London’s National Gallery features works from western European artists ranging from about 1250 until 1900. The gallery, which is located near Trafalgar Square, has over 2,300 works, and admission to the pemanent exhibits, unlike other museums and galleries is free. Of course, you will have to pay for any extras, including an audio guide. Not all paintings have this feature. But what about the paintings? What will visiters get to see? As these works overlap several centuries, you will find that many styles, though a great deal of the works, especially those prior to the 1700s are religious-focused.
Religious work is not my thing. In fact, one of the only pieces which stuck out for me was the Incredulity of St. Thomas, by Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano. The artist’s use of colour and lighting made the work pop and from a distance, looked more like a gigantic diarama than an actual flat work. Other pieces just seemed a bit on the boring side, as they were all very similar. Yes, they were a product of their time, when religion was a very important aspect of life, but in reality, it is no different from music and television today. Everything seems to be a version of one another, no different from the five million dating shows, shows about huge families, or in the 90s, Friends rip offs. Then, just as now, originality, or even concepts of certain things were not seen as being a “good idea” by the Powers that Be (in the past, this meant the Church or the Monarchy, and today, by Hollywood or Major Executives who somehow dictate what we’re supposed to like or not like). It really wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1700s when things began to change.
After the Industrial Revolution, artists really started to focus on more everyday life, especially with the Impressionists in the nineteenth century. Unlike earlier artists, these works seem to be easier for people today to understand – we don’t need to be historians or religious scholars to interpret the work. Looking at a Renoir painting featuring women on a boat or a Degas with girls dancing seem to be much more universal and timeless than works about the Resurrection and even more so than those of the monarchy or aristocracy. If one doesn’t know about the individual, then it’s hard to really understand a work unless the information is looked up.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that one won’t enjoy the National Gallery. I in fact liked it very much. The audio guide was a great help to understand the story behind the works, and even gave tips on how to understand the works.
The National Gallery is open seven days a week starting at 10 am. It closes at 6 pm every day except for Friday, when it is open until 9.
