Exhibition Review: Botticelli to Van Gogh - Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London

📍National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

🗓️ 5 March – 14 June 2021

Rembrandt, Self Portrait at 34

This exhibition has been postponed for a year, in a storage facility in Japan for most of that time waiting for the pandemic to subside. The week I went there was a Covid scare in Sydney, but it didn’t ever get past two cases so there was little to worry about in traveling the three hours to Canberra. QR code scanning to the ACT Government app was required on entry to the museum, a standard process at any event during these times. Other than this, the exhibition felt like a return to normal pre-pandemic exhibitions. I have always had to book pre-timed tickets to the blockbuster show at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) when visiting for crowd control around the artworks.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, At the Theatre (1876)

The show itself is made up of 61 paintings, displayed across 7 rooms. Historically, the works span around 450 years. This is both good and bad. 

Starting with the latter, it seemed like the exhibition was checking boxes. Firstly, it’s ordered chronologically, based in certain locations. Starting with the Italian Renaissance - there’s a Botticelli and a Titian. Then we move to the Dutch masters, there’s a Rembrandt and a Vermeer, check, check. We move to Spain and we have a Goya. Check. English landscapes and we’ve got Gainsborough and Turner, check, check. These are paintings that the NGA didn’t need to do much with to draw visitors. Put Van Gogh’s sunflowers on the promotional material and there isn’t much more you need to do to make it a blockbuster in Australia. 

There was little flair or educational material to go with what we were seeing. There’s a brief overview at the beginning of each room, and a small description beside each painting. The walls are a neutral colour. It just doesn’t scream that love, effort and passion have gone into the exhibition. It seems like an easy moneymaker. And no doubt it has done its job. The public gets to see works of art by a variety of the big names and there is the demand, as every weekend the show seems to be sold out. 

The good thing about the unwieldy theme of this exhibition is, of course, that everyone should be able to see a favourite. I find I am always drawn to at least one painting I’ve never been attached to before. This time it was the Vermeer, Lady Sitting at the Virginal. It’s one of only four or five paintings in the room, called The Dutch Room, but also includes an amazing Rembrandt Self Portrait (Self Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640). John MacDonald, reviewing the exhibition for the Sydney Morning Herald when discussing the idea that people might not attend because they’d already seen them in London (like myself) said that the best way to think about it was to decide whether this kind of art was worth seeing again and again. I have only just begun to appreciate Vermeer, but I know this is one work I would see again this weekend if I could. I would drive the 3 hours to Canberra and the 3 hours back to be able to see these works again. I guess that is all you really need to know.