College Week 3/1 Art History

Monday mornings now start at 9.30 with Jo Kear's Art History lectures.  Today we were looking at portraits, how to 'read' them, and what they tell us about the artist and the sitter.  We looked at a wide range of types of portrait,  commissioned for differing purposes.  Holbein's portraits of Anne of Cleeves

 and Christina of Denmark in 1538,

were commissioned by Henry VIII when he was scanning the courts of Europe for his fourth wife.

Eugene Delacroix's self portrait in 1828 - confident, direct, colourful - was compared with his friends and cousin Leon Reisener's Daguerrotype portrait of him 14 years later - less direct, darker, more anonymous somehow.  

We looked at Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl earring, and considered why and how some portraits lose touch with the identity of the sitters.  

Jo introduced us to a National Museums and Galleries of Wales portrait of Kathryn of Berain, whose history is somewhat mysterious.  Note - to flag this up with Jo and with Wales Women's Archive for a possible presentation at a future annual conference.  

The National Portrait Gallery has commissioned a series of imagined lives of some of the unknown people in some of their paintings, with an exhibition at Montecute House in Somerset.  The link is here.  It might be worth a visit together with a trip to textile and print shows at galleries in Somerton and Wells.....

Co-incidentally, I picked up a flyer at the RWA today for a new dramatic series being put on in the Alma  Tavern this autumn, where writers have been invited to create short plays based on the characters shown in a series of old photos culled from a market stall in Berlin.  More info is here.