Ne’erday
Anne Emily Sophia Grant (known as 'Daisy'Grant), Mrs William Markham (1836 - 1880) by Sir Francis Grant, courtesy Scottish National Gallery
I’m part way reading Laura Cumming’s recent memoir Thunderclap in which she writes about the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt, perhaps best known for his painting The Goldfinch. There is a painting by Fabritius, referred to as Family Portrait, dated 1648. We - or rather, art critics, art historians - know of this painting because “a ghost of this picture survives in a watercolour sketch and a pencil study, by two different nineteenth-century artists. The sketch was done on the spot, in front of the painting in the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam; the watercolour was made from memory.” But what of the original? It no longer exists. A fire destroyed the museum in 1864, two thirds of the artworks were lost forever. To know that the painting once existed is tantalising.
Time spent wandering around an art gallery is never time wasted. Yesterday afternoon, New Year’s Day - the Scots Ne’erday is sadly fading into disuse - we spent a couple of hours in the National Gallery of Scotland. Initially we joined the queue for the annual exhibition of JMW Turner watercolours in the nearby Royal Scottish Academy, but after 5 minutes we hadn’t moved and gave up. That show will be less busy later in January.
Back in the National we saw some old favourites. John Duncan’s glorious Saint Bride depicting two angels carrying the saint across the Sound of Iona, a cheeky seal swimming ahead of them through the choppy sea. A pair of Van Gogh’s, an orchard in Arles from 1888, olive trees painted only a year later while he was in the asylum in Saint-Rémy, the difference between the two startling, the calmness in the first against the wildness of the second. And Jan van Huysum’s extraordinary Flower Still Life with Bird’s Nest, from 1718 predating photography by 100 years, but with the detail from the light on the petals of the carnation to the drops of water on the leaves, you might think this was an image taken by a 21st century digital camera.
This painting however was new to us, my guess being that it was brought out of storage when the new gallery beneath the William Henry Playfair building was opened 15 months back, freeing up more hanging space. Or maybe it was on show somewhere else in the gallery, but it’s hard to believe that I hadn’t noticed it before, it’s well over two metres tall, stunning, hard to miss. It is a portrait of ‘Daisy’ Grant painted in 1857 by her father, society portrait painter Sir Francis Grant. I love the contrast of her red skirt against the cold winter snow, the way her feet are at right angles to each other, her eyes focused on her father or something further beyond, the detail of her gloves, why has she taken one off? Tantalising.