RICHARD CARREÑO

Frederick Wiseman
Photo/Richard Carreño

NATIONAL GALLERY DOCUMENTARY INFORMS, DESPITE MUDDLED, PLODDING EDITING

Philadelphia |WritersClearinghouse News Service

Here are the things you don't learn in National Gallery, a new documentary by the esteemed American director Frederick Wiseman: that the museum was established in 1824; it's opened 361 days a year; it houses Western art from the 13th to 19th centuries; admission is free; and that it's been located on Trafalgar Square since 1838.

     Here is what you do learn: that the museum's director, Nicholas Penny, is a scholarly, amiable chap, whose hunched over-bespectacled look suggests a character actor from Central Casting. Penny, who has been director since 2008, seems far less impervious and imperial than the Gallery's legendary war-time director, the late Lord Clark, the prolific art historian who became wildly famous for his BBC-PBS television series Civilisation.

Whistlejacket: George Stubbs' Masterpiece

The author and Whistlejacket

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

By Richard Carreño

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

London

There's no lack of works by George Stubbs, the gifted 18th-century English animal and sporting painter, in museums around the world, particulary those in the United States and here in Britain. The largest number, with hundreds of oils, etchings, engravings, and other works on paper, is located at the Yale Center for British Art, thanks to the museum's founder and benefactor, the late, great philanthropist Paul Mellon. Mellon's keen interest in Stubbs (1724-1806) is also on generous display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Even the Philadelphia Museum of Art has several examples of his work. Over here, the Tate Britain easily fills a few gallery walls with the master's pictures.

 

Here and elsewhere, we see Stubbs as he almost single-handedly launched the figurative animal genre, in portraits and in landscapes that burst with the kind of real-life energy that invested many of the greenswards of country homes and stables manicured by Capability Brown's verdant hand.

Aristocratic horsemen, their grooms, and jockeys may often populate these scenes. But despite their presence, it's always the horse we care about most. Even in paintings in which horses don't figure, the setting is always sufficiently pastoral that, at any given minute, the viewer wouldn't be surprised if a foal or two trotted on to the canvass. Stubbs' marvelous dog pictures can stand alone. But they also summon up a country life wherein a mounted gentleman or two would never be out of place.