Friday 12 June 2015

a visit to the Wallace

Today, for the first time ever, I visited the Wallace Collection.  It sits in a fine town house in a quiet square just behind Selfridges, where it has been for longer than I've lived in the south east, and entry is free.  Its twenty five galleries hold a world class assemblage of paintings, furniture and porcelain, and a covered rear courtyard holds a quite nice cafe.  Actually, I did go to the cafe once, over a decade ago, as it's a handy place to meet a friend away from the hurley burley of Oxford Street, but still, it's fairly pitiful to have never looked at any of the galleries until now.

That's because of the seductive charm of the passing and the temporary.  When a show of Rembrandt or Rubens or cuckoo clocks made out of papier mache gets a rave review in the Telegraph or the Guardian and a favourable mention from R4's Front Row, you think I must go and see that.  No time to be lost, it's only on until the nth of August.  When something is always there, like the permanent collections at the National Gallery and the V&A, it's easy to defer your visit until some unspecified later date when you'll be less busy.  Which is mad, as apart from anything else permanent collections are nearly always less busy than the visiting blockbuster exhibitions.  I have stood three deep trying to see Vermeer's paintings behind other peoples' heads at a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, while at the Mauritshuis in Den Hague the Systems Administrator and I had his view of Delft completely to ourselves.  Totally to ourselves, as the security guard must have decided we weren't going to try to vandalise or nick it and didn't even bother following us into the room.

I was meeting up with an old work friend I hadn't seen for months, and she opted for the Wallace over the British Museum's Defining Beauty: the body in Greek art (on until 5 July.  Such is my anxiety about not missing any temporary exhibitions through oversight that I keep a spreadsheet of what's on and their closing dates, ever since missing something at the RA that I really wanted to see.  I highlight those with only a month or so to go, when I get round to it.  And highlight the ones I've been to in a different colour.  Make of that what you will).

The Wallace was really good, and now that I've broken my duck I'll be back.  The French eighteenth century is not entirely to my taste.  The paintings tend to be a bit mimsy, and some of the furniture is off the end of the bling scale.  You can see why they ended up having a revolution.  And I have no idea what the point of quite a lot of the things was, other than that when you have a great deal of money you have to spend it on something.  At least you can keep snuff in a snuff box, but what on earth do you do with a glazed platter with a three dimensional eel, a crayfish and a couple of small fish stuck across the bottom of it?  But the collection is absolutely fascinating, even the hideous stuff, and there are some beautiful things.  A Rembrandt portrait of his son, anybody, and a smattering of Gainsborough and Velasquez?  How about a Dutch seascape that is so recognisably the short chop of the North Sea it brings back vivid memories of landfall after bumpy North Sea crossings.  Or a graceful glass vase I would have guessed dated from the 1950s, if the label hadn't told me it was sixteenth century Venetian, the lines were so timeless.

The rooms are fun too, walls hung in very brightly coloured damask.  I'm so used to seeing that sort of thing shrouded in half light to preserve it (other than at Alnwick Castle where the family had presumably taken the view that when it wore out they'd replace it, as they have been doing for the past few hundred years).  It is all totally over the top, and not at all the natural habitat of a rural minimalist like me, but great to visit.  For one morning only, more bling than you can shake a stick at, free and gratis.

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