Every picture tells a story
As the National Gallery prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary in May, Carla Passino delves into the fascinating history of 10 of its paintings, from artistic triumphs to ugly ducklings and a clever fake
To say nothing of the dog
Bacchus and Ariadne lends itself to a cornucopia of superlatives. It is one of the finest works by one of the greatest Old Masters, capturing a scene from one of the most enthralling classical myths, as sung by two of antiquity’s most distinguished poets. It has everything that befits a masterpiece, from captivating colours to dramatic action and exquisite detail: the emotion gripping Ariadne, whose body still faces the ship of faithless Theseus as her face turns towards the carefree Bacchus; the smitten god’s ungraceful leap from his cheetah-drawn chariot, too lost in the princess’s beauty to pay attention to his step; the motley retinue of nymphs, satyrs and a snake-clad Laocoön revelling in a drunken dance; and, up in the sky, golden stars hinting at the couple’s future. Perhaps less fittingly, however, it also includes a little black lap dog, a toy spaniel of the kind so popular in 16thcentury courts. It goes up to a young satyr, barking, albeit more curious than menacing.
Titian added the dog at a later stage, possibly as a nod to his patron, Alfonso d’este, whose companion it may have been (it wears a collar).
This wasn’t the only time the Master showed a penchant for inserting pooches in his work, however, whether in his paintings of the goddess Diana, always surrounded by canine hunting companions, or in his depictions of Venus, who rarely appears without one. Some critics, such as art historian Simona Cohen from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel, believe Titian painted dogs as symbols—at times of seduction, at other times of treachery or human bestiality—but it’s much jollier to think that he simply really liked them.
Bone of contention
Such a small painting, such a big stir. In 1991, when Nicholas Penny, then a curator and later director of the National Gallery, called The Madonna of the Pinks a genuine Raphael, the attribution proved enormously contentious. Painted in 1506–07, the tiny work (a mere 9in by 11in) had been deemed a copy of a missing original by the Renaissance master. However, Penny noticed pentimenti—reworked areas where a Master has changed his mind, unlikely in a copy—which suggested the Madonna was authentic. His views were upheld in a symposium of experts organised by the National Gallery and scientific analysis revealed an underdrawing coherent with Raphael’s other work. Nonetheless, some scholars, including the late James Beck, pointed to the painting’s ‘deficiencies’, such as ‘the malformed feet of the Child’, and insisted it might be no more than an 18th- or 19th-century copy. Science put that particular speculation to rest, with a 2006 report showing the Madonna was made with the same kind of pigments as a known work by Raphael and could not be a forgery from later centuries. Was it made by the Old Master’s very hand? A few sceptics remain unconvinced, but the attribution is widely accepted and the National Gallery has no doubts.
Seeing double
The Virgin and Child with an Angel was a birthday present. The National Gallery received it on its first centenary, as part of a bequest from chemist Ludwig Mond. The painting, by 15th-century Italian artist Francesco Francia, was lovely, the Virgin a picture of serenity, the Child gazing directly at the viewer as an angel looked on, holding a golden chalice—a perfect addition to the collection. Until, 30 years later, an identical work came up at auction. The buyer, art dealer Leonard Koetser, was adamant that his version was the original Francia and the National Gallery’s a copy. A technical report suggested that, although the wood panel likely dated from the 15th century, the museum’s Virgin had probably been painted on it much later.
Deemed a fake, it looked condemned to oblivion, but the 1990s ushered in a plot twist: a theory emerged that the painting might be a badly damaged, badly restored Francia original. It seemed too good to be true—and it was: in 2009, scientific evidence conclusively proved the National Gallery’s Virgin was indeed an elaborate 19th-century forgery; but by whom? And why?
Later investigations unravelled the mystery. The copy had been made for the then owner of the Francia original, Alessandro Palagi, by Italian painter Fausto Muzzi and restorer Giuseppe Guizzardi. However, their intent might not have been to fool unwitting collectors. Instead, according to scholar Giorgia Mancini, the forgery may have served the double purpose of deceiving some of Palagi’s family members and evading an export ban placed on the genuine Francia by the local authorities. Palagi was thus free to sell the original, with no one else any the wiser.
Francia’s Virgin and Child is now in the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, US, and its copy, by now equally famous, is still at the National Gallery, albeit not on display.
What’s in a name?
The Revd William Purton wanted to secure Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows for the nation. When Constable died in 1837, he approached painter Charles Robert Leslie to set in motion a plan to buy the work for the National Gallery. A Committee of Friends and Admirers was formed and 113 patrons pulled together to raise the money required for the acquisition—but, in an unexpected turn, they rejected the ‘too boldly executed’ Cathedral and plumped instead for another painting, The Cornfield. Except that it wasn’t called that at the time: when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1826, the year in which it had been completed, the painting had gone under the concise title of A Landscape, which later became Landscape: Noon and, at the Paris Salon, the extraordinarily unimaginative Paysage avec figures et animaux (Landscape with figures and animals). More names cropped up during the years; it was Harvest Noon in Worcester in 1835. Constable himself referred to it as The Drinking Boy, from one of the details, leading some critics to believe it may have an autobiographical element, because the Suffolk artist had once written: ‘I associate “my careless boyhood” with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter.’
Disregarding all previous nomenclature, the National Gallery patrons apparently gave the work yet another name. Rechristened The Cornfield, it was the first Constable to become part of a national collection.
Happy couple
The Fighting Temeraire may be the National Gallery’s best-known Turner painting, not least because James Bond and Q meet in front of it in Skyfall (‘Walk another day’, May 4, 2022), but the artist was more preoccupied with the destiny of two other works: Sun Rising through Vapour and Dido building Carthage. So much so that when, in 1829, he bequeathed them to the museum, only a few years after it had opened in a townhouse in Pall Mall, he stipulated
that they should hang ‘always between… two pictures painted by Claude’: Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca
and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.
The National Gallery was ready to accede; Turner’s family wasn’t. After his death in 1851, some cousins challenged the bequest, which the artist had amended at the end of the 1840s to include all his finished paintings. The court verdict, reached in 1856, awarded the museum not only Turner’s completed works, but the entire contents of his studio, with the family getting the rest of the estate.
For a time, the National Gallery duly displayed Sun Rising through Vapour and Dido building Carthage next to Claude’s two paintings. However, even the firmest of words can falter and, after the Second World War, as the museum rethought its hanging scheme, Turner’s duo were separated from Claude’s—until another change of curatorial heart reunited them in 1968. The pairs remain together today.
Pretty in pink
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun built her success with her own hands and brushes. Her father, painter Louis Vigée, may have guided her first steps and her (later estranged) husband, art dealer Jean-baptiste-pierre Le Brun, may have opened a few doors, but her talent and the informal style of her portraits captivated the French court—particularly the Queen, Marie Antoinette, whom she would go on to portray dozens of times.
In 1782, however, Vigée Le Brun became her own model in a painting inspired by Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (Le Chapeau de Paille), now in the National Gallery. ‘I was enchanted with this picture, and… I made a portrait of myself, and endeavoured to
Sunflowers was evacuated and eventually restored with a cheese grater and an iron
obtain the same effect,’ she wrote in her memoirs, Souvenirs of Madame Vigée Le Brun. ‘When the portrait was exhibited in the Salon [of the Académie Royale], I may say that it added a good deal to my previous reputation.’
Vigée Le Brun’s Self-portrait did more than merely sanction her fame: it prompted painter Claude-joseph Vernet to propose her as a member of the Royal Academy of Painting. Despite opposition from some curmudgeonly male artists determined to keep women on the outskirts of the profession, Vigée Le Brun clinched the election, albeit with help from Marie Antoinette, and with it, she hoped (albeit in vain), greater respect for her work.
It’s unsurprising that she would paint another version of that game-changing selfportrait. Now at the National Gallery, the second painting features some subtle changes that partly reflect the artist’s greater status: a more determined face, a more obvious hint of a smile and a fetching pink dress instead of the lilac original.
As a lucky charm, however, it didn’t work well. Soon after she had completed her most ambitious work—a portrait of Marie Antoinette with her children—the French Revolution broke out. Afraid of the mob, aware that her royal connection could hurt her, Vigée Le Brun escaped with her daughter to Italy, Austria, Russia and, after a brief return to France in 1802, England and Switzerland. She only settled in her native country again in 1809, but, even then, she still encountered sexism—she was prevented from joining the Institut de France. This time, however, she didn’t turn to a self-portrait to make a statement. Putting pen to paper, Vigée Le Brun wrote her Souvenirs and, by her death in 1842, she had become a French icon.
Out in bloom
He painted them for friendship. Eager to please Paul Gauguin, who was coming to visit him in Arles, van Gogh decided to brighten his home and studio with sunflower still
lifes: ‘I am painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse,’ he wrote to his brother, Theo. It took him only one week, in August 1888, to complete four paintings. Although van Gogh had painted sunflowers before, this series was different—a burst of blooms spurting from humble pots against a plain background. Two of the canvases, the third and the fourth (at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, Germany, and the National Gallery respectively), were almost entirely yellow.
The ‘Sunflowers’ paintings charmed Gauguin; the razor that van Gogh waved at him during a fight about eight weeks later, not so much. The Dutchman slashed his own ear and his guest left for Paris, telling Theo: ‘Vincent and I simply cannot live together without trouble.’ None of this, however, put van Gogh off his sunflowers. He exhibited his third and fourth still lifes in November 1889 in Brussels—telling critic Albert Aurier that the flowers were symbols of gratitude— and painted three more canvases: one replica of the third and two of the fourth.
Although he struggled to sell the ‘Sunflowers’ works when alive, after his death, they reached almost every corner of the world, from Japan to the US, having lives as intense as that of their painter. One of the Japanese still lifes was destroyed in the US bombing of August 6, 1945; the other went to claim the title of world’s most expensive painting in 1987, selling for more than $39.9 million. As for the National Gallery’s version, it was evacuated in the Second World War and eventually restored with a cheese grater and an iron, according to van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey in The Sunflower is mine. The still
life has known turmoil even in the recent past: about 18 months ago, its protective glass was smeared with soup by Just Stop Oil vandals.
Today, van Gogh is perhaps most closely identified with his seven ‘Sunflowers’—appropriately. As he himself once told his brother: ‘Jeannin has the peony, Quost has the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower.’
A nip and tuck
If there ever were an award for the painting that has most been tampered with, Girolamo Romanino’s The Nativity would be a strong contender. Immediately after its acquisition in 1857, the panel—which the Old Master had made for the altar of the San Alessandro Church in Brescia, Italy, in about 1524—was sent for repairs to Milanese restorer Giuseppe Molteni. The craftsman was a luminary in his field and lived by the principle that ‘they restore best who do the least’, according to his obituary. Nonetheless, he sometimes took it upon himself ‘to correct the naive inaccuracies of the Old Masters’, as his contemporary Giovanni Morello put it.
Molteni must have found much that he deemed inaccurate in Romanino’s Nativity, because he turned the ox painted by the original artist into draperies, adding a rock and his own bovine elsewhere on the canvas —possibly with the blessing of the National Gallery’s first director, Sir Charles Eastlake, who had once remarked that the Romanino painting had ‘two heads bad & requiring slight rectification in drawing—a leg of one of angels also requiring slight alteration’. According to Matthew Hayes’s The Renaissance Restored, Eastlake also added some touches of his own: having tasked Molteni with re-creating patina on the Nativity and four other Romanino works, he remained unhappy with their tone and grain and instructed the gallery’s keeper, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, to have London restorer Charles Buttery carry out some extra work.
It took a little more than a century for Molteni’s ‘improvements’ to be undone: they were removed when The Nativity was again restored in 1968.
Between sacred and profane
It’s perhaps strange to think that a ‘truly wondrous and divine’ man, gifted with ‘more than infinite grace’, ‘regal and magnanimous’ spirit and even ‘great physical beauty’ would ever concern himself with the mundane. Yet even a ‘genius endowed by Heaven’, as Giorgio Vasari described Leonardo, has to earn his keep and a prosaic question of money may have been the reason that prompted the Tuscan artist to paint The Virgin of the Rocks twice.
The panel, a masterpiece of the sfumato technique that blurs transitions and softens edges, had originally been commissioned in 1483 by a Milanese confraternity devoted to the Immaculate Conception, seven years after Pope Sixtus VI had designated a holiday to honour Mary’s state of grace. The Church had long wrestled with the problem of whether the original sin affected the Virgin and it was only in the Renaissance era that the view put forward in the 13th century by Oxford’s John Duns Scotus—according to which, Christ’s own grace had redeemed his mother from the moment of Her conception —became more commonly accepted.
For Leonardo, the commission was an opportunity for artistic trailblazing, as there was no established way to treat the Immaculate Conception. His panel was to be the centre of a large altarpiece for which brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis had also been contracted. In 1490, however, the three artists, claiming increased costs of materials, asked the confraternity to up their fee, as stipulated in their contract. The patrons were not keen to oblige and only offered a modest rise. It was the start of a dispute that would last more than a decade—the altarpiece was only delivered in 1508.
It’s unclear what happened to the panel that Leonardo had begun to work on in the 1480s, but the National Gallery believes the Old Master sold it when he was wrangling for payment, only to paint another one that fulfilled his commission once an agreement was reached with the confraternity. This second version, later sold to Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton, eventually made its way to the National Gallery (the first, now transferred on to canvas, is at the Louvre in Paris).
A sorry sight
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it was remarkably absent from most of the eyes that beheld Margarito d’arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned. When the National Gallery’s director Sir Charles Eastlake bought this painting in 1857, together with another 21, to plug an early-italy-shaped gap in the collection, it caused an uproar. Critics and public thought the panel was plain ugly; evidence of the (lack of) esteem in which Margarito was held comes from Franz Kugler’s 1891 Handbook of painting: ‘He is only worthy of note here as being identified by several signed pictures—among them one of the rudest type in the National Gallery.’
Eastlake cleverly countered the criticism by playing the culture card. Declaring The Virgin and Child Enthroned to be a ‘specimen’, he suggested that there was merit in its acquisition because the painting’s study was meant to address ‘the understanding rather than the imagination’.