Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent online study morning from Paula and Geoff Nuttall looking at the history and art of Naples from the 13th to 15th century. Geoff started the morning by looking at the Angevin’s who ruled the city from 1266 to 1435 guiding us through the complicated order of succession covering both the early French Angevins and the later Durazzo branch of the family from Hungary and Croatia. He outlined their building work in the city and looked in particular at the patronage of the civil servants around King Ladislav. I was delighted that he spent quite a lot of time talking about the tomb shown here for Admiral Antonio Baboccio de Piperno which I had discovered a few years ago and loved but I didn’t know a lot about it. He talked us through the imagery in some detail. Paula then took over looking at the Aragonese rulers of the city from 1442 to about 1504 focusing on Alfonso I including his work to rebuild the Castel Nuovo, his commissioned of medals from Pisanello, his interest in Nor...

Useful online study morning from the Wallace Collection to compliment their exhibition of watercolours by Turner and Bonington. Taking the exhibition as a starting point the morning consisted of five talks beginning with a description of the show by its curator Lucy Davis who discussed the pictures and how they entered the collection. John Bonehill from the University of Glasgow then talked about Turner and landed estates and the concept of estate portraits which I hadn’t consciously come across before. He talked about how Turner started doing these as a money spinner but developed the style into a higher form. Next was Timothy Barringer from Yale University looking at how both artists reflected the modern world and how pictures which look romantic to us also critique the changing world in which they were painted. There was a useful talk by Joyce H Townsend from the Tate taking us thought the technique of watercolour and developments in the early 19th century including the inv...

Excellent online study morning by Paula Nuttall looking at the sculptors who came after Donatello in Florence. Nuttall had already done a good three-week course on Donatello himself to reflect the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. That course had led to questions about the artists legacy and how sculpture in the city evolved from him to Michelangelo’s David in 1501-5 and this study morning addressed some of those issues. The talk could have descended into just a lost of names and pretty pictures but Nuttall crafted the narrative to show a continuation and development over the period emphasising the links between artists. I was surprised at how much of the work I knew from trips to the city without realising its significance. We are so often distracted from a lot of work by the power of a few artistic superstars. I learnt about some fantastic artists who I will look out for in the future.

Excellent study morning from Paula Nuttall looking in depth at Quentin Massys’s “The Ugly Duchess”. The morning complemented the current exhibition at the National Gallery which had reunited the Duchess with her other half, “An Old Man”, and had examined the context of the work. Nuttall did this in more depth looking at the fashion for grotesque images both in Northern Europe and Italy and discussed how this knowledge may have passed between the two centres of Antwerp and Florence. She also looked at the traditions of Morris dancing which often featured a similar figure and discussed how that was probably played by a man at the time. I loved her delicate way of explaining the sexual innuendo involved.   We finished by looking at the history of the painting and how people gave tried to identify the Duchess as a real person and how she has seeped into the cultural zeitgeist.   

Wonderful online study morning from the Wallace Collection to mark the end of their exhibition of Male portraits by Frans Hals. I loved this exhibition, went twice and had already done three talks from the gallery on the show, but I still found more to learn in this study morning. We started by looking at some of the female pendant portraits of the men in the show. They hadn’t been included as the plan was to use the Laughing Cavalier and his friends to explore masculinity. A talk on a new identification of a picture by Pieter Biesboer was fascinating but I must admit I got a bit lost in a family tree of Dutch names. An amazing piece of research though. The last talk of the day looked at whether the purchase of the Laughing Cavalier led to the rediscovery of Hals but argued that this had already started with the publication of various books in the proceeding few years which in fact boosted the bidding war. Oddly two independent talks linked. One looked at the Mennonites that H...

Excellent study morning at the National Gallery focusing on Wright of Derby’s picture “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” led by Jacqui Anselm. We began by looking at the picture in the gallery but went a long way round so we could look at other narrative pictures and think and how they told a story. I have done a few study mornings with Jacqui now and she is great at making you look at the picture carefully and think about the position of the people and what they are looking at. We talked about lots of things including the ages of the people in the picture and the light sources. Back in the seminar room we discussed how this picture fitted Enlightenment thinking and the idea of “Learning through Looking”. We looked at the fashion for scientific experiments in the home and talked about whether we thought the main protagonist was a travelling showman or the master of the house. We also talked about whether the picture was saying that the laws of God gone out of the wi...

A lovely study morning at the National Gallery looking at the Aldobrandini Madonna by Titian lead by Caroline Brook. I thought I knew the National Gallery Titian’s well but I must admit to not consciously looking this one before. On first glance it looks like a standard Madonna and child plus John the Baptist with a saint but as you look closely you start to question whether the figure is a saint as she has no halo or attributes and also to wonder why the Madonna is sitting in the countryside. We started by looking at the context of the picture in 16th century Venice and where it sits in Titian’s career. Titian was prolific in the 1530s when this picture was probably painted but very little of the work survives. For example of 12 works done for the Hapsburgs only 2 survive. We spent a lot of time in the gallery looking first at a Bellini of a Madonna in a landscape and then comparing that to the Titian. The tutor made us look carefully at the work and then we compare ...

An excellent study morning at the National Gallery looking in detail at their Water-lilies picture by Money which has recently returned from Tate Modern. The morning was led by James Heard who began by setting the picture in the context of Monet’s life and work. We took a detailed look at some of the series pictures and talked about why he was doing them. After a quick coffee we looked at the water-lilies pictures. I hadn’t realised they had been commissioned by the French Prime Minister Clemenceau as a war memorial. I was fascinated to see the pictures of them in Monet’s studio. The tutor handed round pictures of several of the studies and asked us in groups to think about why these pictures were so radical when compared to other pictures of the time and to think about why they appeal to a post-modern eye. Usually these sessions are purely lectures so it was nice to get a bit more interaction and discussion going. Finally we spent some time in front of the picture an...

Fascinating seminar at the National Gallery focusing on Claude Lorrain’s picture “Seaport with the Embarkation of St Ursula” lead by Steven Barrett. In the first section we looked at the story of St Ursula and how Claude had chosen to depict in in this picture. We discussed whether it was necessary to know the story to appreciate the picture. We also spent a lot of time looking at wonderful photos of details of the picture and talked about Claude’s style. We spent quite a lot of time looking at the picture itself and discussing its composition and how the picture might have been commissioned. We ended back in the seminar room talking about other St Ursula pictures and how this one had come into the National Gallery collection. We also talked about the influence of Claude on other artists including Turner and Monet.

Fascinating morning at the National Gallery on a seminar in their “A Longer Look” series looking at Poussin’s “Adoration of the Golden Calf” led by Jacqui Ansell. I must admit it’s not a picture I’d ever looked at and I often found Poussin a bit dull but I like this series and they always make you look at pictures in a different way. We began by looking at Poussin in this period and why his reputation had ebbed and flowed over the years. We discussed the story of the Golden Calf and how it was told in this picture. I’m not sure I would have spotted the Moses coming down from the mountain in the corner if it had not been pointed out. In the second half we went and sat in front of the picture and decoded it further, moving on to look at other Poussin’s in the same room. I came away wanting to know more about the artist. I loved the complexity of the symbolism, like a big puzzle!

Excellent study morning at the National Gallery exploring the themes of their current exhibition “Building the picture” which looks at architecture in Renaissance painting. The first half of the morning the two curators of the show Caroline Campbell from the National Gallery and Amanda Lillie from the University of York talked about the themes of the show and discussed why they had picked particular pictures. Then Martha Fiennes, the film maker, discussed her work “Nativity” which uses SLOimage to   randomly generate a set of backgrounds, architectural features and people to build up an ever changing image. She likened it to a visual iTunes shuffle. There is a short film about the work showing at the exhibition and from 30 June for a week the Gallery with be showing the complete work in the Lecture Hall. I found this work fascinating and will certainly try to go and see it. It was great to get a contemporary artists take on the idea of architecture in pictures. Fi...

Super morning workshop at the National Gallery looking in detail at Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity. The course leader, Karly Allen, began by looking at the iconography of Nativity scenes to this point and discussing how this picture fits into Botticelli’s later career when his style simplified. We then spent time with the picture itself in the gallery looking at the detail in it and discussing the colours and iconography. After coffee we talked about how the picture sat in its time and place, 1500 Florence, and how it may have been influenced by the preaching of Savonarola and the writings of Dante. Finally we looked at the history of the picture in the National Gallery collection. All in all a nice Christmas themed workshop to put you in the mood for the festivities.

An stimulating study morning at the National Gallery focusing on their picture by Hieronymus Bosch of Christ being mocked after his trial. The session was led by Sian Walters and she began by putting the picture in context both of the life of Bosch, of which little is known, and the period. She also looked at its composition. We then went on to look at the symbolism in the work such as the role that grotesque figures played, the anti-Semitic implications and the references to the church at the time. I was fascinated by   some very high resolution photographs she had which had been taken with a microscope of the fine detail of the detail of the work showing how the smallest brush stokes which can’t be seen by the naked eye build up the image such as the small swipe which becomes a button hole which you hadn’t even noticed on a first glance. She also involved a group of dancers who are in residence in the gallery at the moment as part of a wider project looking at B...

Super study morning at the National Gallery focusing on Ruben’s “Peace and War” from the collection led by Rebecca Lyons. We began by looking at where Ruben’s was in his career at this point and how he came to be in England on a diplomatic mission which led to the painting of this work as part of a plea to Charles I to end his war with Spain in the Netherlands.   We then sat in front of the picture and dissected its iconography and tried to imagine looking at it with a contemporary eye of the time. We now just see the children in the foreground as part of the mix of people but at the time it would have been very obvious that these were contemporary children incongruously appearing in a mythological scene.   Finally we discussed the context of the picture, who the children were, whether it has expanded in size and why and what happened to the picture when it was sold from the Royal Collection on Charles execution. All in all a fascinating morning and a ...

Study morning at the National Gallery to accompany the “ Picasso : Challenging the past ” exhibition. The morning consisted of three talks beginning with Christopher Riopelle one of the co-curators of the exhibition. He talked about what the exhibition is trying to show by examining the first room of self-portraits in detail. I’d not realised from going round the exhibition that each themed room works chronologically clockwise to help you see the themes of time as well as subject. Next came Kathleen Adler, former Direct of Education at the National Gallery looking at the role of classical themes in Picasso’s work both traditional ones such as sculpture and the more thematic such as the Mediterranean. Finally was Alex Danchev, author of “Picasso Furioso” which aimed to examine roots of the reasons he sought to challenge the past. The question and answer session at the end was one of the best I’d heard as not only were the audience questions good but the speakers seemed genuinely intere...

Study morning at the National Gallery on their current exhibition of the works of Pompeo Batoni (see blog entry for last week!), This was a good morning of 3 talks on aspects of the exhibition. The first talk was by Dawson Cart, co-ordinating curator of this exhibition for the gallery. This was a good walk though the exhibition using slides looking at which pictures had been chosen and why and how they fitted together to form the story of this artist. He talked about the stories behind the sitters as well which really brought them to life. The second talk was Rebecca Lyons, a freelance lecturer, on the Grand Tour, why people went on it, what they did and how they wished to be portrayed on it. Finally Jacqui Ansell, again a freelance lecturer, looking at the clothes in the portraits. She outlined the different styles of dressed and discussed which we modern and stylist and which were more old fashioned and trying to say more about dignity and gravitas. Particularly interesting was her c...