Dulwich Picture Gallery

This past Saturday I went down to Dulwich Picture Gallery, located in South London in an area called Dulwich (the gallery is appropriately named). There was a prep school and quite a few soccer fields, tennis courts, and parks - very quaint area! 

The architect of the building was Sir John Soane. His design is in an austere neo-classical style, appropriate for the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century in England. Dulwich Picture Gallery was the first public gallery in London (National Gallery opened in 1824,  same style of architecture). Soane began plans in 1811 and the gallery opened to the public in 1817. I will admit that I was a bit under-whelmed at first glance...but upon closer inspection, it really is a interesting building. The many brick recessions on the visage give the building a unique touch and the different levels of the roof lead the eye upwards like a staircase. From within, Soane manipulates the skylights to make an illusion of continuing space.

The collection of pictures inside was originally commissioned for the King of Poland, however after he lost his throne, it passed through many hands and eventually was bequeathed to "the nation" in 1811. It is quite a mix but there were some impressive Italian, Dutch, and English paintings I really enjoyed. There were also quite a few incredible wood inlay tables, porcelain vases, and an amazing tortoise shell inlay clock in the room housing Veronese, Raphael, and Reni.

Although I was interested in the gallery as a whole, I came specifically to see one painting - a Titian workshop Venus and Adonis that had just been restored and was only on view for one more week. 

The original work done entirely by Titian was sent to King Philip II of Spain and now lives in the Prado in Madrid. However, because the picture was so popular, the "workshop" of Titian, or all of his assistants, produced several copies. This is one of them. There are parts that are very likely to have been painted by Titian himself, such as the right arm of Adonis - one can tell because the musculature is done more expertly than the rest of the flesh. Of course, conjectures like these are pure connoisseurship and there is no record of which parts Titian painted and which his assistants painted while he watched over them. Having seen quite a few Titian pictures and studied him fairly extensively before I was proud that I could indeed detect the difference between different hands that were likely involved in the painting (though only after these were pointed out to me..) but it is exciting to be acquiring this kind of knowledge!