National gallery

A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum a £50 million lifeline to realise the extension in 1990; and clearly, he wasn’t happy with the way his money was being spent. He expressed this with no small amount of elegance: ‘If you have found this note,’ his missive read, ‘you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been

Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a riot of exotic figures by her husband Diego Rivera, or a brightly coloured guitarist by Rufino Tamayo. What you’re unlikely to have in mind is an earthy landscape with a dusty road leading to a nascent city, dotted with hyper-real plant life, and an eagle soaring under a vast, cloudy sky. This is ‘The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel’ (1877), the finest work by a painter who was a household name in Mexico long before Kahlo, Rivera or Tamayo. And from next week, it and many

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290, and the mother and child are the Virgin Mary and Christ. It’s a small painting, tempera on wood; it’s the opener of the National Gallery’s new blockbuster, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350; and it’s there to make the show’s fundamental point, which is that its creator, the Sienese Duccio, introduced many of the painterly

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked

The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists: before art history became an academic discipline, artists were the leading authorities on art. Founded more as a teaching resource than a visitor attraction, until the mid-1940s the gallery was reserved for artists two days a week, when other visitors had to pay for entry. This stopped them getting in the way of artists copying from the masters, an essential part of an art education in the days before cheap colour reproduction. There’s something of the altarpiece in this image of an artist’s progenitors flanking a touchstone for his art

Who was Frans Hals? We know very little about him. He was baptised in either 1582 or 1583 in Antwerp. He died in 1666 at the age of 83 or 84. Approximately 220 works survive. One discredited narrative claimed Hals was a drunk – an inference probably based on his subject matter. There are several depictions of drinkers. On the other hand, there is his evident industry. Two streets in Haarlem, where he lived his entire life, have been identified, but not the actual houses. He was buried in St Bavo’s church in the Grote Markt, which was originally Catholic but became Protestant. There are two commemorative slabs next to

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary of his birth in 1922, London is being treated to a Freud fest of no fewer than seven exhibitions, the most prestigious of which is at the National Gallery. Subtitled New Perspectives, the National’s show promises a change of viewpoint from the perspective now most commonly associated with Freud (that of looking down on figures

Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed at the middle classes continued to rely on wood engraving, and it was as a print designer that the 25-year-old Winslow Homer was sent by Harper’s Weekly to cover the fighting in 1861. Apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at the age of 19, Homer had no formal training as an artist but he had a

For tourists to Rome, the must-see event of 1833 was the exhumation of Raphael from his tomb in the Pantheon. For years the city’s Accademia di San Luca had been claiming possession of the artist’s skull and running a profitable line in souvenirs. That September, the question would be settled. Was the ‘most eminent painter’, lauded in his friend Pietro Bembo’s fulsome epitaph as having ‘lived virtuously 37 virtuous years’, really buried there? And did his skeleton have a head? Hans Christian Andersen was one of 3,000 ticket holders for the six-day lying-in-state. The skeleton was there all right, complete with head, but its dignity, reported Andersen, was somewhat dented

The Duke is an old-fashioned British comedy caper that is plainly lovely and a joy. Based on a true story, it’s an account of the 1961 theft of a Goya painting from the National Gallery, stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, and is directed by Roger Michell (of Notting Hill fame). Many films have all their ducks in a row yet are somehow disappointing, but this is perfect, capturing the spirit and joie de vivre of the old Ealing comedies. I could probably watch it all day every day for the rest of my life. Broadbent plays Kempton Bunton, a 57-year-old, working-class Newcastle taxi driver — although he has trouble

On 6 January 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote from Venice to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, who was at home in Nuremberg. The artist had already been in the city for a little while, and like many people who visit Venice he had spent a good deal of time shopping. Pirckheimer had asked him to buy some jewellery for him, ‘a few pearls and precious stones’, and the artist had been looking out for something suitable. There were, however, difficulties. For one thing, he says: ‘I can find nothing good enough or worth the money; everything is snapped up by the Germans.’ For another, Dürer complained, there were a lot of swindlers

In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the museum’s 39 paintings by Poussin. The subject was ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women’ and the artist was the 27-year-old Edgar Degas, then at work on his own classical battle of the sexes, ‘Young Spartans’. Although lumped with the impressionists, Degas was a classicist at heart. ‘The masters must be copied over and over again,’ he believed, ‘and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature.’ A dedicated copyist himself, Poussin would have approved. The paintings in

What is the National Gallery playing at? Why, in this summer of stop-start tropical storms, is the NG making visitors — visitors with prebooked, time-slotted tickets, mind — queue outside and in the rain? Why are its cloakrooms still closed and umbrellas forbidden? My husband had to stash his behind a balustrade on Orange Street. Why, with a 1:45 ticket, were we not through the doors until 2:05? Why make your harassed marshals, doing the best they can, shout ticket times and field questions from furious picture-fanciers? Lousy sort of freedom this. The V&A, by the way, is just as bad. I used to roll my eyes at the ‘it’s

‘When pictures painted as companions are separated,’ John Constable wisely observed, ‘the purchaser of one, without being aware of it, is sometimes buying only half a picture.’ When he said those words at a lecture in Hampstead delivered on 9 June 1833, he had two great paintings by Rubens in mind: ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’ and ‘The Rainbow Landscape’. At that date they had already been split up, the first going to the National Gallery, the second eventually to be bought by the Marquis of Hertford. Because of the will of Lady Wallace, the eventual heir of the Marquis, or rather the way it was

Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th century. But the imperious self–righteousness is much the same — which gives the entertaining little exhibition at the National Gallery entitled Sin an unexpectedly contemporary edge. Personally, I’ve always thought that the doctrine of original sin has a great deal of explanatory power (it explains why history can’t ‘end’ and plenty of things will always go wrong — because that’s the way people are). Arguably, the medieval list of deadly failings — anger, pride, sloth, etc — provides a better summary of human nature than many later attempts. At any

Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This Smells Like My Vagina scented candles and must-have child-calming essential oil sprays, a shopfront has been taken over to display a poignant series of self-portraits by a rather different woman. Khadija Saye died three summers ago with her mother in the Grenfell Tower fire. Much of the 24-year-old artist’s work was destroyed in the blaze, including three tintype images from a series of nine called ‘in this space we breathe’. The other six were displayed that summer in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Saye’s first major international

Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing reminded me of an anecdote that Lucian Freud used to tell about a Soho painter friend he took into the National Gallery after it had shut (as some senior artists are entitled to do). They arrived after closing time in the drinking holes of Soho, and the painter friend was staggering and swaying so much that Lucian — who was not easily rattled — became alarmed that he was going to put one of his flailing arms through a Rembrandt. I wonder how those art-lovers of yesteryear would have coped

‘It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.’ Over and over she said it. ‘E vero, e vero, e vero.’ It’s true he raped me. It’s true I was a virgin. It’s true all I say. Even under judicial torture, even with cords wrapped around her fingers and pulled tight, she did not waver. ‘E vero.’ These words, spoken by the 17-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi, have come down to us in a trial transcript of 1612. This haunting document, never seen outside the state archives in Rome, will be shown for the first time in the National Gallery’s forthcoming Artemisia exhibition. Artemisia ought to have opened this month. Curator Letizia Treves has been