Ruth Leon recommends… Masterpieces From the National Gallery

Masterpieces From the National Gallery

 This year the National Gallery is sending 52 of its great paintings on a tour of Asia which will continue until the middle of 2024. This tour will build on the great success of the exhibition highlighted in this video. It was made in 2020 when the National Gallery took a selection of its best pictures to Tokyo, to be exhibited in the Japanese National Museum of Western Art.

This was the first ever large-scale exhibition drawn from the collection of London’s National Gallery to be presented outside the UK. Through an extensive selection of 61 masterpieces from the gallery’s collection, all shown in Japan for the first time, the exhibition gave an overview of the history of European painting by exploring the reciprocal relationship between British and continental European art.

There’s rather a long introduction in Japanese but it’s worth persevering as the commentary is soon taken over in English by the Natl Gallery’s Head Curator, Christine Riding (she’s got a much longer and more complicated title but it boils down to head curator).

She’s a bit stiff when talking to the camera but she really knows her stuff and is able to give a splendid forensic examination of the Gallery’s masterpieces, starting, unsurprisingly, with the Italian Renaissance. She then ranges, knowledgably, through Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age, into Van Dyck and British portraiture, Canaletto and the Grand Tour, to The Discovery of Spain. Riding then carefully leads us through an explanation of landscape painting, particularly that of JMW Turner. The final section of the exhibition was French Modern Painting in Britain which inevitably means Van Gogh.

If you watch this enthralling video (or any other long form video) on YouTube you will be plagued by commercial ads, often dropped in at inopportune moments. There is a way to avoid this for a small fee which is well worth it so that you can watch your shows uninterrupted. Or you can just click Skip Ads.

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