Triumph and relief, I put my new post-cold energies to the test and made it up to London to catch French eighteenth century portrait painter Liotard at the Royal Academy and Dutch seventeenth century Masters of the everyday: Dutch artists in the age of Vermeer at the Queen's Gallery. The first closes at the end of this month, and the second on the fourteenth of February, and I've been wanting to go since they opened but always seemed to be busy. I had a day in January pencilled in, given we had no trains between Christmas and the New Year, but didn't intend to run it this close to the wire. I remember going to the final week of a Turner exhibition at the Tate, and being able to swan in ahead of the queue thanks to my Tate Members card, but it was jolly crowded, and I never saw the last lot of terracotta warriors at the British Museum at all because in the end the whole of the rest of the run was completely sold out.
Happily, Enlightenment French portrait painters who are not household names, and Golden Age Dutch artists when they are mostly not actually Vermeer, don't have the same blockbuster appeal as Turner. Fine art seems to follow the same pattern as folk music, in that there are a few artists at the very top of the pyramid, Monet, Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci, or Martin Carthy, Cara Dillon and the late lamented Bellowhead, who are capable of packing out the Royal Academy or the Colchester Arts Centre respectively. With most of the others you'll probably be safe pitching up on the day.
Both exhibitions were very good in their different ways, and worth seeing before they close if you can. Liotardo's portraits embody the rational attitudes of the Enlightenment, smoothly finished, elegant and tidy. His palette is clean and softly bright, his draughtsmanship meticulous, his likenesses acute, stouter and plainer subjects appearing stout and plain rather than everybody being flatteringly tidied into an eighteenth century ideal, but without cruelty or caricature. He was very, very good at fabrics, so the clothes are superb, but the personalities come through too. He lived a long and productive life, and achieved critical and commercial acclaim in his lifetime.
The Queen's collection is more of a mixed bunch. I tended to skip over the large paintings of naval battles, which are hung high on the walls as if the curators knew that most people weren't really there to see them. Her Majesty's multi-storey blue and white china tulip vases get another outing, and there is some fairly hideous Sevres china with scenes of Dutch taverns amidst the gilt and swags, but the show is mostly of paintings. As I heard a guide explain, the Royal collection only has one Vermeer, the lady standing at the virginals with a gentleman singing, but I spent a long time looking at it, and ages studying the sole Rembrandt on show (though I know the Royal collection has more than one of those). And there are lots of serving girls, card players and gentlemen plying ladies with drink. No seascapes, which was a pity as I like those Dutch paintings of ships scudding across the lumpy waves of the North Sea, but the gallery isn't that big.
The RA and the Queen's Gallery each have their points as exhibition spaces. The RA today got ten out of ten for lighting. I wasn't bothered once by reflected glare off the glass of the paintings, whereas in the Queen's Gallery I was left shuffling a foot or two to the left or right several times, trying to find the right place to stand in order to see. On the other hand, the Sackler Galleries at the top of the RA are only stingily endowed with seats, whereas the Queen's Gallery is generously provided with big padded red benches, on which were multiple copies of the full gallery guide. After I'd been all the way round once I sat down for a good half hour resting my legs and skimming my way through the section on selected paintings out of the exhibition, then went back and looked at them again in the light of what I'd read. So it is that I know that the Vermeer has not always been venerated as it is now. No, the figures were too small and too far back, not to mention facing away from us, and how very odd to make a table with a carpet on it the main and dominant feature.
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