The National Gallery in London turns 200 years old on Friday, so what makes it so special? Founded in 1824, when public fine art museums were still in their infancy, this museum differed from rivals such as the Louvre (founded 1793) and the Prado (1819) in that they inherited royal collections. In contrast, the National started from scratch and deliberately built the world’s most systematic corpus of European painting. In the same thoughtful spirit, the gallery and the Guardian have compiled a timeline of 20 masterpieces. Here are five of them that will take you on a 600-year journey of insight, sensitivity and genius.
A young woman is sitting on a cushion on the floor, her back against her chest, her head buried in a book. Every detail is so realistic, from the silk and fur of her dresses to the way her closed eyes focus only on the illuminated manuscript. He might be studying in a cafe, his eyes squinting against the glistening modern world. But this painting was painted about 600 years ago in medieval Europe, where there was little in the way of science, technology or geography. Christianity shaped that Europe and is the heartbeat of this picture.
Of course it’s the Bible he reads. And she is not just an ordinary woman, but Mary Magdalene, imagined in medieval times as a reformed sex worker who followed Christ and was among his mourners. Next to him is a container of ointment that he applied to his feet. This character, both worldly and spiritual, helped the medieval church appeal to ordinary people, especially women. And Van der Weyden’s realism enhances this immediacy. The technical skill with which he depicts the visible world was unheard of just a few years ago. Suddenly, in the 1430s, Flemish artists began creating mirror-like oil paintings of real people in real space.
You’d think he’d be happy to show off his miraculous skills. Instead he uses them to reach into the invisible and inward. Reading religious texts was a way to cultivate personal devotion in 15th-century Europe. Communities of religiously minded ordinary women, called Beguines, grew up in northern towns and were sometimes viewed as suspicious. Van der Weyden lets us see this woman’s eyes wandering over the words, but her thoughts are a secret between her and God.
The 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari describes how people lined up outside a church in Florence to see an unfinished work by Leonardo da Vinci; cardboard paper. Typically, he never finished the painting. This may be what they see. This is the only surviving caricature by Leonardo and the only drawing to appear permanently among the National Gallery’s more than 2,600 paintings.
Could this be a door to his psychological secrets? Sigmund Freud thought that the two women resembled a conjoined pair of mothers. Born in Vinci, Tuscany, in 1452, Leonardo grew up with a stepmother, and it is difficult to say whether he even knew his unmarried birth mother, Caterina di Meo Lippi. Whatever you think of Freud, he is right that there is an uncanny quality to the intertwined forms of Mary and her mother, Anne, whose head appears to emerge from Mary’s shoulder.
It’s also odd that Anne has deep, sunken eyes like a death’s head. This can be interpreted theologically as foreknowledge of the mortal fate of the infant Jesus. But in a closely related painting by Leonardo in the Louvre, Anne smiles benevolently. If Leonardo had finished this painting, would he have softened it? It is typical of the greater freedom he took in his drawings, where he was able to experiment with crazy ideas. The sense of imagination flowing freely in every soft smoky line makes this one of the most hypnotic masterpieces in the National Gallery or anywhere on Earth.
We’re used to the idea of royal portraits. But the Republic of Venice, a city-state that lasted more than a thousand years, had no rulers. Instead, there was an elected doge who was supposed to symbolize the community, as Leonardo Loredan does superbly here. It is Venice. This resilient administration liked to call itself “La Serenissima,” and the features didn’t sound much more serene than Loredan’s.
The faintest smile enlivens her golden skin, warmed by the sun coming through an open window, as she holds her bright eyes fixed for Bellini to observe: You get a strong sense that someone is posing here, even though Loredan’s pose is not so calm and dramatic. He looks absolutely at peace with himself in his delicately aged skin. Bellini contains every wrinkle: the age of such a senior political figure is depicted here as a force that indicates mature wisdom.
It’s a shame Joe Biden couldn’t hire Bellini. While modern US presidents rarely manage to unite the entire nation, Loredan unites with Venice and its commercial dominance of the Mediterranean world. She wears a sparkly top whose floral pattern appears to be influenced by the Ottoman Empire. Loredan’s clothing, including his curved doge’s hat, showcases the luxury that Venice derived from centuries of eastern trade. This portrait assumes that the wealth and stability of La Serenissima will continue for millennia.
A woman watches herself in a long mirror – this is what it is called poetically in French soul. Is he looking into your soul? Or is he judging the social outlook he has to present to the world? In the watery pool of her reflected face, we see the gulf between the 19th-century woman’s true self and the discipline of her public image. As the novelist George Eliot noted at the time of this painting, “The human mind is a much more subtle thing than the external textures which form for it a sort of crest or clock face.”
This is one of the National Gallery’s latest acquisitions as part of its anniversary celebrations this year. But this is not Eva Gonzalès’ first appearance here, having also appeared in a portrait of her teacher Edouard Manet that she bequeathed in 1917 (which is co-owned by Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery).
Gonzalès defends the frankness of truth in this highly provocative picture. One thing he shared with Manet was a passion for the 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, whose ironic realism he imitated. Gonzalès challenges Velázquez here. As French art sought to capture the uncertainties of modern life in the late 1800s, painters were fascinated by the master’s cool and complex encapsulation of the entire social world of imperial Spain. If you want to see the connection, you can do so at the National Gallery, because this woman examining herself in the mirror has the same fragmented self as Velázquez’s Venus of Rokeby, staring somberly into the mirror.
It can be argued that modern art began with this bouquet of flowers. Vincent van Gogh, a self-taught, unemployed artist in his mid-30s, stepped off a train in Arles, France, in 1888. He was fascinated. The intensity of the Provencal sunlight and the brightness of its fruits and flowers instilled in him joy and hope. He rented a small house and believed that it could be a commune where artists could work together in harmony and share social faith. But belief in what? Art, God or utopia? These sunflowers express his ideal in all its vastness and despair.
Van Gogh painted a series of Sunflowers to decorate the Yellow House while he waited for his first and only artist friend, Paul Gauguin, whom he persuaded to join him there. The National Gallery has the largest. This is the ecstatic release of a person who feels he has finally found his purpose. The boldness of Vincent’s intimate first signature in blue on the rustic vase expresses a complete identification with this painting, a sense of finally putting his innermost self onto the canvas. It is impossible to separate Vincent’s emotions from his brush strokes. Objective reality is irrelevant here: the flawless interpretation of the material world that dominated European art, from Rogier van der Weyden’s room to Eva Gonzalès’s mirror, has given way to a feverish fusion of self and world.
Of course sunflowers look like this too, right? No, they’re not made of paint like Van Gogh’s flowers are so ostentatious. Deeply dug, crudely rendered grooves, ridges and clusters of color make every yellow and brown detail an expression of artistic freedom and autonomy. I am these sunflowers, these sunflowers are mine. Since we know how it ends, we can’t help but notice that the flowers are not very fresh. Her curls fading in the Mediterranean heat look like a foreboding; the large yellowish centers are melancholy signs that Jerusalem will not be built here.