Displaying items by tag: National Gallery

The descendants of the original owner of a portrait by Henri Matisse have threatened London's National Gallery with legal action after the museum rejected a return request filed by the family's attorney.

The painting was commissioned by Oskar Moll, the husband of the subject, Greta Moll, in 1908 after the couple befriended Matisse in Paris.

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya's stark portrayals of Spanish aristocrats, intellectuals and fellow artists in a major new exhibition at the National Gallery in London aims to show him as "the best ever portrait artist."

The exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, brings together from around the world around 70 portraits by the celebrated artist who lived between 1746 and 1828.

The works make up almost half of the 150 Goya portraits that still survive today, and account for a third of his total known output.

The National Gallery announced that a pair of rarely lent royal portraits will be coming to London as a late addition to the landmark exhibition Goya: The Portraits, sponsored by Credit Suisse, which opens on October 7. Charles IV in Hunting Dress and María Luisa wearing a Mantilla, both painted in 1799, are last minute loans from the Patrimonio Nacional in Spain.

This is only the second time the paintings have ever been lent as a pair and only the second time they have ever left Spain. The royal portraits, which are of major importance to the artistic heritage of Spain, are in excellent, original condition and still in their original gilt wood frames having hung in the Palacio Real, Madrid ever since they were created by the iconic Spanish painter.

Most of the rooms in the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery remained open despite industrial action on August 4 by some of its staff opposed to the privatization of security staff. But it was a different story behind the Trafalgar Square entrance of the gallery. The wooden doors beneath the portico remained shut and the majority of rooms to the east and north of the Central Hall were behind temporary barriers.

Rooms containing 17th-century paintings, including works by Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as many works by British artists were shut

Portraits make up a third of Goya’s output – and more than 150 still survive today – but there has never been an exhibition focusing solely on Goya’s work as a portraitist, until this autumn when almost half this number will come together at the National Gallery, London.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is one of Spain’s most celebrated artists. He was an incisive social commentator, considered (even during his own lifetime) as a supremely gifted painter who took the genre of portraiture to new heights. Goya saw beyond the appearances of those who sat before him, subtly revealing their character and psychology within his portraits.

A rare medieval panel by Italian artist Giovanni de Rimini has been saved for the nation thanks to a donation from a US businessman and philanthropist.

Scenes From the Lives of the Virgin and Other Saints, painted around 1300-1305, was in the Duke of Northumberland's Alnwick Castle collection until 2014.

It was then sold at auction and a temporary export bar was put in place.

Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.

The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years.

With a record-breaking 6.4 million visits during 2014, the National Gallery remains committed to researching its collection and offering visitors a unique insight into the history and many stories that still lay undiscovered in its paintings. The exhibition 'Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece' (on view from November 4th to February 16th 2016) is the culmination of three years of research on Francesco Botticini’s monumental altarpiece (228.6 x 377.2 cm) of the Assumption of the Virgin, completed in about 1477 for the funerary chapel of Matteo Palmieri (1406 – 1475) in the church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence.

How can you maintain fame if people can’t say your name? This is one question that might have occurred to the 16th-century Dutch artist Joachim Wtewael if he had cared about lasting fame, which, apparently, he only sometimes did. Over the span of his well-cushioned life in Utrecht, Wtewael — pronounced, approximately, oo-tuh-vawl (even the Dutch have a hard time with it) — seems to have paid more attention to selling flax and buying stocks than he did to making art, even though art was his first calling and did bring him local renown.

Part of the “Exhibition on Screen” series, the film “The Impressionists and the Man Who Made Them,” directed and produced by Phil Grabsky, is a behind-the-scenes look at the sole supporter of the Impressionist group during the turn of the 19th century: the Parisian art dealer and connoisseur Paul Durand-Ruel. Produced in conjunction with the traveling show “Inventing Impressionism” — which has already been on view at the Musée d’Orsay and London’s National Gallery, and will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on June 18 — the film provides viewers with the opportunity to learn about Durand-Ruel’s career and his role in establishing the pillars of the modern art market.