The nation's favourite painting
Sep. 6th, 2005 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOffer me a list of "The Nation's Favourite..." (book, seaside resort, love poem, whatever) and I'll rise to the bait, muttering about the pointlessness of the exercise and denouncing the unrepresentative result without pausing for breath between the two. Yet somehow I can't get excited about the news that Turner's The Fighting Temeraire is the Nation's Favourite Painting.
It could be poll fatigue, I suppose; it could be that the news throws these diversions into the proper perspective (though I doubt it: if anything, I feel more need than usual for pure entertainment). But I suspect it's just that Great Paintings play a very small part in my life. This list runs:
Of these, the Van Eyck would get my vote; and I award myself Brownie points for being able to summon a mental image of nine of them (the Piero della Francesca defeats me) although I admit I see the Hogarth as a series of engravings rather than oils. It cheers me to consider that in sneaking The Rake's Progress onto the list, the voters have put down a marker for comics - I beg your pardon, for sequential narrative art! But there's nothing outrageously out of place on the list, though I don't quite believe that all of these paintings, particularly the low scorers, have a large place in people's hearts.
The oddest inclusion must be The Last of England, the one token acknowledgement of the massively popular Pre-Raphaelites: what, better than Burne -Jones Laus Veneris? Better than Ford Madox Brown's own Work? For myself, I'd swap any of those for a William Morris tapestry or some William de Morgan tiles. But the question specified paintings.
When I lived within dropping in distance of the National Gallery, I actually spent more time in the National Portrait Gallery round the corner. The one painting with which I really have spent time is this one. But I do wonder how Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks managed not to make the - surprisingly secular, now I come to think of it - short-list.
It could be poll fatigue, I suppose; it could be that the news throws these diversions into the proper perspective (though I doubt it: if anything, I feel more need than usual for pure entertainment). But I suspect it's just that Great Paintings play a very small part in my life. This list runs:
- Turner's Fighting Temeraire
- Constable's Hay Wain
- Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
- Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait
- David Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
- Van Gogh's Sunflowers
- Raeburn's Revd Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch
- Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England
- Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ
- Hogarth's The Rake's Progress.
Of these, the Van Eyck would get my vote; and I award myself Brownie points for being able to summon a mental image of nine of them (the Piero della Francesca defeats me) although I admit I see the Hogarth as a series of engravings rather than oils. It cheers me to consider that in sneaking The Rake's Progress onto the list, the voters have put down a marker for comics - I beg your pardon, for sequential narrative art! But there's nothing outrageously out of place on the list, though I don't quite believe that all of these paintings, particularly the low scorers, have a large place in people's hearts.
The oddest inclusion must be The Last of England, the one token acknowledgement of the massively popular Pre-Raphaelites: what, better than Burne -Jones Laus Veneris? Better than Ford Madox Brown's own Work? For myself, I'd swap any of those for a William Morris tapestry or some William de Morgan tiles. But the question specified paintings.
When I lived within dropping in distance of the National Gallery, I actually spent more time in the National Portrait Gallery round the corner. The one painting with which I really have spent time is this one. But I do wonder how Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks managed not to make the - surprisingly secular, now I come to think of it - short-list.
