Definitely been overdoing the poliblogging lately. So let us praise beauty once more, and in particular the humane beauties of domestic interior decoration, old style.
Frans Hals’ portrait The Laughing Cavalier is much better seen for real than in reproductions. It’s a picture of a young man in rude health and enjoying life: the facial expression is wonderfully subtle. The lustre of the skin is reminiscent of some of Raphael’s portraits. Young Hans is hidden away in a back gallery at the Wallace Collection, round the back of Selfridge’s – one of London’s better kept secrets. It also has a nice line in Canaletto paintings, which always evoke the urge to drop everything and head for Venice.
The great advantage of these small galleries is their human scale. The National Gallery was built as a gallery and it tends to overwhelm. Is it possible to spend more than half an hour there before getting a headache? The Wallace Collection, on the other hand, is in a building that was originally a private house. One can walk round it and see pretty much all of it in an hour, and it’s less overrun by tourists than the NG. Similarly Sir John Soane’s Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields is on a human scale – again, a nineteenth century dwelling – and contains two minor classics, Hogarth’s painting-series ‘The Rake’s Progress’ and ‘The Election’. Anyone who thinks those prudish Victorians invented moralising stories about personal destruction through folly should see the former. Anyone who thinks that dodgy electoral processes are a recent phenomenon should see the latter.
Further afield, the Frick gallery in New York is a gem. There’s a particularly striking pairing of portraits in one room, Thomas Cromwell, with the face of a real villain, looking angrily at Thomas More, unaware that the two would be united in the manner of their endings – put to death by a royal bully – even as they had been enemies in life.
The Frick too was a private dwelling first, which leads me to think this is a general rule: art was made to be lived with, not fossilised, so it’s best seen in surroundings that are fundamentally domestic. The galleries in Rome, for instance the Doria Pamphili, are quite similar – though no-one could ever accuse them of being small. They are, however, domestic in the sense that they were places designed to be lived in by cultured men of taste. It might be cruel to say so, but a purpose-built grandiose gallery like the NG is a tomb for paintings.
Here’s another modest proposal: replace the National Lottery with an art lottery by which the lucky winner gets to take one of the NG’s paintings for display in their own homes. Good for the paintings, good for the people, and good for the general level of cultural debate. It might even be good for the NG: they’re supposed to spread the word about art, and this would be outreach of the boldest kind.