The National Gallery in London celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, a fact that seems at first to have little bearing on the spell it casts on visitors, who come in search of paintings both much older and much younger than the institution itself. But its history is a part of its charm, its existence, like its capaciousness, a miracle in retrospect. What began with 38 paintings, bought by the government from a banker, John Julius Angerstein, is now a collection comprising 2,300 works of art. In its early days, the gallery had no formal collection policy, its acquisitions dictated by the somewhat dusty tastes of its trustees; and even after it did, resistance was never far away. The promise in 1906 of a number of Impressionist paintings by the Irish art dealer, Sir Hugh Lane, horrified the old guard. Lord Redesdale, paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters, got out the smelling salts at the mere mention of the name Renoir.
But the National Gallery has as much to tell us about shifting tastes as it does the story of art, its elegant spaces also embody our history in all its complexity, from slavery (between 1824 and 1880, at least 67 trustees and donors as well as some significant sitters and painters, had links to the slave trade) to suffrage (it was at the National Gallery that a suffragette called Mary Richardson slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver in 1914). Think of the second world war, and you may picture its director, Kenneth Clark, moving its paintings to a slate quarry in Wales for their own protection; of the pianist Myra Hess giving her morale-boosting recitals in an empty building. Consider its Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991, from the far side of Trafalgar Square, and you may hear the sound of a prince railing against monstrous carbuncles; from this vantage point, you may also trace the irresistible rise of the so-called blockbuster show.
In theory, it should be impossible – outrageous, even – to have a favourite painting in such an institution: one with so much colour and texture and beauty; so many styles and stories. Somehow, though, that isn’t the case. In the face of overwhelming competition, I will always love most passionately the small but ravishing A Wall in Naples (1782) by the British artist Thomas Jones, which hangs in Room 42 – and when the New Review asked eight leading artists to pick their favourite pictures from its collections, they didn’t balk or barrack at the task either. This, I suppose, is how human beings make sense of such an embarrassment of riches: each time we visit, we navigate by a star of our own choosing. RC
Michael Craig-Martin: ‘It’s heroic in scale and yet strikingly casual’
Bathers at Asnières by Georges Seurat (1884)
Born in Dublin, Michael Craig-Martin is a conceptual artist and painter who has lived and worked in Britain since 1966. One of his most famous works is An Oak Tree (1973), featuring a glass of water which he claimed was a tree, and his more recent work depicts common place objects, often in bright colours. He is also emeritus professor of fine art at Goldsmiths
Bathers at Asnières is an unbelievably great painting. And Seurat was so young when he did it, 23 or 24. It’s staggering really. When I was that age, I certainly wasn’t producing masterpieces. It has the scale of a great history painting, but instead of featuring important people – Napoleon and his generals – it’s a scene of ordinary, working-class people at leisure. What’s interesting is that nobody’s looking out of the picture – everybody’s looking to the side, towards something that we can’t see. Which gives it a very strange orientation. It’s the kind of picture that you get with a camera – of people being photographed without realising it. They’re relaxed, they’re definitely not posing. And so we have this painting that’s heroic in scale and yet strikingly ordinary and casual.
I remember first seeing it with my parents when I was about 10. In those days, it was still in the Tate’s collection before it was moved to the National. Some things that you like when you’re very young, you end up thinking they’re awful later on, but this is the opposite. I’ve gone back to see it at the National a lot over the years.
It has influenced my work in lots of ways. I like the way that it speaks to ordinary life. And I’m very struck by the fact that the painting was constructed with a kind of collage technique: Seurat did the studies for all the figures separately and then collaged them into the picture to create a composition. And that’s exactly what I do in my own work.
I never enter the National Gallery without going to have a look at it. That’s one of the great things about the gallery being free to enter. I know many people who go there quite often, and rather than walking around, they go to see certain works which are of comfort to them, or that they just love. That’s very special.
I have a particular interest in early Renaissance paintings, and for any museum to have Piero Della Francescas is extraordinary. But everything about the collection is extraordinary. I was there recently and entered a room of Titians, and then there were more Titians, and then more Titians. I thought, this is just unbelievable. KF
Lubaina Himid: ‘The look on his face is very intense - and those outrageous pantaloons’
The Tailor by Giovanni Battista Moroni (c1570)
Lubaina Himid is an artist and curator who has been pivotal to the British Black arts movement since the 1980s, using paintings, drawings, prints and installations to uncover marginalised and silenced histories. In 2017, she became the first Black woman to win the Turner prize
I love paintings that seem to be a chance encounter with the subject. It seems as if Moroni has opened a door, and the tailor looked at him and said: “Really? I’m just about to use these scissors.” The look on his face is very critical, searching, intense. When I painted a work called Six Tailors I was thinking of this tailor with his absolutely stunning outfit, his beautiful jacket, those outrageous pantaloons, and that lovely ruff at the neck and the sleeves.
The colours are extraordinary: that beautiful grey in the background. I spend a lot of time trying to paint the perfect grey painting. If you paint colour on top of grey, it makes it pop. So painting grey for me makes me think about colour even more. But Moroni here only uses three colours; it’s really restrained.
I’ve been going to the National Gallery since I was about 10, when I went with my mother who was a textile designer. We used to start at the beginning and just perambulate, like we were going down the high street, or through a big department store. We’d stop at things we liked and then keep going. Because we were doing it in that way, we weren’t learning art historical things. We were looking at the clothes, the colours, the people. Even if you don’t know a person or when it was painted, you can relate to the painting through the clothes. It gives you a way into historical classical painting. You begin to think it’s a marvellous way to spend the afternoon, just looking at paintings. Everything in them seemed magnificent. It was a guarantee of something splendid.
I can project quite a lot of myself and the people I know into those paintings. I’m not distracted by the fact that they’re white and wealthy. I see them as confident, equal human beings. I understood from early on who got painted and who didn’t, and I saw it as my role as an artist to fill in those gaps.
I’d have loved to do what Paula Rego and David Hockney did and have a long-term residency at the gallery and make work in the studio there. But at the time they were running that scheme, I wasn’t the sort of artist that people around the place would ever consider, though I thought in my youthful arrogance that I could make a really interesting contribution.
It’s an advantage to the National Gallery that it’s a tourist attraction. You don’t just get comfortable, home counties, middle-classes going round, although there’s a great deal of that. You have tourists from all over the world and that gives the place an energy. You don’t see many people of colour in there unless they’re African American, and I think it’s not only because the paintings are of white people. That’s what art in Europe has been.
I don’t necessarily feel there’s a genuine welcome; there might be a bit of a tick-boxing welcome, but no real understanding of audiences as actual people, more as statistics. People could spend a very nice afternoon having a really wonderful time there. But it’s not sold like that. It’s sold as if you have to know what you are looking at to enjoy it. And it’s such nonsense. You don’t need to know who painted what, you don’t need to know whether it’s the scene from such and such a book in the Bible.
You just need to approach it like you would a park or a shop. What do you like? What do you enjoy? Come and have a look. Maybe it’s time for galleries to be a bit more like caring, interested parents. “Have a look at this. You might like it. I like it. But your dad doesn’t.” I love art historians, but there’s really no need for the rest of us to be art historians. Audiences absolutely need to be allowed to approach it whichever way they want. SC
David Hockney: ‘It’s gone a bit brown... but it’s beautiful’
Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Born in Bradford, David Hockney came to prominence during the 1960s pop art movement before moving to Los Angeles, where he made his iconic swimming pool paintings. Still active and always curious about the possibilities of new technology, he is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century
I first saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers when I was 18 years old. I have always loved it. I came with my friend Norman Stevens to London and all we did was go to the National Gallery, the Tate, the National Portrait gallery. That was it. Then we went back to Bradford. We’d come on the train for 28 shillings. And we had a meal on the train. That cost seven and sixpence. We were splurging a bit. We were going to hitchhike back. When we got to King’s Cross, I ran outside. To see all the red buses and things.
Back then Sunflowers was shown at Millbank gallery [the building that is now Tate Britain but was then part of the National Gallery]. It moved to Trafalgar Square in 1961. I’ve heard that it’s gone a bit brown; the sunflowers would have been a bit more yellow. I don’t know whether they had the cadmium yellows in those days. I know it’s difficult to keep them in a vase like that, so he probably painted them one by one. But it’s a wonderful painting. It was one of a series of sunflowers that Van Gogh painted to decorate the room that Gauguin slept in when he went to stay with him in the yellow house in Arles. I’m sure Gauguin must have admired the paintings enormously there – probably thinking they were a lot better than his. It’s beautiful, just beautiful.
The National also has a work by Adolphe Monticelli, an artist who Van Gogh talks about a lot in his letters, called A Vase of Wild Flowers. Monticelli used to use quite thick paint and painted quite quickly. The work is very black now. Van Gogh really admired him but he’s not that well known these days. It really is a marvellous museum. Everything on the walls is really good. And they have most things on the walls – there’s not that many in the stores.
Anish Kapoor: ‘What we’re looking at, I believe, is intimacy and guilt’
A Woman Bathing in a Stream by Rembrandt (1654)
Born in Mumbai, Anish Kapoor moved to Britain to study and is best known as a sculptor working on a grand scale. Over the past four decades he has also ventured into architecture, stage design and painting. He won the Turner prize in 1991 and in 2009 the Royal Academy staged a major survey of his career
I’m living in Venice at the moment, but whenever I’m in London, which is every month, somehow or other the National Gallery fits into my agenda. I’m often drawn to the Rembrandts. A Woman Bathing in a Stream is absolutely extraordinary. It seems likely that the woman is Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s partner after the death of his wife. We know that Stoffels was pregnant around the time that Rembrandt painted this. What we’re looking at, I believe, is intimacy and guilt.
First of all, she’s about to reveal her sexuality. She is lifting up her robes and her dress is almost at her upper thighs. Then there’s her pregnancy out of wedlock. It was a scandal, a disgrace. So there’s a sense of doom, of social rejection. Even if you don’t know the backstory, you can feel it in the painting.
What it forces is the real issue: why is Rembrandt a great artist? Is it because he’s technically up to it? No, absolutely not. It is, I believe, because he is able to look into himself and see what is only half present. He’s looking to the esoteric, to the half known, to this sense of the human being on the edge. I would go as far as to say that that is the role of the artist: to look at the half known, the unknown, the almost known, or to allow the practice to be that space of unknowing. You see this in Belshazzar’s Feast and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, both also in the National. The words emerging out of darkness in Belshazzar’s Feast speak of death and foreboding. The unknown prophetic force we call God. The terrible pain and knowledge of mortality in Rembrandt’s face in the self-portrait.
I first visited the National Gallery in the mid-1970s when I was 20 or 21. My impression of it was of wonder! There was a sense of bewilderment, because of the overwhelming number of wonderful works. At one level, as an Indian, my sadness is that it restricts itself to so-called western art. This idea that the western tradition is a thing unto itself – it is easily arguable that Renaissance painting derived its great invention, perspective, from the Islamic world. There’s much that overlaps, and especially today.
There are so many wonderful paintings in the National Gallery. It’s great for its rigour, for the fact it looks hard at art history. There was a Mantegna show there years ago which was hugely influential on me. I borrowed the title of the great Mantegna painting Descent into Limbo for a work of mine. They also put on a wonderful show of Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist who sat in the shadows for ever, until at long last she was brought into focus. KF
Cornelia Parker: ‘In the flesh it’s quite small but immaculately painted’
The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1434)
Cornelia Parker is best known for her sculptures and large-scale, often site-specific, installations including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, for which she had a garden shed blown up. She was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1997 and had a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2022
The Arnolfini Portrait has always been special to me. I wrote an essay about it when I was doing my O-levels and had a picture of it on my wall. When I came to London with my art teachers aged 15, I went to see it and was thrilled. In the flesh it’s quite small but so immaculately painted and very intimate. I didn’t really knew the story behind it – it seemed really enigmatic – but I loved the dog, the sandals, the couple, I loved everything about it.
And I especially liked the chandelier. Last year, along with 11 other artists, in collaboration with a glass foundry in Venice, I was asked to create a chandelier to exhibit in St Mark’s Square. I chose to recreate the brass chandelier from Van Eyck’s painting. I like this kind of transubstantiation where something that’s real becomes a painted thing and then becomes something else – it’s taken out of the painting and made into an object.
Of the 12 artists, I was the only one who didn’t have lighting as part of the chandelier. In the painting, there’s only one candle burning, and the chandelier is lit by daylight from a side window. (I wanted to have a real candle but they wouldn’t let me have a naked flame in St Mark’s Square, so I had a glass candle instead.) There’s a theory that the wife was dead when the painting was made, that perhaps she died in childbirth and the painting is a homage to her. I think that’s what the lone candle is about: it’s burning over him and not her. If that’s true, then the painting is not about marriage, it’s about remembering her.
I go and see The Arnolfini Portrait whenever I can – I pop into the gallery three or four times a year. There’s so much there to absorb. As well as the Van Eyck, I always go and see The Battle of San Romano by Uccello, which is amazing. But The Arnolfini Portrait is such a beautiful thing. We really are very lucky to have it in this country. KF
Jesse Darling: ‘I started to identify with the lion’
St Jerome by Albrecht Dürer (c1496)
The winner of the Turner prize 2023, Jesse Darling worked in a variety of jobs including circus clown, barista and dancer before becoming an artist. His work, in sculpture, video, performance and other media, highlights the fragility of systems and explores what it means to be a body in the world
The first time I saw this painting, somebody blindfolded me and led me into the National Gallery and put me in front of it and took the blindfold off. I can’t say any more about that story, but the experience left a very strong impression on me.
At first I thought St Jerome and the lion was a beautiful love story. The lion comes up acting rowdy and the other monks get the crossbow to kill it but Jerome alone says: “It’s not dangerous, it’s just wounded.” And I’m like, Yeah, that’s what everyone wants. You know: “You’re wounded, let me take you in, live with me for ever.” And then something happened in my life. I lost my right paw for a while – I had a paralysed right arm – and ended up under the scrutiny of lots of doctors. And now I think about it differently: even if it’s a sort of love story, it’s also a story of subjugation. I started to identify with the lion and made a whole series of work about “no more St Jeromes”.
But actually, the best thing about that Dürer painting is not St Jerome, it’s what’s on the reverse. It’s a double-sided painting and on the back is an exploding star which may represent the apocalypse. It’s just this tiny little image, but for me it is sublime. Come for the lion, stay for the apocalypse, what’s not to like about that?
All of these museums and galleries are difficult places, they really are troubled mausoleums. They’re saying: “Look, this is what’s been stolen, expropriated, these are the best treasures that the empire can show off to itself.” But the good thing about the National Gallery is that it’s free to enter. Like all institutions that are free to get in, including big libraries and train stations, it’s a space where people can avail themselves of some of what the body needs: a bit of warmth, a place to sit down and even sleep. You see people sleeping in the National Gallery, and I think that’s a very good use for a mausoleum. KF
Rose Wylie: ‘That pink building is floating - it’s marvellous’
Saint John the Baptist Retiring to the Desert by Giovanni di Paolo (1454)
Rose Wylie is a painter who studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s. Known for her exuberant large-scale works often created from memory, in 2014 at the age of 80 she won the John Moores Painting prize. In the same year she was made a senior RA
Giovanni di Paolo is one of my favourite painters. He breaks all the traditional rules of perspective and scale; I also jump about with scale in my work.
I first came across this painting when I was 17 as an art student at the Folkestone and Dover School of Art when we came on visits to the National Gallery. It’s one of four panels that form a predella, the lowest part of an altarpiece, and it’s got an object quality. It’s on a bit of wood – I love wood! – and it’s curved, not quite flat. The frame has the feeling that it has been gilded over and over again, which reminds me of front doors that have been painted over. I love the colours: the pink, the green, the gold and black, with flowers on each side. The whole thing is all over the place. The figures of John the Baptist are the same size on both sides of the painting, and as the mountains diminish and get smaller, John the Baptist doesn’t. Then you suddenly get those pink buildings with one on the ground and the other one floating. As art students we were told that if something was on the ground, it should look as if it was on the ground. But that pink building is just floating, and it always struck me as marvellous.
If you look, you can see this abstract circle of pink and white colours. That circular composition is like Matisse’s The Dance but that was painted in 1910 and this is 15th-century, but the same thing is going on. They are both great paintings, but this is my favourite.
I’ve always loved the National Gallery’s collection of early Italian paintings. When I was a student, I would make straight for it – up the stairs and turn left. Now I tend to go to see contemporary paintings, but I like the National’s collection as it is I like the continuity and to remember it how I remember it. I don’t need to have that disturbed. These paintings are part of me. SC
Idris Khan: ‘It’s like you’ve pulled up a chair and are witnessing this revelation’
The Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio (1601)
Working in a wide range of media including photography, video and sculpture, Idris Khan investigates memory and experience. He is known for using layering techniques to draw out the essence of various sources including musical scores, famous paintings and the Qur’an. His show Repeat After Me opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum on 5 April
I first encountered Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus in 2002 when I moved down to London from just outside Birmingham, where I grew up, to study at the Royal College. I was studying photography, and the painting was discussed as being quite close to a photograph, because of the stillness and the amount of drama in it – it feels like a frozen moment. The painting shows Christ after the resurrection revealing himself to two of his apostles, and the space at the front of the scene makes it feel like you’ve pulled up your own chair and are witnessing this revelation first-hand. It’s so beautiful to be caught in that moment.
But it was the colours that stayed with me more than anything else. The darkness. The transferral of light across the surface. The deep red of Jesus’s robe and the dark green of the figure on the left. The project I’m working on now is based on a number of old master paintings including The Supper at Emmaus. I’ve isolated colours from each painting, printed them out and arranged them in blocks of different sizes and orientations. I find it interesting that a painting can be stripped back in this way. I’ve also used a computer program to translate the colours into a musical score, which I’ve stamped on to the surface of the paper.
The more I looked at the painting, the more I noticed. He’s paying so much attention to the joinery – the detail of the chair is amazing. The still life on the table reflects the colours of the figures. There’s a beautiful yellow-ochre on the apple that you can also see on the face of the man on the right. It’s sort of like life in a bowl of fruit.
These days I go to the National Gallery with my kids, probably two or three times a year. It’s just so amazing that it’s still free, and long may it continue. One thing they could do more of is getting contemporary artists to respond to the collection in various ways. It might help audiences look at the old master paintings afresh, shake it up a little bit. KF
