Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery on the work of Vermeer. Lucrezia Walker took us through the paintings of Vermeer in what she described as ten easy bites. It was a fun approach, grouping the work into eight themes which added segments on his early life and legacy. I must admit I have done quite a lot on Vermeer recently, as the big show is on in Amsterdam, and I don’t think this lecture added a lot to what I had already learnt. She did describe the pictures well and did lead you to look at the works carefully. She raised some interesting questions about what they might mean but, of course, there are no answers. It did make me wish, even more, that I had been organised enough to go to great exhibition as Vermeer is one of my favourites.    

Useful four week online course from the National Gallery introducing four art historical approaches which can be used to ‘read’ paintings. The four approaches were social history, decolonisation, feminism and queer studies and each week we took a picture from the gallery’s collection and discussed it with one of these approaches in mind. Inevitably to make a point, the discussion sometimes felt a bit one dimensional and we sometimes strayed a long way from the painting in question to look at history of the art historical approach. I think week one looking at social history was the most natural to my approach. John Fagg, from the University of Birmingham, looked at “Men of the Docks” by George Bellows from 1912. I do like to know about the context of a picture and what it shows about the times it was painted in as well as what the market for the type of work might have been. Ana Howie, from the University of Cambridge, took the decolonisation theme using “Drunken Silenus Supporte...