Cotman in Dulwich

I went today to the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  This is one of my favourite galleries, notwithstanding that it is south of the river, and I have sung its praises before.  This time I took a friend who had never been there, thinking that she would like it as much as I do.  Thankfully, she did, so that was a success.

Dulwich is currently showing as their temporary exhibition some watercolours, drawings and engravings that John Sell Cotman made during the course of three trips to Normandy undertaken after the end of the Napoleonic wars meant that British tourists could once again visit France freely.  This is a lovely little exhibition.  Cotman was a fine draughtsman, who liked and understood architecture but also had a good eye for human detail, so his clean, meticulous renditions of houses, churches, ruins and street scenes are sometimes enlivened by frisking dogs and cats, or exact sketches of the different sorts of headgear sported by the local women.  I read in the caption to one watercolour that Cotman's use of colour was sometimes criticised at the time for being too loud, but I liked it.  He does use rich deep colours, by the standards of his time, and is all the better for it.  There are also some pictures of the region by other artists of the time, including Turner.  The show runs until early January, so you have time enough to catch it.

London Bridge station is being bewilderingly rebuilt, and having gone through a ticket barrier I don't think we should have, we took a strange and marvellous route up a tunnel and platform and over a bridge to get to where we should have been going, which turned out to be not quite where the member of transport staff we asked at the outset told us we should go.  Having discovered when we arrived at London Bridge that we had just missed a train, it took us most of the time until the next one to find the platform.  On the way back we found the shiny new concourse that we managed to miss on the outward journey.  And to demonstrate that luck about missing and catching trains does tend to average out, on the way back a train drew up seconds after we'd walked down the steps to the platform at north Dulwich station, and that was after I'd had to stop and top up my Oystercard at the machine because it only had 15p left on it.

On Wednesdays the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery organise free concerts at lunchtime in the chapel.  Today's was billed as a trumpet concert, and given that we both like music, and that we were allowed out of the gallery and in again as many times as we wanted during the day (so civilised) we went.  I was interested to see the chapel anyway.  It turned out that the lunchtime concerts were a platform for local young musicians, and that today's slot belonged to Dulwich College, but the boy who was supposed to be playing the trumpet was not well, and we had an impromptu mixed brass programme instead.  The only reason I would normally go to a school concert would be if a relative or friend of the family were playing in it, but young musicians need to practice on somebody, and it was only for half an hour.  At the end of this I had concluded that if there is anything more lugubrious than one boy learning to play the trombone, it is four boys playing the trombone at once.

A rather small boy who performed a rondino on the trumpet with an air of great seriousness and a crisp sense of timing did catch my eye.  He had a great name for a musician, of which I have made a mental note, in case he should go on to great things.  So far the Systems Administrator's and my best musical coup is having seen Kate Rusby play live in the upstairs room of a pub, since last month she celebrated nineteen years in the folk business with a concert in the Royal Festival Hall.  If in twenty years a Benet Parker is the new Humphrey Lyttleton or Alison Balsom, then I saw him in the chapel at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2012.

There was a retiring collection at the end of the concert, in aid of funds for a new piano for the chapel.  My friend, who can play the piano, murmured that they needed one.  The Friends are no slouches, though, raising about £200,000 per annum for the gallery.  Another funding scheme Dulwich has adopted, which I never noticed on my previous visits, is that you can adopt an old master.  I've seen zoos do this, and even gardens with particularly attractive trees, but not an art gallery, though since Dulwich have been doing it since 1988 I obviously haven't been paying attention.  You contribute to the restoration costs, basically, and are invited to meet the conservators and to the unveiling when it goes back on display, and can have its image to use on your Christmas cards.

Dulwich does its share of outreach work, and there were several clusters of primary school children sitting on the ground in front of some of the pictures in the permanent collection, and an art class going on in a room in the modern extension by the original Soane gallery.  The children were all very well behaved and seemed fully engrossed in the art.  I thought that was great.  Often, when you hear somebody who has achieved eminence in their field interviewed, and asked when they first got interested in so-and-so, or when they first knew they were going to make a career out of it, the reply is that they were hooked before they were ten.  So let them try out some fine art at a young age, so that tomorrow's people who might be able to make a living out of doing something visual (not necessarily as artists) while loving what they do can start discovering what rocks their boat.

There is a very nice modern cafe, where we had first of all coffee and cakes, and later on bagels and tea.  The bagels at the Dulwich Picture Gallery are absolutely first rate.  By the time we'd eaten, and drunk, and been to the concert, and looked at the permanent collection as well as the Cotman, we'd made a full day of it.