London Art at Last!

 Largely for Alex, but also because I'm not sure I can actually continue with a day by day account of our time in London, this post will be dedicated to Art Seen. Art Photographed. With maybe a few diversions into Historical Artifacts Ditto and Stately Homes. Do let's just find out together, shall we? 

Okay, I've found out even if the Imaginary Reader has not. I've spent quite some time looking through the various photos of art from the trip and, by god, this post will be only Art and almost entirely only paintings and not really all of them either because, my goodness!, we saw a lot of fine art. Fair warning: we're pretty traditional in our artistic tastes, Scott and I, so don't look for anything more cutting edge than this one for which I take full credit:

"The Curator of His Own Misery" (On temporary loan to the Tate Modern)

 I'm not entirely sure why the Tate Modern was the first art museum we went to; neither of us are that into modern art.  You may not notice the scattering of a half dozen Bic pens under the text in the above photo, but that, with the verbiage, was the actual piece of art on display. It was a fine moment for us each to quote the bemused Principal Snyder ("I don't get it"). But there were some highlights: we watched a couple of excellent videos, especially Wael Shawky's depiction of the First Crusades using very old puppets. I was also taken with this modern Tower of Babel--google to find a video with sound for the full effect:

 

 

 

"Babel" by Cildo Meireles

I'm pretty sure this one was also at the Tate Modern:

"Fire! Fire!" by Enrico Baj

It was another day that we traveled by bus to get to Kenwood a few miles from our rental. It was our first time on a classic London bus so naturally we opted to sit upstairs--and we got the very front seats too. I quickly realized that the nightbus scenes in the Harry Potter movies were based on real life; it is astounding how tightly those buses corner and just how much it looks like they are going to crash into other vehicles and run over pedestrians. 

Kenwood House is a charming stately home. The staff are all volunteers and so nice that you could take them for Canadians. We came in partway through a talk about the William Larkin paintings they have (see "The Curtain Master" section here) and the volunteer was utterly fascinating. As we paused to admire Sir Edwin Landseer's "Hawking in  the Olden Times," Scott had an epiphany about "telling a hawk from a handsaw" that was good enough for me to want a close-up of the painting:

Hawk and henshaw in action

But of course the real reason for us to be at Kenwood at all was that it is home to a Vermeer. And sure, I'd seen it there once before, but that was a long time ago. There was a talk (about a Rembrandt, I think) going on in the room, but I mostly had eyes only for "A Girl with a Lute."

"Does my hair really look like from behind?"

 The amusing thing about the Vermeer is that Scott felt it was hanging a little bit crooked and he had to make quite the effort to stop himself from straightening it. We wandered about the grounds for a bit and saw another lovely English robin as we did so, but this post is about capital-A Art so I'm skipping right over that here.

 Joseph Mallord William Turner left the bulk of his paintings to the Tate Museum so, naturally, we needed to go there. I was asked recently what Scott's favorite part of the trip was and I said, "most likely the Rosetta Stone," but on reflection it was probably seeing so many of Mr Turner's works in person. Just as I've learned to love "JAWS," over the years I've become quite fond of Turner, but mostly I like to look at sections of his paintings so I took a lot of photos of snippets rather than the whole work. (In part because I assumed they'd have a ton of full-painting postcards in the gift shop. I was mistaken. When will I learn?) So, some Turners (I don't rule out the possibility of some of these being from the National Gallery which we visited on another day):

Scott admires one of Mr Turner's "Whalers" paintings

"The Shipwreck" by JMW Turner

Close-up of same

Snippet of "Whalers" by JMW Turner

 

A snippet from "Burial at Sea"

And the full "Burial at Sea"

 Some Turner sketches/watercolors that I quite liked:

 I can hear Polonius in my head--or at least I feel that I've been sat here for far too long--so I'm going to continue with yet more Real Art in a later post. Do stay tuned! (Is that expression soon to go the way of hawks and hensaws?)