Cathy's Art Diary

Lecture by Peter Cherry of Trinity College, Dublin, focusing on one picture in the current exhibition at the National Gallery “ Sacred made real ”. He used “Saint Serapion” as a way of looking at the live and works of it’s artist Zurbaran. He looked at why he tended to work for the Orders , despite the fact they did not pay well. He also analysed what Zurbaran was good at such as still lives and portraits using other works in the exhibition to emphasis this.

Lecture at the National Gallery by Xavier Bray, Assistant Curator of 17th- and 18th-century Paintings at the National Gallery, on the painting of “St Francis in Meditation” by Zurbaran. This picture is currently featured in the exhibition by the artist in residence, Alison Watts, as it inspired her to paint her large scale pictures of drapery. The lecture looked at the iconography of the picture and at who it might have been painted for. It was nice to look in detail at one particular picture and all aspects of it.