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Want to learn more about one of our exhibitions? 📚
Our range of books offers a closer look at our collection and shows. With contributions from curators and art historians from around the world, each title is packed with beautiful illustrations. Visit our shop to discover something new today.
Members get 10% off:
http://bit.ly/3YE2Jk9
Like mother, like daughter 💙
Jacques-Louis David painted the Comtesse Vilain XIIII and her five-year-old daughter, Marie-Louise in 1816. They are depicted with almost identical hairstyles and wear similar dresses, yet their poses appear contrasting. The seated Comtesse is static and contemplative, her gaze focused on a distant point beyond the viewer, while Marie-Louise’s pose hints at movement. Standing, she leans back into her mother’s lap while tilting her head slightly in the opposite direction. Unlike her mother’s, her gaze directly meets our own.
The Comtesse supports her young daughter by draping the orange cloak over the chair and around her right arm. The orange cloth complements the deep Prussian blue of the dress and brings warmth to the picture. David includes a variety of materials and fabrics, such as lace, linen, and velvet.
Images of motherhood and maternal affection had been popular in French art since the 1780s. However, unlike such precedents, David’s picture does not depict a full embrace or kiss. It is a scene of subtle affection rather than overt emotion:
https://bit.ly/3EJsLeG
The painter of light ✨
In contrast to many of Turner’s paintings, often full of activity, grand architectural settings, dramatic weather, and dazzling effects of colour and light, ‘The Evening Star’ looks almost empty. The only figure is a barely visible young boy with a sh*****ng net over his shoulder, who wades in from the shoreline to be greeted by a small leaping dog. The ghostly trace of a boat to the right of centre, which has been painted over, suggests that Turner decided to emphasise the vastness of the sky and sea rather than human industry. It has been reduced to its most fundamental elements: day and night, land and sea, earth, and sky:
https://bit.ly/3jA3ecV
Our free exhibition 'Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different' is now open!
Buy the catalogue now to learn more about our first National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund:
http://bit.ly/3KGD86P
Can you guess the ? 🤔
This right hand emerging from a stone frame belongs to a celebrated Spanish artist from our collection. The frame itself is decorated with scrolls and foliage, an effect commonly seen in engraved portraits.
Find out the answer on our website:
https://bit.ly/322vBG2
One famous pair, one entrepreneurial woman.
Early Netherlandish master, Jan van Eyck painted the now iconic 'Arnolfini Portrait' in 1434. When van Eyck died in 1441, his wife Margaret van Eyck was left a widow with several children. Despite numerous obstacles, Margaret showed great entrepreneurial spirit by successfully applying to the Duke of Burgundy to receive half of her husband's annual pension. With this funding she was able to take on the management of her late husband’s workshop for over a decade, helping to ensure van Eyck’s legacy for centuries to come.
A portrait of Margaret by her husband, painted when she was 33, survives, and is now in the Groeninge Museum, Bruges.
Read about the restoration of the portrait, which took place at the National Gallery, on our website:
https://bit.ly/3mhUoVw
Guess the title... (wrong answers only!)
This famed portrait by Caravaggio, depicting a young boy recoiling in pain, is thought to have an allegorical meaning, referring to the pain that can derive from love.
Learn more about the painting on our website:
https://bit.ly/2zcwH5e
How do you tell the difference between a heroine and a femme fatale? And why could the woman in this painting be either Judith or Salome?
The two candidates for the subject of this painting share many attributes but their drastic actions have very different motives.
Join Maria, our Vivmar Curatorial Fellow, as she unpacks this ambiguity to discover what it tells us about the way artists experiment with iconography. Watch the full film here:
https://bit.ly/3ZITkbL
Digital activity at the National Gallery is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies Digital Accelerator
The unfinished masterpiece ✨
Renaissance master Michelangelo was born in 1475. Known as ‘The Manchester Madonna’ since 1857 when it was exhibited in the great Manchester Art Exhibition, this composition is probably the earliest of Michelangelo's surviving paintings.
Here the Virgin Mary sits on a rock with the Christ Child and a young John the Baptist next to her. Her right breast is bare suggesting that she has just been feeding her child who reaches up to grasp the book she is holding. The book may be the Old Testament open at Isiah 53 which prophesies Christ’s future crucifixion. The Virgin seems to try to hold it away from him, as though she doesn’t want him to discover his destiny. Saint John the Baptist in his camel skin coat appears to be steadying his cousin, Christ, who is balanced precariously with one foot on a fold of his mother’s cloak. John looks out of the painting maybe to suggest his role in preparing the way for Christ’s teaching.
Angels stand on either side of them. Those on the left are rendered by lines drawn in to mark out the folds of their clothes and by the areas of greenish underpainting traditionally used to balance the pink flesh tones that would be painted over them. Unfinished, 'The Manchester Madonna' provides clues to the artistic process behind of one of art history's greatest painters:
https://bit.ly/3oGIhwO
Can you guess the ? 🤔
Visit Room 14 and you'll find a temporary display of some of the Gallery’s most treasured 14th- and 15th-century Italian paintings. This particular detail of a goddess looking to her lover comes from a Florentine painter and draughtsman.
Find out the answer on our website:
https://bit.ly/37iPCdu
With Mother's Day just around the corner, show your appreciation with a gift from our Mother's Day guide 💐
Filled with gifts inspired by our collection, order by 13 March to receive the delivery in time for Mother’s Day (excluding Custom Prints).
Members save 10%.
Start shopping now:
http://bit.ly/3KKHeuu
We have acquired our first painting by the German Modernist painter Max Pechstein.
This is a portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt, the daughter of Max Cuhrt, a successful solicitor and patron of the avant-garde. She’s dressed in red, with a large, dark hat on her head and a flamboyant ring on her left hand. The picture was part of a wider decorative scheme for the Cuhrts’ lavish apartment in Kurfürstendamm 152, Berlin. You can see the painting in Room 43:
https://bit.ly/41badNU
This acquisition was made possible thanks to the extraordinary generosity of Martha Doris Bailey. Find out more here:
https://bit.ly/3kiAklr
© Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf / DACS 2023 / Photo: The National Gallery, London
NOW OPEN: 'Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different'
Artist Nalini Malani, our first National Gallery contemporary fellow, presents new ways of seeing well-known works of art. Taking her inspiration from paintings in the National Gallery and Bath’s Holburne Museum, Malani has created striking new video animations.
The animations, hand-drawn using an iPad, reveal and conceal different aspects of the paintings in both collections, including works by Caravaggio and Bronzino in the Gallery’s collection and by Jan van der Venne and Johann Zoffany in Bath among many others, to rediscover them from an alternative, and critical point of view. The exhibition also has fictitious portraits of the marginalised in society that appear in between the animations; a reference to people whose work underpins the economies that connect us across the globe.
The exhibition is open until 11 June. Find out more and book your visit here:
https://bit.ly/3alFloj
Nalini Malani My Reality is Different, 2022 (details); Animation chamber, 9-channel installation, sound: 25.12 mins © Nalini Malani; Photo: Luke Walker
For Women's History Month, join Gallery Educator Fiona Alderton as she looks at a surprising painting by one of our most celebrated female artists.
Watch the full film on our website:
https://bit.ly/3IDawsk
Digital activity at the National Gallery is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies
Is it just us, or is this demon wearing a cactus?
Snakes for arms; scaly, avian legs; and moth-like wings, find out why this late-Gothic demon was the stuff of nightmares in its day with Daniel Sobrino Ralston, Acting Associate Curator of 1600‒1800 Paintings.
With our major exhibition 'After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art' opening in under a month, now is the perfect time to pre-order the accompanying exhibition catalogue.
Discover the pioneers of modern art and trace how a new creative freedom made waves across Europe:
http://bit.ly/3xIEaY3