Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent course at the National Gallery on painting in the Netherlands in the 17 th century. This course ran over three Saturday mornings and was led by Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe. She is a very engaging speaker and seemed delighted that a course which was due to be run for a small group in the seminar room had to be moved to the lecture hall because of numbers. Week one looked at portraits and went through the reasons people commissioned portraits and the different styles. She had wonderful photographs with lots of good details. In doing this she also went though the reasons why there was such a high demand for art in this period. Week 2 was genre painting and we had a romp through the various subjects with interesting insights into their symbolism. I often find these work’s quite a turn off in galleries as there are acres of them but now I know a bit more about them I will look more carefully and I’ve already had a walk round the Wallace Collection’s collection. ...

Interesting workshop at the National Gallery starting a season on unfinished pictures led by Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe. As this was the first in a series of talks the first section looked at the difference between an unfinished picture ie one which is not complete and the finish on a picture which can be described as unfinished ie loose. We then talked about why a picture might be abandoned. It might be that the artist dies while creating it and we talked about what is left in a studio. It might be that the patron changes there mind and we took Pope Julius’s tomb as an example. It might be that there is a problem with the work such as the Michelangelo Risen Christ where a fault in the marble was found where Christ’s face was going to be. And finally it might be that the work was too ambitious and was not achievable. In the second half we looked at what unfinished pictures can tell us about technique and Chantal look us through the process of painting a picture at this da...