I went to London today. My real business was with the RHS orchid show in Vincent Square, but I wanted to get maximum value from my travelling time and off-peak rail fare, and fitted in a couple of exhibitions first. It's a slightly back to front way of planning a day out to save the main event until last, when you might be getting tired, but I thought that if I were to buy any plants I would probably not be allowed to take them into a gallery. I might be wrong about that. I have never tried taking a carrier bag of orchids into the Tate, and if I were going to attack the artworks a small Dendrobium would not be my weapon of choice, but I was afraid that the staff might take a dim view, and even if they didn't it would be a faff carrying the plants all round the exhibitions without squashing them.
The exhibitions on at Tate Britain at the moment were not necessarily top of my list of things I wanted to see, but Millbank is very close to Vincent Square, and I was quite sure I would be able to get in on the grounds that (a) I have a membership card which offers immediate entry to all temporary exhibitions and (b) neither exhibition has received blockbuster rave reviews and they were most unlikely to be full (so unlikely I would put it in the same category of implausibility as Gladstone slapping Queen Victoria on the back the first time he met her and offering her a cigar. It's possible, but you know it didn't happen).
Salt and Silver, early photography 1840 to 1860, is rather good in a quiet way. It shows a small part of a very large collection amassed by Michael G Wilson, who in his day job is a film producer who has worked on the James Bond franchise, and is also an Art Fund trustee. The photos are visually attractive, in a soft, small way, and interesting as historic documents of vanished people and places. I am not a photographer and let the technicalities wash past me, apart from being amazed that the processes described could possibly have produced coherent images (and in my hands I'm pretty sure they wouldn't). So that was nice.
Sculpture Victorious is simply bonkers. The Tate has filled several rooms with stuff the Victorians made, apparently largely because they could. Busts of Queen Victoria, nude statues of nymphs and athletes with tight buttocks, some caught in the act of wrestling snakes or slaying eagles (what did the Victorians have against eagles?), huge strange contraptions for putting salt or candles in, elephants, dead birds. They used a vast range of materials (because they could), marble, imitation marble, ivory (poor elephants), pottery, wood, bronze, copper and zinc, plaster. Most of it was unremittingly hideous. I don't understand how an era that could produce Middlemarch and Jane Eyre could lose its way so utterly when it came to the visual arts, but there you go.
The orchids seemed less over the top than they would have otherwise, after viewing the Victorian sculpture. They were still quite overwhelming. When I visit Chelsea nowadays I have a rough idea of what quite a lot of the plants are. By no means all of them, and not the tropical displays, but on many of the stands I have a general idea of what I'm looking at, or direct experience of trying to grow some of them. With orchids my knowledge and experience pretty much end with the supermarket moth orchids on the kitchen window sill. Two large halls full of strange and unfamiliar flowers in every colour you can think of (except true blue) coming from every corner of the Far East and Latin America, that's something else. They were wonderful, and I wandered around gawping.
I made a few small (young plants) and modest (by orchid standards) purchases, after asking a couple of exhibitors if they had anything that would grow in the conditions I had to offer, frost free but no warmer in winter, west facing so only partial sunlight. People were extraordinarily nice. One man spent ages explaining Dendrobium to me, brushing aside my concerns that he was spending a lot of time over a potential six pound purchase. I suppose you only go into that line of work if you really like orchids. You certainly don't do it to become rich. And today's tentative beginner might be a keen collector in a few year's time, and might click on your website ahead of others because they remember that you were helpful to them, but I think mainly they are driven by enthusiasm. I'll see how I get on with my embryonic collection, and let you know whether they live and flower, or merely live, or quietly die.
Addendum Today's literary crib is from GK Chesterton, who would believe the impossible but not the improbable.
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