FAQ

I'm currently offering two services: (1) one-on-one Zoom lectures focusing on one painting (or a group of related paintings) at a time and (2) guided private tours through the National Gallery.

Zoom lectures can be purchased individually. Tours are customised, but are intended to be given after several Zoom lectures. This will help me understand a client's interests and objectives, and also give some purpose and structure to our Gallery visit.

I'm just a lifelong lover of painting who wants to help make art history more accessible and enjoyable for more people.

I also have a post-graduate diploma from the Courtauld Institute of Art, although my undergraduate education was in economics.

Good eye!

One reason is that I think that older art is often the most opaque to the untrained eye today. In many cases, this is because we are not as familiar with the subject matter -- often Classical or religious in nature -- as a contemporary viewer would be assumed to be. A little knowledge can go a long way in making these paintings more interesting for today's viewer.

Another reason is that I'm roughly working chronologically and it's going to take a long time to get to the early modern stuff.

So glad you asked! In general, I believe that ...

You will get more out of your National Gallery visit if you do some research before you go. The National Gallery is overwhelming. It’s huge and home to some of the greatest masterpieces in the world. It is virtually impossible to take it all in within a single visit (although that doesn’t stop most people from trying), and it's difficult to spend much time with any one painting while you're there. My Zoom lectures are designed to counterbalance this by giving you extensive insights into one painting at a time. This makes it exciting to finally "meet" the painting in person. Also, frontloading your education will help you to better understand and appreciate the rest of the paintings in the Gallery.

Art education can be preoccupied with slotting works into periods and styles. While a top-down approach can be very useful, it can also prevent us from appreciating the idiosyncrasies that make a particular artist, place, or painting special. I try to evaluate each artwork on its own merits before tying it to a broader art historical category.

Art education also attaches too much certainty to basic facts: artist, title, and date. Related to the point above, much of introductory art education is fixated on these datapoints – which are often not fixed at all. Attribution, dating, and especially titles are often much more debatable than art galleries would lead one to believe, and I like to acknowledge this upfront.

I am very interested in non-art historical contexts as well as the physical history of an artwork. With an educational and professional background in economics, it might not surprise you that I’m less focused on aesthetics and more focused on history. I don’t believe that masterpieces are created by singular geniuses guided by their personal visions alone; I think that artists are products of their own times so a lot of my research extends beyond the history of art. I also find questions of materiality (e.g., pigments), provenance, and conservation/restoration to be very interesting.

Please email me! My model is intended to be very flexible so maybe we can work something out.