2025-04-03

Lord Ribblesdale and friends

PXL_20250401_115541697To the National Gallery for the Siena exhibition, but we were early so browsed around. And I was happy to find Lord R again; I think they move him around a bit. As wiki says the painting captures "the quintessence of understated aristocratic style … the portrait of an age as well as the man." Amusingly, wiki also says that Lord R ended up living up to the image presented in the painting.

If interested you can see all the pix I took here. And the full-length Lord R here. Sadly what I didn't do was take the ten or so other full-length portraits in the room. What was interesting was how much better this one is; the others were all oddly posed, or with strange backgrounds, or unnatural expressions, or other defects. Ah but happily the Nat Gall has a listing, you may judge for yourself.

The Siena stuff was interesting but desperately religious, of course. And crude. In the sense of their choice of subjects and their methods of painting and style.

I leave you with a quasi-typical example, only atypical in that it isn't the crucified Christ or the annunciated Virgin. Why did it never occur to them to paint stuff like this? Some kind of weird (or not weird, because everyone had it) mental block in painters and patrons.

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Refs

* France 2024: Orsay, Chamonix, Argeles, Canal du Midi.

* [2024/03] London: Cloth Fair, Wigmore, Westminster, Courtauld, National Gallery, St Bartholomew the Great, RA.

* [2024/03] A visit to Magdalen and Elias.

* [2023/12] Ashmolean: Egypt.

* [2023/03] Cezanne: a trip to London.

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Update: NPG

I visited the National Portrait Gallery for the first time, by chance. There's a JSS of Balfour; but to my eye it is much less successful. 

I haven't quite decided if Balfour is less interesting; or if the painting is just less good. The background - again a pillar, but wider, so B can rest his arm negligently on it, but the gesture is weak - is muddy; B blends into his own shadow, there is nothing of interest in the lower half; and don't get me started on the reflection I simply could not remove, they do a bad job of lighting these things.

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4 comments:

Graeme said...

A bit harsh. You should look at the paintings and icons that were created before Duccio came along. As wiki says "

06/04/2025, 16:14
Graeme said...

Duccio was also one of the first painters to put figures in architectural settings, as he began to explore and investigate depth and space. He also had a refined attention to emotion not seen in other painters at this time. The characters interact tenderly with each other; it is no longer Christ and the Virgin, it is mother and child". An opinion with which I concur and discussed with other visitors, who were also impressed by the realism of his babies. Just compare the strange babies that Leonardo painted at a much later time

06/04/2025, 16:20
William M. Connolley said...

Harsh, moi? In fact I have a plan to be nicer, but that may take some years work to come to fruition. I did notice e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duccio#/media/File:Duccio_di_Buoninsegna_036.jpg but... no, I cannot like it. It is such a strange painting... the boat like a hollowed-out hazelnut, the "generic rock" that Christ stands on. But, I am happy that others get more out of it.

07/04/2025, 09:08
William M. Connolley said...

FFS. Would you believe that blogger decided *my own comment* was spam and didn't publich it?

13/05/2025, 16:06

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