I’ve always been interested in art, though I don’t profess to know a great deal about it. You could say I know what I like, and I’m always interested to know more about it. Lisa’s talk raised very interesting questions. The star of the exhibition is the self-portrait by Van Dyck – his last before he died. He was very handsome, so I think he really was that gorgeous. But now I look at it and wonder - did he know he was ill, did he know he would soon be dead?
I had seen the Van Dyck before but it’s intriguing to look at it beside the Lucian Freud, so different, but another self-portrait of a man about the same age, looking at himself but also turning to look at the viewer, keeping with the exhibition’s theme. Of course Van Dyck is not really looking at the viewer, he’s looking beyond the canvas towards a mirror – but you feel his eyes engaging with yours.
Very often when you go to an exhibition you look at all the pictures, but you don’t really understand or think about how they were chosen, and why certain works were hung together. Lisa’s talk really gave an insight into how this exhibition came about: it really changes the way you look at it.
It was interesting to see some of the pictures from Birmingham, including from the pre-Raphaelite collection, and drawings by Edward Burne-Jones which aren’t often on display, in a new context. It was lovely to see an exhibition like this in Birmingham, instead of having to go to London. I volunteered in Stoke when the Staffordshire hoard came there. That was wonderful, to have such incredible objects in our own museum, and see the excitement of crowds of people and then of course discovering other things in the collection.
Self-portraits are intriguing in the age of the selfie, when so many people seem obsessed with taking photographs of themselves. There were people taking selfies in the exhibition – you could take photographs so long as you didn’t use flash – but I wouldn’t be bothered.
As told to Maev Kennedy
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