National Gallery

David, Connor and I did the survey tour of the National Gallery today. A bit of Gothic, Renaisannce, the Impressionists. I love the tour for it shows how painting has moved through the centuries, from the early 13th century technique of adding gold leaf and using the deep blue pigment, the most expensive of the paints in religious painting, to the quick brush strokes of the impressionists and their desire to catch the changing moment.

We took a quick look at the Jan van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Marriage, before the tour began. So when the tour guide took us back there and stayed 20 minutes at the painting, it did not matter that we were at the back of the crowd for we had a clear view of it just a few minutes previously. The guide told us facts about history that the picture captured. I am not skilled at reading images. Black and white text always moves along, a paragraph at a time. I was learning how to linger at a painting for a long time, to study the depth of the colour, to notice how natural light is reflected on chandeliers and streaming through windows.
I have heard many lectures in the Impressionist rooms in past trips, every trip hanging out there long after a tour ends.

Hogarth is who I am going back to study next, for I am interested in the satire around the set of pictures called “Marriage à-la-mode”. On tours of the National Gallery, we often stop to see those works in the Hogarth Room. Each time I make that determination and never get to it – study up on Hogarth.

The 11:30 am and the 2:30 pm Taster Tours of the Collection are never the same pictures, though the general format is to show one create piece of work from each century. On Monday the tour guide focused on a book she reading called If Frames Could Talk. The author did the research on the style of frames used, the guide did the reading and I got to walk around the gallery having not the picture the focus point of the lecture, but the frame it was in. Perhaps my favourite line of hers was when she got close to show us how the work we were looking at was once a door cabinet, and then she pointed with her finger to show where the hole from that hinge had been filled and covered over.

Laynie and I did Lucinda Hawksley’s Highlights of the Collection tour of the National Portrait Gallery. I had been there the day before with David and Connor. When they saw the full length portrait of Judy Dench, white on white, Connor said, “Hey, that looks like Mum, David.” I thought he was talking about Janet and that she should die happy with that compliment. But no. I was wrong. He was talking about Judy Dench in a movie he had seen.

At the portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucinda pointed us to a book by Clare Tomalin’s The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft should we want to know about the woman behind that portrait. Next we saw Mary Shelley and heard about the night of lightning and thunder that triggered, Frankenstein. That was followed by a bust of Virginia Woolf, the group leader rattling off a long list of Woolf’s work and then apologizing that the main portrait they have of her is on loan. We stopped at other busts – perhaps 30 on three rows of shelves for Hawklsey had just given a lecture on what we can learn from the beards that we say exhibited there. That is the beauty of the tours for me, someone pointing out the facial hair, shaved half way back under the chin and then a full beard flowing from there.

We saw the new portrait of the two princes, William and Harry, a portrait that will catapult that artist to instant fame.

Sweet Charity

Monday all others went to Sister Act.

I, alone, slipped off to see Sweet Charity which has moved to the West London venue of Theatre Royal Haymarket. You will know some of the tunes: “Hey Big Spender”, “If My Friends Could See Me Now”, and “The Rhythm of Life”. I love what I think are the scenes that “trap” Charity Hope Valentine. With a name like that, it’s a slam dunk that the show is going to be about love, about a guileless and gullible woman who is not only trapped in a nightclub as a hostess, but she gets trapped because she can’t swim and is in danger of drowning in a lake, trapped in a closet of an Italian movie actor Lothario, trapped in an elevator with a nerdy accountant and trapped on the bucket of a broken ferris wheel. I came home making my feet resist dancing up Regent street. I was unable to restrain humming phrases like "The minute you walked in the joint / I could see you were a man of distinction / A real big spender / Good looking, so refined / Say, wouldn't you like to know What's going on in my mind?"

The others party of theatre goers from our house were already home were humming “Hey, lady in a long black dress ....”

National Gallery

I took my camera with me this morning to catch the early morning sun, having strolled through Queen Mary’s Gardens in Regent’s Park yesterday. I was seeing pink blossoms or the red bill of a duck, or a six-foot high waterfall and wishing that I had my camera with me. So it was in hand this morning as I was leaving, and Glen said to me, “If my knees felt better I would be going with you photographing old buildings and bridges. We can catch flowers and water anytime out at the Shuswap.” So I changed the direction I had decided to walk, moving down New Cavendish Street, pausing to steady my hands on fence or a sign post to take advantage of the new morning light.

I paused at Hynde Street at a Methodist Church for I thought the light was just right. I was focusing on the sky and the steeple, using my zoom lens the columns, and taking advantage of the pauses in the traffic to snap pictures of the church in its best form.

It was here a by passer who confirmed to me that what I was doing was fun, stopping his brisk walk to say to me, “Aren’t the buildings magnificent. Every time I come to London I bring my camera, though I don’t have it with me today. I don’t have any sense of what the architecture means. I just take the pictures because I love the look of the buildings.”

I slipped down another block, turned a corner and was startled to see the back of a street person who was only a head higher than the handles of his cart.

His shoulders slopped, his ankles were thick and his legs roughly textured.

I saw the glistening of brilliant fuchsia green on a Harrods bag that was tied to the handle of his trolley. Notable, too, was as a plastic bag underneath the Harrods bag with the word Gorgeous written across it.

I was at my subject’s back and listened to him was calling out words I didn’t understand to people across the street. I didn’t have the good sense to approach him and ask to take picture from the front. Next time.

Eighteenth century London and the royal family have been on the minds of many. During the year, Glen has been working his way through Dickens, by now reading about half of his works. Laynie reads madly on the royal family, so she was hanging out in the Tudor Wing of the National Gallery and has high on her list, a return visit to the Tower of the London, this time to really see the places she has been reading about. I slipped off on Monday to hear D. Shawe-Taylor lecture on Winter Halter’s Royal Family in 1864 and the Conversation Piece.

One lecture leads to another, for he highly recommended the new exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum called “Victoria and Albert: Art and Love”. I thumbed through the catalogue that goes with the exhibit: £45 and maybe four pounds in weight. With the recent cut back as to how many suitcases a person can bring on the plane, it is not the cost of the book, but the weight of material goods that precludes buying much in London. I only have room for 1 ½ more pounds of luggage, which makes buying anything except jewellery out of the question. And I can’t think of another piece of jewellery I want to buy.

More later ...