In the gallery

 The Eyes have it......

    or.... The sign of a good painting.....

I still revere Peter Cook, even though a quarter century has passed since his fatal gastrointestinal haemorrhage at the age of 57.... And to this day I cannot enter an art gallery without thinking of Pete and Dud eating their sandwiches in front of Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses [Eleven female figures repose in an imaginary landscape bordered by trees.....] The painting was purchased in 1964 with a special grant and the aid of the Max Rayne Foundation.  As Pete tells Dud in their In the Gallery sketch, The Big Bathers (Pete's translation of the painting's title) cost almost as much as Tottenham Hotspur. About fifty thousand pounds a body - you could get the real nude lady for that price.....

Anyway, the art critic in Pete lectures Dud in what makes a good painting.  That's the sign of a good painting - if the eyes follow you round the room, it's a good painting.  If they don't, it isn't.

Dud queries how that works with the Big Bathers, and Pete explains that if they are facing away, then the sign of a good painting is if the bottoms follow you around the room.  And they test the theory.....

In these days of up-lock and anti-social distance, I have been thrilled to revisit some galleries, and to test Peter Cook's perspicacity.  I concentrated on the eyes of certain famous paintings (no, not the bottoms.  I have no place for drifting bits of gauze in my life.....) And I was alarmed to find that not all our treasured masterworks are looking the same way....

Take this group of Four Poor Clares, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, pictured around 1320-25 from the Chapter House of the Sienese church of San Francesco. They certainly don't seem to be following me.....

And this Virgin and Child, by Ambrogio Bergognone (c.1488-90) appears to be watching something while her boy is distracted by something else.... (and neither seem interested in the Carthusian monks behind  them, building the Charterhouse at Pavia.....)

My curiosity is raised.  Who/what are these icons gazing at?  What attracts their attention?  And why won't their eyes follow me?  Here is Giovanni Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-2) [looking uncannily like Pier Paolo Pasolini by the way].  His dead eyes seem to be deliberately avoiding the artist's attention.  Very cinematic (never look at the camera....)

But Albrecht Dürer's father (1497) would appear to have an eye on his son?  Or is he looking past him?  I hate to say this, but there's a touch of strabismus in the gaze.....

In Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) it could be that Giovanni Arnolfini, a wealthy Italian merchant resident in Bruges, is contemplating his wife's bump, and that she is dreaming of a happy family.  But she could be looking at her husband's hand and thinking she would rather their guests (in the mirror) hadn't got off the bus.  Either way, they sure ain't looking at us.....

Rembrandt, one of my all time faves (up there with Peter Cook), could play tricks with the light, and his Belshazzar's Feast (c 1636-8) shows us shock and awe as the divine hand writes on the wall (Thou are weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.....  something of a Johnsonian nightmare, perhaps?) These eyes are never going to follow us around the room......

But when he comes to paint himself, as he did many times (he painted himself before the mirror at least forty times, etched himself 31 times and made a handful of drawn self-portraits); he is not shy.  Rembrandt van Rijn will stare us down, daring us to eyeball him back, as in this example from 1637.

His son, Titus, looks a little more abashed when painted in 1658, but he was his father's agent and factotum, and things weren't going well at the time (though they were worse ten years later when Titus died of the plague.)

There's a distinct family likeness visible in this self-portrait at the age of 63 (the year after Titus's death).  But Rembrandt is not finished.  He looks at the viewer with the hint of a smile; there's life in the old dog yet, and these eyes will not only follow you around the room, they will haunt you all the way home.....

I wander the great Galleries of London, almost alone with these darkening faces.  I almost see the paintings reacting to each other in their suspension.  

Edouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian (1883) not surprisingly upsets the woman in pink sitting with her cat within earshot..... Her expression reminds me of someone on holiday who has just realised the people in the chalet next to her have a child with ADHD.....

And I am interested to see the interaction of others with the windows on the walls. What does this little daughter think about Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnières (1883 - 4)?  Does she like the little red dog in the foreground?  Or does she wonder why these boys are swimming in a river so close to the smelly chimneys in the background?  Or does she wonder why no one is looking her way?

Meanwhile, other solitary browsers seem to be checking Pete's other thesis.  The Rokeby Venus [The Toilet of Venus, 1647 - 51] (Diego Velasquez's only surviving nude) has the kind of bottom that might just follow you....  (though probably only if you had a Porsche and a flat in Knightsbridge....)

Amidst all this, despite the solemnity of great art, one picture stands out.  The eyes of Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (1624) do definitely follow you around.  He's a confident 26 year old and he poses as a man of some vitality.  He is proud to be seen, and will watch every watcher with a view to perhaps meeting up later when the gallery closes.  

As Dud says to Pete: That's the thing about the laughing cavalier - at least he has a giggle......

In risu veritas.....

With thanks to The National Gallery and The Wallace Collection for allowing me to wander freely amongst these treasures and to take photographs (I promise I didn't take any of the pictures....) I didn't use flash and I won't benefit in any way from this blog.....