I don’t often visit the National Gallery for a number of reasons. The sole focus on oil paintings seems particularly old-fashioned, and the way they are displayed in rigid chronology is also troubling. I feel the weight of art history rather than enjoying what should be an excellent collection of artworks.
Perhaps that’s why I get drawn into looking at the frames, the wallpaper and the marble skirting boards as much as the artworks. And in the room dedicated to van Dyck, I paused in front of a portrait of Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I and grandmother of King George I. She is therefore, from one perspective, the link between the Stuart and Hanover dynasties, but this draws us into a history lesson.
She is also the focus of The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, a book by Frances Yates about the influence of this esoteric movement upon early modern Europe. Elizabeth was also the Winter Queen, as she and her husband briefly ruled Bohemia in 1618-19, before they were forced into exile as part of the opening shots of the Thirty Years War. Again, I am being drawn into another history lesson, and this painting is merely serving as an illustration.
But it serves also as a means of tangential thinking, in that art as research has a certain power to make connections between many different things. My interest in doing so is somewhat unresolved – simply connecting pieces of information in the aim of reaching something encyclopedic? Perhaps there is something educational which could come out of this process, a necessary palate-cleanser to the facts-and-dates approach to knowledge and learning.
