Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery introducing their exhibition on Van Gogh. Christopher Riopelle and Cornelia Homburg led us around the show explaining the themes including lovers, gardens and architype portraits, and the choices they had made when hanging it. They emphasised how they wanted to put the art rather than Van Gogh’s life at the centre of the narrative. They talked at length about the Yellow House and how he decorated it and how it became a place to show art in a new way. The best fact I learned was that Arles is full of Roman artefacts and yet Van Gogh doesn’t paint them. There was an excellent Q&A session at the end with some intelligent questions and illuminating answers. I have since been to the amazing show and he talk had been very useful in setting the scene and in pointing out the works on loan which are rarely on show.

Comprehensive online course from the National Gallery examining aspects of their current Winslow Homer exhibition. Over three weeks six speakers guided us through Homer’s life and work. Week one started with Chris Riopelle curator of the current show guiding us through it. I have heard him talk about it before but you learn something new each time. This was followed by John Fogg from the University of Birmingham talking about Homer’s experiences in the American Civil War and the effect on his art both during and after the war. Week two took us to Europe with Frances Varley from the Courtauld leading us through what art Homer may have seen when he was in Paris in 1866 and how it influenced his work on his return. She saw this as a period of experimentation and recovery from the Civil War. We then moved to England and his time at Cullercoats with Christine Riding from the National Gallery placing the work in the context of his whole career and in the fashion for artists to work in wo...

Fascinating and useful online lecture from the National Gallery on their new exhibition on Winslow Homer which opens in two days’ time. Christopher Riopelle talked us though the life of Homer using paintings which have been chosen for the show. He covered his early work in the American Civil War doing woodcuts from the front for the newspapers and how this then fed into his later career and his continued interest in taking a journalistic approach to subjects. He then looked at how he came to England in 1881 to visit the seafaring community of Cullercoats on the North East coast recording the work of the rescue crews there and the lives of the fishermen and their wives. He talked about how Homer built a collection of drawings and sketches which he drew on for the rest of his career. Finally he looked at some of the iconic paintings from Homer’s his later years and how they commented on   American life . I’m off to see the show tomorrow at a members’ preview and am really lo...

Useful lecture at the National Gallery looking at the current exhibition pairing portraits by Ingres and Picasso. I had seen the show a couple of weeks earlier. It brought together Picasso’s “Woman with a Book” from 1932 with Ingres’ “Madame Moitessier” from 1856 which it was inspired by. This is the first time they have been seen together. Curator of the show, Christopher Riopelle, gave us a whistle stop guide to the career of Ingres, pointing out works which related to the Madame Moitessier picture and talked us through the long process of making the work itself which was painted over a period of 12 years during which time plans to include a daughter who’d grown up were dropped and the design of the dress changed as fashions changed. He then talked us through the Picasso picture of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter and it’s deliberate links to the Ingres work which he had seen in 1921 and which was for sale in 1936 when he first exhibited the portrait. I did pop back and take...