The Covid Diaries 3: The National Gallery, Titian & Maes

Review of National Gallery exhibitions on Titian and Maes. In which the exhibitions are ok, and the National Gallery expects you to know their layout as well as they do

Back at the National Gallery

By this time, I had been to the Wallace Collection and the Royal Academy. I felt like I was getting good at figuring out coronavirus safety measures and following all the rules. The National Gallery don’t make this so easy though, and it ruined my enjoyment of probably quite a good exhibition.

The National Gallery have two exhibitions on at the moment. Titian: Love, Desire, Death is a paid exhibition within their main galleries (not the Sainsbury Wing where they normally have their main exhibitions). Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age is a free exhibition just before the one-way system exit. We had tickets for Titian but ended up seeing both, partly because we kept getting lost. As a bonus we also saw parts of the permanent collection I hadn’t seen in years.

National Gallery Exhibition – Titian: Love, Desire, Death

The National Gallery exhibition Titian: Love, Desire, Death is a simple concept. It brings back together a group of paintings commissioned by Phillip II of Spain, in which the subject matter is mostly classical mythology from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All six paintings are reunited in a single room. This allows you to see the ways in which they complement each other. There is the artist’s skill in depicting both emotions and textures, and the smaller details you wouldn’t notice by viewing the works in their normal locations, such as the fact that most are still in their original frames.

Artworks have travelled from as far as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but the real coup is getting ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ from the Wallace Collection. This is the first time in its history that the collection has lent a work. A second room displays more paintings by Titian, and others by followers and contemporaries. Titian is a small exhibition and fairly academic as the National Gallery mostly is. Nonetheless it’s an interesting achievement in recontextualising these dispersed paintings.

Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age

Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age is a nice little self-contained monographic exhibition. A student of Rembrandt, I don’t know his work but recognised his ‘Eavesdropper’ series when I saw it. The exhibition is near the exit, and requires a circuitous route to access or exit. It was quiet, felt cosy due to the small formats of the paintings and low lighting, and was interesting. I particularly liked thinking about the original frames of Dutch Old Masters, vs. they types of frames they often have now. So I would recommend it to fans of Old Masters or who want to expand their personal art history canon. The only comment I would make is that, when the Netherlands are moving away from the term ‘Golden Age’, it could have done with a tweak of the title.

How did the National Gallery Handle Covid Measures?

Compared to my experience of the Wallace Collection and Royal Academy, poorly. Granted, it’s difficult in such a big institution to manage multiple visitor experiences: different one-way paths, timed tickets, etc. But the signage wasn’t clear for me. We got lost at one point finding Titian and were frowned at for having to backtrack.

When we exited the exhibition we got quite lost trying to get to the exit. As a silver lining we saw a lot of the permanent collection, which we probably weren’t supposed to but was nice. And when we decided to pop into the Maes exhibition just before leaving, it transpired that to get back to the exit again we had to circle back through half the galleries. Perhaps predictably we went on a few more accidental detours through the gallery. I felt overall we could have avoided a lot of unnecessary close contact without those one-way routes.

The staff seemed more stressed than in other places I’ve been since reopening, which was another negative. Everywhere has its own rules, but the National Gallery expects you to know them and is frustrated when you don’t. The Wallace and Royal Academy on the other hand patiently explained them. So I didn’t have the best time, but maybe you will fare better.

On its own merits: 3.5/5
Implementing Covid rules: 2/5

Titian: Love, Desire, Death until 17 January 2021
Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age until 20 September 2020