Cathy's Art Diary

Remarkable exhibition at the National Gallery bringing together the six mythological pictures Titian painted for Philip II of Spain. I had been so looking forward to this show but I ended up doing a rushed look round on the way back from collecting a last few things from work prior to starting to work from home for the Coronavirus so I must admit my heart wasn’t in it. I know all the paintings well from books but it was lovely to see the National Gallery’s work back alongside the companion pieces from Madrid, Boston and the Wallace Collection and a nice touch to include Apsley House’s Danae which is now thought to be the original painted for Philip. The paintings were described well, outlining the story as well as when and where they were delivered to Philip. At the time I wasn’t sure about the colour the gallery was painted but seeing it again on videos I realised it picks out the red he uses and there is a little bit of that colour on every picture. The curator of the e...

Interesting display at the Wallace Collection featuring superb Murgal sword to complement their Forgotten Masters exhibition. The sword was made by Muhammed Baqir Moshhadi known for a handful to top class blades. There are four known identical swords in this pattern which featured dragon headed guards. It was made for Safdar Jan, a Turco-Iranian First Minister of the Murgal Emperor. The design shows Indian and Iranian influences. It was hard to see the enamel design on the scabbard but there was useful enlargement of it next to the sword. The dragon head design had an almost Anglo-Saxon feel to it.

Delightful exhibition at the Wallace Collection looking at the art commissioned by the East India Company by local artists. I love Mughal painting and was fascinated to see the combination of that style of art with subject commissioned by the British in India. I like the meticulous detail and occasional quizzical take on a subject that is strange to the artist. The commentary pointed out that each region had its own style and gave a good outline of the main artists. The show also traced the changing relationship between the two countries with a real sense of assimilation in the early years including the wonderful “Portrait of Sir John Wombwell Smoking a Hookah” going through the tenser pre-mutiny period when the British tried to dominate more. There was a room dedicated to an album of natural history pictures commissioned by Sir Elijah Impey by Bhawani Daso Ram Das which took seven years to complete. I particularly liked the looming pictures of bats and the detailed ones of b...

Sumptuous exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery looking at the life and collecting of George IV. The show started with some wonderful portraits of George’s siblings including some on copper by Peter Edward Stroehing. These were gentle, intimate pictures and made you want to go and look up what had happened to them all. There were also some wonderful cartoons of the time many of them collected by George himself. In the large gallery there were recreated decorative scheme with over the top furniture and ceramics. These were show with some of the full length portraits from the Waterloo cycle celebrating the victorious generals and monarchs, these included a wonderful portrait of Pope Pious VII by Thomas Lawrence. The third room looked in detail at Carlton House, given to George for his 21 st birthday, which he renovated and filled with objects and paintings, many acquired in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was all very ornate but it was fascinating to see which pictures ...

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of new acquisitions in response to recent social, cultural and political events.  Curators had looked at gaps in the collection, particularly around diversity, and purchased and commissioned work to fill those gaps. Areas covering included women, BAME sitters and people from the LBGTQ community. I was fascinated by a series called 209 Women, an all-female initiative with female sitters and photographers. A lovely example from this was a picture of Seema Kennedy MP by Julia Fullerton-Batten in the House of Commons corridor standing on a box in a suit looking over her shoulder. There was a lovely contemplative picture of Stormzy by Olivia Rose and four by the same photographer of women in the art world including Maria Belshaw, head of the Tate. My favourite, shown here, was a lovely windswept photograph of Laura Kuenssberg by Richard Ansett in one of her characteristic brightly coloured coats. Closes 28 June ...

Poignant display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at pictures of Florence Nightingale to mark 200 years since her birth. In just a couple of display cases the pictures explored not only her work in the Crimean War but also her later life as a campaigner but invalid. It looked at how she was upheld as an exemplar of female virtue but had an aversion to the idea of celebrity and so did not sit for many portraits. This delightful sketch was by James Barrett, who was sent to the Crimea in 1856 to paint a portrait of Nightingale. She wouldn’t sit for him so instead he had to rely on sketches like this make of her while she worked. The resulting picture “The Mission of Mercy” was hanging in the room next door. As well as a medal there were also two photographs of her as a young woman and aged 71 looking Queen Victoria like. Nearby stood a lovely bust of her and the whole display was in a room of portraits of significant Victorian women which was a nice touch. Closes ...

Charming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at how David Hockney has used life drawing throughout his career. What made this charming was the show concentrated on just three people plus self-portraits. The self-portraits began and ended the show with rooms in-between devoted to Celia Birtwell, the designer and a life long friend, Gregory Evans, a x-lover and now a curator and Marcus Payne, a master printer Hockney has worked with for a number of years. There is also a small room devoted to vey touching drawings of his mother. I loved the pictures of Birtwell which incorporated her own designs and the commentary did talk about how the two artists influenced each other. It was beautiful to watch the sitters age and a lovely touch to end with a wall of drawings done them all less than a year ago. The drawings were beautiful, and it was clever to take one aspect of an artists work and use it to show the trajectory of their career however what I most took from it ...