If you're an art lover, you can't go far wrong in London. Old Masters, Impressionists, Cubists, or just portraits of famous people- you can find them all within a fifteen minute walk of each other.
Here are three of my favorite artistic places to visit. They are great spots on a rainy day.
The elegant classical columns of the National Gallery have faced Trafalgar Square since 1838, and inside the fine old building is one of the world's great collections.
van Eyck, Botticelli, da Vinci, Valasquez, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Goya, Seurat, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh - they're all here - get the picture?
Two of my National Gallery favourites are shown on this page. J.M.W. Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire Towed to the Breaker's Yard" and John Constable's "The Cornfield". The Turner sunset and the Constable sky and clouds are breathtaking evidence of their talent.
By the way, if you have ever played the old Parker Brothers art auction game, "Masterpiece", you are in for several shocks of recognition here, starting with Goya's "Duke of Wellington."
Right around the corner from the National Gallery is this eclectic collection of Britons from Tudor times to the present. The people are front and centre here, not the artists, although some great ones are represented in the collection. Some of the highlights include Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, lots of other kings and queens, Gladstone and Disraeli, Faraday and Darwin, and 18th century courtesan Kitty Fisher (depicted with her cat as it reaches into a fishbowl!)
Of course, you can also see Elizabeth and Robert Browning as they looked in 1855, plus the Brontes, Jane Austen, Rupert Brooke, and Bernard Shaw.
One of the best things about the Portrait Gallery is the neat audio guide you can rent for a donation of your choice. It is a little CD player with lots of interesting stories, and sound bites from many of the late 19th century and 20th century subjects.
Well, by now you are really getting into the art scene, so you won't mind walking down past the Parliament buildings to Millbank to see the Tate Gallery.
The Tate has 3 major collections, and a space problem:
If you'd like to share my experience, surf over to the Tate Gallery Website and you can take a look.
When we visited in the spring of 1998, the Tate featured a wonderful exhibition called "Turner and the Scientists". The Turner masterpieces celebrating 19th century technology were placed side by side with Faraday's lab notes and Isambard Brunel's engineering analysis of a Great Western Railway elliptical bridge arch. (Yes, he did use calculus, but no spreadsheets were available for him back then!). Even the "Temeraire" came over for a limited engagement at the Tate, as did "Rain, Steam and Speed."
This page last modified on June 19, 2001.
