I went to London today, to catch the current exhibition at the Queen's Gallery before it closes, and take in something else while I was up in town. This was a piece of strategic planning based partly on the weather forecast, which was for wet but not too wet. Rain all day rules out gardening, since I am not a masochist and do not wish to give myself a cold and lumbago in pursuit of my art. But very heavy rain is apt to end up with random underground station closures, while lightning takes out half the mainline signalling and level crossings, and gales bring down the overhead power, half the time, so London in severe weather conditions is to be avoided.
The Queen's Gallery by Buckingham Palace is showing The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy, until next Sunday, so I was cutting it a little fine to go. I'd been meaning to visit after we got back from Gloucester, and there simply wasn't time last week. I hoped that a wet Monday in October would be reasonably quiet, and so it was. I'd already seen the Lucy Worsley TV programmes (is there anybody who doesn't adore Lucy Worsley? She is wonderful) and am most of the way through her book Courtiers: the Secret History of the Georgian Court, and the Systems Administrator gave me the exhibition catalogue for my birthday, which I have held off examining in depth until I had seen the actual objects, so as not to dilute their impact, so I felt prepared for a dose of Georgians.
It is a good exhibition, and while none of the exhibits are of an inherently unfamiliar type (apart from one extraordinary cabinet that left me frankly baffled at the things people have managed to come up with) it's interesting to see the artifacts of an age brought together. The Georgians were very keen on side tables and footstools. Quite extraordinarily keen, though I wondered what you did with a gilt pier table whose surface was heavily carved. It wouldn't be at all convenient for putting a glass down on, in case it tipped over. The exhibition ends with examples of Georgian taste, in terms of the painters of earlier periods that were fashionable at the time. There are some good portraits, and a lot of military maps which would have meant more to the SA than they did to me.
I like The Queen's Gallery. The staff are friendly and helpful, and it has the swankiest loo of any gallery I visit. If you buy your ticket there, rather than through an agency or as part of a tour, you can get it stamped before you leave and it becomes valid for twelve months, so you can see the next exhibition or two at no additional cost, or go back to see the first one again. Coming up next are early photographs of the Middle East, which will certainly be worth a look, and a room full of things made out of gold, which might well be interesting (the RA made a good show out of Bronze). In fact, so far I have never been to a dud exhibition there, and while it probably helps that Her Majesty has a jolly good art collection, I think she also employs a talented curator.
From Buckingham Palace it's only another three stops down the Piccadilly line to South Kensington and the V&A, where their Constable exhibition is on for ages yet. They have called it Constable: The Making of a Master, and it looks at his early work and influences, artists he admired, and works he owned (mostly prints for reasons of expense), and lines up some of the major works next to his preparatory sketches. That's fair enough. A show containing nothing but his largest and most famous canvases wouldn't be a very big affair, and we would feel rather cheated when we could see most of them anyway for free in the National Gallery or the Tate. The result was interesting, though I must admit I didn't examine each of the prints chosen to represent his collection with quite the intensity it probably deserved. There is a limit to how many black and white lithographic studies of trees you can take on board at once. It is well worth a visit, however, and I look forward to comparing it with the Turner exhibition when I see that in a couple of weeks.
The V&A seems to be London's worst signposted museum, which is slightly ironic when it is a temple to design. I am beginning to learn my way around, but they don't make it easy for visitors. I was dealt a salutary blow by the chatty young man with incredibly white teeth on the ticket desk, when I looked at my ticket after claiming my Art Fund discount, and saw that without making further enquiry he had charged me the Senior rate. Do I really look that old? Presumably so, from the vantage point of twenty-something.
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