Cathy's Art Diary

Stunning exhibition at the National Gallery focusing on the 17th century Spanish artist Zurbaran. I love Zurbaran and had been looking forward to this show and it didn’t disappoint. The monumental   work looked amazing in the space and was given room to breathe. It was shown in a simple way which evoked the religious settings in which it would have originated. I loved the stark Crucifixion scenes set against black and the single figure saints reminiscent of Spanish polychrome wood sculptures. It was moving to see three panels of a massive altarpiece reunited. There was a beautiful room of still-lives by Zubaran alongside those of his son. It was a visceral moment when you realised his son had died in a plague aged just 29. The most surprising piece in the show was a huge painting of a head. Measuring about 6ft sq from a distance it was striking but I assumed it was an enlargement of a face from a painting but no it is, as described in the show, a colossal head, recently as...

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery on the 17th century Portuguese artist, Josefa de Obidos. Carmen Rippolles from the University of Oregan who has recently published a book on Josefa introduced her, taking us through her life and art. She placed her as an artist of the Counter-Reformation influenced by Spain but creating a Baroque style for Portugal. I had never come Josefa before so it was fascinating to learn bout a new artist and see work that was unfamiliar to me. She worked across genres and medium but did create large altarpieces as well as small devotional works on copper and still-lives.

Excellent online six week course from the National Gallery examining six major texts on art from Vasari to John Berger. Amy Mechowski led us through the course with a format of her giving a lecture on the book and the author then inviting a speaker who has reacted to the work either via art or writing. This was a really good grounding in art historical thinking and the format led you to think more widely around the subject.  The books were : * Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” 1550 * Charles Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” 1863 * Ernst Gombrich’s “The Story of Art” 1950 * Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 1936 * Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 1971 * John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” 1972   Guest speakers were: * Jenny Graham from the University of Plymouth who discussed how Vasari created the canon of artists and established the idea of what an artists should be. She then t...

Intriguing lecture at the National Portrait Gallery using works from the gallery to talk about sex in the Victorian era. Catherine Philips of The University of Bristol introduced us to a number of radical Victorian thinkers both campaigning for rights of sex workers of the time or introducing laws to limit sexual freedoms starting with Charles 'Boatswain' Smith, a Baptist minister in Stepney who established a refuge for sex workers, educating them to be domestic servants and finding them jobs with families moving out to the colonies. She moved on to Josephine Butler and Dadodhal Naoroji who fought to overturn the Contagious Diseases Acts and Annie Besant who republished a pamphlet of sexual education for which she was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. She then looked at Henry Labouchere who introduced the law to criminalise all male homosexual activity in the UK and Sir Richard Francis Burton who wrote about sexual practices he came across when travelling and t...

Intriguing exhibition at the British Museum examining the history of the Samurai. It was a beautifully designed show and covered from their origins in medieval Japan's civil wars through to the 19th century when they had become the elite, cultured ruling class. It also looked at their myths and l egacy. My only moan is, that as ever at the British Museum, the labels were quite long and wordy creating log jams partly because they were set low so if anyone leaned over to look at an object they blocked them. Add to that the fact that quite often they were a distance from the item they were discussing so you had to play a game to match the object to the label. There were some beautiful objects and plentiful use of intricate painted scrolls and prints. I think my favourite object was this charming small dish dated 1700-50 which I felt could be a contemporary shop. I also loved a book described as an I-Spy book for processions to enable people to identify the different clans as th...

Fascinating small exhibition at the British Museum highlighting a medieval ewer and its journey to Africa and back. Made in England between 1340 and 1405, the ewer later travelled to West Africa. In the 1880s it was photographed in a courtyard of the royal palace of the Asantehene, king of the Asante people, in Kumasi (in present-day Ghana). During the Anglo-Asante War of 1896 it was looted by British forces and later purchased by the British Museum. A second ewer, also taken in 1896 and shown in the same photograph, was presented to the Prince of Wales's Own (West Yorkshire) Regiment. This display reunites the two. It was amazing how one object could tell a little-known story of medieval trade, how English objects had been treated as sacred items in Africa and Victorian colonialism.   Closed 7 June 2026