Frances Homan, a Schools Officer at The National Gallery in London

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BBC Learning English
Talk about English
Private lives - Part 6
Frances Homan, a Schools Officer
at The National Gallery in London
This programme was first broadcast in 1997

Clip Frances Homan
I’ve worked at three of London’s major galleries - The National Gallery, The National Portrait
Gallery and The Tate Gallery - and it seems to me that they provide a very good showcase for
showing off this nation’s collection of art. And very importantly, they’re free to go in to and I
think that’s a very important thing.


Sue: In Private lives today we meet Frances Homan. Frances is 30 years old, and
she’s a Schools Officer at The National Gallery in London. It’s her job to
introduce students and teachers to one of Britain’s most important collections
of pictures. During the programme, Frances takes us on a tour of The National
Gallery and shows us some of her favourite paintings. She explains how they are
being used to inspire new work, and to teach many different school subjects,
such as history and maths, as well as art. Frances also talks about where she
lives, what she does on a typical weekend, and she introduces us to someone
she especially admires and likes spending time with. But now our tour begins.
Frances leads us into the West Wing of The National Gallery, where there are
European paintings dating from the 16th century.


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Clip Frances Homan
We’re now standing in front of a painting called The Ambassadors - it’s by Hans Holbein and
he painted it in 1533, in England, which was the year that King Henry VIII made his final break
with the church of Rome. It shows two men who came from France as envoys of King Francis
I, standing in a very strange space with a green curtain behind them and a very elaborate
marble floor with inlaid stone.


Sue: The ambassadors stand on either side of an array of astronomical and musical
instruments, which tell us a great deal about the intellectual achievements of
16th century Europe. But in front of the two men, on the floor, is large,
distorted object which has been the inspiration for a stunning new piece of art,
recently on display in the gallery.

Clip Frances Homan
If we move round to the right hand side of the picture, you can see that below the men on the
floor, is an extraordinary object. It’s a stretched out skull and if you see it from the right hand
side of the picture, it suddenly goes into perspective, into focus, so we think this painting was
originally meant to be hung perhaps on a stair case where you could see the skull, looking like
a real skull, only from the side - a bit like a trick. So one student, took this skull which he
loved, and made his own version of a stretched skull, but not two and half or three feet long as
it is here, but probably more like thirty foot long, which was displayed in a recent exhibition
here at the gallery, in the central hall - which is a very traditional room with marble pillars and
a marble floor - and suddenly here was this student’s new piece of work, astonishing people as
they came in.




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Sue: The National Gallery has a special programme for art students, allowing them to
use certain pictures like The Ambassadors, for inspiration. And, as we walk
from room to room there are copyists at work - art students who are painting
copies of masterpieces in order to increase their understanding of the originals.
The National Gallery collection is also used to teach many different subjects on
the primary school curriculum. With this in mind, Frances leads us to a display
of 17th century paintings.

Clip Frances Homan
A lot of my work at The National Gallery is taking children round, primary school children as
young as four, and sitting them down in front of pictures like this and getting them to really
look at them and see what they can find, and what they can imagine is happening in the picture.
This is actually a very new skill for a lot of them because they spend so much of their time
looking at fast moving images on films, television, playing with computer games and using
computers - so a still image is a novelty.


Sue: It’s clear that to get to know Frances, we need to appreciate not only the
gallery’s collection and activities, but the building itself. The National Gallery
was built in the middle of the 19th century - during the reign of Queen Victoria
- but recently a new wing was built, called the Sainsbury Wing.

Clip Frances Homan
We’re now walking through from the old part of The National Gallery, which was built in
Victorian times, through, over the new bridge, to the Sainsbury Wing, the new part which was
finished about 5 or 6 years ago, to one of my favourite parts of the gallery.



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Sue: In the Sainsbury Wing there are paintings from 1260 - 1510. Frances casts
admiring glances at one painting after another, and then she talks about her
childhood and how her interest in art began.


Clip Frances Homan
I was born in the North of England, but my family moved to the south very soon afterwards to
Sussex, just south of London, and that’s where I grew up and went to school. And when I was
at school, I spent more and more time in the art room - and I decided to go to college and do
Fine Art and French, because those were my two favourite things, and they still are, and so I
did that, and spent a lot time doing sculpture and doing painting, doing a little bit of art history
and really enjoying that more and more, and I still paint now and do a lot of drawing.



Sue: Next, Frances spent some time showing American high school students around
the great art museums of Italy and France, and she took a further Degree in Art
History - doing a special study of 15th century English staircases. She decided
that her ideal job would combine her art history qualifications with her love of
introducing art to other people.


Clip Frances Homan
I really do feel incredibly lucky to work here, I mean, I used to come to London and look at
The National Gallery, and it looked so grand, which it is in a way, and now here I am working
here - it’s just - it’s a lovely place to work. And also, it’s so satisfying because here are all
these pictures which people think of as very great things, untouchable, wonderful works of art


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from the past which you must stand back from and revere, and it’s so great and rewarding
when you get groups of children, or students, of whatever age, and you talk to them about
pictures and they’re reacting and responding to them and you’ve been the key in helping them
perhaps unlock some of those reactions.



Sue: Frances loves London because it’s where her work is, and she says she’s very
fond of the flat where she lives.


Clip Frances Homan
I live in west London, in a very quiet street, in a Victorian house which has three stories. Our
flat’s on the ground floor, I share it with my sister who works in the film industry. And it’s
very light and sunny. We’ve got a little garden at the back which I love and which we’ve got
lots of herbs and roses and things like that growing in. My favourite room in my flat probably
would be the kitchen, which is very light and sunny, overlooks the garden, and is decorated
with tiles that I painted myself, using actually a lot of the colours that you would see in the
paintings in the Sainsbury Wing here - very bright oranges and blues and pinks and yellows -
lots of bright colours, and I spend a lot of time cooking in there.



Sue: At weekends, Frances often entertains friends at her flat. Or she might take the
chance to visit friends who live outside London.




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Clip Frances Homan
On a typical weekend - if I was staying in London - which sometimes I’m not - I would
probably meet some friends and go shopping, go and see a film, probably go round to supper
with some of the friends, or maybe have them round to my flat and cook for them. And then on
Sunday, I might well go and see an exhibition, which of course I don’t have time to do during
the week, and, maybe go and visit some people who live in London, but farther away, in
Greenwich perhaps - it takes a while to get there, and go for a long walk.


Sue: Next, Frances introduces us to someone she especially admires and likes to visit.


Clip Frances Homan
Someone I very much admire is my mother’s godmother who was 100, two weeks ago, 100
years old! And she is quite an extraordinary person. She is fascinated by art and culture and
literature, and things that are happening today, not just things that happened when she was
young in the past. If you go and see her, she’ll say, “Now what about that new exhibition?”
And she’ll have read all the reviews. She’ll always be reading somebody’s letters in the original
French, and she wants to talk to you about these things. She’s got an incredibly lively mind,
and I think that she is somebody who is an example to everyone as someone who can grow old
but still be fascinated by everything. She’s incredible.


Sue: Frances herself has a strong love of learning, and teaching. She describes what
she thinks is the general attitude towards art in Britain, and how she hopes
people will visit London’s National Galleries, since they’re free and very user-
friendly - they have a lot of events, lectures and holiday activities for children.


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Clip Frances Homan
I think that people in Britain maybe are coming to know more about art. I’d say there’s a
problem with modern art in Britain - people either laugh at it or say, “My 5 year old grandson
could have done that in two minutes!” So that is a problem. Older art I think takes some
understanding and explaining which is tricky. So it just needs time spent on it, which not
everyone is able to do and of course not everyone is able to come and visit collections of art
like this, but we hope they can.



Sue: Now, we arrive at the last painting on our tour. A young art student is working
in front of it, putting the last brush stokes on his copy of this 17th century
masterpiece.


Clip Frances Homan
We’re now standing in front of a self portrait by Rembrandt. He painted it in 1669, which was
the last year of his life. He died aged 63 the next year. And I think it’s a wonderful portrait.
He’s against a very dark background, and his old face which he’s taking no trouble to disguise
at all - every wrinkle is there - the bulgy nose, which is a bit shiny at the end, and the bags
under his eyes and the drooping, sagging jowls under his chin, and the grey hair as well, that’s
set above a very simple, plain, rusty coloured artist’s smock, and he’s looking out at us - not
quite straight in the eye as he did in his earlier self portraits, but looking away as if he’s
thinking back on his life. And his hands clasped in front of him, as if they’re no good for
painting any more - or not as good as they used to be.




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Sue: To end the programme, Frances lists some of the reasons why she admires this
self portrait by Rembrandt. And as she does so, she reveals more about herself
and the qualities she admires in other people.


Clip Frances Homan
I really admire this picture because Rembrandt was having a very hard time in the last years of
his life, and yet he still managed to come up with this very noble, dignified picture of himself.
And self portraits are incredibly hard to paint, I mean I’ve tried to do it, and it’s really difficult,
you have the mirror - you keep moving because you’re the model, and yet he managed it so
successfully so many times and you get such a real feeling of what he was like as a person by
looking at this picture, it’s so honest - that’s what I really admire about it.