Museum Stroll: National Gallery, London

Having visited many great galleries on my last London trip, and this being an illustrator’s blog, I figured it’d be good grist for a few posts so bear with me. You can’t complain, I’m even posting twice in under a week!

Though pigeons were fed in front of them in ’98, I didn’t get to The National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery, both of which are right on Trafalgar Square. I rectified that situation this time.

National galleries (like the Louvre) tend to have an overview of western art, so you’re likely to get italians, flemish and the like. These types of galleries are not my favorite: I prefer more tightly focused places. but I’m not going to exactly pass on a museum just because they have Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Constable all under the same roof!

After seeing a lot of original art (and being a painter doesn’t hurt), I’ve taken to being a lot more focused in my viewings. I’ve seen enough medieval wooden altarpieces to last me a lifetime and don’t find much interest in them so I’ll walk past entire rooms of them now. This wasn’t an issue here as there weren’t any. However I’ve also seen enough pre- and early renaissance works by third-tier artists to last me a lifetime, so I’m able to walk through more rooms now. there are occasions where I will stand in front of a large, generally italian, religious work and think to myself that the painting is on display basically because it survived all these centuries. In some cases there is nothing to recommend the piece when there is a Leonardo and some Raphael pieces in the next room over. The anatomy might be bad, the paint sloppily handled, the subject matter poorly presented. The first time this thought appeared in my head it was quite the shock: I am poo-pooing an artwork by an Old Master, for God’s sake! But not all old masters are equals, and survival is quite important in their being in a museum: if a large estate was filled with paintings and that family was important, it was quite likely that all the art there would go down in history simply by association. It’s not like every piece was weighted for historical or artistic significance. Their significance in many cases was simply that the wealthy patron bought the painting, but it will now hang with a promoted importance due to its sheer existence 500 years later. Many equal-quality pieces lost through the centuries, in antique shops unattributed or damaged beyond repair never get the honor.

So anyway, I skipped quite a few rooms and lingered over others. I took the museum in chronological order. This is because to see it in reverse order would be too painful. All artists have stood on the shoulders of giants and so it’s best to see the art get better and better than to go top-down and end your museum viewing by staring at the feet of the first giant, corns and all. If you get my drift. The most pleasant surprise was a beautiful large canvas by Paul Delaroche I’d only known from his monograph, which image I got to near the end of my visit, in the late 1800s at the split between academy painting and modernism.

"But...but, I was only queen for 9 freakin' days!"

In the next room the realists and the impressionists followed. A couple of pieces held me but let’s just say I had other places to be. Like the special exhibition: Americans in Paris. I’d read about it in the papers but had forgotten about it. Here were a bunch of Sergeants and even Whistler’s mom (larger than I thought—the painting, not his mom), some Childe Hassam, and other great works. as many of the pieces came from the USA’s east coast and I’ve never been there, it was like having an extra helping of awesome after a full dinner.