London Bridge station is largely closed for the next year for building works, so if you want to go to Dulwich it's better to catch the line from Victoria, which you can intercept at Blackfriars if starting from points east. Our railway guru advised us to change at Herne Hill and travel one more stop to West Dulwich, but Herne Hill isn't that much longer a walk, so since it wasn't raining and the indicator board was showing an eighteen minute wait for the next West Dulwich bound train, we just walked from there. It takes about twenty minutes.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery is doing two good things at the moment. Their current temporary exhibition, on until 15th March, is of a Canadian painter I'd never heard of called Emily Carr. Not having heard of her puts me in the same position as about 99 per cent of the British population, so I'm not feeling too guilty about that. She worked in the first half of the last century, painting and drawing the trees and landscapes of her native Western Canada, and the canoes and totem poles of its first nation inhabitants (though relatively few actual people). Her work is absolutely marvellous, swirling with vitality, movement and strong colour. You can see a range of influences, so there is a touch of Van Gogh, a dash of Cezanne, a hint of Vorticism and another of cubism, but she is no mere copyist. Her trees breathe life and essence of tree.
The other thing Dulwich has done is buy a fake Old Master from China over the internet. There is a regular market in them, sold not with any pretence of authenticity but offered in the same spirit as reproduction furniture. Dulwich has bought one, put it in a nice old frame and hung it somewhere in the permanent collection, with an invitation to visitors to spot the fake if they can, and at any rate think about the nature of art and what it is we value in paintings. I thought this was an absolutely brilliant idea. The art critic of the Guardian thought it was dreadful, but since I seem to disagree with him about most things I'm not letting that put me off. I couldn't identify the Chinese imposter at all.
All will be revealed in April when the modern copy will be identified, and hung side by side with the original so that visitors can compare and contrast. I certainly want to go back for another look to see the two of them together. Copies are interesting the more you think about them. After all, it's generally accepted that Rubens had cohorts of assistants doing a lot of the grunt work for some of his paintings, limiting his own input to sketching out the initial idea and then adding finishing touches (and presumably executing any really difficult bits), while he himself was an accomplished copyist when needs arose in the interests of diplomacy.
After Dulwich we went to the National Portrait Gallery where Grayson Perry's series of fourteen artworks Who are You? are on free display tucked in among the permanent collection, also until 15th March. I adore Grayson Perry (I've a feeling the art critic of the Guardian doesn't like him either, or at least not his Reith Lectures, which I really enjoyed) and I'd watched the TV series about the creation of the works. If you like Grayson Perry and are tickled by the idea of Chris Huhne represented by a broken pot decorated with repetitive phallic patterns, smashed and glued back together with gold paste along the cracks, or if you find the concept of a TV reality star painted in the style of an Elizabethan miniature (complete with lock of hair in the back) amusing, you will love the display. If you don't like Grayson Perry you might as well wait until it's gone before visiting. There was one of his trademark maps on the way in, this one of his own mental state, which was as clever and tongue in cheek as his maps always are, but I was surprised to see a Philip Larkin corner. I wouldn't have had Grayson Perry down as a Larkin fan, but that's one more thing to like about him.
That was yesterday. This afternoon I went to a Plant Heritage lecture by Peter Gibbs, who was thoroughly entertaining, and I now know what the difference between air and ground frosts is. I ran into one of my former colleagues for the second time in three days, having met her at the Chatto gardens, and my old manager, so it was a mini plant centre reunion as well as a lecture. Plant Heritage do extremely good cake as well, courtesy of the WI. I saw from the posters studded along the road that the inhabitants of Stowupland do not want a development of 190 houses built there, which bears out my theory that most communities don't want more housing, despite the housing shortage at a national level. Hilary Benn, take note.
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