Cathy's Art Diary

Disappointing online lecture from the National Gallery looking at female artists in the gallery’s collection. I say disappointing as from the title, I had assumed the talk would focus on female studio practice and in particular, that of Eva Gonzales. However the talk became a mix of a standard talk on female artists in the collection and ones I had done a couple of year’s ago on the Eva Gonzales portrait in a studio by Manet when there was a focus exhibition on the painting at the gallery. Jacqui Ansell, from Christies Education, as ever delivered the talk well with good images and intelligent coverage of the subject, but I felt the talk’s title had promised more focus than this. It was a good International Women’s Day talk but, as a paid talk, was not novel enough. Maybe I have just done too many National Gallery talks now!

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery discussing the afterlife of Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzales and its Irish connections. The talk complimented the exhibition which examined the painting that was at the gallery at the time. Hannah Baker, an artist and phd student at Trinity College, Dublin, talked us through how Hugh Lane, who was collecting art for a gallery of modern art in Dublin discovered the picture and borrowed it for various exhibitions eventually buying it in 1906. She discussed the mixed success of his gallery in Dublin and how the picture then ended up in the National Gallery following Lane’s death on the Lusitania in 1915. He had left it to the gallery along with 38 other pictures in his will but an unwitnessed reverted this to the Dublin gallery. For many years this was not recognised but the paintings are how viewed as jointly owned by the National Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. She also looked in detail at William Orpen’s “Homage t...

Excellent exhibition at the National Gallery putting Manet’s portrait of the artist Eva Gonzales into context. The painting is the centre piece but the show then uses it to talk about the relationship between the artists. Eva was Manet’s only formal pupil and they had a sustained friendship and artistic dialogue. It featured work by both artists and I’d never consciously seen work by her before. The show went on to put the picture in the context of self-portraits by female artists to point out that they often show themselves in pale, fine clothes as in this picture and put themselves in the guise of the Allegory of Painting. It was fantastic to see such an array of pictures from Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, founder members of the Royal Academy to Laura Knight the first elected female academician in the 1930s. Finally it looked at how opportunities for female artists were still limited in this period. The Ecole des Beaux-Art did not admit women into 1897. It featured picture...

Comprehensive online lecture from ARTscapades previewing the current exhibition at the National Gallery based around Manet’s portrait of the artist Eva Gonzales. Richard Stemp described the portrait from 1870 putting it in the context of both their lives and pointing out some of the oddities in the work such as the fact she is painting a work that is already frame and she wears an impractical white dress. Most fascinating was the fact that the still-life she is working on is a copy of a print of a 18th century print which appears in a contemporary book on the history of French painting which is in the show. He then went on to explain some of the oddities in the context of other portraits and self-portraits of women artists explaining how many were painting the Allegory Le Pittura which was a female figure. He went through the pictures in the show which demonstrated this. He also used them to talk about what women wore to paint and how that contrasted with how they showed themselve...