THE National Gallery (NG) is on something of a roll at the moment, as it should be. It celebrates the bicentenary of when a group of art-lovers embarrassed Lord Liverpool’s administration into buying the collection amassed by the mercurial broker John Julius Angerstein to ensure that they remained together after his death.
Preparations for the year and the current refurbishment of parts of the Trafalgar Square site have meant that London currently shows fewer pictures than usual and has taken the opportunity to send out works on temporary loan.
Celebrated pictures from Botticelli to Van Gogh have toured South-East Asia, with 420,000 visitors in 15 weeks in Shanghai (that it was the National’s most successful ever paid exhibition has not quietened the criticism of going to China) and 361,866 in Seoul before the exhibition of 52 masterworks moved on to Hong Kong and most recently to a private museum, CHIMEI, on Taiwan.
Since the anniversary date (10 May), 12 paintings from the 14th to the 20th centuries, 11 by men, have been sent to regional galleries from Edinburgh to Bristol, Aberystwyth to York, Belfast to Brighton. Birmingham’s IKON gallery lands the only woman artist: Artemisia Gentileschi’s recently acquired Self-portrait as Saint Catherine already had a brilliant tour of its own a couple of years ago.
The NG website helpfully lists the rail companies serving the chosen venues but offers no guarantee that any of the trains will be running between now and the end of the summer when the shows variously close. In Brighton, the last chance to view Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 will be 4 August (to compare his self-portrait of 1669, when he was 63, you need to go to Taiwan). The last come down in the second week of September, Newcastle, York, Edinburgh, and Cambridge among them.
There is a sort of soft diplomacy at play here. A former luckless PM might want us to know that it has the Sovereign “purring” down the line. “It’s alright, it’s ok”; but as Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each has its own substantial national collection, this is pure gift, allowing local curators and directors to make of it what they will.
© The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), The Supper at Emmaus (1601), at Ulster Museum, Belfast, until 1 September
At the Laing Gallery, in Newcastle, more than 20 works by J. M. W. Turner form “Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia” and focus on his 1839 The Fighting Temeraire, a celebrated image that contrasts the natural world with the low sun burnishing the Thames and the dark Trafalgar battleship.
The two steam tugboats (the London and the Samson) pulling the unwilling veteran towards the knacker’s yard at Rotherhithe were both built on Tyneside.
In Oxford at the Ashmolean (to 1 September), the Wilton Diptych (Arts, 19 March 2021) starts a route through the galleries with 22 medieval artefacts and paintings, including a triptych that maybe by Fra Angelico, a reliquary ring that once housed a fragment of the True Cross, and the silken funeral pall used in the University Church at the annual commemoration of Henry VII (d.1509). This trail is intelligently curated and as informative and enjoyable online as in the museum.
In Belfast, The Supper at Emmaus (1601), the first painting by Caravaggio acquired for the National Gallery in 1839, is next to his Taking of Christ (1602), from Dublin. Both were last side by side in the 2016 exhibition “Beyond Caravaggio” (Arts, 2 December 2016). Ciriaco Mattei commissioned both revolutionary works for his palace in Rome, where Caravaggio had lodged.
I saw the now accepted first autograph version of the Gethsemane scene, from the Ruffo collection, last November, at Ariccia in the Palazzo Chigi in the Alban Hills south of Rome, in its original black frame guilloche-worked in gold. That painting was on show in the Palazzo Ricca in Naples this summer, but I should like to remind myself of Dublin’s version.
www.nationalgallery.org.uk