Fine art: Painters dwarfed by the pictures on their walls

Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck
National Gallery, London, until september 4

The paintings, apart from Degas and Matisse, diminish their owners. Reynolds, Freud, sad Leighton, even able Van Dyck – brought down by the Vendramins on his walls – have little to say compared with the grand, archaic body of Corot’s L’Italienne, the sphinx with the yellow sleeve that Freud hung humbly over his mantelpiece. Freud’s Corot would reduce the former’s self-portrait, and his nude, lit by the white light of dawn, to his tiresome obsession with the surface of flesh.