bookgazing (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bookgazing) wrote2012-03-26 12:51 pm
bookgazing) wrote2012-03-26 12:51 pm
An Art Full Return (terrible puns for the win)
The other day I had a spare few hours in London, so I dropped into the National Portrait Gallery. I specifically wanted to see the Imagined Lives exhibition, a group of portraits with subjects that have yet to be correctly identified, because Meghan told me it was interesting. They also had some of the newly released photographs from Scott’s Terra Nova expedition on display and I am a polar enthusiast, so that sealed the NPG as my destination for the day.
I’ve been to the gallery before, but if you’ve set foot in that building you’ll know it’s not an attraction you can see all of in a day and it is incredibly addictive. Both displays that I’d come to see were on a floor I’d never visited before so I got kind of caught up in trawling this floor for faces I knew something about. I lingered in the Science and Technology gallery, where there are pictures and busts of Darwin (Darwin in everywhere on that floor), Lister, Harvey, Stephenson etc. I wandered through some special cabinet exhibitions about Dickens and learned a bit about an artistic group I’d never heard of called The Souls. It turns out Edward Burne Jones (whose stained glass is monumentally cool) was involved with them. I also saw a Branwell painting of the Bronte sisters, which was particularly awful. He may have been the ‘secret genius’ but he was not a painter it seems.
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of famous men on display in the portrait gallery, but I also saw pictures of Mary Seacole, Emmeline Pankhurst and two sketches of proto-feminists Josephine Butler (shown in the picture below) and Harriet Martineau, which for some reason were randomly in the Science and Technology gallery. They campaigned against the poor treatment of women with sexual transmitted diseases, that’s sort of sciency I suppose.
And then on the way out I went and gazed in wonder at the free part of the Lucian Freud exhibition. His etchings are just absurdly absorbing. How do any of the staff in the gallery get their work done while those are on display? It’s so easy to get lost in his lines.
It often feels like everything interesting happens in London, so it’s nice when something I want to see turns up closer to home. The week before my trip to the NPG I went to see a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition in Birmingham. I understand that The Royal Collection holds many Da Vinci sketches and a large exhibition has been opened up in London to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. A small selection of sketches have been released to tour the country. I’ve never actually seen a queue at Birmingham art gallery before (although I hear the Staffordshire Hoard prompted queues out the doors when it first opened), so it was a bit of a shock to have to queue through two galleries. Of course that meant there was lots of time to look at the huge Edward Burne Jones drawings in another gallery.
I’m very much of the ‘don’t know much, but I know what I like’ type of art appreciator, so you won’t get any technical talk about Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings from me, but I did like them. That sounds so silly, I mean, it’s Da Vinci! Anyway, there were sketches of inventive weapons he’d designed, which reminded the fantasy fan in me of the Terry Pratchett novel (is it Jingo?) where the captured inventor first appears. He has all these fabulous ideas for abstract inventions and is horrified when Vetrinari outlines the way these inventions could be used in war. There were also a couple of sketches for a Da Vinci painting that has been lost. The fact that the sketches still exist is so cool, as it allows you to almost see right into a part of the past that can never be recovered.
My absolute favourite sketches though were his drawings of the anatomy of the hand and foot. The pages are covered in his notes and the lines of the drawings are so fine and the detail is intricate. That really brought home to me the fact that Da Vinci had sat over this piece of paper, touched it and left his mark on it. History girl hot flush.
I’ve been to the gallery before, but if you’ve set foot in that building you’ll know it’s not an attraction you can see all of in a day and it is incredibly addictive. Both displays that I’d come to see were on a floor I’d never visited before so I got kind of caught up in trawling this floor for faces I knew something about. I lingered in the Science and Technology gallery, where there are pictures and busts of Darwin (Darwin in everywhere on that floor), Lister, Harvey, Stephenson etc. I wandered through some special cabinet exhibitions about Dickens and learned a bit about an artistic group I’d never heard of called The Souls. It turns out Edward Burne Jones (whose stained glass is monumentally cool) was involved with them. I also saw a Branwell painting of the Bronte sisters, which was particularly awful. He may have been the ‘secret genius’ but he was not a painter it seems.
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of famous men on display in the portrait gallery, but I also saw pictures of Mary Seacole, Emmeline Pankhurst and two sketches of proto-feminists Josephine Butler (shown in the picture below) and Harriet Martineau, which for some reason were randomly in the Science and Technology gallery. They campaigned against the poor treatment of women with sexual transmitted diseases, that’s sort of sciency I suppose.
And then on the way out I went and gazed in wonder at the free part of the Lucian Freud exhibition. His etchings are just absurdly absorbing. How do any of the staff in the gallery get their work done while those are on display? It’s so easy to get lost in his lines.
It often feels like everything interesting happens in London, so it’s nice when something I want to see turns up closer to home. The week before my trip to the NPG I went to see a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition in Birmingham. I understand that The Royal Collection holds many Da Vinci sketches and a large exhibition has been opened up in London to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. A small selection of sketches have been released to tour the country. I’ve never actually seen a queue at Birmingham art gallery before (although I hear the Staffordshire Hoard prompted queues out the doors when it first opened), so it was a bit of a shock to have to queue through two galleries. Of course that meant there was lots of time to look at the huge Edward Burne Jones drawings in another gallery.
I’m very much of the ‘don’t know much, but I know what I like’ type of art appreciator, so you won’t get any technical talk about Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings from me, but I did like them. That sounds so silly, I mean, it’s Da Vinci! Anyway, there were sketches of inventive weapons he’d designed, which reminded the fantasy fan in me of the Terry Pratchett novel (is it Jingo?) where the captured inventor first appears. He has all these fabulous ideas for abstract inventions and is horrified when Vetrinari outlines the way these inventions could be used in war. There were also a couple of sketches for a Da Vinci painting that has been lost. The fact that the sketches still exist is so cool, as it allows you to almost see right into a part of the past that can never be recovered.
My absolute favourite sketches though were his drawings of the anatomy of the hand and foot. The pages are covered in his notes and the lines of the drawings are so fine and the detail is intricate. That really brought home to me the fact that Da Vinci had sat over this piece of paper, touched it and left his mark on it. History girl hot flush.
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Thanks so much for my Edward Burne Jones postcard by the way. I'm going to put it on my pinboard to remind me of the art available near by.
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(Anonymous) 2012-03-27 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-03-27 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)no subject