In the first of these two articles celebrating the two-hundredth birthday of London’s National Gallery, I showed some of its more famous works and personal favourites up to the end of the eighteenth century. Although the Tate Gallery is better known for more recent paintings, particularly those of British artists, the National Gallery must still be high on the list for anyone in London wanting to see paintings from the nineteenth century. Here are some of my personal favourites.
I’ve been writing recently about Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantic artists. While most of their paintings are in Germany, in 1987 the National Gallery bought Friedrich’s Winter Landscape from about 1811. This is notable as being one of the last oil paintings attested to use the blue pigment smalt. Perhaps the artist found it more suitable for its subtle colour transitions.
While the Tate’s collection of paintings by JMW Turner is the most extensive, several are in the National Gallery, and worth the journey through London.
Turner’s Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire from 1815 is overtly inspired by Claude Lorrain. Dido is seen on the left bank, dressed in blue. On the opposite bank is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.
Turner’s Fighting Temeraire is one of his most famous later paintings, and has proved a challenge to the conservation scientists at the National Gallery because of the artist’s presumed use of asphalt, which can inhibit the oxidative drying of linseed oil.
Turner painted his pre-Impressionist Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway in 1844, only five years after this railway bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead was brought into use.
The gallery also has several of the best paintings of John Constable, including his most famous work, The Hay Wain from 1821. Amazingly, this failed to find a buyer when originally exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. It did, though, attract attention from some of the French visitors, including the artist Théodore Géricault. The following year, Constable exhibited it at the British Institution and asked 150 guineas (£157) for it, but it again failed to sell.
Constable’s Cornfield (1826) is a view inspired by Gainsborough, looking down Fen Lane in East Bergholt, to the north of the River Stour, although its distant church is an invention of the artist.
Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries from 1862 is one of ten paintings shared between the National Gallery in London, and the Hugh Lane in Dublin, as part of the Hugh Lane bequest, as explained here. This is currently in Dublin.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, from about 1881-86, is another of the bequest, although this is currently in London.
Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert from 1878-80 was bought by the gallery in 1924.
In 1869, Claude Monet and Renoir painted together at a popular resort on the River Seine near Paris. Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère is his early statement of his Impressionist agenda, a plein air oil sketch originally intended to be turned into a finished painting, and another major work in the National Gallery.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Yole (The Skiff) of 1875 was bought as recently as 1982.
Camille Pissarro’s Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise from 1877 is another canonical Impressionist landscape painting in the collection, this time from a period when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise.
Edgar Degas’ final version of his portrait of Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando from 1879 was bought in 1925.
The National Gallery also has nine paintings by Vincent van Gogh.
Perhaps the most popular of all its paintings is his Still Life: Vase with 15 Sunflowers, known as the fourth version of this series, which has the most remarkable background of them all, with a unique metallic sheen that has to be seen.
Van Gogh’s Wheatfield, with Cypresses from the following year is unusual for his use of ultramarine blue mixed to form green.
Despite its reputation for stopping short of the more modern styles to be found in the Tate, the National Gallery has thirteen paintings by Paul Cézanne, including his Hillside in Provence from 1890-92, with its emerald greens and pale turquoise sky.
This has been quite a journey, from Duccio in the early fourteenth century to Cézanne at the end of the nineteenth, all in a single public collection. Read more about the history of the National Gallery here.