Hello I'm francesca. I'm an associate
curator here at the National Gallery and
today I'm talking about this portrait, a
woman from the Hofer family from about
1470 and I'm trying to answer the
question
'Why does this lady have a fly on her
head and what does that tell us about
the tricks the artists play on us?'
[Music]
So, imagine the year is about 1470
you are having your portrait painted. Now
even if you're really wealthy this is
unimaginably expensive. You might maybe
once, maybe twice in your life get to sit
before an artist who's going to paint
you and commemorate what it is that you
look like at that particular moment.
So you are going to get yourself ready
in your finest clothes you're going to
do your hair you're going to make
yourself as presentable as possible. You
go to the sitting you sit there maybe
for hours in front of this artist. They
might go away work on the picture come
back you're waiting waiting waiting and
finally you get to see your finished
portrait
and there's a fly on your head.
why on earth would there be a fly on
your head?
Well I think this takes us right back to
the origins of painting this question
and what it is that makes art so magical.
So when we look at this portrait here in
the National Gallery we've got a lot of
questions. First question, who's the
artist? And actually we don't know we
think they're probably an artist working
in Southwestern Germany in, as I said,
around about 1470
but we don't know who the artist is we
think that on kind of stylistic grounds
historical grounds, but we don't actually
have one single artist's name yet.
And who's the woman? Well again we don't
know who this lady is sitting for this
portrait is. We've got one clue which is
up here
in the top left hand corner where
there's an inscription that reads
'Geborne Hoferin' which means she was born
a member of the Hofer family and that's
amazing you might think oh goody we've
got a clue we can go from there but
annoyingly Hofer is a really really
really common surname in Southwestern
Germany so it doesn't actually help us
that much in tying down exactly who this
lady is.
So really when we look at this panel and
the portrait that's painted on it,
all the information we have is kind of
in the picture itself.
She's
not an old lady, she's not a young young
girl. I've landed on her being young-ish
because if we look really closely you
can see that she has this amazingly
smooth complexion, there's no lines no
wrinkles, and the artist has lavished
incredible attention in painting every
single detail. So we can look at her eyes
and you've got every eyelash picked out
there. She's got this beautiful face,
unlined, kind of slight turning up of the
lips as she's kind of almost almost on
the verge of smiling.
Like I said she's dressed in her finest
clothes so we've got this black fabric
here but it's not just a kind of plain
black fabric it's not matte, if you look
closely it's a brocade so it's been
woven. It's got these amazing kind of
swirling patterns to it and that would
have been incredibly expensive. She's
wearing that for a reason and that
brocade actually that extends not only
just in her clothes but also in the
background behind her she's standing
against again a kind of woven fabric
background so all of these are kind of
markers of her wealth, indicators that
she really has put on her very finest
clothing. If we look at even more detail
we can look around her neck or around
her cuff and we can see that her garment
is fur lined. Well,
really only they're like very very
wealthiest people could afford a fur line
costume so again this is telling us that
she's absolutely putting her best foot
forward in this picture.
I love the detail of the metal clasps
holding this garment together because
they're so intricate and lovely and I
think they work really well actually
with the kind of the jointedness of her
hands and the way that she's holding her
hands up to us here. Her hands as well
they've got more clues on because
they've got lots of gold rings again
ordinary people don't have this kind of
finery, ordinary people aren't sitting to
have their portraits painted either so
all of this is telling us just how
wealthy she is
and in her hands there's one more clue
for us, she's holding this little sprig
of very delicate blue and white flowers,
forget-me-nots. Now normally if you're
looking at a portrait from the second
half of the the 1400s and you have a
sitter holding something, especially a
plant,
art historians think that's like winning
the jackpot because that's a clue, that's
included by the artist to give us some
kind of information whether it's
why the portrait is painted at that
moment or who the person is or what
their profession might be and we do have
some kind of tantalising glimpses with
these forget-me-nots because
often they're associated with love,
especially in german poetry of this
period, so is she holding forget-me-nots
because this is a picture that's being
painted to commemorate an engagement or
a marriage?
We don't know. At the same time think
about the name even in english forget me
not, that's a flower that's associated
with remembrance and not forgetting
people, so is this a portrait that's
being painted
so that we remember this woman after
she's gone?
we don't 100 percent know.
Having looked at all those details we
have to get to this amazing white
headdress that she's wearing. I
deliberately left it but it's really
hard to avoid it you come at this
picture and there's this amazing kind of
pale
swirl of fabric. It's an incredibly
architectural bit of painting actually
to have the kind of sweep of the folds
that sense of volume
but again these very
sharp corners and points and folds. It's
something the artist has lavished a lot
of attention on. It's also worth saying
that for an artist it's incredibly
difficult to paint white like that
because how do you, if you've just got
white, how do you create
light and shadow and depth and volume?
It's a really hard ask and I think
that's why this artist has shown off
their skill as much as they have with
this headdress.
Every detail has been included so we can
look at the edges and see every
individual stitch, we can look at the
pins that presumably kind of hold this
headdress together or maybe even fasten
it to the woman's hair, we've got every
single pinhead and the kind of
indentation in the fabric. It's
absolutely beautiful as a piece of
painting
and it's again about money. Imagine the
wealth you'd have to have to keep a
piece of white fabric like that so
spotless and pristine and imagine all
the servants you'd have to have to
launder it for you and iron it and even
kind of put it on you again it's a way
of saying how well off this woman is and
of course the headdress brings us back
to this pesky question, this pesky fly
sitting there with its horrible googly
eyes and its transparent wings,
painted in such detail that you've not
only got the spindly fly legs but even
the shadow cast by those legs on the
white headdress.
So what is this fly doing there? Why has
this artist included a fly on this
lovely looking lady's head?
I think the answer is it's a joke and
it's a joke that works on different
levels because on the one hand the fly
has been tricked into thinking this is a
real headdress, so the flyers come and
landed on it thinking it's real and it's
not it's painted,
but obviously there's a double joke
because we looking at it think 'oh my
gosh, there's a fly on that painting oh
my gosh' and in that moment that instinct
to kind of
bat it away or be panicked that it's
there,
the artist has tricked us, we've been
duped because actually everything
here
is two-dimensional. This is just paint
and the skill of the artist is that
they've been able to take that paint and
a brush and a bit of wood
and to conjure it into something that
feels so lifelike, we do believe even
just for a second that that's a fly
sitting on that picture. She is living
hundreds of years before the kind of
image saturated world that we live in.
We've all got cameras in our pockets. We
can, any moment of the day or night,
capture anything and everything around
us and she's inhabiting
a totally different universe to that. For
so many artists for so many centuries
capturing a moment in time and capturing
that sense of life likeness, that was the
kind of ultimate goal, and I think that's
what this artist is doing here with
the detail of the fur trim and with
every single eyelash being painted and,
kind of gross as it is, with that fly as
well. They're saying
'look at me, look how I can capture the
world around me',
and that impulse, that impulse to trick
us, to make something, to make this
fiction of a picture that's so
believable, that takes us right back to
the origins of painting. So painting in
the kind of western tradition is
thought to begin in about the fifth
century bc in ancient Greece there's a
famous painter called Zeuxis who
paints still lives and paints them in
this kind of radical radical way with a
radical illusionism, whereby although
they're fresco, so kind of painted
onto a wall, they are so lifelike that if
he paints a bunch of grapes birds will
come and peck at them and knock
themselves out on the wall. That's the
kind of myth the story around Zeuxis.
So that's how we think of paintings
starting. It starts with that trick, with
that moment of looking across a room and
going 'oh for a moment I thought you were
there, I thought you were real and that
it was you not your painted
person, but actually your physical person
here in the flesh'.
This lady, whoever she is, this lady born
into the Hofer family, I think she must
have been in on this joke because
there's no way an artist just kind of
sticks a fly in there without her
knowing about it at the end right she'd
have known and I think, for me I love
that because I look at her and I look at
these slightly upturning lips and I look
at the fly and I think she must have
been in on that. She must have
appreciated what that meant in terms of
tricking people. She must have had, when
this portrait was finished, a sense of
pride not only about how it captured how
she looks, but also that it was going to
trick people. That friends and family
that people coming to view it, they'd
have that moment of being duped by the
illusion. I like to think that in some
way or other it is a bit of a love story
this picture, and although we don't know
for certain, we do know that it gets to
us here at the gallery as part of a love
story. So this is a picture that was
owned by Prince Albert the Prince
Consort, husband of Queen Victoria and he
gives it to Queen Victoria as a gift and
his encouraging she gifts it to the
nation. So,
whatever this lady's story might be we
know that it comes to us by a bit of a
love story.
It should go without saying this is by
no means the largest picture in our
collection at the National Gallery I
think you'd have a hard time arguing
it's the most important but it is a
picture that really rewards close
looking
and for me it's not only a painting that
makes me smile every time I come and see
it but actually it's one that reminds me
that the very best artists always keep
us on our toes.
If you'd like to know more about our
collection you can click here or here
thank you so much for joining us, I hope
to see you again soon