Celebrating 200 Years of The Nation’s Mantelpiece

Course Outline

23 Sep 2025 – Early Italian Painting and The Wilton Diptych

This session looks at the earliest works in the National Gallery, from the 13th and 14th centuries. Like most Italian paintings of this period, they were intended for Christian worship. They were painted as altarpieces, to decorate the fronts of altars or as crucifixes to hang in church interiors. Church men and women, and members of the social elite, owned small images of Christian subjects to stimulate prayer and devotion; an outstanding example of which is The Wilton Diptych.

30 Oct 2025 –   Netherlandish to Northern Renaissance: The Netherlands 1430s-1560s

Today, we will look at painters in the Low Countries during the early 15th century, most famously Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, who achieved a technical mastery of oil paint which made them celebrated throughout Europe.  In their large altarpieces, as well as in the small devotional paintings and portraits exhibited here, they suggested realities by their ability to paint the effects of light on surfaces both natural, like the human face, and artificial as in fabrics and furniture.

07 Oct 2025 –   Italian Religious & Secular Visions: Italy 1480 – 1500 & Venice 1450 -1570

Here we will explore early Tuscan and Venetian painting.  In this period, it was dominated by Titian (Tiziano) and three family workshops, active both locally and internationally: those of Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Jacopo Bassano. Veronese was renowned for his harmonious and decorative colour and brilliant illusionistic effects. His paintings won Titian’s praise and he attracted many commissions from the Venetian state, including paintings for the Doge’s Palace.

14 Oct 2025 –   Renaissance Mythology, Northern & Venetian Portraiture: Italy, Early to Late 1500s

This session will look predominantly at portraits by Northern Italian artists and as such reflect one of the most important pictorial genres of the period. Regardless of the identity of the sitter, the primary function of a portrait was to capture likeness and inner virtue, denoting that the sitter was worthy of the honour of being portrayed and in time, remembered.  From the 1520s onwards, the Protestant Reformation reduced the demand for religious painting in some parts of Germany and Switzerland. The violent destruction of such works in Basel in 1529 hastened the return of Hans Holbein to the court of Henry VIII in London, where he went on to produce portraits combining psychological insight with dazzling illusionistic skill.

21 Oct 2025 – The Florentine & Venetian High Renaissance: Michelangelo & Florence

We will explore the monumental grandeur of the figures in Michelangelo’s paintings betraying the fact that he was primarily a sculptor. Younger artists from Michelangelo’s native city of Florence, such as Pontormo and his pupil Bronzino, took up his ambitious and experimental representation of the human body to develop a new style, now often called Mannerism.  Bronzino’s elongated figures in contorted poses reflect the elegance of the new style. Such refined and graceful works suited his role as painter to the Medici Court in Florence.  Pontormo’s and Bacchiacca’s paintings were originally set into furniture and panelling in the bedchamber of the wealthy Florentine banker Pierfrancesco Borgherini. 

28 Oct 2025 – From the Antique to Northern & Italian Portraiture & New Art for A New Nation

This session will examine some examples of Northern and Spanish painting, but also prime examples of what were newly independent artistic genres, including landscape, still life, portraiture, and scenes of 17th-century Dutch domestic life.  The Dutch Republic in the 17th century witnessed one of the most powerfully creative periods in Western art. In the late 16th century, the predominantly Protestant Northern Netherlands declared itself independent from Catholic Spanish rule. A new art was born, and artists increasingly produced works for a speculative market which was determined by the demands of a new class of prosperous citizens.

04 Nov 2025 – Baroque & Chiaroscuro: Peter Paul Rubens

Today, we will look at Peter Paul Rubens, the most celebrated Flemish painter of Western art, who was actually born in Germany to parents who had fled Antwerp because of their Protestant beliefs. In 1587, his family returned to Antwerp, where Rubens eventually converted to Catholicism. He had an enormously successful career as a learned painter of religious works expressing the Catholic reaction to the Reformation (the Counter-Reformation). Rubens was equally successful as a painter to the courts of Europe, including England, and on occasion worked as a diplomat.

11 Nov 2025 – Baroque to Rocco: 17th-Century Italian Paintings

In this session we will consider two differing styles that emerged in Italy and were to affect the future of painting across Europe. One was idealised and classicising, as demonstrated by the works of Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, and the other, introduced by Caravaggio, was powerfully naturalistic.  Although profoundly different, both styles were based on a return to the study of nature. What emerged from these two different approaches are the characteristics of the Baroque – dynamic compositions, dramatic lighting, vivid use of colour and intense expression of emotion.

18 Nov 2025 – Empire & Decline – British Painting:  Great   Britain 1750–1850 – Constable & Turner

In the second half of the 18th century, British society portraits were painted by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and were painted on a grand scale in the European manner. George Stubbs’s equivalent representations of heroic racehorses were, however, uniquely British. Other family and group portraits by William Hogarth and Joseph Wright of Derby reflect more traditional preoccupations with mortality.  British painters also developed highly innovative approaches to landscape painting, while always keeping note of a wider European tradition.

25 Nov 2025 – A New Vision – Impressionism & Beyond:  Towards Modernity: Morisot, Degas and Monet

This final session will look at the rise of Impressionism in the 1860s and what happened when Edouard Manet shocked exhibition visitors in Paris with his unflinching scenes of modern life, painted boldly and using sober colours. His radical style made a profound impact on many artists. The German Adolph Menzel responded directly to his innovative compositional techniques.