Painters' Paintings at the National Gallery; or, working your working space.

The Painters’ Paintings at the National Gallery is not the kind of exhibition I would generally want to pay money to see – too many pictures of people, I thought, too many portraits of the artist and his friends, when my preference is for landscapes and architectural spaces. Being in London for the Bank Holiday Monday, however, I had another look at the exhibition website and thought, hmm, there could be interesting stories about what the artists had thought about the paintings they possessed.

There were, but that’s not what made this the most enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition I have seen in a long time.

The curators were clear about what had inspired this exhibition: a gift from Lucian Freud of Corot’s The Italian Woman, donated to the National Gallery in 2013. From this began an interest in the private collections of artists, and what we can learn from them. This is a question they have explored through eight painters, with Freud, Matisse, Degas, Reynolds, Watts, Leighton, Lawrence, and van Dyck. Each is presented with a self-portrait, and the first two of these, Freud and Matisse, struck me with a follow-up question: what do we wear to work when we work from home?

©Musée Departement Henri Matisse

Both Freud and Matisse wear suits in their self-portraits, Freud with a grey suit with no shirt underneath, Matisse with a brown morning suit. The first was selected, I would guess, for the effect of grey cloth with pink flesh. The second, however, just looks like a suit he would wear in daily life, suggestive of Matisse’s status as a gentleman who wears certain kinds of suits in certain times of day. Both seem an impractical choice – surely you are likely to splatter paint on your clothes as you work – and I don’t know whether they actually wore these suits while they were painting. But what matters, what is more interesting, is that they chose to present themselves as doing so. It makes these suits their ‘work-clothes’, outfits worn especially to indicate one’s status as currently working, different from the clothes worn at home while not-working, or outside, when one’s audience is larger and more societal in nature. For anyone who has worked from home, this is a crucial question – what differentiates the work-you from the home-you when both are at home?

Walking through the rest of the exhibition with this in mind, I noted the prevalence of the painter’s smock – a more practical outfit, clearly, but also one which denotes the artist’s professional identity. The most interesting portrait, however, and one which gave me oodles of delight, was Watts’s Self-Portrait in a Red Robe, where he has dressed up as a Venetian lawyer from the Renaissance. Here is a man who, on deciding how to present himself in his self-portrait, thought that a costume from a different historical and cultural context would be the way to go. I love it, and will from now on aim to stealth-cosplay (as a Young Revolutionary from Les Miserables? As Lix Storm from The Hour? As Arthur from Inception?) at least once a week.

 © Watts Gallery

Another thought which I kept returning to throughout the exhibition was the question of work space. What does it tell us that Freud liked to look at contemplative women in his living room? Degas surrounded himself with paintings by his friends and rivals – what did he get out of looking at them? Suggestions for a new kind of brushwork, ideas for dynamic composition, different ways for capturing the world? My walls tend to be covered in historical landscapes involving water (Canaletto, Gallen-Kallela), with occasional pockets of nineteenth-century train travel – what does that say about me? My computer sits under an early modern Flemish interior and a nineteenth-century painting of an Alhambra courtyard – what kind of a work space do they create?

And this is where the crux of the exhibition lies for me; it’s about work, how we present ourselves physically when we work, what identities we assume when we are ‘at-work’, what kind of a space do we need to do our best work. It’s a question rarely raised beyond particular professional uniforms or health and safety concerns over ergonomic chairs, but it is, I think, worth considering. Who knows what I might produce dressed as Enjolras and staring at Caravaggio’s Bacchus all day long?