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An exciting discovery was made in 1989 when the painting was examined by infra-red reflectography. Under the plum-coloured drapery across the Child’s legs is an underdrawing, which can convincingly be attributed to Duccio himself and whose individual characteristics can be recognised also in panels from Duccio’s Maestà (see next page). The abrupt, emphatic lines are sketched with a slightly scratchy quill, whose split nib creates a double contour clearly visible when magnified (fig. 1).
duccio di buoninsegna The Annunciation 1311 Tempera on poplar, 43
(active 1278 –died 1318 /19)
44 cm ng 1139
This small panel and the other two pictures by the artist hanging nearby, Jesus opens the Eyes of a Man born Blind and the Transfiguration, come from the predella of a huge doublesided altarpiece painted in Duccio’s workshop and carried from there in triumph to the high altar of Siena Cathedral in 1311. Most of it survives in the Siena Cathedral museum, although after the complex structure was dismantled and sawn apart in 1771 some of the panels were lost and others, such as those in the National Gallery, sold abroad. The predella, a box-like supporting structure under the main panel, was, like the whole altarpiece, painted on both the front and the back. The front of the
millstone around her neck. Their combined presence may point to Duccio’s patron having been the Dominican Niccolò da Prato, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia (died 1321). A luxury object such as this would not have been available to everybody. The Virgin’s brilliant blue robe, for example, is painted in the best ultramarine, a mineral extracted from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, whose only source at the time was from quarries in Afghanistan, and which was more expensive than pure gold. Duccio, however, tempers sumptuousness with tenderness in the relationship of Mother and Child, and his modelling is more naturalistic than that of Margarito a generation earlier. The green undermodelling of the Virgin’s face now shows through more than it would have done originally.
Fig. 1 Infra-red reflectogram of Duccio’s Virgin and Child with Saints. Detail showing the quill-pen underdrawing of the Child’s drapery.
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duccio
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Paintings 1500–1600 t h e w e s t w i ng
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shaded by the hat brim, as are the coarser hatching in the background and the taller outline of the hat originally sketched in by Rubens. White highlights and red and dark shadows were then added over the flesh colour on nose, cheeks, chin, neck and breasts. Equally rapid and effective is the treatment of Susanna’s hair, stray wisps painted with the tip of the brush or scratched with the point of the handle. The fluent handling extends to her costume, especially in the dashing ostrich feathers and the splendid removable red sleeves, attached to the bodice with ribboned gold-tipped laces, whose bold colour echoes and concentrates the warm blush of lips, nostrils and eyelids.
peter paul rubens (1577 – 1640) Samson and Delilah about 1609 – 10 Oil on wood, 185
205 cm ng 6461
In 1608 Rubens hastily returned home to Antwerp after an absence of eight years in Italy, in a vain attempt to reach the bedside of his dying mother. His arrival in the city virtually coincided with the truce between Spanish Flanders and the Dutch United 246
Paintings 1600–1700
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Provinces, and he was quickly appointed official painter to the Regents of the Southern Netherlands, the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella, with leave to remain domiciled in Antwerp. He was never to return to Italy, although he was irrevocably marked by his study of Ancient Greco-Roman and Italian Renaissance art. In Antwerp he proceeded to work towards the reconstruction of his war-torn country and to establish himself as a leading figure in its artistic and intellectual life. One of his closest friends and patrons at this time was the wealthy and influential alderman Nicolaas Rockocx, for whom Rubens painted Samson and Delilah to hang in a prominent position over the mantelpiece of his ‘great saloon’ in Antwerp. When the picture was hung at its original height of just over two metres some years ago in an exhibition at the National Gallery, it became clear how nicely Rubens had calculated the angle of vision. The surface of Delilah’s bed receded to a properly horizontal plane, with the space of the room leading convincingly back to the wall and the door through which the Philistine soldiers enter to capture the hapless Jewish hero. To the multiple light sources in this room, for which Rubens was indebted to his friend Elsheimer (page 115) – the flaming brazier, the candle held by the old procuress and the torch of the Philistines – we must add in our mind’s eye a fire blazing in the fireplace below, highlighting the saffron satin throw behind Delilah and the patterned Oriental rug, and casting warm reflections in the shadows of the skin tones and the rubens
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in Amsterdam) is an ‘armchair, red and green night effect…on the seat two novels and a candle’. The motif of chairs may have been suggested to him by Luke Fildes’s engraving The Empty Chair – Gad’s Hill, Charles Dickens’s chair drawn on the day of the writer’s death. Gauguin advocated painting from the imagination, starting with an idea – nourished by literature – then seeking pictorial form for it. Van Gogh’s Chair exemplifies his own inspiration: a simple rustic seat of natural materials, seen by daylight in ‘Japanese perspective’ with sprouting bulbs behind it suggesting natural growth. But a darker association may also brood over this picture ‘in light colour’. In seventeenth-century Dutch art, as Van Gogh would have known, pipe smoking was a symbol of transience, illustrating a verse from that Good Book with which he was also very familiar: ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord. . . For my days are consumed like smoke. . .’ (Psalm 102:1–3).
vincent van gogh Sunflowers 1888 Oil on canvas, 92
(1853 – 1890)
73 cm ng 3863
In the summer before Gauguin’s arrival in Arles, Van Gogh began to paint a series of pictures of sunflowers as a decoration for his house, which he hoped to share with ‘the new poet [who will be] living here’. Gauguin, in Van Gogh’s words, was ‘mad about my sunflowers’, and portrayed him at his easel painting them; of all the artist’s works, they are the most popular and the most widely reproduced. He painted four canvases in all before the flowers faded, but considered only two good enough to sign and to hang in Gauguin’s bedroom. The Gallery’s picture is one of these two signed paintings; the other is now in Munich. They were among the few works which Van Gogh felt confident enough to select for exhibition, and were shown, and admired, in Brussels in November 1889. ‘To get up enough heat to melt those golds. . . it’s not everyone that can do it, it takes the energy and concentration of a person’s whole being. . .’ Vincent had written to his brother Theo. The London Sunflowers is the first successful example of Van Gogh’s ‘light on light’ technique, perhaps indebted to the experiments in one-colour painting pursued in 1887 in Paris by his fellow student, Louis Anquetin. Its predominant yellow hue – for Van Gogh an emblem of happiness – is also a tribute to Provence, and to the contemporary Provençal painter Monticelli, who ‘depicted the south [of France] all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulphur’. In January 1889, however, Van Gogh painted three ‘absolutely equal and identical copies’, with the intention of showing copies and originals as side panels to versions of his portrait of Mme Roulin, wife of his friend the Arles postman. The red-haired Mme Roulin is painted in violent shades of green and red holding the strings of a baby’s cradle. ‘I imagine these canvases [the portraits] between those of the Sunflowers, which would thus form lampholders or candelabras of the same size. . . And then the yellow and orange tones of the head will gain in brilliance by the proximity of the yellow wings.’ Thus Van Gogh’s interest in colour, while grounded in nature, differed from that of the Impressionists by extending also to decorative combinations, in which the hues of one painting intensified those of others, at the same time modifying their original significance. 300
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The Sunflowers illustrates the cycle of life, from the bud, through maturity and death. The spiky or gnarled forms of nature also symbolised human passions to Van Gogh, although it would be wrong to see evidence here, as many people have, of artistic ‘frenzy’. The luminous sunflowers look extremely lifelike, their raised dabbed-on texture – made possible by the stiff consistency of the new machine-ground paints available to nineteenth-century artists – carefully controlled to mimic bristling seedheads and hairy green sepals, vigorous longer brushstrokes flowing to match the direction of the petals, leaves and stems. As if in contrast to these natural forms, the table top and vase are simplified, flattened and outlined, recalling crude popular prints, and Van Gogh’s signature, ‘Vincent’, becomes a naive blue decoration in the glaze of the Provençal terracotta jar.
gogh
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with a quotation from Thomas Campbell’s poem Ye Mariners of England: ‘The flag which braved the battle and the breeze/ No longer owns her.’ The Temeraire had distinguished herself at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but by the 1830s the veteran warships of the Napoleonic wars were being replaced by steamships. Turner, on an excursion on the Thames, encountered the old ship, sold out of the service, being towed from Sheerness to Rotherhithe to be scrapped. In his painting topography and shipbuilding alike are manipulated to symbolic and pictorial ends. Turner conceives the scene as a modern Claude: a ghostly Temeraire and the squat black tug, belching fire and soot, against a lurid sunset. His technique is very different from Claude’s, as thick impastoed rays and reflections contrast with thinly painted areas, and colours swoop abruptly from light to dark. A heroic and graceful age is passing, a petty age of steam and money bustles to hasten its demise. The dying sun signals the end of the one, a pale reflecting moon the rise of the other. But just as Claude’s sunrises and sunsets enlist the viewer’s own sense of journey, so does the last berth of the Fighting Temeraire recall the breaking up of every human life.
joseph mallord william turner (1775 – 1851) Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway before 1844 Oil on canvas, 91
122 cm ng 538
While in the Fighting Temeraire Turner seemed to deplore the Industrial Revolution, his attitude in this, one of his last great works, is much more ambiguous. The 1840s 340
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was the period of ‘railway mania’ and the restless Turner appreciated the speed and comfort of this form of travel. An unreliable anecdote by Turner’s champion, Ruskin, records the origins of this picture in a train ride through a rainstorm, during which the artist is supposed to have stuck his head out of the window. Excited as ever by strong sensations, Turner replicates the experience in paint, although the viewer is imagined as seeing the approaching train from a high vantage point. The bridge was, and is, recognisable as Maidenhead Viaduct across the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead, on the newly laid Great Western line to Bristol and Exeter. Begun on Brunel’s design in 1837 and finished in 1839, the viaduct was the subject of controversy, critics of the GWR saying that it would fall down. The view is towards London; the bridge seen at the left is Taylor’s road bridge, of which the foundation stone was laid in 1772. Once again Turner relies on Claude (page 191) for the diagonal recession from foreground to a vanishing point at the centre of the picture. The aims of the two artists, however, are very different. The exaggeratedly steep foreshortening of the viaduct along which our eye hurtles to the horizon is used to suggest the speed at which the locomotive irrupts into view through the driving rain, headlight blazing. Ahead of it, disproportionately large, a hare – proverbially swiftest of all animals – bounds across the tracks; we doubt if it will win the race and escape with its life. A skiff is on the river far beneath, and in the distance a ploughman stoically turns his furrow. Virtuoso swirls and slashes, and smears and sprays of paint, simulate rain, steam and speed to blur these figures of the old countryside. Exhilaration and regret are mingled with alarm; in a second we must leap aside to let the iron horse roar by. turner
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