When planning our trip, we selected a location in London that is close to multiple museums and we took advantage of our location at the Kimpton Fitzroy on both Saturday and Sunday.
Yesterday (Saturday) was our visit to the British Museum. We were there 3 years ago when we visited London with Abby and we will never get tired of this treasure house of history. Our location across the street from Russell Square means that it only took us about 10 minutes to walk to the entrance. Well, it would have taken 10 minutes but there were stores in between the hotel and the museum. Patricia is now the proud owner of a beret-style hat from the Highlands Shop. We had timed-entry tickets but the ticket taker did not seem too concerned that we were early and let us in immediately. I should mention that we learned a couple of days ago that this week has been “half term” which is like a fall break and means that places have been much busier than usual. We haven’t really been bothered too much by the crowds and feel fortunate we have had good access to the places we wanted to see.
The British Museum is massive and there are dozens of rooms—maybe more than 100. That means one cannot see everything in a single visit and it would be foolish to try. For this visit, we decided to spend time in the section devoted to ancient Assyria. Last year I read a couple of books about how cuneiform writing was decoded and the place names associated with the explorations and the history of the area that I read about were well represented in this section. For example, there were many wall decorations (sometimes called plaques) from the palace at Ninevah dating from the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. Calling what we saw “wall decorations” is misleading, of course. Some of the panels are 15 or 20 feet long and several feet high. They have detailed images of ceremonies, protective entities, and they often tell stories. What we saw was fascinating and combined with what I read about cuneiform writing, demonstrated just how difficult it must have been to decode / decipher.
We spent the bulk of our time in the Assyrian section. After a few short stops, we moved to another section neither of us had seen before: Asia. To get to the main gallery, we passed through a relatively small area which showed the multi-thousand-year history of the use of jade as a decoration. I just checked my pictures and found, as I expected, that I was so busy looking at the jade and reading about how it was processed and used that I forgot to take pictures. I was particularly interested in how tools to drill, shape, and polish jade were developed over millennia and how the development of tools and techniques influenced what could be done to the stone.
The Asia section was almost overwhelming. There were so many art forms and religions represented that we could have spent days there and not the relatively short time we did, I can keep track of one “god” or even a bunch of Greek and Roman “gods”, but the multiplicity of Asian (to use the exhibit’s term) gods was too difficult for me. I had to be satisfied with being impressed with the associated art and symbols without understanding anything about the religions.
It was still bright and sunny when we returned to the hotel.
It was not bright and sunny Sunday morning.
When Patricia looked out the window it was rainy and windy. We knew that we would not have to be outside for long in order to get to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but the weather did not look like it was going to cooperate at all. However, by the time we finished breakfast, it was almost as nice outside Sunday morning as it was Saturday morning.
We took the Tube to the closest station to the V&A. Somebody recognized some time ago that (surprise) the weather was not always conducive to walking outside and there is now a “subway” from the South Kensington Station right into an entrance at the V&A. Very civilized. The Victoria and Albert is immense and is another place which can not be comprehensively viewed in a single visit. [The Wikipedia link in the previous sentence leads to a good background article.]
We simply started where we came in: the Sculpture galleries. We first encountered sculpture from the mid 1800s to the early 20th century. There were more Rodan sculptures in that one gallery than I have seen outside Paris. Each of the pieces was not only carefully described but its influencers and influences were often mentioned as well. As we moved from gallery to gallery, it was like stepping back in time as the pieces came from earlier and earlier times going back to Greek sculpture.
I then went to the medieval art section—which was also sculpture. In the V&A, there are few paintings. There were a few pieces of [reconstructed] stained glass, but mostly in the medieval section there were memorials and carved religious artifacts.
Then I worked my way to a gallery I was very interested in seeing: The Rafael Cartoons. You probably know that “cartoons” in this context aren’t like Looney Tunes, but are instead the work an artist does prior to creating a finished painting. I expected to see relatively small—maybe no larger than 48-inches in size—line drawings like the Michelangelo sketches we saw in Florence last year. Was I ever wrong! These cartoons were monumental with the height being about 10 feet and the width going up to just over 16 feet. I thought they were preparation for paintings, but I was wrong again. They were designed to make tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I suspect they were intended to be exactly the size of the tapestries. I have two pictures from that gallery that at first glance will look nearly identical. However, one is the cartoon, and the other is the tapestry which was created from it. Apparently, there are many copies of the tapestries. Patricia and I spent quite some time contemplating the cartoons.
Patricia wanted to see the contemporary glass display so we went up to floor 3, where it was supposed to be, only to find that we needed to go down half a floor, turn right, go up half a floor after crossing a wide open space, and voilà! there it was. [The directions could have been better.] I don’t think either of us was particularly inspired by the contemporary glass, but just beyond that gallery was another which showed the development of the art of glass from ancient Egyptian times until the 20th century. Now that impressed us.
By this time, we were on overload; there was too much to see and absorb. Instead of taking the subway tunnel back to the Tube station, we decided that the weather was still nice and we would take the outdoor route instead. We crossed the street next to the V&A and saw the Natural History Museum. I went there in 1996 and ever since then I thought that was the Victoria and Albert. Memory is a funny thing.
Over the course of two days we saw a wide range of history and historical objects. We are fortunate to be able to visit places like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
I added many pictures to the London pictures page.
