Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery introducing their Zurbaran exhibition. I’d been to the show the day before and loved it so it was still fresh in my mind when Francesca Whitlum-Cooper and Daniel Ralston, led us though it explaining the theme of each room and introducing the main works in the show. They talked us through the artist’s early career from which no work survives then described the works he painted on his return to Seville in the 1620s including this mysterious picture of “The Apparition of St Peter and St Peter Nolasco”. They went on to the rooms of works for the religious orders including a massive altarpiece for a church just outside Cadiz, paintings of single saints including the gallery’s own wonderful St Francis, a look at subjects which he repeated, work for the royal court and to be exported to the America’s, still-lives by him and his son and finally works for private devotion from his later years. This was a good comprehensive introducti...

Stunning exhibition at the National Gallery focusing on the 17th century Spanish artist Zurbaran. I love Zurbaran and had been looking forward to this show and it didn’t disappoint. The monumental   work looked amazing in the space and was given room to breathe. It was shown in a simple way which evoked the religious settings in which it would have originated. I loved the stark Crucifixion scenes set against black and the single figure saints reminiscent of Spanish polychrome wood sculptures. It was moving to see three panels of a massive altarpiece reunited. There was a beautiful room of still-lives by Zubaran alongside those of his son. It was a visceral moment when you realised his son had died in a plague aged just 29. The most surprising piece in the show was a huge painting of a head. Measuring about 6ft sq from a distance it was striking but I assumed it was an enlargement of a face from a painting but no it is, as described in the show, a colossal head, recently as...

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.