Do art galleries devalue the art in their tacky gift shops? ✎

This is the from the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition last year at the National Gallery:

 

I felt a bit embarrassed. 😔

I think Van Gogh would be shocked by what’s been done to his work.

His sunflowers motif were a lifelong, almost spiritual, expression of “gratitude” of being face to face with nature. E.g. see Gauguin’s depiction of Van Gogh’s magnum opus. The power of his art comes from his energy and excitement; and Van Gogh was a troubled soul.

Quite a lot of his paintings were done in an asylum, and it feels v. disrespectful to slap his face and works on tacky bags, jewelry, kitchen towels, tea matts, and everything else etc. 

Van Gogh always wanted “validation” (esp. among the respectable Paris salons), but he certainly had a respect for art.

I get museums are strapped for cash, but is it too much?  🤔

“Radical Harmony: Neo-Impressionists” exhibition at the National Gallery - Part 1: A New Art ✎

Last year, I went to visit the special Helene Kröller-Müller exhibition at the National Gallery.

Helene Kröller-Müller was an industrialist’s daughter and one of the wealthiest women in the Netherlands. An art enthusiast, she built a significant art collection that eventually formed the basis of the Kröller-Müller Museum. She amassed a remarkable collection, including 90 paintings by Vincent van Gogh and an unrivalled collection of Neo-Impressionist works.

This was a Neo-Impressionist exhibition which I found fascinating because it delved into the philosophy of this epoch of art history. 

While the Impressionists (like Monet and Renoir) worked on intuition, and capturing the fleeting “impression” of a moment; the Pointillists (Neo-Impressionists) viewed this as too messy, romantic, and subjective.

I think pointillism, at its deepest core, is a form of “constructivism”, in the sense that it seeks to construct a “new” truth through a destruction followed by a “rational” reconstruction. Just as a Marxist might argue that Communism is the inevitable scientific conclusion of history, Signac’s art wanted to do away with romanticism etc. to “modern” utopian visual reality.

The Pointillists (particularly Paul Signac & Camille Pissarro) were deeply committed anarcho-communists. While Georges Seurat (the founder) was more reserved about his personal politics, his art (and especially Pissarro) depicted beautiful agrarian & industrial scenes, ports, and peasants, rendering the working classes with a touching dignity. 

Ironically, for us, today, this sort of art is considered rather conservative and passé!

Score: 4/5.

For this blog post, I will select the best paintings for each section of the exhibition.

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Gallery 1: “The New Art”

These are some paintings of the early days of Neo-Impressionism. It is based on the application of dots in line with colour theory.

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Collioure, the Belltower, Opus 164 by Paul Signac (1887)

Magnificent.

Great structure. I love the way the sunlight glints off the wave surfaces. The distinct dots/strokes mimic the sunlight hitting Mediterranean ripples wonderfully.

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Sunday at Port-en-Bessin by Georges Seurat (1888)

Not much of an admirer.

The problem with this painting by Seurat is the dark diagonal railing in the foreground. Signac’s curved beach (in Collioure, the Belltower) swept you smoothly toward the tower. Here, it creates a psychological distance that feels cold.

Even the French tricolors feel stiff, as if frozen in ice.

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Portrieux, The Lighthouse by Paul Signac (1888)

Wow.

Filled with heat and humanity.

This Signac painting uses a very similar compositional device to the Seurat I disliked above (a stone barrier at the fore), but here it works beautifully.

Signac paints the water and sky in cool, receding blues. He then paints the sails in blazing, hot orange-reds. Because the background is so light & cool, those sails and the lighthouse physically “pop” in the eye. They vibrate with intensity.

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Late Afternoon in our Meadow by Camille Pissarro (1887)

One of my favourites of Pissarro.  This is one of the National Gallery’s own masterpieces. 

I absolutely love the quiet romanticism, despite being overtly “unromantic” art.

I love the solitary figure in the field, with her basket.

This is a stylistic twin of the exquisite “Spring Sunshine in the Meadow at Eragny” at the D’Orsay.

A more dynamic version of impressionism? In this Pissarro painting, I feel he has truly replicated the way natural light glints and vibrates of surfaces. The painting feels like it is breathing, capturing the feeling of a warm afternoon sun, more visually impactful than any photograph could.

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Gallery 2: Radical Politics

The exhibition then turns the Neo-Impressionist depictions of the lives and landscapes of people perceived to be of the exploited classes.

Artists, like Luce, Signac and Jan Toorop, made works with an overt political message. While others, like Van Gogh and Anna Boch, were a little bit more sutble.

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Factories on the Thames by Georges Lemmen (1892)

Wow. Effective painting on the alienation of industry. Anomie. Ghosts of ships in the distance. 

That enormous dark oppressive wall dominates the view. Those chimneys are belching smoke into the sky. 

My first painting of Georges Lemmen.

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Boulogne-sur-Mer by Theo van Rysselberghe (1899)

Belgian artist Theo van Ryss. is one of my favourites of the Neos.

This is a painting of hard, unromantic reality. Not a leisure scene: a working fleet. The water is choppy and grey. The sky is overcast.

THis Van Ryss. painting is quite different to his earlier pointillisms. Here, a more subdued earthy palette to give a “realistic” heavier colour scheme. Perhaps a more honest colour, than a rainbow effect - expressionist?

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The Eve of the Strike by Jan Toorop (1889)

Wow.

Pointillism with a nervous anxiety? They seem to be radiating some orange electricity/energy?

This painting (with the setting sun) depicts the day before a strike. Head in hands, his wife looking forlorn with, perhaps, a little baby in arms.

Anxiety & a heavy dread about what the strike might bring.

These are probably the best Jan Toorop paintings I’ve seen. 

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After the Strike by Jan Toorop (1890)

The tragic consequences.

Bent forward, unnaturally so; slumbering, and carrying a little baby, this is about the physical and emotional toll of the strike’s effects.

Horrible and moving.

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The Sower by Vincent van Gogh (1888)

Uplifting and a deeply spiritual painting.

Unlike Toorop, in Van Gogh’s The Sower, the worker (like the sun) radiates an inner force and strength that dominates the canvas. I love the stride, the liveliness and the all-encompassing beams of sunshine.

In fact, I think Van Gogh depicts The Sower as working in harmony with the sun. The aureate sun has the same vibrant colour as the field of wheat. The man has the same colour as the seeds and untouched fields. One helps the other in a beautiful cycle of creation.

Van Gogh depicts man as a source of strength and growth, rather than just toil.

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The Iron Foundry by Maximilien Luce (1899)

I think this artist was a communist.

The danger and exertion of industry: people aren’t just working; they are wrestling with the molten metal. 

Their limbs are fully extended, muscles tense, leaning back to counter the weight of the ladle/smelter.

The blue-gray clouds of some toxic gases? 

Terrific.

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Morning, Interior by Maximilien Luce (1890)

I found this strikingly beautiful. Love it. 

It is visually stunning, and the subject so intimate and tender. I love the warmth of the sunshine pouring in.

To paint a regular man (Luce’s own friend) in his modest bedroom putting on his socks was a statement. Luce is saying: “This moment matters too”.

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Gallery 3: Portraits

The Neo-Impressionist distillation of form run up against the traditional expectation that of a portrait and its likeness.

The exhibition has a few interesting portraits, I focused on the development of Rysselberghe and Toorop.

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Maria Sèthe at the Harmonium by Theo van Rysselberghe (1891)

Wow.

This is “Maria Sèthe at the Harmonium” (wiki) and depicts a close friend of the artist, sitting in a deeply concentrated and reflective pose.

The pointillism here is incredible. The velvet dress sparkles with a wonderful intensity. Her deep purple dress even more pronounced against the bright yellow-orange wood of the organ.

Van Ryss loves to “paint” the frame too.

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The Lady with the Blue Hat by Theo van Rysselberghe (1900)

This portrait is only 10 years after Maria Sethe.

It captures a much lighter (see dress), airier moment; the simple pleasure of a sunny afternoon.

Excellent contrast in the exhibition.

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Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeannette de Lange by Jan Toorop (1900)

Stunning.

The woman, Marie Jeannette de Lange, was the chairwoman of the Association for the Improvement of Women’s Clothing. 

She advocated for “Reform Dress” - i.e. without restrictive corsets that allowed women to move and breathe.

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The Connoisseur of Prints by Jan Toorop (1898-1900)

The subject of the portrait is Dr. Aegidius Timmermann in intense and quiet focus.

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Part 2 to follow

“Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection” exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London ✎

Earlier this year, I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see a special exhibition of the masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection (of Winterthur, near Zurich). 

It was a wonderful show - full of exciting paintings which had never been seen in England before.

Oskar Reinhart was born from a wealthy Winterthur family who ran a leading international trading company. More interested in art than business, he began collecting seriously in 1919. He eventually had to step back from the firm to devote himself fully to building his collection. This included impressionists and Renaissance works. He built a gallery which he then bequeathed to the Swiss Confederation, which opened to the public in 1970.

Rating: 4/5 ★★★★☆

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Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks by Francisco de Goya

Wow. Breathtaking. 

This painting was part of a group of twelve still lifes painted by Francisco de Goya.

Painted during the Peninsular War - within the Napoleonic Wars - against Napoleon’s France.  According to the gallery:

Still life must have seemed a neutral subject matter at a time of censorship and political upheaval. However, the raw realism of these salmon steaks, isolated from any context, their flesh rendered in blood red, suggests the brutality of war. 

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Man with Delusions of Military Rank by Théodore Géricault

A powerful and rueful painting.

This man is suffering from a mental illness.

Théodore Géricault was a painter of French Romanticism. This painting was created as part of a series of portraits (which were never exhibited during his lifetime) of patients in an asylum, around 1822.

It’s a touching and empathetic painting - his small cap, hospital tag, v. gaunt cheeks, and an anxious & distressed look.

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Laura Cumming, in her review “The week in art: Goya to Impressionism; Linder: Danger Came Smiling – review” (Guardian, Feb 2025), wrote an eloquent encomium about this painting which I enjoyed reading:

There are not many portraits you wait all your adult life to see, but so it is with A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank, painted by Théodore Géricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. This shattering image of a man with no name is in Britain for the first time, loaned by a small Swiss museum a dozen miles outside Zurich.

To see it with your own eyes is to have a sense of who this man might really be, whether the title seems right, and why Géricault painted him in the first place: all of them unresolved mysteries.

The man is gaunt and elderly and sunk in anxiety, or suspicion. He looks away from us towards some other world. He is dressed – or dressed up, perhaps by somebody else? – in white shirt, black gilet and cloth sash over one shoulder. Around his neck hangs what looks to modern eyes like a dog tag, numbered 121, and on his head is a tattered hat with red piping and tassel. Perhaps it is the hat of Napoleon’s military police, hence the delusions of rank. Or perhaps the tag gives the number of his hospital ward.

But all the historic interpretations of this painting – that this is a study of monomania, painted for a Parisian doctor specialising in madness – fall away when you stand before the actual portrait. Géricault has sat with this man in Paris, heard him breathe or even speak, watched his gaze slide away into the distance. Who knows where or for how long he has been confined. The portrait is so empathetic and dignified, but so loose in its excitable rapidity, that Géricault’s own state of mind becomes part of the picture’s content. It is anything but a diagnostic illustration.

One of a fabled series of 10 “insane” portraits, scattered after Géricault’s premature death at 32, it disappeared for years, eventually bought by the Swiss art collector Oskar Reinhart (1885-1965) in the 1920s. It has been hanging in his pristine white villa in Winterthur ever since. The private collection of this Hanseatic merchant became a public museum in the 1950s, and now a tranche of its greatest masterpieces has arrived in the once-private collection of his merchant contemporary Samuel Courtauld in London. Goya to Impressionism is a jewel of an exhibition.

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The Wave by Gustave Courbet

A powerful seascape by the French Realist painter Gustave Courbet.

I’m always so delighted to see an artist paint the foamy white bubbles on the crash bursting of a wave, or at its collapsing peaks.

They’re a force of nature which the artist seizes and then pours onto his canvas for our delectation. See also: The Wave by Gauguin (right). 

This painting was - for its time - quite radical. Important for his stylistic (thick and expressive) brushwork - textured surface created by thickly applied paint via a palette knife. This would be influential.

Fellow blogger Debra (“She who seeks”) recently posted about Hokusai. This painting also traces its inspiration to those magnificent Japanese woodblock prints of the 19th century. 

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The Hammock (Le Rêve) by Gustave Courbet

A feeling of carefree escapism?

Being one with nature. This was early among Courbet’s ouvre.

According to wikipedia, it was “submitted to the Salon of 1845 at the Louvre in Paris, but rejected by the authorities.”

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Marguerite de Conflans Wearing Hood by Édouard Manet

Just wonderful.

Manet’s loose impressionistic brushwork crates a canvass “texture” to her delicate garments and accentuates her thoughtful and engaging gaze. The dark background really illuminates her presence alongside those diaphanous fabrics. 

It’s a beautiful portrait.

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Self-portrait by Paul Cezanne

I’ve never seen Paul Cezanne as a younger man. He painted this when he was only 27. Claude Monet bought it.

Aged 41.

He seems measured, deliberate & composed - and yet perhaps a little anxiety in his hand raised to his cheek? 

It’s also a bit of a dark painting and the overall effect is a bit inscrutable?

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Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Honoré Daumier

From Miguel de Cervantes.

Bold colours, loose brushstrokes, and almost abstractions.

It’s a funny painting - I’ll have to think about it more.

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The Little Reader (La Petite Liseuse) by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Excellent - it’s that feeling of quiet inner peace.

Camille Corot was the teacher of Berthe Morisot. I think this is an interesting connection. 

Here he paints a woman entranced by a novel.

The posture, the face, and the environment all suggest a sense of serenity. 

Moreover, she feels so contemporary. Unlike the Rococo, she isn’t dancing, or posing alluringly, or doing anything at all. In fact, she doesn’t seem to care or notice the viewer - which perhaps invites the viewer to contemplate their relationship with the female object?

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Confidences by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Again, we see Renoir’s masterful use of light which adds to fleeting sense of the impressionist interaction. 

And, for me, once again ... a certain want in the visage. 

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Portrait of Victor Chocquet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Lovely painting.

It’s nice to see Renoir paint a man. Victor Chocquet was a French art collector (wiki).

There is something irresistible about Chocquet’s gaze, and a certain charm & delicacy to his personality.

I like the open shirt, the feeling of an easiness about him and perhaps he’s a little bit of a thinker.

The light flowery background is a nice touch.

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The Milliner by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Beautiful brushstrokes forming her blouse. A lovely painting.

A working lady engrossed, confident, careful, against a light-greeny floral backdrop of swirling petals. 

I love those small & loose wisps of hair at the nape of her neck.

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Barges on the Canal Saint-Martin by Alfred Sisley

Great.

Sisley is an underrated impressionist.

Once again, fabulous waves rippling the water capturing the overcast atmosphere of the surface of the water which contrasts with the graded wooden finish of the barges.

And the sky’s calmful clouds are a beautiful contrast to the energy of the water.

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The Break-up of the Ice (La Débâcle) by Claude Monet

Another wow.

Monet’s mind-blowing watery effect.

The unripplied surface, a soft palette of colours across every surface, and those white brushstrokes of ice on the surface.

I feel I need to put on a jumper looking at this !

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Blue Roofs of Rouen by Paul Gauguin

Another wow.

The palette saturation is wonderful - azurean sky, then green hills, blue roofs, and red-browny fields.

This painting doesn’t like like a Gauguin yet. 

And yet, even so, his use of negative space in the foreground adds, I think, an allegorical tone to the work. Once again, Gauguin uses humans in a large & overbearing field which, to me, evokes a feeling of gloom, pity and/or despondency. For example, see Harvest: Le Pouldu by Paul Gauguin:

Harvest: Le Pouldu by Gauguin.

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Château Noir by Paul Cezanne

Cezanne is a difficult painter.

He does something beautiful - but why? 

Is it the limited form, the limited colours, the limited use of perspective, the melding of objects near and far ?

Not sure, but it does work. And brilliantly - sometimes he’s paintings are absolutely engrossing.

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Still Life with a Curtain, Jug and Fruit by Paul Cezanne

Another one of Cezanne’s enduring themes.

It’s obvious why he’s described as the father of modernism. It’s his intellectual challenging of art in producing something that doesn’t cohere - but has an immersive stunning effect.

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The Sickward of the Hospital at Arles by Vincent van Gogh

This is new to me.

And I had already seen so much of Van Gogh recently.

Poor Van Gogh. This is a window into his world - having spent weeks recovering from a mental breakdown. 

People huddled by the heater, a heavy atmosphere, solemn and lonely.

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The Clowness Cha-U-Kao by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec doesn’t do much for me, I don’t think.

Cha-U-Kao was a popular entertainer of 1890s’ Paris and a recurring subject of his.

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At the Café by Édouard Manet

Exhilarating to see this.

Manet’s brushwork is fascinating - the richness, the loose strokes etc... I always love poring over the details of his paintings.

And his subject is focused on the everyday and it’s fascinating. A recurring theme is Parisian bars - e.g. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: 

I had already seen the twin to this painting at the National Gallery. It was a delight to see the other half at the Courtauld before it went to the National Gallery.

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Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto by Pablo Picasso

Hmm ... not sure how I feel about a painting.

This was recently in the news, according to artnet:

Beneath the melancholy hues of Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto by Pablo Picasso, conservators have uncovered a long-hidden secret—an earlier painting of a mysterious woman, concealed for over a century ... Painted in 1901, when Picasso was only 19, this artwork marks one of the earliest pieces from his renowned Blue Period—a phase that lasted until roughly 1904 and was characterized by a monochromatic palette dominated by cool cerulean tones. It depicts Picasso’s friend and fellow Spanish artist Mateau Fernández de Soto.

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Le Pilon du Roi (The King’s Peak) by Paul Cezanne

Wow .... I give up now.

Cezanne has won me over.

I could just walk into this painting.