Five of the best at the National Gallery
My selection of what you should share with a first-timer
As part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, the learned and enthusiastic director of the National Gallery, Sir Gabriele Finaldi, has shared his top 10 ‘must-see’ paintings from the collection’s array of around 2,500 outstanding art works. Here they are. The Director's Top Ten
Now, I love a Top Ten as much as anyone, and everyone familiar with the National Gallery will have their own particular favourites, but I was slightly taken aback by Sir Gabriele’s choices. They are terrific paintings. Yet I think his selection is scholarly and surprising, rather than inclusive and familiar. Of course his role is to remind the public that it’s important not just to make a bee-line to the Gallery’s most famous works, including Vermeer's Lady at a Virginal (currently on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Scotland) or Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and make the effort to see lesser-heralded pieces. But I don’t think his choices are going to encourage first-timers or people who only know the collection via reproductions. Anyway, the National Gallery, being free, means you can pop in again and again and build up your knowledge. Plus, you can simply pop in to see one painting. But which one?
If you haven’t been to the National Gallery for a while, or have never been, or want to take someone who has never been, here is my Top Five. Seeing these will comprise a visit of about 90 minutes. This selection goes across the centuries from the 14th to the 19th. Plus, they are reasonably well known and you might recognise them, which always helps. Furthermore, I think they give a taste of the spirit of the National Gallery, which I believe to be modest and human-sized. These paintings are all wonderful, but they are also about human life.
It’s also important to remember that this is the NATIONAL gallery, not a Royal collection. I mean, it has elements of the famous Royal collection of Charles 1, dispersed widely through Europe after the Civil War, but (barring the first item), it is of the people.
Here goes. If you have other suggestions, please do put them in below.
Painted around 1395, this is one of the earliest paintings in the National Gallery and a thing of jewel-like beauty. It is a portable, hinged wooden painting showing Richard II on the left praying to the Virgin and Child, surrounded by an obedient squad of angels on the right.