The National Gallery Madonna

A bold collision of past and present, The National Gallery Madonna (1994-2000) is a compelling postmodern painting from one of Peter Blake’s most important late bodies of work. In September 1994, Blake took up a residency as Associate Artist at London’s National Gallery. Tasked with responding to works in the collection, he worked with unusual vigour in the gallery’s basement studio, fired with inspiration from the Old Masters around him. At four feet in height, The National Gallery Madonna is among the largest paintings he produced. It is based on Bartolomeo Montagna’s The Virgin and Child (1485-87). Rather than slavishly copying the original, Blake has reinvented the painting in his own distinctively crisp, Pop-inflected style – the rich fabrics and softly-lit skin of his subjects are alive with tactile realism – and transposed his medieval Madonna into the interior of the National Gallery itself: a view onto Trafalgar Square, complete with Nelson’s Column, Big Ben and distinctly contemporary cars and buses, unfolds through the window behind her. He has also switched the Virgin’s face for that of Cecilia Chancellor, a prominent fashion model in the 1990s.

Elsewhere in his ‘National Gallery’ works, Blake took Renaissance Virgins to Venice Beach, and depicted a gang of Venuses by Cranach, Botticelli, Velázquez and others frolicking in landscape derived from Constable. Playing directly with the London context of its creation, the present work is a more focused and intimate reflection on Blake’s relationship with his artistic forebears, and a joyful example of the constant dialogue with art history and popular culture that continues to inform his practice. ‘You never stop learning how to paint,’ Blake has observed, ‘and what you learn changes all the time’ (P. Blake, quoted in M. Livingstone, Peter Blake: One Man Show, London, 2009, p. 192).

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