Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent lecture at the National Gallery looking at the clothes in Goya portraits. The lecture was given by Jacqui Ansell and she discussed the changing fashion seen in the pictures from the formal court dress, through a genre for French style and the take up of the national Maja style dress. She had excellent slides both of works in the current exhibition and from other galleries. I always enjoy her quirky take on things to get you thinking such as comparing the dashing full length picture in the exhibition with a chap showing off his excellent leg in white breeches with a picture of Angelina Jolie on the cat walk!

Interesting small exhibition at the National Gallery examining the gallery’s own portrait of Dona Isabel de Porcel by discussing if it is in fact by Goya as a companion show to Goya : The Portraits. The show discusses the historical and technical evidence. It traces the sale record of it and talks about the fact it was not sold by the family of the sitter and can’t be traced to that family. It also looks at x-ray evidence which shows another picture underneath it and shows that the picture we see was painted directly on this other image without the application of a new ground or primer. However despite all the evidence the show doesn’t draw any conclusions which is a shame but it is an interesting study in research techniques.

Fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the portrait work of Goya. I found this show really engaging as it managed to tell a number of stories in a very clear way as well as displaying the pictures beautifully. It shows the growth of Goya as a portrait painter. The first works are lovely but seem rather quaint and naïve although he is already alluding to the great court portrait painter of a different generation, Velazquez. By the later works the pictures show a great insight into people’s characters. It also showed the stories of a group of people with figures reappearing in different rooms at different ages. I loved the fact the little boy with long blond hair in an early work reappears as a cleric. The audio tour and leaflet adds nice touches of the sitter’s stories and gives a real sense of a generation of people. There was also a great sense of friendship in the works. A number of the sitters were people Goya worked with or knew well and often the...

Interesting lecture at the National Gallery given by Richard Stemp as an introduction to the current Goya portraits exhibition. Richard went thought he exhibition room by room describing some of the main pictures and telling the stories behind them. He used that format to also tell the story of Goya’s life. He gave good insights into the works although having now gone round the show a lot could also be found on the audio tour. I did find it useful that he pointed out that a number of children in the earlier works reappear later on in the show. Also useful to realise there is a progression through the work as when you start the exhibition the work does seem a little naive but you do seem them grow.  

Fascinating and learned exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery bringing together nearly all the pictures from a Goya album of drawings. I was lucky enough to attend the friends’ private view of this show with a talk by the curator Stephanie Buck which was a real insight into the work to bring these pictures together and to work out the order they appeared in the album. She said she become obsessed by dirt on the pictures as often it wasn’t dirt but an imprint of the picture on the previous or next page! The pictures have hung in the order they appeared in the album and show Goya working through various creative ideas starting with floating figures and ending with very tender pictures of old women. The pictures were very freely drawn and yet were finished drawings of a fine quality. A display in the centre of the room looked at Goya’s experiments with lithographs, which was a new technique, at this time. With the drawings this showed a man still experimenting with ideas a...