Week One - recap from other blog

This was the first week of my blog just as a re-cap cant work out how to put it in as a previous entry!! For all those only wishing to read this weeks please scrole to the last blog entry!

Week One – The Queens Collection/The Conversation Piece Posted on 13:23 on 18 January 2010 by you Edit Delete Private 33 Views
www.royalcollection.org.uk/microsites/theconversationpiece/MicroObject.asp
****************************Disclaimer*******************************
I haven’t written an essay or anything about art in over 5 years so please appreciate the drivel written below for its quaint naivety!
So, I have never been to the Queens Collection before but tip from me to you; go – its £5 entry (£4 for students and oldies) and with that you get free entrance to all the exhibitions they do for a year! This was excellent news for me as they have a FAB one coming up in March entitled something vomit inducing like ‘Victoria and Albert are in Love’, or similar, and it’s a collection of over 400 objects the royal loved ones bought and gave each other throughout the reign, ahhhh how cute. Anyway am defo going and will inform you of my thoughts when I do – LUCKY YOU!!!
Another top tip = The audio guide was very informative (and free!) and it turned out to be a necessity for full appreciation of the exhibition as the number of deaf old bastards in there with the volume pushed up to the max would have ruined any enjoyment for me if I hadn’t been able to drown them out with my own BOOMING head set.
This gallery is well worth visiting for the amusement of going inside Buckingham Palace alone and I also greatly enjoyed the wide selection of royal family related tourist crap in the excellent gift shop.
The exhibition I visited on Saturday was called The Conversation Piece; a beautiful collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century conversation pieces from the Royal Collection including work by artists such as Stubbs, Landseer, Hogarth and Zoffany and was especially great for me who enjoys all things Victorian excessively. The exhib begins with some truly beautiful Flemish pieces demonstrating how the tradition began, spreading in popularity throughout Europe in the following centuries and adapted to suit the changing tastes of era and nationality.
This exhibition, interestingly, was by no means just a collection of pieces in the Royal Collection, but demonstrated how the popularity of early Flemish Conversation pieces purchased by the Royal Family influenced both what paintings they themselves commissioned in following centuries (thus determining the success of the artists they patronised) but also the very nature of Conversation pieces in general. This is best demonstrated in a truly beautiful and elegant group of 3 paintings commissioned from Stubbs which marries the popular taste for horse paintings and conversation pieces at the time thus creating a hybrid of fashionable tastes of the time and creating a somewhat new genre of painting. The exhibition also discusses how the popularity of all things French in the18th and 19th century influenced Conversation pieces and how the genre of Watteau, Fragonard and Chardin was adapted to suit the British market by investing humour and satire in scenes of fashionable life. The supremacy of Rousseau (wanker) is also evident in the use of informal family portraits of young royals skipping amongst lush rural backdrops – yuck.
The use of conversation painting as tool of royal propaganda was also demonstrated well, particularly in the work commissioned by the ever amazing Victoria who, it turns out, was by far the most prolific monarch in the use of intricately engineered public images – presenting herself as the almost divine image of all things mother, wife and angel of the hearth. God she was fucking amazing. Apparently Queen Charlotte, about whom I know fuck all, was also prolific in this sense and commissioned some truly gorgeous group portraits of her, the heir and the spare. One of my favourite self aggrandising pieces from the exhibition was a scene from St James Park/The Mall commissioned by and containing a portrait of the Prince of Wales of the time, some guy called Fred. He, it appears, was keen to distance himself from the court and wished to project an image of himself as ‘man of the people’ therefore, choosing to have himself painted amidst the London mob complete with squatting dog, a woman with her tits out, another pulling up her stockings and a guy in the background pissing against a tree, haha!
All in all well worth a visit.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions for future outing and also if you fancy coming along! xxx
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