I’m only just realising what a cheek I’ve had writing this blog for the last two & (almost) a half years. Here I’ve been, pontificating about art & what’s great & what’s interesting when actually I’ve not seen a whole stack of things I’ve been writing about. This didn’t really bother me before (& it’d be foolish to restrict myself to what I have seen) but this month it really struck me. The reason for this depressing epiphany is that I’d never been to the National Gallery. On a recent visit to London, all that changed.
As one of the attendants I was chatting to pointed out, we do have the National Gallery of Scotland & the National Portrait Gallery, both of which house fascinating & important works. But Scotland is a small place & comparatively so too are the galleries.
You might think it strange that despite this smallness I’ve not been to London much in the last thirty years but I always had a parochial anxiety about tube stations & a very real (& justifiable) fear of getting lost.
But who wants to miss out?
As I say, not having seen the works I write about hasn’t bothered me before, but the National Gallery made me understand how many Important Art Things I’d never seen. Things that everyone knows. Things that are really famous or really good. Things that I really ought to have seen by now.
I don’t know what gives you goose-bumps.
For me more than anything else it’s music but now & then it’s because I’m so thrilled at seeing an artwork in person. Walking round the National Gallery I had goose-bumps almost the entire time. Partly it was the excitement at just having seen one amazing thing, partly the anticipation of seeing another & partly the astonishment of just how many great & famous works the Gallery has. I knew some of the things were there of course, but even they confounded me in some way.
Usually in the blog I’ll avoid too many major or well-known works but this week is a bit different. Live music aside, my visit was as close to a religious experience a miserable atheist like myself is likely to have so I’m just going to pick through a mere three elements of my (first) visit that surprised, delighted & intrigued me.
.jpg)
The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Jan van Eyck (active 1422- d. 1441)
Part of the oddness of this experience comes from having known particular works for most of my life & believing I’d known them very well. I’ve seen them in articles, postcards & TV programmes, I’ve read about them in books, heard about them on podcasts & learned about them online. The Arnolfini Portrait is a perfect example. I used to collect a weekly magazine called “The Great Artists” & still have all the copies in their binders. One of the paintings I saw there for the first time was The Arnolfini Portrait. There’s no getting away from it – it was odd then & it’s odd now. There’s his face, pose & expression, the debate about her dress & whether or not she is pregnant (or indeed dead already), the symbolism of various features & the tiny mirror & its inherent possibility of reflecting van Eyck himself. But one of the disadvantages of any art in print is the lack of quality reproductions. Not only is the Arnolfini a good deal smaller than I’d imagined, it’s also a good deal finer. No repro has ever come close to showcasing the skill of the brushwork, delicacy of the detail nor the beauty of the colours that van Eyck achieves. & sadly I’m not going to be able to come close to describing it well enough. This clip will show you the portrait more close up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM6d9BOj4Ww
The Ambassadors (Jean de Dinteville & Georges de Selve) (1497/8-1543), Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543)
Holbein is the guy that gave us our mental image of Henry VIII. The picture you think of when someone says “Henry VIII.” If not for Holbein, we’d imagine Henry differently. He’d probably seem less obnoxious & somehow less believable. Because with Holbein, the work seems so photo-realistic – especially for its time - that you can’t believe he’s going to paint a lie. There are a number of fantastic Holbeins at the National Gallery & they genuinely made me gasp. In particular, The Ambassadors had an almost supernatural impression on me. For one thing, as a life-sized piece, it’s absolutely enormous. Like Henry, it commands attention. But aside from that it has a presence. It’s as if the painting itself is a living thing, perhaps sentient. It was a peculiar feeling standing in front of it, as if it might see you too. I can’t remember the last time art did this. It’s a picture filled with mystery & intrigue too. The strange shape on the floor is an anamorphic skull. It’s like a 15th Century Magic Eye optical illusion. It of course reminds us of our own mortality but there is a theory that the still life aspects of the painting represent the levels of heaven, earth & the afterlife. Note: naturally, when I saw there was a little pin of this skull for sale in the shop, I HAD to get one & yes, the anamorphosis works on it too.
This clip is a bit longer, but is nevertheless quite an interesting history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paA8hqqQ-_w
Whistlejacket (c. 1762), George Stubbs (1724-1806)
One of the great things about Whistlejacket at the National Gallery is where they’ve hung it. You can take a walk of your own through the gallery or you can follow a suggested route. As I’ve suggested, I’m terrible with directions, so I’m generally better at furrowing my own path, even indoors… Anyway, as you pass through the different rooms, you effectively look along through the openings to the other end of the building. The result is that you appear to see Whistlejacket at the end of a corridor, even though it’s on a wall in a far room. It’s terrifically clever & means you look at it many times. On the whole, I’m not enamoured of equestrian paintings, but Stubbs was undoubtedly the master & this is a beauty. Plus Whistlejacket is instantly recognisable, with his beautiful coat, dramatic pose & plain background, which he seems to vault forward from. Apparently Whistlejacket was a very spirited horse & was only ever beaten in four races. There is one story that Whistlejacket was so startled, nay (!) outraged by the presence of Stubbs & his easel in his stable that there was no chance to fill in a background, but in fact he made other paintings without background details.
This National Gallery clip tells us more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M8BmsrC18g
No comments:
Post a Comment