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.