Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from the Wallace Collection speculating on why Rubens did sketches out of doors at various points in his career. An Van Camp from the Ashmolean Museum gave us a brief overview of his career and when the sketches fist started to appear. The early works from around 1615 seem to have recorded images which were later reused in paintings. They also seem to have been kept in the studio and reused in later pictures so were they just drawn a tools for the studio? When he moved to Het Steen in 1635 he seems to have started drawing for pleasure and moved to working on large sheets of rough paper. He also seems to have annotated some with nature and optic observations. She also talked about the role of his watercolour sketches which may have been more compositional works rather than recording specific details and also about research into his handwriting in the annotation and how if is different in different medium and also in later life.  

Interesting online discussion as part of London Art Week Digital about portraits. The talk was chaired by Matthew Reeves of Sam Fogg London and brought together curators, auctioneers and a gallery owner to talk about their recent experiences of working with portraits. It would have been good if the talk had been more themed but I was introduced to some wonderful pictures which were new to me and I am a sucker for a good portrait. An Van Camp, from the Ashmolean Museum, talked about curating the Young Rembrandt show which was on as the museum closed. She compared three self portraits from 1628/9, a drawing, a painting and an etching to demonstrate the different mediums he worked in, She also talked about a Van Dyck portrait the gallery is hopefully in the process of purchasing and shared research she has been doing in lockdown to identify the sitter, which she thinks may be the wife of a friend of Van Dyck’s father, Olivia Ghosh, of Christies, talked about some works in a recent ...