What makes an iconic painting? The National Gallery’s top 12 works
A list of the museum’s most viewed pictures during the past year reveals that at times of crisis we seek art of feeling
A year after UK museums moved more or less online, what art do we especially want or like? The National Gallery’s chart-toppers for the year’s most viewed pictures — from lockdown in March 2020 until now, determined by the number of page-views on the gallery’s website — are varied and epoch-ranging. The top dozen (of a list of 20) happen, marvellously, to encompass art’s history: from Van Eyck’s pioneering oil paint realism in 1434 to Monet anticipating abstraction in 1899. Yet the selection is intriguingly far from representing the scope of Trafalgar Square’s 2,300-work collection. Rather, it is revelatory of 2020-21’s moment of artistic taste and need, and of audience preferences, which museums could bear in mind as they reopen and plan their futures.
The people’s choices have certitude. They are strongly composed, sharply defined, brilliantly coloured images: Titian’s ultramarine sky, Van Gogh’s yellow of happiness, the stately green backdrop of “The Ambassadors”. They are also peaceful, domestic and, Turner’s elegiac “The Fighting Temeraire” apart, optimistic. The only mock-fierce note is Rousseau playing tigers: “Surprised!”’s big cat, modelled on an animal in Paris’s zoo, transposed among surreally enlarged houseplants. Nothing in this list is threatening or even exotic: landscapes are local — the Thames, Suffolk — and extend no further than a Normandy garden.
What we crave is wellbeing in familiar nature. Is there a more crystalline painted example than brightness at noon in “The Hay Wain”? Yet the first British audiences ignored it; only at the 1824 Paris Salon, Constable recorded, did French painters raise the “alarum in my favour”, acknowledging “the richness of texture, and attention to the surface of things”.
The surface of things is a basic joy of painting, and reproduces well in close-up on screen: the dabbed-on bristling seed-heads and hairy sepals in “Sunflowers”; the lynx fur and pink silk Holbein gives envoy Jean de Dinteville; light entering through a window, catching polished brass chandelier, silvered mirror, so convincingly that we feel, as the painter signed “The Arnolfini Portrait”, that “Jan van Eyck was here”. Perhaps intense painterly presence is a reason why interiors and still lifes (“The Ambassadors”, with its ornamental carpet, globe, lute, is both) take the top slots.
National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi says of these “indoor scenes with very dressed-up people” that “I am wondering whether they reflect our own experience of being enclosed in our homes during lockdown but yearning to go out and celebrate”. TV presenters Ant and Dec, posed as merchant Arnolfini and his wife in a hilarious bathrobe Instagram recreation, spurred interest in the Van Eyck. But a mood of secular comfort and solid naturalism dominates the list: unable to go out, we brought home the real world.
Only one of the top 12 is religious in subject — compared with a third of National Gallery paintings — and it too is a comforting harmonious image of refuge: Leonardo’s “Virgin” secluded in a grotto with infants Jesus and Saint John the Baptist. The babies consider each another as they are watched over by one of the most beautiful, diaphanous angels in art. Auden’s evocation of museum art in “Musée des Beaux Arts” — “About suffering they were never wrong/The old Masters” — strikes no chord with this list.
Classical narratives here are romantic comedies. Botticelli reverses the sexist order with a clothed Venus and a languid reclining male nude, post-coitally drowsy, sleeping through a conch shell blasting in his ear. Too excited to be decorous, Titian’s Bacchus leaps from a cheetah-drawn chariot as Ariadne pirouettes towards him, the dance-like turn accentuated by her swirling scarf: love at first sight is touching, awkward, absurd, true. All the list’s figure paintings are about relationships, often delineated through exchanged gazes. There are no solo portraits — human connection, not introspection, is the thread. Even Velázquez’s nude stunner “The Rokeby Venus” is attended by a plump innocuous Cupid, in a game of mirrors that is also about how we, the viewers, look.
What makes an iconic picture? Virtuosity matters — Velázquez’s control of a single, black-edged brushstroke tracing a line beneath the opalescent body from mid-back to calf; Turner’s freedom of swirls, slashes, sprays in the blurred rush of “Rain, Steam, and Speed” — but the alchemy remains mysterious. Of his “Bigger Splash”, David Hockney said: “It’s a memorable picture but you don’t know you’re doing them because there’s no formula. If there was a formula there’d be a lot more memorable pictures.”
We each have our musée imaginaire; this list carries weight as a collective one. It breaks rules of political correctness — exclusively white dead male European painters — yet is irrefutable: as former National Gallery director Charles Saumarez Smith said ahead of this week’s publication of his book The Art Museum in Modern Times, “the greatest works of western European art remain the touchstones of public experience of art”. For museums, the challenge of the 2020s is to redress under-representation — the Rijksmuseum has just, for the first time, moved paintings by women into its “Gallery of Honour” alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer; seven solo shows for women, two for men, are scheduled for 2021 at Tate Britain and Modern — without sacrificing prominence of the greats who, as this list celebrates, remain beloved and meaningful for audiences.
None of these dozen pictures is directly political, yet many mark social turmoil: Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire” lamenting the age of sail, Holbein’s broken lute string, maths book open at “division”, skull streaked across the floor, implying Reformation Europe’s tensions. These things are not narrated but felt: every work here is infused with emotion about its subject.
“To get up enough heat to melt those golds . . . it’s not everyone that can do it, it takes the energy and concentration of a person’s whole being,” Van Gogh said of his bud-to-wilting, life-to-death “Sunflowers”. The effect of that expressiveness still drives much of our response to art. The chronological gap in this list — nothing between Velázquez, last of the Old Masters, in 1647, and Constable in 1821 — is a snub to rationalism and the Enlightenment: at crisis times, we seek art of feeling.