Date published: 2006/05/21
As usual, the National Gallery in London has some good exhibitions on. Closing today (and then moving onto the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and then onto the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art) was "Americans in Paris: 1860-1900". The paintings were pretty much all of high quality. There were many from well-known figures like Whistler (including "Portrait of the Artist's Mother", but more interestingly "The White Girl"), John Singer Sargent (including an amazing portrait of Carolus-Duran), Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt (mostly the usual mother and child stuff, with "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair" being the best). But the majority of the works in the exhibition were by artists who are long forgotten (except by experts), and so worth seeing just for that.
The National Gallery also has a small exhibition (until 25 June) called "Bellini and the East", about the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, who from 1479-1481 worked for Mehmed II (Mehmet the Conqueror) in Istanbul, as part of Venetian diplomacy. Anyone who has visited the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul will have come across his name, and it is interesting to see how he is presented from the "western" perspective. There is not a heck of a lot left from Bellini's trip to Istanbul, and the exhibition includes only one Bellini oil portrait of Mehmed II and a few more general sketches. So an exhibition worth going to only if you happen to be near the National Gallery in any case.
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