return to Dulwich

I paid another visit today to the excellent Dulwich Picture Gallery.  I am very fond of this museum. Soane's building, the oldest purpose built art gallery in England, is delightful.  The permanent collection is good, and I have never yet been to a duff exhibition there.  The leafy streets of Dulwich Village make me feel I have slipped through a time warp, and am living inside a song by The Kinks.  It is only thirteen minutes by train out of London Bridge, with trains running every fifteen or twenty minutes.

I have persuaded a couple of friends to visit with me over the years, but both, while proclaiming it an enjoyable experience at the time, have shown no enthusiasm for a return trip.  Or as one put it in my hearing to another friend, it was very nice but I'm not sure we'll do it again.  Fortunately it is very convenient for one ex colleague who defected from North London to the expanses of Blackheath, practically on the doorstep, driveable and parkable, so when we were discussing where to meet today for an art viewing and some lunch, my tentative suggestion that I'd like to see the Hockney prints at Dulwich was seized on with enthusiasm.  Veronese at The National Gallery might have had it for magnificence, but Hockney scored for convenience, especially on a day when the builders were coming round that morning.

Due to the arrival of the builders, we met rather late, and so I had time for a proper look at my favourite bits of the permanent collection first.  There is a limit to how much fine art I can absorb in one day, but Albert Cuyp's Low Countries cows bathed in the romantic light of Italy, and Dulwich's splendid choppy Dutch seascapes, are so different to Hockney that the one doesn't spoil your appetite for the other.  The Gallery has some very good paintings from the Golden Age of Netherlands culture, and some splendid portraits.  I have a soft spot for Van Dyck's poor, beautiful, witty, scandalous Venetia Stanley, dead at the age of thirty three, and am always up for a couple of Gainsboroughs.

The Hockney is great.  I thought it would be, given that Hockney is a superb draughtsman with a lively sense of humour.  I hadn't realised that the Royal College of Art almost refused to let him graduate, a decision which if they'd gone through with it would have put them up there with the record executive who refused to sign the Beatles, or the one who said he'd take the Rolling Stones if they'd get rid of that awful lead singer with the rubbery lips.  I also admire Hockney because he keeps trying new things.  Some work better than others, but it's always more interesting than if he'd worked out how to do Hockneys by about 1985, and then just gone on churning them out for the next thirty years.

Having a late lunch at the gallery cafe works in that you get a table much more quickly than if you try to pile in at half past twelve, but is not so good in that by the time I got back to London Bridge it was already four o'clock, and I decided it was too late to try and fit in another exhibition.  I expect I'll be back in Dulwich at some point over the summer, since the next temporary exhibition is of Winifred and Ben Nicholson and their contemporaries in the 1920s.