There are many dazzling representations of stars in the National Gallery's collection.
It takes you on a whole history of painting from early medieval work, from the fantastic
religious paintings of Duccio, to the wonderful representations of nature in Turner's sublime
paintings of the early nineteenth century, and then to the work of the Impressionists
in the trouble and turmoil of late nineteenth century Paris.
You can trace the entire history of European painting through this one element, the star.
One of the best places for stargazing in the National Gallery's collection is on the clothing
of the Virgin Mary. She was a very poor, humble girl from a a very modest background and artists
really had to think about how you could represent her as she was supposed to be, as the Queen
of Heaven. Duccio's 'Virgin and Child with Saints' is for me one of the most magical and evocative
small paintings in the National Gallery. It represents the Virgin with her son Christ
who's pulling at her robe. She's dressed in beautiful blue clothes with a wonderful star
on it. The star shimmers and gleams and it's actually made of gold itself.
When we look at Velazquez's 'Immaculate Conception' what I think is really interesting about this
for the modern eye is the way in which Velazquez has made her look as if she's spotlit.
There's something almost wonderful about the way that the stars have been painted, these
very delicate and precise sharp pinpoints of light, compared to the broader application
of paint across the rest of the picture.
Turner's 'Evening Star' is one of a very large number of paintings that were left to the
Nation by Turner, so this was a work that was in his studio when he died.
The sun is setting and the moon is coming up and we have twilight and the first star is
in the sky. But the sky's not quite yet dark enough for it to be very bright, but bright
enough for us to see and Turner has painted the little star and particularly the reflection
has this fantastic thick paint which shows not just the reflection but also the movement
of the sea. So it's a moment in between times where the light is about to change.
In about 1858 Corot visited his friend the artist Decamps at Decamps's studio in Forest
of Fontainebleau. As a gift he painted for him four large panels on wood showing
'The Four Times of Day: Morning, Noon, Afternoon and Night'. The most dramatic is 'Night' and
the night sky is particularly interesting for the way in which he paints stars.
Conventionally, some stars are blobs of white applied on the inky blue. Much more unusually,
other stars, perhaps meant to be more distant in the sky, he's simply taken the end of his
brush and flicked paint out of the surface, so that there are indentations. They read to the
eye as a slightly different colour and remarkably we also read them as stars in the sky.
With the Impressionists at the end of the nineteenth century, they're no longer trying
to delineate forms, they're trying to evoke atmospheres; the look of a night sky, which
is a certain kind of glow often rather than specific stars in the sky with a given shape,
and that is perfectly matched to a new freedom of movement of the brush across the surface.
Pissarro's "Boulevard Montmartre at Night" shows the tension of the modern city between artificial
light and the faint glow of the night sky. It was no longer a magical time, because darkness
could be defeated by artificial light. There are no stars depicted in the picture but
we know beyond the artificial lights of the city, they're twinkling away as they always
have, and that absence gives a certain poignancy to the painting.