‘In the end, nothing goes with anything,’ Lucian Freud remarked one afternoon years ago. ‘It’s your taste that puts things together.’ He would perhaps have been a little startled to find those words inscribed on the wall of Painters’ Paintings at the National Gallery, but they are very apt.
The exhibition reassembles the works of art owned by a number of great painters, among them Van Dyck, Reynolds, Degas, Matisse and Freud himself. It begins with pictures and sculptures that used to co-exist in Lucian’s sitting-room. Most powerful of these is a magnificent Corot, ‘Italian Woman’ (c.1870), that once hung over his fireplace and is now part of the National Gallery’s collection. Around are a small Cézanne, an Auerbach drawing, a Degas bronze and a portrait by John Constable. A series of items, that is to say, which do not have a great deal in common, except the common factor: Freud.
As you look at them, you can see how he found parts of himself in each — the jokiness of the little Auerbach, the intimacy of Degas’s head of a resting woman, the formidable presence of the Corot. Furthermore, you can see these all in relation to his own works, hung side by side in the show. The effect is just the same when you step next door into the room devoted to Matisse and his array of pictures by Picasso, Gauguin, and Cézanne, all revealing. I hadn’t realised Matisse once had Degas’s ‘Combing the Hair’ (c.1896), for instance, its space entirely created by deep orange-red hues just as happens in his own ‘Red Studio’. Similarly, in the two splendid galleries devoted to Degas you encounter different aspects of his own complex artistic personality: the loose brushwork of his friend Manet; the imperious precision of Ingres.
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