Today, to celebrate the fact that I'm on holiday, I went up to London to catch some exhibitions. Several things I've been meaning to see finish soon after Christmas, and I thought I might as well not leave it until the last minute, or the weather had turned snowy again.
First off was a small free display at Tate Britain, Family matters: the family in British art. I read an enthusiastic review of this when it was showing in Norwich, and never got round to going to see it there, but gathered that it was due to move on to the Tate in winter of 2012-13. It was not a large exhibition, just one room's worth, and if I had gone all the way to Norwich specially I might have felt rather short-changed, but it's worth catching as part of a day out if you are in the area. Central London in this context is a likelier area for most of us to be in than Norwich. It is on until 24 February, if you want to go and tut-tut at the profligacy of the Victorian Pulleyne family, forced out of their ancestral home by gambling debts, and the modern day parents and small children sitting eating chips on a bench next to an overflowing litter bin.
Tate Britain made a handy jumping off point for the Garden Museum, who are showing their nascent art collection in a show called Collecting cultures - from cabbages to kings. This only runs until 6 January, and the entire museum shuts over Christmas until 8 January. On this basis I'm not clear how the art exhibition can be said to run until 6 January. I should say you had tomorrow and Friday to look at it. Since 2008 the museum has been buying garden related paintings, drawings and etchings, and these are now on display, before reappearing in a planned new permanent gallery in four years' time. I'm interested in garden art anyway, and the clincher was seeing that they'd laid their hands on an Anthony Gross etching of kite flying in Battersea Park. I first encountered Gross in an exhibition in Eastbourne of original artworks commissioned by Lyons Corner House. He had a lively, whimsical style, redolent of 1930s graphic art, and I was enchanted. He is so much out of fashion that I have never managed to track down a book about him, though I suspect that even out of fashion his etchings would be outside my price bracket.
I love the garden museum, with its gently, slightly chaotic ambience and vagueness about dates. When I looked up the finishing date of the art exhibition last week it wasn't even on their website at that point, and I had to e-mail them and ask them. There were almost as many volunteers staffing the front desk as there were visitors looking at the pictures. I had a very nice piece of chocolate and cherry cake for £2.50, infinitely nicer than the cake I had the last time I went to Fortnum and Mason's tea room, at approximately one third of the price.
From Lambeth Palace it's a short walk up Whitehall to the National Portrait Gallery, to learn about the oldest son of James I of England and VI of Scotland, who would have been king of England if he hadn't unfortunately died when he was eighteen, in The Lost Prince - the life and death of Henry Stuart. The paintings in this span an interesting period, Tudor stiffness giving way to greater naturalism and animation in some of the later works. Poor Henry was clever, handsome, cultivated, athletic, beloved, and being groomed as the perfect model of chivalrous kingship. Instead we got his sickly younger brother, Charles I, whose performance as king can't have been improved by the fact that he was constantly compared to his elder brother by everybody, including himself. If I'd planned things better I'd have stopped in Whitehall to visit Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, from whose central window Charles stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649. Another time. You've only got until 13 January to see The Lost Prince.
From the National Portrait Gallery is is only another short walk to Somerset House, where The Courtauld Gallery is showing Peter Lely - a lyrical vision, also until 13 January. Lely's nymphs and musician frolic in delightful pastoral landscapes, showing a great deal of luscious flesh amidst implausible draperies. When I was a teenager I fell for Lely's cavaliers and ladies, with their bright, knowing expressions, their lace and their amazing shiny satin, and now that I am middle aged I still have a soft spot for him. This show is great fun, and afterwards I went and stared for a long time at my favourite Braque fauvist rendition of the waterside at Antwerp. The Courtauld only has it on loan from a private collection, and I am afraid that one day I will go, and it will have gone. Somerset House has created a temporary ice rink in the courtyard, as they do every year, and people were skating round in circles in the drizzle. I think that sort of thing works better on the Continent, where it is reliably colder. I avoid ice skating myself, since I shouldn't enjoy the skating bit, and breaking my wrists, arms or fingers would be a calamity.
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