Why does this lady have a fly on her head? | National Gallery
Summary
TLDRIn this video, a museum curator analyzes a 15th century portrait of an unnamed German woman from the Hofer family. She highlights details conveying the sitter's wealth and the artist's skill in creating a hyper-realistic image, down to each eyelash and fur trim. The curator hypothesizes why there is a fly on the woman's headwear - as a joke for viewers to demonstrate the painter's ability to create illusion. She traces this impulse back to early Greek painting and its radical illusionism, making images seem so real that birds would try to eat painted grapes. Though the portrait's origins remain mysterious, it came to the museum via a love story between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Takeaways
- 😊 The portrait depicts an unnamed German woman from the wealthy Hofer family in 1470
- 👩🎨 The identity of both the subject and the artist who painted this portrait are unknown
- 👗 The fine clothes and jewels worn by the woman signify her wealth and high social status
- 🌼 She holds a sprig of forget-me-nots, which may relate to love, marriage, or remembrance
- 👘 Her pristine white headdress exemplifies the skill of the artist in rendering fabric
- 🪰 A fly sits on the headdress, tricking the viewer into momentarily thinking it's real
- 😜 The fly is likely an inside joke that the woman would have appreciated
- 🎨 The extreme realism reflects how Renaissance art aimed to capture nature convincingly
- 😍 The portrait was a gift from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria, linking it to a love story
- 🔍 Close examination rewards the viewer with appreciation for the artist's virtuosity
Q & A
Who is the woman in the portrait and what clues do we have about her identity?
-We don't know for certain who the woman is. The only clue is an inscription indicating she was born into the Hofer family, but Hofer is a very common surname in that region at the time.
Why would the woman have worn expensive clothes and jewelry for the portrait?
-The clothes and jewelry, like the fur lining and gold rings, indicate the wealth and status of the subject. Fine portraits were very expensive so subjects wanted to showcase their affluence.
What is the significance of the forget-me-not flowers the woman is holding?
-Art historians think objects held by portrait subjects offer clues, but here the meaning is unclear. Forget-me-nots may symbolize love or remembrance, but we don't know if that applies to this portrait.
Why did the artist paint the intricate details of the woman's white headdress?
-The headdress shows off the artist's technical skill in depicting texture, light, and shadow. It also symbolizes the subject's wealth to be able to keep such a garment so immaculate.
What is the purpose of painting the fly in the portrait?
-The fly adds an element of visual trickery and humor. It fools the viewer initially into thinking it's real. This demonstrates the artist's ability to paint highly realistic illusions.
How does the fly relate to the origins of Western painting?
-The illusionism connects to stories of ancient Greek painters like Zeuxis who could paint grapes so lifelike that birds tried to eat them. The goal was to trick viewers with realism.
Would the portrait's subject have been aware of the fly when sitting for the painting?
-Almost certainly yes. The fly seems to be an intentional joke that the woman was likely in on at the end when she saw the finished work.
How did the portrait make its way into the National Gallery's collection?
-Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert gifted her the painting. She then donated it to the National Gallery as part of its founding collection.
Why does the curator say this portrait rewards close looking?
-There are abundant small details that reveal information and delight viewers, like the intricate clasps, pins, and stitches - plus the humor of the trompe l'oeil fly.
What is the overall importance of this particular portrait to the curator?
-More than a noteworthy work, this portrait makes her smile every time with its playful trickery. It also epitomizes painters' enduring ingenuity and skill.
Outlines
😄 Introducing the portrait and key questions
Francesca introduces herself and the portrait of an unknown 15th century German woman with a fly on her head. She poses two main questions - who is the artist and subject, and why is there a fly, which tricks viewers and shows the artist's skill in creating realistic illusions.
😊 Explaining the context and meaning of portraits
Francesca explains that in the 15th century, portraits were incredibly rare and expensive, reserved for the wealthy. The woman wears expensive clothes and jewelry, indicating her wealth and desire to convey status. The forget-me-nots may symbolize love or remembrance.
😀 The intricate details of the portrait
The portrait has many intricate, skillfully-painted details showing the artist's talent - the woman's smooth complexion, beautifully rendered clothes and jewelry, metal clasps matching her hands, and precisely depicted forget-me-nots. The challenging depiction of the white headdress also demonstrates the artist's abilities.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡portrait
💡illusionism
💡brocade
💡forget-me-nots
💡headdress
💡fly
💡illusion
💡love story
💡close looking
💡illusionism
Highlights
Having your portrait painted was unimaginably expensive, so you would dress in your finest clothes to look as presentable as possible
The fly landing on the woman's head is a visual joke playing with the illusion of reality in painting
The incredibly detailed depiction of the fabric and accessories indicates the wealth of the woman being painted
The portrait subject's smooth complexion and fine details show the artist's great skill in capturing lifelike qualities
An inscription provides a clue that the woman was born into the Hofer family, a common name locally
The forget-me-not flowers she holds may symbolize love or remembrance, but their meaning is uncertain
The bright white fabric of the headdress demonstrates the painter's skill in creating light, shadows and depth
Keeping fabrics perfectly clean and white would require great wealth to afford servants for laundering
The fly shows the artist's ability to trick viewers into briefly thinking part of the painting is real
The origin of painting lies in creating such realistic illusions that viewers are momentarily fooled
The portrait likely depicts the woman as young, based on her smooth skin and intricate details
The woman seems to be painted from life, not from the artist's imagination
Neither the identity of the artist nor the portrait subject are conclusively known
The portrait was a gift of love from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria
This painting rewards close looking and serves as an ongoing reminder of artists' tricks
Transcripts
Hello I'm Francesca. I'm an Associate Curator here at the National Gallery and
today I'm talking about this portrait, a woman from the Hofer family from about
1470 and I'm trying to answer the question
'Why does this lady have a fly on her head and what does that tell us about
the tricks the artists play on us?' [Music]
So, imagine the year is about 1470 you are having your portrait painted. Now
even if you're really wealthy this is unimaginably expensive. You might maybe
once, maybe twice in your life get to sit before an artist who's going to paint
you and commemorate what it is that you look like at that particular moment.
So you are going to get yourself ready in your finest clothes you're going to
do your hair you're going to make yourself as presentable as possible. You
go to the sitting you sit there maybe for hours in front of this artist. They
might go away work on the picture come back you're waiting waiting waiting and
finally you get to see your finished portrait
and there's a fly on your head. why on earth would there be a fly on
your head? Well I think this takes us right back to
the origins of painting this question and what it is that makes art so magical.
So when we look at this portrait here in the National Gallery we've got a lot of
questions. First question, who's the artist? And actually we don't know we
think they're probably an artist working in Southwestern Germany in, as I said,
around about 1470 but we don't know who the artist is we
think that on kind of stylistic grounds historical grounds, but we don't actually
have one single artist's name yet. And who's the woman? Well again we don't
know who this lady is sitting for this portrait is. We've got one clue which is
up here in the top left hand corner where
there's an inscription that reads 'Geborne Hoferin' which means she was born
a member of the Hofer family and that's amazing you might think oh goody we've
got a clue we can go from there but annoyingly Hofer is a really really
really common surname in Southwestern Germany so it doesn't actually help us
that much in tying down exactly who this lady is.
So really when we look at this panel and the portrait that's painted on it,
all the information we have is kind of in the picture itself.
She's not an old lady, she's not a young young
girl. I've landed on her being young-ish because if we look really closely you
can see that she has this amazingly smooth complexion, there's no lines no
wrinkles, and the artist has lavished incredible attention in painting every
single detail. So we can look at her eyes and you've got every eyelash picked out
there. She's got this beautiful face, unlined, kind of slight turning up of the
lips as she's kind of almost almost on the verge of smiling.
Like I said she's dressed in her finest clothes so we've got this black fabric
here but it's not just a kind of plain black fabric it's not matte, if you look
closely it's a brocade so it's been woven. It's got these amazing kind of
swirling patterns to it and that would have been incredibly expensive. She's
wearing that for a reason and that brocade actually that extends not only
just in her clothes but also in the background behind her she's standing
against again a kind of woven fabric background so all of these are kind of
markers of her wealth, indicators that she really has put on her very finest
clothing. If we look at even more detail we can look around her neck or around
her cuff and we can see that her garment is fur lined. Well,
really only they're like very very wealthiest people could afford a fur line
costume so again this is telling us that she's absolutely putting her best foot
forward in this picture. I love the detail of the metal clasps
holding this garment together because they're so intricate and lovely and I
think they work really well actually with the kind of the jointedness of her
hands and the way that she's holding her hands up to us here. Her hands as well
they've got more clues on because they've got lots of gold rings again
ordinary people don't have this kind of finery, ordinary people aren't sitting to
have their portraits painted either so all of this is telling us just how
wealthy she is and in her hands there's one more clue
for us, she's holding this little sprig of very delicate blue and white flowers,
forget-me-nots. Now normally if you're looking at a portrait from the second
half of the the 1400s and you have a sitter holding something, especially a
plant, art historians think that's like winning
the jackpot because that's a clue, that's included by the artist to give us some
kind of information whether it's why the portrait is painted at that
moment or who the person is or what their profession might be and we do have
some kind of tantalising glimpses with these forget-me-nots because
often they're associated with love, especially in german poetry of this
period, so is she holding forget-me-nots because this is a picture that's being
painted to commemorate an engagement or a marriage?
We don't know. At the same time think about the name even in english forget me
not, that's a flower that's associated with remembrance and not forgetting
people, so is this a portrait that's being painted
so that we remember this woman after she's gone?
we don't 100 percent know. Having looked at all those details we
have to get to this amazing white headdress that she's wearing. I
deliberately left it but it's really hard to avoid it you come at this
picture and there's this amazing kind of pale
swirl of fabric. It's an incredibly architectural bit of painting actually
to have the kind of sweep of the folds that sense of volume
but again these very sharp corners and points and folds. It's
something the artist has lavished a lot of attention on. It's also worth saying
that for an artist it's incredibly difficult to paint white like that
because how do you, if you've just got white, how do you create
light and shadow and depth and volume? It's a really hard ask and I think
that's why this artist has shown off their skill as much as they have with
this headdress. Every detail has been included so we can
look at the edges and see every individual stitch, we can look at the
pins that presumably kind of hold this headdress together or maybe even fasten
it to the woman's hair, we've got every single pinhead and the kind of
indentation in the fabric. It's absolutely beautiful as a piece of
painting and it's again about money. Imagine the
wealth you'd have to have to keep a piece of white fabric like that so
spotless and pristine and imagine all the servants you'd have to have to
launder it for you and iron it and even kind of put it on you again it's a way
of saying how well off this woman is and of course the headdress brings us back
to this pesky question, this pesky fly sitting there with its horrible googly
eyes and its transparent wings, painted in such detail that you've not
only got the spindly fly legs but even the shadow cast by those legs on the
white headdress. So what is this fly doing there? Why has
this artist included a fly on this lovely looking lady's head?
I think the answer is it's a joke and it's a joke that works on different
levels because on the one hand the fly has been tricked into thinking this is a
real headdress, so the flyers come and landed on it thinking it's real and it's
not it's painted, but obviously there's a double joke
because we looking at it think 'oh my gosh, there's a fly on that painting oh
my gosh' and in that moment that instinct to kind of
bat it away or be panicked that it's there,
the artist has tricked us, we've been duped because actually everything
here is two-dimensional. This is just paint
and the skill of the artist is that they've been able to take that paint and
a brush and a bit of wood and to conjure it into something that
feels so lifelike, we do believe even just for a second that that's a fly
sitting on that picture. She is living hundreds of years before the kind of
image saturated world that we live in. We've all got cameras in our pockets. We
can, any moment of the day or night, capture anything and everything around
us and she's inhabiting a totally different universe to that. For
so many artists for so many centuries capturing a moment in time and capturing
that sense of life likeness, that was the kind of ultimate goal, and I think that's
what this artist is doing here with the detail of the fur trim and with
every single eyelash being painted and, kind of gross as it is, with that fly as
well. They're saying 'look at me, look how I can capture the
world around me', and that impulse, that impulse to trick
us, to make something, to make this fiction of a picture that's so
believable, that takes us right back to the origins of painting. So painting in
the kind of western tradition is thought to begin in about the fifth
century bc in ancient Greece there's a famous painter called Zeuxis who
paints still lives and paints them in this kind of radical radical way with a
radical illusionism, whereby although they're fresco, so kind of painted
onto a wall, they are so lifelike that if he paints a bunch of grapes birds will
come and peck at them and knock themselves out on the wall. That's the
kind of myth the story around Zeuxis. So that's how we think of paintings
starting. It starts with that trick, with that moment of looking across a room and
going 'oh for a moment I thought you were there, I thought you were real and that
it was you not your painted person, but actually your physical person
here in the flesh'. This lady, whoever she is, this lady born
into the Hofer family, I think she must have been in on this joke because
there's no way an artist just kind of sticks a fly in there without her
knowing about it at the end right she'd have known and I think, for me I love
that because I look at her and I look at these slightly upturning lips and I look
at the fly and I think she must have been in on that. She must have
appreciated what that meant in terms of tricking people. She must have had, when
this portrait was finished, a sense of pride not only about how it captured how
she looks, but also that it was going to trick people. That friends and family
that people coming to view it, they'd have that moment of being duped by the
illusion. I like to think that in some way or other it is a bit of a love story
this picture, and although we don't know for certain, we do know that it gets to
us here at the gallery as part of a love story. So this is a picture that was
owned by Prince Albert the Prince Consort, husband of Queen Victoria and he
gives it to Queen Victoria as a gift and his encouraging she gifts it to the
nation. So, whatever this lady's story might be we
know that it comes to us by a bit of a love story.
It should go without saying this is by no means the largest picture in our
collection at the National Gallery I think you'd have a hard time arguing
it's the most important but it is a picture that really rewards close
looking and for me it's not only a painting that
makes me smile every time I come and see it but actually it's one that reminds me
that the very best artists always keep us on our toes.
If you'd like to know more about our collection you can click here or here
thank you so much for joining us, I hope to see you again soon
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