As anyone who recently saw them projected giant-sized at the Royal Hall of Industries during the recent run of exhibition Van Gogh Alive can attest, there’s something utterly mesmerising about the Dutch painter’s beloved ‘Sunflowers’. Now you have a chance to see the real deal up close and personal. Just take a road trip to Canberra for Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London.
Opening March 5 at the National Gallery of Australia and running through to June 14, the astounding exhibition will proudly display ‘Sunflowers’, as borrowed from London. But talk about sensory overload, because it’s not just the vivid creations of Vincent that will transfix. Oh no, the roll call's insane. The show contains 61 of the most era-defining European paintings on display. You’ll be snapping your neck so much you’re bound to get headspin.
Oh look, there’s Leonardo da Vinci’s 'The Virgin with The Infant Saint John the Baptist’, and is that JMW Turner’s ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey’? Oop, yes it is. Wowzas, it's Johannes Vermeer’s ‘A Young Woman seated at a Virginal’ and there’s Paul Cézanne’s ‘Hillside in Provence’. Throw in Rembrandt’s ‘Self Portrait at the Age of 34’? Don’t mind if we do. All this plus Renoir, Monet and more...
And if you get a bit peeved that the megastars of art history always seems to be blokes (same), then we thoroughly recommend booking tickets for online talk ‘Tackling the gender gap in art history,’ led by Dr Caroline Campbell, director of collections and research at National Gallery, London, on March 11 here.
We might not be able to fly to London as yet, but we can certainly bring a little bit of London to Canberra. Spanning 500 years of incredible creativity, this blockbuster exhibition is the first international touring show presented by London’s National Gallery in it's nearly two centuries of existence. Now that really is worth making the the trip to C-Town to bow down.
