10/6: London's Exquisite National Gallery!

After our walking tour of the Whitehall section of London that led Steven and me to Trafalgar Square near the end of our six-week-long trip to Ireland and the United Kingdom last fall, we reached the National Gallery also known as the 'National Gal.' With Britain's greatest collection of paintings, we thought the gallery would be a very pleasant break from the hubbub of the city outside.

A street artist out front caught our attention when we saw his sign asking passersby to put a coin on their country's flag. What a novel and very artistic way to earn some moey!

Thanks to travel writer Rick Steves, we knew touring the gallery would be like an in-depth art history course that spanned, as Reeves, wrote, "medieval holiness, Renaissance realism, Dutch detail, Baroque excess, British restraint, and the colorful French Impressionism that leads to the modern world." That sounded fantastic but overwhelming considering we just had a few hours! We started in the Medieval and Early Renaissance Gallery whose shiny gold paintings of saints, angels and Madonnas went from the 1200s to the early 1400s.

We knew these were holy people from the gold 'plates' on their heads. They were likely saints because of the symbols they carried, in this case, a book, not because of their human features. Look how stiffly they were posed, another feature of the period.

The Wilton Diptych was created about 1335-1339 by an unknown English, or possibly, a French artist. The shield in the left outside wing of this portable altarpiece showed the royal arms of both countries - the lion and fleur-de-lis. The outside depicted not a saint, not a god but a real-life deer.

Steves described the painter as struggling with reality with John the Baptist holding the 'lamb of God' that looked more like a small dog and Mary's fingers holding an anatomically impossible little foot! The kings, however, did have distinct down-to-earth faces. Richard II, the English king from 1377-1399, was known to "have knelt before this portable altarpiece to inspire his devotion to the Virgin."

Uccello's Battle of San Romano was a colorful battle scene which showed the victory of Florence over Siena in 1432. I loved how the horses and soldiers were placed at every conceivable angle and how the farmyards receded into the background and the tiny soldiers gave an illusion of distance.

I can't remember what the name of this one was but the 3D look caught my fancy.

Though called by some the Shotgun Wedding, this portrait by Van Eyck was actually The Arnolfini Portrait and depicted a solemn, wealthy couple from Bruges, Belgium, not a wedding ceremony forced by the woman's growing belly. As we looked into the round mirror on the far wall, the entire scene was reflected backward in miniature. When this was painted just one generation beyond The Wilton Diptych, people could understand the hidden meaning of symbols: the chandelier with the one lit candle represented love; the fruit on the windowsill meant fertility; and Fido, the dog, equated fidelity. According to Steves, the woman was likely not pregnant. The look of the period called for women to gather up the folds of their ample dress!

From the middle and early Renaissance we moved on to the late 1400s and the Italian Renaissance which meant the 'rebirth' of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures that changed people's thinking about all aspects of life: in politics, that meant democracy; in religion, it meant a move from Church dominance toward humanism and the assertion of man and a more personal faith.  

In Botticelli's Venus and Mars that he painted in 1485, Mars, the God of War is clearly seen taking a break from war and enjoying the delights of love thanks to Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty. The shell the satyrs use to blow into Mars' ear represents Venus' birth from the sea. It was evident that artists in the early years of the Renaissance felt comfortable using pagan Greek gods as symbols of human traits.

The Annunciation with Saint Emidus, painted by Crivelli in 1486, had a huge collection of realistic details just like Van Eyck's wedding painting. If you look carefully at the photo, you'll notice the hanging rug, the peacock, etc! The Holy Spirit spanned the entire distance, connecting a heavenly background with an earthly foreground.

In the lower right-hand corner was Mary being visited by the dove of the Holy Spirit.

We skipped from the Italian Renaissance to the High Renaissance which was the short period from the 1490s to the early 1500s. When the greatest sculptor ever, Michelangelo, painted The Entombment about 1500, the unfinished altarpiece showed the crucified Christ being carried to the tomb after he had been lifted from Mary Magdalene's lap. It gave one the feeling of its being a painted sculpture. The naked Christ shocked the medieval Church but classical nudes were totally fine with the Renaissance world as they were seen as an expression of the divine. 

In Raphael's 1511 Portrait of Pope Julius II, he was pictured wearing a beard as a sign of mourning after losing the city of Bologna. Though the painting was considered by Raphael's contemporaries as one of his greatest, it was only verified as a Raphael original in 1970. If you look closely at the pope, you notice his velvet shawl, silk shirt, and many rings, all pointing to his wealth. However, he was literally painted into the corner with the visage of a bent and broken man.

The Mannerism years from the 1520s to 1600 were a reaction to the High Renaissance with "exaggerated proportions, asymmetrical compositions, and decorative color." I read that An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, painted by Bronzino around 1545, was intended as a difficult riddle with the boy Cupid kissing his mother Venus and the boy with the rose petals likely representing Jest. Other figures stood for Fraud, Jealousy, and possibly Pleasure. I wouldn't have understood any of that without the information by the painting! 

I also read in Steves' notes that Cupid's foot apparently became famous in the 1970s on the British TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus! Cupid's large foot came down as the show opened and closed, as circus music played when credits came to an end.

In The Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto, Jupiter is depicted seeking immortality for his illegitimate son, Hercules. When he carried his son to his sleeping wife, Juno's breast, the goddess awoke and he milk spurted out, creating the Milky Way in the heavens.

The Northern Protestant Art period spanned the 1600s when smaller canvases and subdued colors became the norm. The Italians had wealthy nobles and the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church to buy art but patrons in Northern Europe only had hardworking, middle-class Protestant shopowners who wanted simple and cheap pieces to decorate their homes and businesses. 

Young Woman Standing at a Virginal by Vermeer was painted in 1670. It showed a virgin playing a virginal or early piano. Like other North European art, it was painted with great attention to detail so viewers could appreciate the beauty of everyday things. For instance, see the blue chair in the foreground, the detailed images in the background paintings, the black and white tiled floor, etc.

The virgin's purity was strengthened by the nude cupid on the back wall.

Belshazzar's Feast by the great Dutch painter, Rembrandt, was created in 1635.

His Self Portrait at the Age of 63 shows the artist appearing quite frail in the final year of his life. His hands are limp, his skin is pasty, and his normally wiry hair was subdued. Rembrandt had refused to paint what he knew would sell, preferring to create images of family members and Bible scenes even though others would not invest in them. There he was at the end of his life, bankrupt, having buried several children, and mourning the loss of his mistress. 

The 1600s was also the Baroque period but the big, colorful paintings from Catholic and aristocratic countries were very different from those painted in Protestant Europe. What was gaudy in Venetian art became gaudier in Baroque art; likewise, what was dramatic was shocking. The most celebrated Flemish painter was Peter Paul Rubens. As the most successful painter of his day, Rubens could only meet the demand for his works by hiring many assistants who were Italian Renaissance painters he admired. Patrons knew that a Rubens' work might, therefore, be painted by some of his pupils to some extent even though he had designed the work.

In his The Judgement of Paris, Paris was asked to decide the most beautiful of the goddesses before him. The painting looked like a study of nudes with them appearing from all angles. 

The 1490s to the early 1500s comprised the High Renaissance and the 'Big Three' painters - da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo - all trained in Florence which was where the Renaissance was born before it spread north to the rest of Europe. In Caravaggio's painting The Supper at Emmaus created in 1661, Jesus is depicted after His Resurrection with two disciples after they walked to Emmaus. Christ was only recognized, however, when they dined with Him and He blessed the bread as he had done at the Last Supper. Behind Christ is the innkeeper. One of the disciples is shown with a shell, the symbol for a pilgrim.

When we were at the National Gallery that long ago Sunday afternoon, we discovered that was the time for Family Sketching Salon, a family art activity that was free for families to drop in and paint together. What a brilliant way to introduce children to art and entice them to become lifelong gallery fans! I wish that idea would be carried over to this side of the pond. 

From French art, we then crossed the Channel for British Romantic Art during the early 1800s. British people were more at ease at nature than with the lofty gods. Think of the poet, William Wordsworth, who found peace just being outside.

John Constable painted The Hay Wain in 1821 in plein air, an artistic technique which meant setting up his easel outside to capture nature's beauty. The 'hay wain' was a horse-drawn carriage crossing the ford.

Turner's 1838 painting, The Fighting Temeraire, depicted the last journey of the famous warship as it traveled up the Thames to a ship-breaker's yard in South London. The veteran ship, seen against the setting sun, is contrasted with the modern steam-propelled tug. This painting will be featured in 2020 on the new twenty-pound banknote issued by the Bank of England. 

When Europe's political and economic center shifted to France from Italy in the 1700s, the court of Louis XIV at Versailles became its hub. This period of art was the French Rococo and every aristocrat spoke French, dressed French, and bought French art. Rococo art was seen as frilly and sensual as the decadent French court, according to Steves.

Camille Pissarro painted the Portrait of Cezanne, his friend in 1874.

A huge crowd of people thronged around all the Impressionism and Beyond Paintings which spanned the years between 1850-1910. Prior to the Impressionist period, great artists for 500 years painted the real world with perfect accuracy. But the new generation of artists abandoned studios and set up their canvases in a farmer's field, at a beach, or took their notebooks into restaurants to do quick sketches in order to catch a moment in time or an impression. 

When Cezanne painted Bathers about 1894, he used the Impressionist technique of building the nude figures with dabs of paint that were the precursor of 20th century Cubism. The outlines of the figures and the main background features were done in blue to heighten the serene atmosphere and suggested unity between people and nature.

It was impossible not to love Renoir's twin paintings of Dancing Girl with Castanets and Dancing Girl with Tambourine. The head of the woman in the former was based on a Renoir household nursemaid who was a favorite model of the artist.

Although I never tire of seeing endless paintings of dancers by Degas, I really appreciated his rendition of a circus acrobat in Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. Degas watched her perform several evenings in January of 1879 and made sketches and drawings of her act.

We first admired Bathers at Asnieres by Georges Seurat from a distance and saw a sunny image of people relaxing on a riverbank. Up close, though, it was all just a gazillion dots and what had looked like 'green' grass was, on closer inspection, a mixture of green, yellow, red, purple, and even white!

Renoir painted The Skiff in 1875 when rowing boats, sailboats, and steam trains crossing bridges were favorite elements of the Impressionists. As with the Bathers at Asnieres, the scene of boats on sun-dappled water was very different up close, with 'blue' water actually made up of many different colors. Renoir wasn't attempting to paint the water, but rather the reflection of the sky, shore, and boats on its surface.

It was a bit of a mob scene trying to mosey on in to look at Van Gogh's Sunflowers which he painted during his stay in southern France. Steves opined that in 1888 Van Gogh "hovered between despair and delight, bliss and madness." It was just a year later he killed himself, dying as a penniless nobody who had only sold one painting in his entire career as an artist. Van Gogh did six versions of Sunflowers, one of which sold in 1987 for $40 million. If resold today, it could likely fetch five times that price!

Not a painting but exquisite mosaics! Our visit to The National Gallery was truly like a quick walk through a history of art in Europe and we enjoyed every moment of our 'course.'

Next post: A whirlwind bus tour to Windsor, Salisbury, and Bath!

I have also been writing of our far more recent trip to Sri Lanka and India that we thought, at the outset, would be just the start of a four-month-long trip to Asia and the Middle East. But, of course, the trip got upended by Covid-19 and Steven and I, fortunately, got home just in the nick of time. Here's the link to my latest post on exploring the city of Kochi in the southern Indian state of Kerala:

https://bergersadventures8.blogspot.com/2020/07/313-kochis-chinese-nets-citys-european.html

Posted on July 14th, 2020, from home in Denver as we celebrate the birth of our second granddaughter, Clara Josephine, this morning in Chicago! I hope she will also love to travel the world when she's a few years older as her Granny and Grandpa continue to do so.