Hello, and welcome to the first of these
gallery talks at home.
My name is Francesca, I'm one of the
curators at the National Gallery,
and rather unusually, today's talk is
coming to you
from my living room.
Obviously we are living through some
pretty strange times, pretty troubling
times. All over the world, millions of
us are staying at home to protect our
families, and our communities, and
our amazing healthcare workers,
and thinking about that, I started
thinking about some of my favourite
paintings of the home, or of people in
interiors,
in the Gallery's collection, and started
thinking about that for today's talk,
thinking that maybe some of these very
beautiful paintings in these troubled
times could be for people a bit of a
distraction, provide a bit of inspiration, a bit of relaxation,
something to take our minds off the
headlines and all the news. So that's
what
I'm going to talk about today, five of my
favourite paintings of interiors
from the National Gallery's collection.
Now, the first painting I want to talk
about today is Vermeer's 'Young Woman Standing at a Virginal' of
about 1670 to 1672.
I love this painting, it really is one of
my favorites in the collection
at the National Gallery, and I think
that's partly because, in normal times when we're at work as
normal, the National Gallery stands in the
middle of a really bustling metropolis, we're right
in the centre of the city, Trafalgar Square is right on our
doorstep, and it's loud and noisy and busy and
there's people everywhere, and yet it's so easy to come inside, to
walk into the Gallery, to come and find a painting like this
Vermeer and then
quite suddenly just be transported to
this very calm, cool, quiet world
of 17th century Delft. It's a typical
Vermeer painting in so far as we're
looking into this very beautiful, luminous room.
We have the whitewashed walls, the little
array of Delft
tiles along the skirting board, this
amazing window letting in this gorgeous
quality of light, and then there's a young woman who's
standing there looking out at us, standing at a virginal, a kind of
harpsichord-esque keyboard instrument. And to me, it always feels as
if we've arrived in this moment
of pause, of silence.
I always feel she's just put her
fingers onto the keys, and she's
waiting. She's about to start playing. And
her look, that way she looks at us so
directly is maybe the invitation to come in
to sit down on this very prominent chair
that's been placed
in the foreground, and to enjoy the
concert with her.
So this is a very typical Vermeer
painting. He was not a prolific artist, we
only know something like 36 Vermeers in the world,
and of those, about two-thirds of them
are
paintings of interiors, like this, with
the windows, a very distinct
fall of light. And the light here is just
so
beautiful, and such a lovely thing to
kind of look at and explore the details
of, especially when you need your mind
taking off everything that's happening
outside. For me, I love the way that the
light hits the silk of the woman's skirt. You
know, you get this amazing sort of
fall and fold and fabric, where it
almost seems to dimple under the light.
I love the way that the light hits
her string of pearls around her neck, so
that just a few of them where the light
is hitting become really just iridescent
under the fall of light.
Now as I said, Vermeer is an extremely
rare artist, or rather, paintings by
Vermeer are extremely rare. There's only
about three dozen that we know of,
and we are extraordinarily lucky at the
gallery not only to have this Vermeer,
but actually to have a second Vermeer as
well, and that means
that if you come to visit us on a good
day,
when the world is open and normal, and
and we're doing normal things again,
you can, if you're lucky, see two
Vermeers side by side, in one room, and
2 out of 36, that's one twelfth of the
world's Vermeers
just sitting there, waiting to be looked
at, so I do hope
that you will come and visit us when
we're back open, and when we're all able
to travel again,
but until then I personally find looking
at this Vermeer,
and the pendant picture, very very
calming for these these strange times. The second
painting I want to talk about
jumps us forward a century. We leave the
17th century, we leave Delft behind,
and we find ourselves now in the middle
of the 18th century, but
I think there's still something in this
picture of that kind of quiet,
calm contemplation. This is a picture by
Jean-Etienne Liotard. It's called the
'Lavergne Family Breakfast'. It's a pastel, not an
oil, which is what most of our later
Collection is painted.
Pastels are essentially kind of coloured
chalks,
and instead of painting them with a
brush onto canvas, like you might oil,
pastel chalks were applied to sheets of
paper,
often many sheets of paper, because they
didn't make paper big enough to produce
you know quite a hefty picture like this. It's
a very fragile medium, it is pretty
miraculous that
you know, all these hundreds of years
later something like this still survives,
and it gives the painting this
particular kind of glow, this real
softness, all these bits of coloured chalk
clinging
to their paper support. I love this scene,
because it is
I suppose a bit like the Vermeer, such an
ordinary
moment, we are looking at a woman, and a
young child, having breakfast together,
and we know that it's breakfast because
it's morning,
and we know that it's morning, because
the little girl has these wonderful
paper curlers in her hair,
so it's obviously just the start of the
day, and she's dressed, but she hasn't yet
finished having her hair done. And it's
this wonderful - I love the tenderness of this moment, you
know, the elder woman reaches out
steadying the cup, because the young
girl's got her milky coffee,
and her biscuit, and she's just about to
kind of dunk the biscuit in, and if you
look closely,
it always makes me think of my chemistry
lessons, or at school, you've got this
kind of meniscus of liquid, that's just about to
spill over the edges of the cup, and you know it's
such a such an ordinary thing, but
painted here
in such a sort of delicate gentle way,
with such such tenderness and care.
All the still life elements in this
picture are painted in the most
extraordinary way.
If you look at the the metal coffee
pot there, it's got these amazing
three-dimensional wet bits of pastel,
where Liotard's taken the wet chalk and
kind of wetted it which is unusual but then sort
of made it into these lumps these
dimensional lumps
to give it the form that he wants for
the highlights. And
the fact that those survive, 250
something years later,
is beyond miraculous. I love
the reflection of the window panes as
well in the side of the milk jug,
and maybe the best detail is the open
drawer, because it's such an invitation.
Don't we all just want to kind of pull
that open, and peer inside. And actually if we do,
peer inside, we see a sheet of music and on that
sheet of music Liotard has signed his
name,
the date and the place it was painted. So
he says Liotard,
in Lyon, 1754, and what a show off to be able to
leave us such a little delicate clue
like that,
to explore in a painting, all these many
many years later.
The third painting I want to look at
keeps us in the 18th century,
keeps us at a table with an open drawer
in fact.
this is Chardin's 'The House of Cards',
painted
in about 1740 or 1741.
Lots of similarities with the Liotard,
not just the drawer, but that very plain
background,
the idea of taking a very ordinary
subject,
and making something very beautiful
out of it. Because we're looking at this
little boy here, I love the fact he's caught in
profile with this you know, this
expression of such concentration, because
he's building his house of cards,
and of course to do that you really have
to concentrate.
Now Chardin is a French artist, he's
probably one of the great artists,
so if not the greatest artist of the
18th century in France, and he actually started out as a still
life painter. So his early works
are still lives of fish and meat, and
cooking utensils, not necessarily very grand, many of them
very very modest, but about 1730 he transitions, and he
starts making these paintings, we'd call them Genre scenes, but
they're basically paintings of everyday
life.
So, interiors, women, children, just doing
very very ordinary, unremarkable things,
like building a house of cards. And one
of Chardin's contemporaries, the great
philosopher and writer and art critic
Denis Diderot
actually called Chardin 'the great
magician'.
And I think what he was getting at
there was the extraordinary capacity to
take something as ordinary as this moment, to take
something as ordinary as building a
house of cards,
and yet to make something so beautiful
from it.
And what i love about Chardin is that he
very rarely gives us a kind of
strict, didactic, 'this is what this means'
approach to a painting. I think he leaves
us these paintings
to look at, and to wonder, and to
contemplate. So some people have seen the 'House of
Cards' as a metaphor for the frailty of human endeavors.
For me, I look at it and I think, golly,
what a beautiful little painting of
patience. And especially at the moment,
you know when we're all living
one day to the next, you know we don't
really know what's going to happen
a few months from now, 'The House of
Cards' feels to me like the perfect
metaphor. You know you do one card at a
time,
and that's all you can do and you do it
the best that you can,
so I feel that I certainly have a lot to
learn from this lovely little boy.
Who is probably by the way from the Lenoire
family, who were the people who
commissioned the painting. Now his father
Mr Lenoire
was a cabinet maker, and furniture dealer,
so I think there must be something, knowing that I can't help but
look at the open drawer, and
the lovely details of the nails, along
the edge of the table, and think,
oh Chardin must have known, must have
known that a woodworker would appreciate details like that. Now one of the
great pleasures obviously of walking
around the National Gallery
is that you can walk through a door,
or turn left or right, or look over your
shoulder, and quite suddenly find yourself in a
completely different world, completely different setting, completely
different kinds of paintings, so I wanted to capture a little bit of
that today, even though I'm at home,
you're at home, we're all at home,
and so we're jumping forward now into
the late 19th century, with
Manet's portrait of Eva Gonzales.
Beautiful, full-length portrait, much much bigger
than any of the pictures we've looked at
so far, this full-length portrait of Eva
Gonzales painting at her easel. This was painted in
1870. Eva Gonzales would have been in her
late twenties,
Manet in his late thirties. Manet of
course is the
most celebrated painter of his day at
the time, certainly one of the painters
we most esteem from this period
now, and he only had one pupil,
one formal pupil, and it was this young
lady Eva Gonzales. I think we
shouldn't sugarcoat how extraordinary that
was, and how difficult it would have been
for her to have been
a female artist in the late 19th century,
but that to me is one of the things i
love about this interior scene, how seriously Manet takes her as an
artist. You know, we've had centuries of
portraits of women looking very beautiful, but not really doing very
much, relaxing at home, being at home and although you know
there is a suggestion perhaps this could
be at home, we think it was probably
painted in Manet's studio - actually, Eva Gonzales is working.
She's at her canvas, she's got her
brushes and her palette in her hand,
and to me I really, I love how seriously
Manet takes her as an artist in
this very large, very ambitious portrait.
There are a few fictions. I for one,
given how dirty and smelly and nasty
oil paint is, cannot imagine that you
would want to paint in oils,
in a beautiful long white dress like
this, that to me feels very fictitious.
It's also a bit odd that she's painting
a picture that's already in a frame,
though I mean who knows maybe she's just
touching it up. But nevertheless, it is very much a
portrait of an artist at work, and I just love this painting for that.
I love how the white dress really glows against
that dark background, I love the carpet underfoot,
with you know these kind of
vegetable shapes, you know the leaves and
everything else, almost as if the carpets
gonna kind of bloom into a,
into a garden, with that white
fluffy peony
at her feet. But you know, Manet couldn't
couldn't quite resist reminding people
that it was his portrait not Eva's, and of
course she was his pupil, because if we look down on the
floor, we see that there's a print that's
been rolled up.
We can just make out Manet's signature
on the bottom of this print, so he just,
just wants to remind us, just in case
we're in danger of forgetting,
how good a painter he is, as well as
as she.
Now the final picture I want to talk
about today is Edgar Degas' 'Combing the
Hair' of 1896. So having started out with that
little Vermeer, that was so precise in how it
thought about the interior, and the light
and then the shadow, and everything else,
we now find ourselves in a totally
different interior, but still
this kind of wonderful snapshot of an
ordinary,
everyday moment. I mean all of us at some
point brush our hair,
and yet a bit like Chardin, Degas is the
magician here, because he takes this
very ordinary subject, and makes it
something
exceptionally beautiful. So we are
in some kind of interior, it's not very
defined, there's a suggestion
of some kind of curtain or drape at the
left of the canvas, but we don't really know much else
about the space.
There's a woman sitting in a chair, and
this is probably her maid servant, who's
brushing or combing their
mistress's hair. And I think one of the things that's
wonderful about Degas is how much he
leaves this
up to us, you know this gesture leaning
back with her eyes shut -
is she relaxed? Is she in pain? Is she
just kind of holding her hair in place?
Is this a moment of just kind of
abandoning, and not thinking about
anything? We don't know, it's up to all of
us to decide how we want to read that.
Many people have read the kind of bulge
of her dress as
the idea that maybe she's pregnant, but
again, it's sort of not confirmed, it's up
to us to imagine what we want this narrative to
be. Is she a very respectable young married wife? Is
she somebody's mistress? Is she -
who knows what we don't know. It's really
left to us, and what Degas does
give us, is this beautiful,
extraordinarily saturated brick red
palette. You know the soft pink of the
maidservant's blouse, the table in the
foreground here,
it's probably an unfinished picture, I
mean it is an unfinished picture,
you can see the brushes on the table
but not much else. Everything else has
been left you know very sketchy, and it was a work
that remained in Degas' studio until his death.,
and was then bought sometime afterwards
by Henri Matisse.
But I love it, because I think for me at
the moment, there's something very
comforting at looking
at pictures of ordinary things,
brushing your hair, having a cup of
coffee, thinking about playing music,
building a house of cards - not that I've
done that yet, but I might depending on
how long this quarantine goes on
for. And there's something very comforting
about knowing that people have been
doing these very ordinary things for
such a long time,
and that other people, artists, have been
coming and looking at them and turning them into something very,
very beautiful against all the odds. You
know,
that art doesn't need to be great and
grand and
flamboyant. It can just be these very
ordinary little moments, and sometimes
those are the most touching, or the most
evocative.
Thank you very much for joining us
today, if you're interested in learning
more about art history, you might click
here
or here. Thank you for
giving us the time, and watching this
video, and we hope that you will join us
for another video like this again soon.
