model for other portraits and was particularly admired by Richelieu. Yet it is unlikely that the artist would have signed a work that he kept, which suggests that this version was intended as a gift. One version was displayed in Richelieu’s Paris residence, the Palais-Cardinal, now part of the Palais Royale – an engraving made after the painting shows a Latin inscription has been added which is missing from our painting.
Champaigne spent most of his career working in Paris. He painted the other great French ministers of the seventeenth century: Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661) in about 1653 (Musée Condé, Chantilly) and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) in 1655 (Metropolitan Museum, New York).
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This group portrait shows the officers of the Coopers‘ and Wine-rackers’ guild of Amsterdam, which included men who made barrels for the wine imported into the city and those who sampled and bottled it. The name of the guild is written on the seal which hangs over the edge of the table, while in the background is a painting of Saint Matthias, patron saint of coopers, holding an axe. The adze and broad axe carved in the frame were the tools used by coopers to make barrels.
The sitters are named on the document lying on the table: Philips van der Neer, Jan van den Eeckhout, Tomas Hendrick and Jan Hendrick. We don’t know which is which, but Jan van den Eeckhout was the painter’s brother and is probably one of the younger men – he was 37 or 38 years old when this portrait was made.
Group pictures like this – representing the leading figures of trade guilds and military companies, and the trustees or governors of schools, orphanages and hospitals – were very common in seventeenth-century Dutch art. They represented a formal record of those who held office at that moment and would hang on the walls of the guild’s hall or offices. They were usually all male groups, but some women did appear, especially in charitable institutions.
The sitters were the leading figures of their communities, and the challenge for the artist was to make the group seem natural, authoritative and lifelike while also capturing the likenesses of individuals and reflecting any differences in status. However, each man might pay the artist for his own portrait within the group, so by spending more it was possible to make yourself more prominent.
One of the absolute masters of the genre was Rembrandt. The Night Watch and Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (both in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (The Mauritshuis, The Hague) are all examples of group portraits and are among his greatest paintings. He had an uncanny ability to make such gatherings seem natural and the moment depicted spontaneous. Van den Eeckhout was his friend and pupil and has clearly learnt from Rembrandt. The four men might seem a little disconnected from each other, but the figures are carefully arranged and balanced. The two in front of the table mirror each other’s poses to form a symmetrical frame to the composition. Each has his own preoccupation. One of the men behind the table turns the pages of a book, while the man leaning on the back of his chair holds a quill; both look up to engage the viewer. The other two men seem to be deep in conversation. The man holding the book is a particularly successful figure – he seems the most relaxed, with one foot casually resting on the bar under the table. We don’t know the significance of the dog – it may have belonged to the man on the left.
Van den Eeckhout has also demonstrated his skill as a still-life painter. The seal and its stamp, the paper knife and the ink stand form a neat display in the centre of the picture, and he has depicted the reflections on the different metals with a subtle realism.
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This is the first in a series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. Two tall trees with full foliage on the left of the panel are offset by two on the right, which are much smaller and more fragile. Perhaps just saplings, their foliage is sparse.
Corot used a similar arrangement in Noon, but reversed the composition with a group of trees in full foliage on the right and a single, almost bare tree on the left. A compositional device used by classical landscape painters such as Claude, the trees either side create a vista framing the view beyond. Also on the left, immediately behind the trees, is a large rocky outcrop with yet more trees beyond it. On the right, a solitary person holding a stick (made by Corot scratching directly into the wet paint) and wearing a red bonnet or hat is gathering wood. The gesture of the arm reaching up to the tree trunk is one that Corot used for female figures in other paintings. The presence of two goats (only just visible to the left of the figure) suggests that she, or he, may be a goatherd.
Starting from a thin and sketchily applied brown underpaint, which can be seen throughout the picture, Corot built up the composition with thicker, more opaque paint, particularly for the rocks and denser foliage. Yet much of the picture remains an almost monochrome brownish-green. The most intense colour is the band of cadmium yellow-orange on the horizon. Mixed with a just hint of pale rose pink, it indicates the imminent emergence of the sun as dawn breaks. Thickly painted with impasto, these streaks of yellow are almost the only area of bright colour in the panel, except for a few small patches of vivid colour, such as the red bonnet.
The suggestion here is that colour is a function of light, initiating a development that unfolds across the next two panels. In effect, The Four Times of Day presents a narrative of the world revealing itself as the day advances. As the light increases, so colour intensifies, achieving its richest tonalities in Evening, before we return to near monochrome in Night.
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This is the last in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. It is a rare example of a night scene by him, as he only painted a handful of nocturnal views. As in Morning, we see a single figure, probably a man, accompanied by a dog. He wears a red cap – a motif that appears throughout the sequence – and uses a staff. There is a sense of the journey home at the end of the day.
As the day ends, colour drains from the landscape and we return to the near-monochrome tones of Morning, but now in a darker key. The sky has turned dark blue, becoming grey near the top of the picture, and is dotted with white stars. A very bright star (or tiny moon) shines above the highest house on the hilltop. The houses that cling to the hill and the square tower hint at an Italian landscape – a suggestion which extends the possible reference to Italy introduced by the figure of the monk in Evening.
Corot’s visits to Italy had a profound effect upon his art. It was in Rome, in the spring of 1826, that he began painting series of views of the same scene or building at various times of the day to show different lighting conditions. In accordance with the advice of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, these were typically groups of three sketches painted in the morning, at noon and in the early evening. Beginning in 1827, Corot also painted pictures in pairs, to be hung together, which contrasted morning and evening light. Such landscapes often included people carrying out daily tasks that were appropriate for the specific moment.
In The Four Times of Day this practice of painting series meshes with an aspect of Corot’s art that first appeared in the 1850s – namely, his painting of souvenirs (‘memories’). These souvenirs were less ‘views’ of specific locations but were instead poetic reminiscences of a place in which feeling or mood, rather than topographical accuracy, were Corot’s primary concern. Reviewing Corot’s work in the Salon of 1861, the critic Théodore de Banville wrote of him, ‘This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape … who breathes the sadness and joys of nature … The bond, that great bond that makes us brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them.’ Although The Four Times of Day does not achieve the full poetic reverie of Souvenirs painted in the 1860s and 1870s, Banville’s comments – particularly his observation on how Corot’s figures are at home in the landscape – could be taken to apply to this series.
In part a ‘memory’ of his time in Italy and an evocation of the forests at Fontainebleau, The Four Times of Day is also a synthesis of the influences that shaped Corot’s art – the classical landscapes of Claude, the fêtes galantes of eighteenth-century French painting and the practice of sketching in oils outdoors.
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This is the only painting by Klimt in a British public collection. Hermine Gallia, née Hamburger, was born into a Jewish family in Western Silesia (now part of the Czech Republic). In 1893 she married her uncle, Moriz Gallia, who was 12 years older and originally from Moravia. Hermine and her husband were among the many thousands of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had moved to Vienna, where they helped create a newly wealthy middle class in the city.
Unable to match the social pedigree of the established Catholic nobility, this new middle class instead asserted itself through cultural patronage, often favouring the avant garde. By around 1900, the Gallias were part of Gustav Klimt’s circle. Klimt was by then Vienna’s most avant-garde, and expensive, artist. He was a founder-member and the first president of the Vienna Secession, an association established in 1897 to promote modernism in art, design and architecture. By commissioning a portrait from Klimt, the Gallias were making a clear statement about their own social status – one that was based on taste, rather than birth.
Around 40 preparatory sketches for the portrait have been identified. Klimt produced these quickly, as Hermine moved around his studio. In some she is seated in profile, in others she is shown full-face. As with many of his sketches for portraits, Klimt gave little attention to the face, which lacks any distinctive features except for traces of mask-like features. Instead, he focused on the pose, finally choosing one that allowed him to display much of the dress, which takes up almost a third of the picture. It is a fashionable ‘reform’ dress, which had recently replaced the narrow wasp-waist style.
Klimt chose the dress himself, and he may also have been involved in its design with his partner, Emilie Flöge. Made of layers of semi-translucent creamy white chiffon, it is secured by a pale salmon-pink waistband. It was a challenging material to paint. Klimt differentiated between the various patterns and textures of the delicate fabric – the denser layering of the shoulders of the short jacket, for example, contrasts with the narrow stripes of the almost transparent sleeves of the dress itself. The white boa around Hermine’s neck echoes the swell of her shoulders and sleeves, and forms an oval with her tilted head at one end and clasped hands at the other. In the lower left of the picture, the dress’s gossamer train, which sweeps around Hermine’s legs, has a faintly geometrical pattern. This echoes the modernist design of the carpet on which she stands. The mosaic-like treatment of the carpet is itself a reference to mosaics Klimt had admired when he had visited Ravenna, Italy in early 1903. By this time, the Viennese modernist architect Josef Hoffmann was also using mosaic patterns in his architectural designs. Although limited mainly to the carpet, this mosaic effect hints at the ‘Byzantine’ style that Klimt was to adopt from around 1906.
Klimt paints Hermine’s dress with long sweeping brushstrokes, using shorter strokes for the ruffles of the boa. The thin paint not only allows the pale priming of the canvas to come through, but also recreates the effect of the translucent material – for example, around her arms. Although soft whites and pale greys predominate, there are hints of pink and also of a blue undertone. Hermine’s face is painted more smoothly. Partly framed by her distinctively styled dark hair, its paleness echoes the white dress below, just as the touches of orange-pinks on her cheeks, lips and ears echo the pink of the waistband and jacket cuffs. The only area of thickly applied paint is the heavily encrusted brooch, which almost stands out from the canvas. The cluster of rings and the pearl earring also introduce tiny highlights of intense colour.
Swathed in billowing diaphanous fabric, Hermine herself seems almost to float weightless above the floor. Her white dress recalls portraits by James McNeill Whistler – for example, Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Tate Britain, London) – but her stylised outline also has echoes of geishas in the Japanese prints that were highly popular with many artists in the late nineteenth century. The sinuous outline of the drapery shows the influence of the serpentine lines of Art Nouveau. Although Hermine looks back at us, her expression seems slightly distant, even dreamy, as if she is absorbed in her own thoughts. In a case of life imitating art, one biographer has described how, in later photographs of herself, she tried ‘to live up to Klimt’s picture’ by replicating her pose, tilt of the head and hairstyle.
Moriz and Hermine’s support for contemporary art and design was to extend beyond Klimt. They assembled a substantial collection of silverware and ceramics from the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) – they also became shareholders after it faced bankruptcy – and in 1913 commissioned Hoffmann to design and furnish their apartment in a newly built five-storey residential building on wealthy Wohllebengasse (‘Good Living Street’). The couple’s modernist sensibility is evident in Klimt’s portrait, which was first shown in late 1903 in an incomplete but advanced state at the Klimt Kollektive exhibition at the Secession. Klimt’s ‘ladies’ portraits’ were intended to be part of a carefully designed environment that was a Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’. A photograph published in a contemporary magazine, Die Kunst, shows that the Gallia portrait was displayed in the exhibition within a typically Secessionist interior, between two cubic chairs designed by Koloman Moser. When the portrait was hung at the Gallias’ home, Hermine’s white dress and the picture’s long rectangular frame complemented the apartment’s fluted white neoclassical columns.
The couple’s assimilation into Viennese society through patronage of modern art and design was only partially successful. Like many Viennese Jews, Hermine and Moriz had their children baptised as Catholics and themselves converted in 1910. This allowed them to enter Vienna’s ‘second society’, just below the older aristocracy, and for Moriz to secure the title of imperial councillor. However, conversion to Catholicism did not protect their children from the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws introduced in 1935. Following the Anschluss (the union of Austria and Nazi Germany) of 1938, the Gallia children were no longer Austrian citizens, but became German Jews. They fled Austria in late 1938 and settled in Australia, taking this portrait with them.
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This is the second in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. The light source in Morning is from the back and to the right of the picture. In Noon the light has increased and is more evenly distributed, as maximum visual clarity is achieved. In his book Éléments de perspective pratique, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes had particularly urged painters to seize the intense bright light of noon when ‘Nature [is] prey to the devouring fires of high summer [and] the shadows cast are barely longer than the bodies that produce them.'
There is also general lightening of tone that can be seen most clearly in the tree trunks, pale blue sky and distant hills. As he often did, Corot has added white paint to achieve this – a technique adopted by Pissarro. There is also a greater differentiation of colours – for example, the dark brownish-green foliage in Morning has been replaced by foliage consisting of green and pale grey. The application of the paint is still sketchy, and you can see traces of the paintbrush’s bristle in several places.
Nearest to us, a young man in a white shirt and red hat rests his left foot upon a rock as he adjusts his shoe. Unlike the figure in Morning, we can see his face (in profile) and there is greater detail to his clothing. Lit from above, he barely casts a shadow – in keeping with Valenciennes’ observation. Further back, a man with a walking stick and a woman wearing a white hat walk along the path, although their direction of travel is unclear. As the woman (on the left) appears to be moving away from us, while the man seems to be coming towards us, they are perhaps passing each other rather than walking together.
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This is the third in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. It is evening and colours are at their richest. The upper half of the sky has now turned a deeper blue that is almost turquoise. This is the most highly worked of the four panels and there is greater definition throughout – for example, of the foliage, especially in the foreground, as the shadows begin to deepen. This is also the only picture in the series to include water (a lake), a feature in many of Corot’s paintings.
As in Noon, we can see three people. Nearest to us, a mysterious figure with an indistinct face walks away from the lake. He holds a large staff and wears what appears to be a dark brown monk’s habit with a hood, possibly Capuchin robes. Corot first painted a monk during his first trip to Italy in 1825–8, and monks appear in a number of his paintings. On the lake itself, two women are in a boat on the shoreline. One, wearing a white and pink dress, is sitting while the other, in a white dress and yellow shawl, stands as she holds an instrument that may be a mandolin. Her red bonnet echoes the streak of red on the monk’s hood.
The seventeenth-century artist Claude often conceived of his paintings as pairs and frequently juxtaposed morning and evening – setting a precedent for Corot’s work. Morning scenes were frequently associated with beginnings – for example, of voyages or journeys. Evening scenes were, not surprisingly, associated with activities that occurred at the end of the day, such as people making music, as the two women do here. Their clothing, the landscape setting and the suggestion of music give the picture the feeling of a fête galante, a subject that emerged in Italian art in the sixteenth century and which was particularly popular at the French court at Versailles in the eighteenth century. The lakeside location, ringed by tall sinuous trees, whose billowing feathery foliage is set against the sky, also has distinct echoes of French Rococo painting. Artists such as Watteau, Pater, Lancret and Fragonard frequently painted such scenes – for example, Watteau’s The Scale of Love.
Corot loved music and he often attended concerts, as well as the opera and ballet. He frequently sketched performances and his mature works, although based upon the observation of nature, often recall stage scenery. Music is a theme throughout his work, and a number of his paintings include musical instruments, particularly string instruments such as mandolins and cellos. Although not a musician himself, Corot often used musical metaphors when discussing his work – for example, likening his own abilities to that of a flute which could only play a handful of notes. As his biographer, Ėtienne Moreau-Nélaton, commented, ‘He analysed a symphony as he would a picture. He praised an art which was able to produce the most varied effects from the same motifs.’
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This is the third of the large landscapes set around the River Stour that Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825. The Hay Wain was shown in 1821, the year after Stratford Mill. His determination to capture the rural Suffolk landscape of his boyhood in these monumental paintings must in part have been due to a sense that this way of life was changing due to rapid industrialisation – the factories, steam power and locomotives that appear in works by his contemporaries, such as Turner, are absent from Constable’s paintings.
The view is of the millpond at Flatford. Flatford Mill was a watermill for the grinding of corn, leased and operated by the Constable family for nearly a hundred years. It still survives and is about a mile from Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt, Suffolk. In The Hay Wain, the mill is out of sight – we just glimpse the edge of its red brick wall on the extreme right. The building on the left of the picture is the house, which also still survives, occupied during Constable’s time by the tenant farmer Willy Lott. Although Constable’s parents moved from the mill house to a residence in East Bergholt before he was born, he would have known this view of Willy Lott’s house extremely well.
The painting’s title refers to the wooden wagon (wain) used for transporting cut and dried meadow grass (hay), which is used as animal feed over the winter. The empty wagon is making its way through the shallow millpond towards a ford across the stream – the ‘flat ford’ that gave Flatford its name. The front wheel of the wagon is already turning to the right towards the ford which will enable it to cross to the meadow on the other side. There haymakers are at work: one sharpens his scythe, others are pitchforking hay into an already laden wagon in the distance. It is just possible to make out one man stacking the load from the top.
Although the painting evokes a Suffolk scene, it was created in the artist’s studio in London. Over the years, Constable had made many drawings and oil sketches of Willy Lott’s farmhouse; its red roofs and chimneys, whitewashed walls and brick buttresses appear in several of Constable’s Stour scenes. His earliest oil study of it was probably painted in 1802. When painting The Hay Wain, Constable referred back particularly to three small oil sketches of the house he had made in 1811. The woman stooping over the water from the step outside Lott’s house with a pitcher beside her was retained in the same pose and position in the final picture. Constable made a small preliminary oil sketch showing the hay wagon itself in about 1820 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). This was followed by a full-scale oil sketch to develop the composition (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), which Constable painted quickly with large areas of the brown ground of the canvas left bare. The horse and rider in the foreground of the oil sketch were kept in the final picture but painted out at a late stage.
The small empty boat on the right is based on a study Constable made in 1809 – already used in The White Horse (National Gallery of Art, Washington) in 1819 and later used again in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh) of 1831. It demonstrates Constable’s economy with his source materials, his instinct for local detail and his ability to balance a composition – for small though it is, the boat balances the house on the left and the hay wagon in the centre. The thick red fringes decorating the horses‘ leather collars add a bright note of colour.
Scenes showing a cart going through a ford recur in seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch landscape paintings. Constable admired these works for their depiction of the natural rather than classicising landscape that were fashionable in his day. The 1838 sale of Constable’s pictures that took place after his death included two landscapes by Jan van Goyen, one with travellers in a cart, one with wagons descending a hill. Constable was probably encouraged that Flemish painters had made such unheroic events the subjects of their pictures. He had also studied Rubens’s An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen and admired it greatly. The oddly Flemish appearance of the wagon and the breadth of the composition in The Haywain may owe something to Rubens’s influence. The wagon does not conform to the usual design of hay wagons or carts of Constable’s period – its sides are too low for carting hay and it appears more suited to carrying timber. It is also very close to Rubens’s chalk study of a hay cart for Return from the Harvest (Staatliche Museen, Berlin). However, Constable did not generally copy the work of other artists directly, preferring to pursue a way of painting ’founded on original observation of nature‘.
Constable himself did not call this picture The Hay Wain – it was a nickname given to it by his friend Archdeacon Fisher. When it was sent to the Royal Academy in 1821 with its given title ’Landscape: Noon‘, it was greeted favourably by reviewers. The Examiner declared that it ’approaches nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever‘. However, it did not sell. Constable was probably unaware at the time that two French visitors to England – the artist Géricault and the writer Nodier – had seen his painting in the Royal Academy. According to Delacroix, Géricault returned to France ’quite stunned‘ by Constable’s picture. Nodier suggested that French artists should similarly look to nature rather than relying on journeys to Rome for inspiration (by this he meant emulating the classicising landscapes, painted by artists such as Claude).
In 1824 Constable agreed to sell The Hay Wain, View on the Stour near Dedham and a small Yarmouth Jetty to the Anglo-French dealer Arrowsmith for £250. Arrowsmith sent them to the 1824 Paris Salon, where they caused a sensation. Constable commented: ’Think of the peaceful farm houses of Suffolk, forming a scene of exhibitions to amuse the gay and frivolous Parisians.' He was awarded a gold medal by the French king, Charles X, for his exhibits at the Salon, but chiefly for The Hay Wain. The medal is now in the National Gallery Archives.
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This large, atmospheric painting depicts a moment in the Passion: Christ’s trial before the Sanhedrin (a Jewish judicial body). Gerrit van Honthorst has used a muted palette with dramatic lighting, eliminating unnecessary details. The composition is symmetrically balanced around the lit candle on the central table: the shimmering flame illuminates the faces of Christ and the man sat facing him, but not much else. The picture hints at why, when he worked in Rome between 1610 and 1620, Honthorst’s nickname was Gherardo della Notte (Gherardo of the night).
The identity of this seated figure has been a subject of debate. When Joachim von Sandrart, Honthorst’s pupil and biographer, saw this painting in the Giustiniani collection in Rome in 1628, he described its subject as Christ before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. In the inventory of the Giustiniani family made up in 1638, it is recorded as Christ before the priest Caiaphas. Another argument suggests that Christ is before Annas, a different priest before whom Christ was brought for judgement. The title Christ before the High Priest seems to be a good compromise, although most art historians tend to think the Giustiniani inventory was right and Honthorst indeed depicted Christ before Caiaphas.
The time of day rules out an identification as Pilate, who, according to biblical accounts, judged Christ during the day. The priest Caiaphas, however, interrogated Christ at night in the house of his father-in-law, Annas. Furthermore, the account in the Gospel of Matthew mentions two false witnesses who came forward during Caiaphas’ questioning of Christ, providing an identity for the two men depicted behind the candlelit priest here. In their false testimony they accused Christ of saying that he could destroy God’s temple and rebuild it in three days.
Honthorst’s arrival in Rome in 1610 more or less coincided with the death of the highly influential Caravaggio. The style developed by the Dutch artist was very much based on that of the Italian master and his followers. Honthorst only had to cross the street from the palace of Marchese Vincenzo Giustianiani, the likely patron of this picture, to see some of Caravaggio’s masterpieces in the Contarelli Chapel of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Honthorst lived in Giustiniani’s house in these years and absorbed the style of Caravaggio and other painters, subsequently passing on their manner when he returned to his native Utrecht.
Giustiniani’s collection in Rome included a painting that must have also been on Honthorst’s radar when he painted Christ before the High Priest. Luca Cambiaso painted Christ before Caiaphas lit by two candles that can be dated to after 1570, now in Cambiaso’s native Genoa (Museo dell’Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti). The Utrecht painter must have been motivated to compete with the great Italian masters, resulting in a picture that, in its striking simplicity, is arguably more successful than Cambiaso’s slightly crowded depiction of this decisive moment in the life of Christ.
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This painting illustrates an episode from the classical story of Cupid and Psyche. Having fallen in love with Psyche, Cupid only visited her at night, forbidding her to look at him. Here we see Psyche welcoming her two sisters into Cupid’s palace where she shows them the gifts she has received. Provoked by envy – represented by an allegorical figure above them who is clutching snakes – the two sisters persuade Psyche to reveal Cupid’s identity and thereby destroy her happiness.
The story was originally told by Apuleius (c.124–c.170 AD) in Book V: 7–10 of his Latin prose work Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass). However, Fragonard’s painting – particularly the abundance of figures and objects – owes more to Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Amours de Psiché et Cupidon, which was first published in 1669 and frequently republished.
Some detail is now missing as the canvas has been cut down – it has lost around 26 cm from the top and around 35 cm on the left hand side. In what would originally have been the middle of the picture, the two sisters stand flanked by the giant columns of Cupid’s palace. On the right, Psyche, swathed in white, reclines as she is attended to by two nymphs, one of whom dresses her hair. Three more nymphs are on the left. Two are holding the fabrics that Psyche is showing to her sisters. Part of another (sixth) nymph can just be glimpsed at the very left edge of the picture. Fragonard has also filled the scene with an array of luxury items, including golden vases and a perfume burner, and Cupid’s full quiver lies on the ground. Flowers and jewels are scattered throughout. Jewellery, especially, was central to La Fontaine’s narrative, and it is possible that the piles of jewels he describes were originally in the bottom left corner of the picture before the canvas was cut down.
This is an early work by Fragonard, painted the year he was admitted as a pupil to the Ecole royale des élèves protégés, then under the direction of Carle Vanloo. At that time pupils at the school were required to produce a work to show to the King at Versailles. This painting was among those presented in 1753. It was an immediate success, but later passed into obscurity when it was also attributed to Vanloo. Before he arrived at the school, Fragonard studied with Boucher during 1752–3 and, perhaps not surprisingly, the picture shows the influence of the older painter. Many of its details derive from sketches made by Boucher in 1737 for a tapestry illustrating the same story. However, Fragonard’s painting shows more movement – for example, in the opposing diagonals of Psyche and the figure of Envy or the almost Baroque upward lift of the columns and putti. Fragonard’s colours are also sharper, such as the pale lemon dress of one of the sisters, its acidic tone perhaps denoting her envy.
It has been suggested that the figure of Psyche may have been inspired by the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. She is shown later in life in Drouais’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour Frame.
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This painting is of a summer landscape in Cézanne’s native Provence in the south of France. Like the Impressionists, Cézanne was interested in depicting the landscape primarily using touches of colour. Although this painting shows Cézanne’s debt to Impressionism, his method is more controlled. For example, he has not sought to spontaneously capture ephemeral, transitory effects of light but has instead used colour to systematically build up the structure of the entire composition while still attending to local detail. He later remarked to the artist and writer Maurice Denis: ‘I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums.’
Cézanne created the volume and texture of the large poplar trees here using vertical and oblique brushstrokes of green and blue laid down in parallel formation. The natural forms of the trees contrast with the tauter, more geometric man-made structures in the centre of the picture. The building – possibly a farmhouse – and low stone wall are constructed with broader patches of ochre and blue-grey. Darker outlines define the building’s roof and walls, and Cézanne has also introduced small touches of red. The short brushstrokes used for both the trees and the buildings contrast with the relatively unworked and uniform area of sky and the looser, almost scribbled, strokes of the foreground meadow. Areas of raw canvas are visible along the picture’s right edge.
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This painting places us in a busy street in Paris close to six principal figures who fill the foreground. A milling crowd behind them almost completely blocks out the boulevard beyond. The top quarter of the picture is mostly filled by a canopy of at least a dozen umbrellas. The picture was the last of Renoir’s large-scale vertical paintings of modern life before he turned to more traditional and less obviously contemporary subjects such as landscapes, nudes and portraits. It is also significant because both its composition and its painting method already point to a shift in Renoir’s art which took place during the 1880s.
By the time he came to paint The Umbrellas, Renoir was gaining recognition from a small circle of patrons and collectors. But he was also beginning to reassess his art and its relation to Impressionism. As he later commented to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard: ‘I had come to the end of Impressionism, and was reaching the conclusion that I didn’t know how either to paint or draw. In a word, I was at a dead end.’
Like other Impressionist artists, Renoir had worked by applying rapid touches of bright, often unblended colour to create luminous shimmering surfaces. This method was particularly suited to plein air landscapes, such as The Skiff, but he was also searching for more structure and clarity of form. In this, he sought the ‘instruction of the museums’, developing a particular admiration for Ingres, especially his drawings. During a trip to Italy from 1881 to 1882 he was inspired by the frescoes of Raphael in the Villa Farnesina, Rome, and by ancient Roman wall paintings in Naples. He believed that classical art had a ‘purity and grandeur’ that was lacking in his own work, and this perception was perhaps reinforced during a long stay with Cézanne in Provence on his return journey. Not only was The Umbrellas painted during this period of artistic re-evaluation, but it was produced in two stages with a gap of around four years between the first stage (most likely 1880–1) and the second (1884–5). Having put the picture aside, Renoir was prompted to complete it when it was to be included in a major exhibition of Impressionist painting due to open in New York in April 1886.
The Umbrellas is a painting of two distinct styles. During the first stage he worked on it, Renoir painted the group on the right that includes a mother and her two daughters and the woman in profile in the centre who looks up as she opens her umbrella. These people, who are presented side-on, are painted in a characteristically Impressionist manner. Renoir uses delicate feathery touches of rich luminous tones of blue, green and orange, which evoke the sheen of velvet and the textures of feathers and lace. Their soft facial features are not clearly modelled and Renoir avoids crisp contours or outlines.
The people on the left of the painting, including the full-length young woman – a milliner’s assistant holding a bandbox – and the man standing behind her were originally painted using the feathery technique. At this first stage, the milliner’s assistant was also wearing a hat. Renoir then repainted the group during the second stage of the picture’s evolution, abandoning the soft technique for a more linear style. These figures now have clearly defined outlines and precisely drawn features. Renoir’s attention to Ingres is also evident, perhaps, in the flowing outlines of the young woman’s head and torso. The brushwork on this side of the canvas is more even and uniform and helps create a sense of three-dimensional form. The long grey-blue dress of the woman on the left (with its echoes of Cézanne) is also much more structured. Its folds and lines are more clearly described than the blue dresses of the women at the centre, which almost merge into each other.
Changes in women’s fashion also provide clear evidence of the four-year interval in completing the picture. The figures on the right wear expensive clothes which came into vogue around 1881 and remained fashionable the following year. However, the dress of the young woman on the left, which is quite different in cut with more severe lines, only came into fashion around 1885. Like Ingres’s Madame Moitessier, Renoir’s women wear the latest fashions – indeed, a lithograph of his painting On the Terrace was used to illustrate a fashion magazine in 1882. Close technical examination of the picture, including X-rays, has provided further evidence about the stylistic differences between the picture’s two halves. Not only is the underpainting of the two groups completely dissimilar, but their paint surfaces were also built up in quite distinct ways. The figures on the right were initially only very loosely indicated before being gradually refined. However, the figures and forms on the left were clearly defined from the start, and Renoir also made a number of alterations as the work progressed. He even changed his choice of paint for the picture, replacing chrome yellow and cobalt blue (his preferred pigments from the mid-1870s) with Naples yellow and French ultramarine, which produced the distinctive slate-grey tones that are particularly visible in the umbrellas.
We can only speculate as to why Renoir did not resolve the discrepancies in the picture before exhibiting it, as these would have been apparent to contemporary viewers and would have also adversely affected its saleability. He did eventually sell it to Durand-Ruel in 1892 for a very modest price for a picture of this size. Perhaps he believed each group was successful in its own right, but he more likely thought that the painting – particularly the group on the right – was a throwback to the compositions he had moved away from following his trip to Italy. Although Renoir may have left the picture unresolved, it provides a fascinating insight into how he rethought his working methods.
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This picture is one of four identified versions of The House of Cards painted by Chardin. It is most likely the last version he painted and was probably exhibited at the Salon of 1741.
A young boy stands at a small wooden table, which is covered with green baize. Leaning forward slightly with his forearms resting on the table top, he is fully absorbed in the task of constructing a house out of playing cards. The first storey has already been completed and he is about to begin the second. The boy is Jean-Alexandre Le Noir, whose father, Jean-Jacques Le Noir, was a furniture dealer and cabinet-maker. A close friend of Chardin, who had witnessed the artist’s marriage in 1744, Jean-Jacques Le Noir had commissioned several paintings from him, including a portrait of Madame Le Noir (now lost and known only from an engraving). It has been proposed that other Le Noir children are shown in The Young Schoolmistress, which was painted a few years earlier. However, it is not possible to be certain, and the claim that the two paintings were companion pieces, intended to hang together, is unlikely.
The theme of a child building a house of cards was familiar to Chardin’s contemporaries from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century images, which were often accompanied by moralising verses. When an engraving of Chardin’s painting was made by François-Bernard Lépicié in 1743, the caption under the image included the lines: ‘Dear child on all pleasures bent / We hold your fragile work in jest / But think on’t, which will be more sound / Our adult plans or castles by you built?’ But even without the addition of the verse, the symbolism of the delicately balanced cards – signifying the fleeting and fragile nature of human endeavour – would have been clear.
Cards were also associated with gambling, but this does not appear to be Chardin’s concern here, despite the presence of a chip and a coin on the table. These seem to be of no interest to the boy (who anyway does not have a companion with whom to gamble) and were most likely left over from an earlier game of piquet. Nor does the boy have any interest in the value of the cards themselves. Indeed, he is looking at the blank reverse of the card he is holding. As stated in the catalogue of the 1741 Salon, the boy is simply ‘enjoying himself making a house of cards.’
The fact that this house of cards is only one storey high may be of significance. Contemporary paintings of this theme typically show the cards to be two or more storeys high – and thus at greater risk of collapse. It has been suggested that the incomplete house could be a metaphor for the child, who is not yet an adult. But there may also be more immediate family associations. As a maker of fine furniture, Monsieur Le Noir may have hoped that his son would follow him into the business. The boy’s card building is perhaps not just a game but may also be an exercise in methods of construction. ‘Noir’ means black in French, and the prominent display of two upright folded black suit cards (the spade and club) – whose tripartite shapes echo the boy’s black tricorne hat – is perhaps intended to suggest an association between the Le Noir family name and a profession based upon creating structures that will endure.
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This picture shows the view across Moulin Huet Bay on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. Renoir seems to have recreated the viewpoint fairly accurately: the rocks in the distance have been identified as ‘Les Tas de Pois d’Amont‘ while that on the right is probably ’La Surtaut‘ (or Cradle Rock). Renoir visited the island for six weeks in September and October 1883, and this is one of a group of paintings he produced during his stay. Renoir wrote with enthusiasm about the ’charming beach‘ where ’one bathes among the rocks, which serve as cabins [changing rooms] since there is nothing else; nothing prettier than this blending of women and men crowded on these rocks…. Consequently I have a source of real motifs, graceful, which I will be able to use.‘
All the paintings he made on Guernsey depicted beach and seascapes and often bathers from different viewpoints around the same bay, which is near to the island’s capital, St Peter Port. The views of the sea allowed him to observe and try to capture the reflections on the surface of the water, a theme which had long fascinated him. This was a period when Renoir was starting to break away from some of the tenets and techniques of the Impressionist approach to landscape painting, which involved working mostly in the open air in order to capture the light effects as immediately as possible. He was now returning to a more traditional discipline: making oil sketches on site and making a finished painting in the studio. As he wrote to his agent, ’I hope to return soon, around 8 or 9 October with some canvases and documents to make some paintings in Paris.‘ The ’documents' he is referring to seem to be the studies or sketches he made on the beaches and rocks of Moulin Huet Bay.
This painting, measuring 29.2 by 54 cm, is clearly one of those sketches, and the spontaneity with which it was made is palpable. The way that Renoir has cropped the top of the rock in the foreground suggests that he planned out the composition only very roughly in advance. The four (or possibly six) figures are rendered in the most rudimentary way, with only a handful of brushstrokes, and the foam on the waves in the foreground is indicated with quick dabs and simple, wavy lines of paint. The picture also seems to have been made in one session: close examination shows that the figures were added while the paint layers of the sea were still wet.
Despite the shift in his approach to making paintings, Renoir’s primary concern still seems to centre on the way that sunlight reflects differently from the sea and the rocks, and he has used short, urgent brushstrokes of multiple bright colours to capture what he saw. The rocks, shorn of their hard sharp edges, seem to float and blur into the blues, whites and green of the sea and the strange pinky hues of the sky.
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This picture, together with its companion piece Dancing Girl with Castanets, was made to decorate the dining room of the Paris apartment of one of Renoir’s most important clients, Maurice Gangnat. Of the two dancers, this figure has the more static pose. She stands with her weight slightly on her back foot, as though she is more focused on tapping out the rhythm on her tambourine while the other woman dances with her castanets. She taps only lightly, using her fingertips rather than the heel of the hand.
Renoir used Georgette Pigeot, a dressmaker who often posed for him, as a model for the figure. Her flowing costume shimmers with colour, and, like her counterpart’s, has elements of oriental or near-Eastern style, not only in the short, gold-coloured bodice and blue and gold slippers, but in what seem to be her harem pants. These loose trousers tied above the ankle became fashionable in Paris around this time.
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This picture, together with its companion piece Dancing Girl with Tambourine (also in the National Gallery’s collection), was made to decorate the dining room of the Paris apartment of one of Renoir’s most important clients, Maurice Gangnat. Of the two dancers, this figure has the more animated pose. Her foot is raised and Renoir has created a long, sinuous line up through her leg and arms to suggest her turns and twists as she clacks the castanets. The way the edges of her sheer, shimmering costume blur into the vibrant colours of the background also enhances the impression of movement.
Renoir used Georgette Pigeot, a dressmaker who often posed for him, to model the body of the dancer. The head of this figure, however, is that of Gabrielle Renard, nursemaid and housekeeper for the Renoir family, who was one also of his favourite models. Her costume has elements of oriental or near-Eastern style (in the short, gold-coloured bodice, for example), but the red flowers in her hair are reminiscent of Spain, as are the castanets.
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This portrait shows Captain Robert Orme (1725–90) at the age of 31, during the war against the French for supremacy in the North American colonies. The portrait was not commissioned by the sitter or his relatives, and was never owned by him, but was painted on speculation by Reynolds with the hope of selling it or displaying it to gain more work.
Orme was first commissioned as ensign in the 34th Foot. He transferred to the Coldstream Guards on 16 September 1745 and was promoted to lieutenant on 24 April 1751. He was aide-de-camp to General Edward Braddock, commander-in-chief of the British forces in America. Orme became friends with the young George Washington, who in May 1755 volunteered to serve under General Braddock.
On 9 July 1755, General Braddock and his forces were ambushed and defeated by French and Native American riflemen near Fort Du Quesne on the Ohio River. Braddock’s troops were virtually massacred and he was mortally wounded. Orme was also wounded but George Washington was unharmed.
In Reynolds’s portrait, Orme stands beside his horse, as though about to leap on and ride off with reports of the battle. The dispatch in his hand is illegible but it may carry news of Braddock’s death. Orme wears his campaign uniform as an officer of the Coldstream Guards: a scarlet frock-coat with blue lapels and cuffs over a grey waistcoat (all trimmed with broad gold lace), buff breeches and black gaiters over buckled shoes. His sword-belt is worn under his coat and only the hilt and tip show. His long hair is tied behind his neck and a blue and gold sash is looped over his horse’s saddle. Orme’s face, with its urgent, haunted expression, is set against a break in the thunderous clouds and smoke rising from the battlefield, which is glimpsed to the right, below the tails of his coat. The drama, action and heroism of battle are expressed in the Captain’s tense, dynamic stance. The poses of both Orme and his horse are derived from one of the lunette frescoes by Jacopo Ligozzi in the church of Ognissanti in Florence, which Reynolds drew in 1752 in his Italian sketchbook. Copying elements from old master paintings was typical of Reynolds’s approach.
Orme probably sat for the portrait late in 1755, soon after his return to England. Reynolds was keen to keep heroic full-length portraits on display in his studio, so that his sitters might be persuaded to commission something more ambitious than a mere head-and-shoulders likeness of themselves. For a time, Captain Orme hung with Reynolds’s portrait of Commander Augustus Keppel (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich), where it drew much notice for its ‘boldness and singularity’. Perhaps Reynolds also hoped that a portrait of a military hero might attract an engraver and so increase his own fame. However, Captain Orme was never engraved. The painting was eventually bought in December 1777 by 5th Earl of Inchiquin, simply as a fine example of Reynolds’s work.
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This small canvas mounted on panel shows two imaginary portraits of figures from Ancient Greece. The main figure, whose bearded face is shown in profile, is the lyric poet Pindar (518–438 BC). Behind him, and in shadow, is Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon, who lived in the mid-fifth century BC. To help us identify them, Ingres has given each the tools of his trade: Pindar, wearing a wreath of laurel leaves – a mark of his achievement in poetry – holds a lyre and Ictinus holds an architect’s ruler. If you look closely, you can see that Ingres has added a border of varying width to the canvas to accommodate the final composition.
Ingres had included a very similar portrait of Pindar in his monumental painting The Apotheosis of Homer, a ceiling decoration he completed in 1827 at the Louvre, Paris. The painting shows a group of over 40 figures in front of an ancient Greek temple, arranged symmetrically around the enthroned poet, Homer. When first exhibited, the painting was described as ‘Homer receiving homage from all the great men of Greece, Rome and modern times’. Pindar, standing on the right of the picture, offers Homer his lyre.
More than 200 preparatory studies for The Apotheosis of Homer have survived. These reveal the wide range of sources Ingres used for the painting. The figure of a bearded man wearing a toga and carrying a lyre is probably derived from the figure of a man playing a kithara (an ancient Greek lyre) on a Greek vase illustrating The Crowning of a Kitharist. An engraving of the vase was included in the catalogue of the collection of classical vases owned by Sir William Hamilton (1731–1803), a British antiquarian and ambassador to Naples. Published in four volumes in 1766–7, this richly illustrated catalogue – many copies of which were hand painted – was one of the great achievements of archaeological scholarship and a rich source book for artists and designers, including Ingres, who shared the Neoclassical taste for outline drawing. Here, Ingres does not emulate the outlines of the illustration, but instead paints Pindar using the smooth translucent glazes of oil paint. He does, however, retain the profile format for Pindar’s head.
Although Pindar was included in the 1827 Louvre ceiling painting, Ictinus was not. It is possible that this double portrait of poet and architect relates to a revised version of The Apotheosis of Homer, which Ingres never completed. A highly detailed drawing (in the Louvre) for this later version, sometimes referred to as Homère Déifié (Homer Deified), which Ingres worked on intermittently between 1843 and 1865, does include Ictinus, although standing on the other side of Pindar. There are several small paintings, including Pindar and Ictinus, that relate to either The Apotheosis of Homer or to Homer Deified, but without exactly matching either. It is likely that Ingres painted these to sell as pictures in their own right.
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This was the first painting by Friedrich, one of the principal figures of German Romantic art, to enter a British public collection when purchased by the National Gallery in 1987. It had been discovered in Paris in 1982 in the collection of an exiled Russian prince. It shows a snowy landscape in which a man, having cast aside his crutches, lies against a large boulder as he prays in front of a shining crucifix protected by three fir trees (a trinity that recalls the Christian Trinity). In the distance, the silhouette of a German Gothic cathedral looms in the mist, its facade and spires echoing the shapes of the trees in the foreground.
The picture most likely dates from 1811 and appears to be a pendant (companion) to another painting, of the same date and title, in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. In the Schwerin picture, a similar tiny figure, leaning on a crutch, stares at a deserted snow-covered landscape under a grey-black sky. As he wanders among dead or dying oak trees, the stumps of felled trees stretch into the distance behind him. If that picture is one of desolation and despair, the National Gallery painting offers the hope of resurrection through Christian faith. The shoots of grass pushing through the snow, evergreen trees and faint pink glow of approaching dawn affirm its message of renewal and rebirth. It is a fine example of Friedrich’s use of landscape painting as a vehicle for religious feeling and personal symbolism. As he stated, his aim was not ‘the faithful representation of air, water, rocks and trees … but the reflection of [the artist’s] soul and emotion in these objects.’
Winter Landscape is painted with a limited range of pigments, its atmospheric effect achieved through smoothly graduated tones rather than colour. The distinctive effect of a shimmering translucent mist was achieved by careful stippling with the point of a brush using smalt, a blue pigment that contains glass and is transparent in an oil medium. Friedrich’s precise handling of paint derives from his training as a draughtsman and topographical artist. Infrared photography shows detailed underdrawing in most areas of the picture. The structure of the cathedral, especially, was defined in detail, possibly in pencil overlaid with ink. Friedrich included similar visionary Gothic cathedrals in other paintings. These were usually imaginary structures, although often based upon his studies of actual buildings, notably the Marienkirche in Neubrandenburg.
A very similar version of this picture was discovered in 1940 and is now in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Dortmund. Although several other pictures by Friedrich exist in at least one other version, there is reference to only one Winter Landscape in the early literature on him. Until the discovery of Winter Landscape in Paris, the Dortmund picture was believed to be the original painted by Friedrich in 1811. However, there is no evidence of underdrawing in the Dortmund version, the overall execution is less detailed, the gateway beneath the cathedral is missing (as are the blades of grass in the foreground) and the cathedral itself is a vague silhouette that lacks any distinct architectural features. The Dortmund picture may be a replica by Friedrich but is more likely a copy by a pupil or imitator. The London Winter Landscape, however, has all the hallmarks of Friedrich’s own hand.
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This young woman appears to have been startled by something – she turns towards an unseen disturbance to the right and clasps her blouse to her chest. Although Dubufe was well known as a portraitist of the French aristocracy, the identity of this woman is unknown. Her state of semi-undress suggests that this picture was not intended to depict a particular person, but may instead have been based on a model.
Dubufe has based the woman’s pose on a famous Greek marble sculpture from the first century BC, known as the Medici Venus. It shows the goddess with her head positioned towards the right and her right arm clutched to her chest. Unlike the woman in this painting, the sculpted Venus is completely nude.
The plain, dark background emphasises the woman’s porcelain white skin and her flushed pink cheeks, and her striking amber-coloured eyes glow in the warm light. The smooth skin of her face and neck was created with feathery brushstrokes of pink, white and subtle blue tones, while thicker layers of paint give her arms a sense of three-dimensionality. Fine, delicate brushstrokes make up her glossy black hair, with bright highlights to show the reflection of light.
Some pentimenti can be seen in this picture – Dubufe has made the woman’s right shoulder slightly wider than was originally planned, painting over some of the background paint with a pale flesh tone. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828.
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We are probably looking at the river Seine near Chatou (some ten miles west of central Paris), although the exact site has not been identified. However, it is likely that Renoir was more interested in creating a generalised image of a summer’s day on the river than in producing an accurate topographical record. Although routinely dated to 1879–80, the picture was probably executed in 1875, the same year Renoir painted Luncheon at La Fournaise (Art Institute of Chicago), which has similar soft feathery brushstrokes.
Like Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day, painted a few years later, Renoir’s serene and sunlit picture of city-dwellers relaxing on the outskirts of Paris is typical of imagery that has come to characterise Impressionism. Boating was a popular subject for the Impressionists, and Renoir includes familiar Impressionist motifs such as the rowing boat itself (in fact, a skiff or small gig), a sailboat, a riverside villa, and a railway bridge (perhaps also a discrete reference to Monet’s interest in railways). The arrival of a steam train from Paris in the background underlines the easy access to the countryside.
If Renoir’s choice of subject is typically Impressionist, his painting technique – especially his use of colour – is perhaps even more so and is also central to his aim at this time of producing ‘modern’ pictures painted with recently introduced pigments. The picture, despite its appearance of spontaneity, evolved through distinct stages. Renoir conveys the shimmering play of light, particularly upon the water, by laying down a dense mesh of strokes, which are clearly distinct in the foreground and mid-distance but softer for the trees in the background.
As in Morisot’s painting, the distant treeline and thin band of sky are very close to the top of the canvas. This draws our attention to the surface of the canvas itself and undercuts traditional techniques of atmospheric recession into space. Instead, structure is created by a series of horizontals – notably, the boat and the river bank – which are offset by various features placed near the picture’s edges – for example, the white sail of the sailboat (whose hull repeats the red-orange of the rowing boat), the clump of reeds in the lower left corner, and the patch of sunlight under the bridge. The woman on the left, positioned almost dead centre and whose presence is emphasised by the diagonal line of the oar, functions as a linchpin for the whole composition.
Renoir roughly primed most of the canvas with white paint (the original pale brown canvas is clearly visible around the edges) to help create a light tone throughout, but the intensity of colour is achieved mainly by his juxtaposing areas of bright unmixed paint used directly from the tube. Many of these pigments had only recently become available and Renoir limits himself to lead white and seven other strong colours. He makes no use of black or of earth tones. Above all, the painting is dominated by the strong contrast between the orange of the boat (and its reflection) and the blues of the water. According to the colour theory developed in 1839 by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, blue and orange are complementary colours, and when placed next to each other the intensity of each is enhanced.
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Zoffany has portrayed Mary Oswald (about 1713–1788) at the age of about 50. Probably born in Kingston, Jamaica, she was the only child of Alexander Ramsay, a Glasgow-born merchant who settled in Jamaica, acquiring plantations there and in the South American colonies. Mary not only succeeded to her father’s estates, but also to those of her two uncles. She was very wealthy and much of that wealth was gained through slavery.
In November 1750, Mary Ramsay married Richard Oswald, a Scottish entrepreneur, merchant, shipowner and slave trader. Oswald also negotiated the peace treaty with Benjamin Franklin that concluded the War of American Independence, during which Oswald had operated as an army supplies contractor.
This portrait is one of Zoffany’s largest paintings and was probably commissioned to hang in the Oswald’s Scottish house designed by the architect Robert Adam, on their estate of Auchincruive, three miles from Ayr. Oswald collected paintings and decorated his Scottish home with them. After his death, Mrs Oswald requested that the pictures displayed at Auchincruive should stay there, and this portrait by Zoffany remained in the house until 1922.
Mrs Oswald was almost certainly painted in Zoffany’s Covent Garden studio. Perhaps she was surprised on seeing the finished picture to find she was sitting on a boulder with a large slanting tree trunk beside her. She does not seem at ease in this wild setting. She wears a ribboned cap and lustrous blue taffeta dress with ruches, bows and wide lace sleeve ruffles and a lace ‘modesty piece’ above her neckline to protect her fashionably pale skin from the sun. She carries a flat straw hat over her arm, the same one that appears in Zoffany’s portrait of David Garrick and his Wife by his Temple to Shakespeare at Hampton (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven). The hat clearly did not belong to Mrs Oswald but came from Zoffany’s props box.
Zoffany appears to have detected little zest for life in Mrs Oswald and her pose and setting seem only to emphasise her solitude. There is a tradition that a portrait of Mr Oswald, who died in 1784, at about the time this portrait was painted, ‘exists behind a cloud’ in the picture. X-ray photographs show what was possibly a large male head sculpted as part of an urn in the top right area, later painted over with foliage. The male head is too large to have formed part of this composition and may be the remains of an earlier abandoned work.
The Scottish national poet, Robert Burns, who was Ayrshire born and bred, wrote that although he had not known Mrs Oswald personally, ‘I spent my early years in her neighbourhood, and among her servants and tenants I know that she was detested with the most heart-felt cordiality.’ In a very nasty ode to her memory, which was published in the Morning Star on 7 May 1789, he wrote: ‘View the weathered beldam’s face / Can thy keen inspection trace / Aught of humanity’s sweet melting grace?’ We must wonder whether Burns ever saw Zoffany’s portrait of Mrs Oswald.
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‘The Archers’ is one of a small number of outstanding portraits from the early part of Raeburn’s career, in which he used an exceptionally accomplished and subtle combination of arresting compositions and dramatic lighting to create a sense of intimacy between the viewer and the sitters.
The portrait was probably painted in about 1789 or 1790, when the subjects were in their late teens. Robert and Ronald Ferguson became members of the Royal Company of Archers in 1792 and 1801 respectively, and the contemporary revival of archery as a fashionable sport appears to have inspired the composition. In 1770 Reynolds, the dominant English portraitist, had exhibited his portrait of two archer friends, Thomas Townshend and Colonel Acland, at the Royal Academy in London (now at Tate Britain, London). However, it is unlikely that Raeburn ever saw that painting and Reynolds’s over-charged, full-length action portrait is quite different to Raeburn’s rational and still approach.
The two Ferguson brothers are shown in a striking and complex geometrical arrangement that plays on tonal contrasts. The left-hand boy’s powdered hair and dominant position imply that he is Robert, the elder brother (although family tradition identifies the brothers the other way round). In a wonderfully outlined profile, he is lit from the left, while Ronald behind him is shown entirely in shadow, gazing out at the viewer while framed in the tautened bow held by his brother. The horizontal arrow precisely divides the canvas in two. The way the figures are arranged resembles a classical sculptural frieze – appropriate to Scotland of the Enlightenment, when classicism and a renewed interest in antiquity influenced the thought and aesthetics of the country. The stillness, darkness and broad, confident application of paint combine to create a sense of hushed atmosphere, which is at once formal and verging on the romantic. The bold but sensitive manner of painting recalls some of the double portraits of courtiers by Van Dyck in the previous century, such as Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart.
Robert Ferguson became a Whig Member of Parliament and succeeded his father to the estate of Raith in 1810. He was a dedicated collector of books and pictures. Ronald joined the Army and had a distinguished and varied career, becoming general in 1830 and also sitting in parliament. The Scottish lawyer and literary figure Lord Cockburn (1779–1854) said of them: ‘Nothing could be more beautiful than the mutual affection of these handsome, gentlemanlike, and popular brothers.’
It was works such as The Archers that established Raeburn’s long and successful career as a portraitist. He was the first Scottish artist to be able to pursue such a career from Edinburgh rather than London. The Ferguson family also commissioned other portraits from Raeburn, including a full-length portrait of Robert out shooting with his dog (private collection) of about the same period as The Archers.
The Archers remained in the Ferguson family collection until it was acquired in 2000 by the National Gallery under the Acceptance in Lieu scheme.
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According to the Gospel of Matthew (1: 20-1), an angel appeared to Saint Joseph in a dream to confirm that the Virgin Mary had conceived Christ through the Holy Ghost. Champaigne shows the angel suspended above Joseph and surrounded by a soft ray of light, pointing with one hand to heaven and with the other to Mary – a gesture often seen in biblical paintings. Kneeling in front of an open Bible, Mary glances towards the angel, her arms crossed and held against her chest.
Joseph was the patron saint of workers, particularly carpenters and joiners. Scattered on the floor are his tools: a wooden mallet, chisel and axe. He is shown as a youthful rather than elderly man, as was more common. The chair, with its ornately carved arms and legs and deeply padded and tasselled cushion, on which Joseph rests his head, are at odds with the simplicity of his yellow cloak and sandals. His appearance signifies his humility, which the viewer would have been encouraged to follow. Champaigne’s figures were typically inspired by classical sculpture, and the drapery here appears solid and arranged in precise, large folds.
This subject was painted frequently during the seventeenth century. It was promoted by, among others, Saint François de Sales (1567–1622) and Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623), who in 1621 introduced an annual Saint Joseph’s day (19 March).
Like most of Champaigne’s paintings, this one is not signed or dated. A painting of this subject by the artist was mentioned in late eighteenth-century guidebooks as being in a chapel in the now demolished monastery of the Minims, near the Place Royale, Paris. Champaigne also painted this episode for the Carmelites of the Faubourg St-Jacques (the painting is now in the Louvre) and the Tuboeuf chapel in the church of the Oratory in the rue St-Honoré, both in Paris.
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Saint Sebastian was a third-century Roman centurion who was martyred for converting to Christianity. Following the direct orders of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, Sebastian’s fellow soldiers tied him to a post and shot him with so many arrows that, according to the Golden Legend, his body looked like a porcupine. He miraculously survived, but was clubbed to death on the Emperor’s command.
The subject of Sebastian’s incredibly violent death was favoured by painters throughout Europe across centuries. Gerrit van Honthorst has shown the saint on the brink of death in this arresting close-up depiction. Four arrows pierce his partially naked body, which hangs lifelessly from what looks like an oak tree. The one that has stabbed through his leg points outward, and emphasises the painter’s signature in the lower left corner. Blood drips from this arrow’s tip in a steady stream, seemingly into our space.
Sebastian’s tormented body takes centre stage in Honthorst’s painting. The beautiful torso echoes classical sculpture, like the Belvedere Torso, which had been admired by artists in Rome since the fifteenth century. At the same time, the saint’s physical suffering was intended to inspire devotion: viewers were prompted to imagine his intense pain and the strength of his faith.
The cult of Saint Sebastian was especially strong in Rome, where he was venerated as the city’s third patron saint after Peter and Paul. His remains were buried in the catacombs, at a spot now occupied by the Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, a church dedicated to him. In the years that Honthorst spent in Rome, a number of ecclesiastical building projects dedicated to Sebastian were being planned or completed.
This picture was likely finished around 1623, three years after Honthorst had left Rome for his native Utrecht. There were a number of outbreaks of the plague in the city between 1624 and 1626, following renewed hostilities between the Dutch Republic and Spain that lead to food shortages and severe malnutrition in large parts of the population. From the seventh century onward, Sebastian was the most important saint to invoke for protection against the deadly disease. The Golden Legend recounts how, in that century, the Italian city of Pavia had been scourged by the plague until an altar dedicated to Sebastian had been erected and relics of the saint brought in.
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This portrait is one of Carel Fabritius’s final works, made in the last year of his short life – he died aged just 32. He was apprenticed to Rembrandt in Amsterdam between 1641 and 1643 and is generally considered one of his most talented pupils, but only about a dozen of his paintings survive.
Although it is impossible to be sure – no documented likeness of Fabritius exists – it is almost certainly a self portrait. The intensity of the gaze and the posture are reminiscent of a series of earlier self portraits made by Rembrandt and his other pupils. The costume he wears, including a soldier’s breastplate, also fits in with this tradition: Rembrandt, for example, painted himself as a soldier in the 1630s.
One intriguing aspect is the hat. The title, which would have been given to the painting long after it was made, describes it as fur, but the curls depicted in the rather obscure paintwork make it look more like wool. It’s possible that it had flaps which came down around the ears and neck – a type of hat worn by sailors, and possibly soldiers – but it is too ill-defined to be sure.
The fact that it was a self portrait probably wasn’t always considered important at the time. Self portraits of famous artists, such as Rembrandt, were collected by connoisseurs, but images of types or characters in different professions, known as tronies, were also popular and artists would use themselves as models. Fabritius may well have been painting for this market and would have also no doubt found the discipline of painting himself useful practice. It allowed him to develop his technique and experiment with different effects, materials and facial expressions.
Ten years after he had left Rembrandt’s studio, Fabritius was definitely developing his own style. This painting uses a brighter palette of colours and less dramatic lighting effects than those he had learned in Amsterdam. Instead of looming out of a deep, dark background – like those we see in Rembrandt’s work, including Self Portrait at the Age of 63 – Fabritius has here set himself against a bright but cloudy sky. This is a very unusual backdrop and it creates its own sense of drama, especially because of our low viewpoint (we are slightly below the man, rather than on his level).
It may be that this use of lighter colours and a more airy atmosphere shows the influence of other artists in Delft where Fabritius had moved from Amsterdam in 1650. It was a move which had tragic consequences. On 12 October 1654, the same year that he made this painting, one of the gunpowder stores accidentally detonated and flattened a large part of the city, including the studio where he was working. Fabritius was pulled alive from the rubble but died of his injuries, and it is assumed that many of his pictures were destroyed. The scene of devastation was recorded in a painting by Egbert van der Poel, A View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654.
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This triple portrait was intended as a model for a full-length statue of Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1585–1642). He wears the robe and skull cap of a cardinal, a position granted to him in 1622. On a blue ribbon hangs the Order of the Holy Spirit, symbolised by the dove just visible along the bottom edge.
Richelieu became one of the most significant political figures in seventeenth-century Europe, and in 1624 he was appointed Chief Minister to the French King Louis XIII (1601–1643). The head is repeated in this painting in three different poses: facing forward and in profile turned to the left and the right. The central portrait relates to the artist’s full-length painting Cardinal de Richelieu, also in the National Gallery.
The painting was executed in Paris and in 1642 was sent to the Italian sculptor Francesco Mochi (1580–1654) in Rome. Mochi’s statue was formerly in the Château de La Meilleraye in Poitou, but in 1793, during the French Revolution, the head was removed and is now lost. The remaining statue is in the Musée du Pilori, Niort.
The commission for a full-length statue of Richelieu had originally been granted to the more renowned Italian sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but the project was abandoned in 1641 and a bust was made instead. Once in Paris, Bernini’s bust was criticised for its poor resemblance to Richelieu, and this was blamed on the inaccuracy of the painted profiles, supplied by an unknown painter, on which Bernini had based his work. Shortly after this, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661), soon to become the Minister of France following Richelieu’s death, asked the celebrated Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck to provide Bernini with a portrait on which to create the full statue (this artist had supplied Bernini with a portrait for his bust of King Charles I of England). However, Van Dyck died before the commission was confirmed.
Champaigne probably painted the central and right heads; an inscription above the latter reads: ‘this is the better one’. The rest of the painting was likely carried out by his workshop, as the costumes lack vitality and accuracy of detail. An earlier high-quality single profile of Richelieu by the artist is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg. Painted underneath it and invisible to the naked eye are several other portraits in varying profiles.
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A gallery for all


Trafalgar Square could be reached by the rich driving in their carriages from the west of London, and on foot by the poor from the East End. It was felt that in this location the paintings could be enjoyed by all classes in society.


With a commitment to free admission, a central and accessible site, and extended opening hours the Gallery has ensured that its collection can be enjoyed by the widest public possible, and not become the exclusive preserve of the privileged.


From the outset the National Gallery has been committed to education. Students have always been admitted to the Gallery to study the collection, and to make copies of the pictures. A vibrant education programme continues today for school children, students, and the general public. The programme includes free public lectures, tours and seminars.
HTMLText_18127A3F_1663_8BEF_4175_B0DF8CE38BFE.html =
The National Gallery is home to around 2000 pictures from Western European painters dating as far back as the early 13th century including Turner, Van Gogh and Picasso. Admission to the museum is free.


Address: Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
GPS: 51.508919, -0.128306
W3W: chemistry.woes.vast



HTMLText_0DECCFED_12FA_D26D_418B_9646D02C4859.html =
DESCRIPTION:
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.


The National Gallery, London. Welcomes you. The Nation's Gallery, open and ready when you are. Open daily 11am–6pm Friday until 9pm. Admission free By advance booking only. Book your visit.


Titian: Love, Desire, Death.
See our unmissable, five-star exhibition.


CONTACT:
E-mail: information@ng-london.org.uk
Web: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
Tel.: +44 (0)20 7747 2885
Address: Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
HTMLText_0B1CF751_121B_B3B2_41AA_8DF6E24BB6F1.html =
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London.


The first paintings
In April 1824 the House of Commons agreed to pay £57,000 for the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein. His 38 pictures were intended to form the core of a new national collection, for the enjoyment and education of all. The pictures were displayed at Angerstein's house at 100 Pall Mall until a dedicated gallery building was constructed.


The size of the building – Angerstein's house – was compared unfavourably with other national art galleries, such as the Louvre in Paris, and ridiculed in the press.


A new home
In 1831 Parliament agreed to construct a building for the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. There had been lengthy discussion about the best site for the Gallery, and Trafalgar Square was eventually chosen as it was considered to be at the very centre of London. The new building finally opened in 1838.
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Painting:
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THE NATIONAL
GALLERY LONDON
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THE NATIONAL
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NATIONAL
GALLERY
LONDON
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CONTACT
INFO
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description of ArtWork
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PANORAMA LIST:
HTMLText_0DECCFED_12FA_D26D_418B_9646D02C4859_mobile.html =
CONTACT


DESCRIPTION:
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.


The National Gallery, London. Welcomes you. The Nation's Gallery, open and ready when you are. Open daily 11am–6pm Friday until 9pm. Admission free By advance booking only. Book your visit.


Titian: Love, Desire, Death.
See our unmissable, five-star exhibition.


CONTACT:
E-mail: information@ng-london.org.uk
Web: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
Tel.: +44 (0)20 7747 2885
Address: Trafalgar Square, London
HTMLText_0B1CF751_121B_B3B2_41AA_8DF6E24BB6F1_mobile.html =
NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON


The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London.


The first paintings
In April 1824 the House of Commons agreed to pay £57,000 for the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein. His 38 pictures were intended to form the core of a new national collection, for the enjoyment and education of all. The pictures were displayed at Angerstein's house at 100 Pall Mall until a dedicated gallery building was constructed.


The size of the building – Angerstein's house – was compared unfavourably with other national art galleries, such as the Louvre in Paris, and ridiculed in the press.


A new home
In 1831 Parliament agreed to construct a building for the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. There had been lengthy discussion about the best site for the Gallery, and Trafalgar Square was eventually chosen as it was considered to be at the very centre of London. The new building finally opened in 1838.


A gallery for all
Trafalgar Square could be reached by the rich driving in their carriages from the west of London, and on foot by the poor from the East End. It was felt that in this location the paintings could be enjoyed by all classes in society.


With a commitment to free admission, a central and accessible site, and extended opening hours the Gallery has ensured that its collection can be enjoyed by the widest public possible, and not become the exclusive preserve of the privileged.


From the outset the National Gallery has been committed to education. Students have always been admitted to the Gallery to study the collection, and to make copies of the pictures. A vibrant education programme continues today for school children, students, and the general public. The programme includes free public lectures, tours and seminars.
HTMLText_3918BF37_0C06_E393_41A1_17CF0ADBAB12_mobile.html =
PANORAMA LIST:
HTMLText_18127A3F_1663_8BEF_4175_B0DF8CE38BFE_mobile.html =
THE NATIONAL
GALLERY - LONDON


The National Gallery is home to around 2000 pictures from Western European painters dating as far back as the early 13th century including Turner, Van Gogh and Picasso. Admission to the museum is free.


Address: Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
GPS: 51.508919, -0.128306
W3W: chemistry.woes.vast
HTMLText_938C20BC_89DC_27E5_41C3_8FB0FF202CA4_mobile.html =
THE NATIONAL
GALLERY - LONDON


Painting NAme
ARTIST
DATE
ROOM


Description
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THE NATIONAL
GALLERY - LONDON
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