Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapades on Frans Hals. Clare Ford-Wille led us through the career of Hals and set him in the context of his time. I found her narrative a bit disjointed at times, however in her defence, I have done a lot on Hals around the show at the National Gallery and the previous one at the Wallace Collection so there probably wasn’t a lot more to learn. She did however provide good study notes after the talk which will be really useful to refer back to.  

Delightful all day course from the London Art History Society on French 18th century artists Watteau and Chardin. Clare Ford-Willie began with a good overview of art in France in the century before to set the scene and to pinpoint where some of the themes of the later artists came from. At times she did gloss over some of the history assuming we knew it but she had provided a good handout with more of the detail which helped those of us who in true historian tradition can say “it’s not my period. She then looked at the work of each artist separately as they work in very different genres. She talked about how Watteau was born in a Flemish area and how we can see the influence of this in his work. She talked about the decorative work he did and then his pictures of contemporary people in autumnal landscapes and his use of Commedia dell’arte figures. We moved onto Chardin and looked at his still-lives and talked about how he liked placing shapes together, simplifying the composition...

Interesting online course from the London Art History Society summer school on how Western art has represented the major stories of the New Testament. Unfortunately in the end I could only do two of the six days which covered the period from the circumcision of Christ to the Last Supper. This meant I missed the introductory talk which might have given a bit more shape to the talks. I felt a certain amount of knowledge, which I did have, was assumed and it turned out a couple of the events in this part of the narrative had been covered in that introduction as an example of how the course would run. The summer school had been advertised as six linked but stand-alone sessions. I liked the form of the days lead by Clare Ford-Wille going through the narrative in sections, outlining which gospels the story appeared in and how it varied between them. This has taught me to look at a picture and think about which gospel it might be following as well as thinking about which aspect of a story...

Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society as the last in a series on early Italian art focusing on lesser-known fresco cycles. Other study days in this summer series had looked at specific cities but this final session swept up other art which wasn’t in those three major centres. We also had a different lecturer for this session and Clare Ford-Wille took us on a lovely tour of Northern Italy and added lots of towns to add to my list of places I want to visit. Most interesting was her tour of the abbey at Pomposa which I had not come across before. Various abbots had commissioned cycles to promote the church. Sadly none of the artists are known but there seems to have been a fashion for depictions of the Last Supper at circular tables. We then looked at cycles in Padua which are overshadowed by the amazing work by Giotto which we had studied in the previous session. We started with the work of Giusto da Menabuoi in Baptistery commissioned by Fina B...