An unexpected visit to the National Gallery

The car started to make a funny noise as we travelled to London for a family visit. The idea was that we would stay in London from Thursday to Saturday and then set off to Eastbourne for a two week break. 

But as we turned off the M4 we noticed the car sounded a bit odd. Like our old school unleaded guzzling Ford Focus had transitioned into a whining elecric job. Freaky. On arriving at our destination a peek under the bonnet revealed a fluid leak. Not engine oil, but whatever it was, there was quite a bit of it. Too much to risk proceeding with our journey without getting it looked at. 

A visit to a garage on Saturday morning revealed that the power steering pipe needed replacing. Couldn't be done until Monday at the earliest. We were stuck. In London. Where there's always stuff to see and do.

Like arty stuff in an air conned gallery during yet another summer 2022 hot spell. And so we braved the sweltering Bakerloo line and headed for the effortlessly cool National Gallery. 

We hadn't visited for years, so it was like bumping into old friend after old friend as we wandered through the various exhibition rooms. There's Rembrandt as a young man and then as an oldie. The greatest self-portraits ever? And his epic Belshazzar's Feast. 

I wanted to see Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. There it was. Like, wow. The ghostly old ship being towed to the breaker's yard by the fiery, modern tug boat. That sunset. On the way we saw Gainsborough's portraits of gentry couples proudly posing on their estates, shooting a confident gaze at their  viewers. Placed next to tenderly intimate depictions of the painter's young daughters. 

Then the Monets and Reniors. Not to mention Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Chair and Wheat Field. It was the visual eqivalent of playing a setlist of all your favorite songs, with some welcome surprises thrown in. And this was a rushed 2 hour visit in which we sampled only some of the artworks on display in the grandeur of the National Gallery. All for free. To think, we could have been travelling to Eastbourne. 

Samuel van Hoogstraten’s perspective on art

On Saturday our children attended a Youth Conference at Grace Church, Westerleigh. While they were there Sarah and I visited Dyrham Park, a National Trust property which is not too far away from Westerleigh, making it handy for collecting the children at the end of the day. We had a lovely lunch and enjoyed a guided tour of the gardens before exploring the 17th century stately home. Its art collection includes a couple of paintings by the Dutch perspectivalist, Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678).

The artist, who honed his skills in Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio, hailed from Dortrecht. The town earned its place in theological history by hosting Synod of Dort in 1618. The Synod formulated the  so-called "Five Points of Calvinism" to rebut the five points of the Arminian Remonstrants. It seems that Samuel van Hoogstraten's approach to painting was influenced by Calvinistic thinking. In an essay on The Visible World. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Seventeenth Century, Thijs Weststeijn writes,

Van Hoogstraten’s focus on the painter’s careful examination of the details of the visible world can be related to his Calvinist background, and to the formulation in the Dordrecht catechism that revelation takes place not only through scripture, but also through the ‘Book of Nature’. The notion that creation is God’s artwork, and that the painter in particular should pay attention to this, are commonplaces in the international tradition of art theory.

You can see a fine example of one of van Hoogstraten's works in the image at the top of this post (from a photograph taken inside Dyrham House). At first glance you may think that I have taken a shot of a room with an open door which leads to a long corridor. But look again (click on the image to enlarge). The passageway with the white tiled floor featuring black crosses, with a sweeping brush and small dog in the foreground, is in fact a perspectival painting hung in a doorway.

You can read the whole of Thijs Weststeijn's fascinating essay  on Samuel van Hoogstraten’s art theory here (PDF).