London: Aug 3: National Gallery Part 1

On Monday, August 3, 2009, I stole out of work to visit the National Gallery. It was such a beautiful day, I decided to walk along the park (St. James) to get there rather than take the tube. On the way, I took a few pictures.

The museum provides an incredible amount of detail on its paintings. Not only does every painting have a description, most (yes, most) paintings have audio guide explanations! There are thousands.

I visited about half the museum this trip:

• 16th-century paintings. In this section, I was amazed how vibrant the colors are. The museum must have the best-preserved (or best-restored) paintings from this era. Nevertheless, I found (as I expected) the section had too much religious imagery for my liking.
• 18th- to early-20th-century paintings. This section has all the painters you'd expect at a quality museum: monet (some decent ones), pissarro (half a room of his paintings), manet, gauguin, cezanne (half a room), van gogh, and degas (a whole room). Although photography wasn't allowed in the museum, here are some of my observations of this section:
  • There is a whole wall of Turners, including The Fighting Temeraire, which I had as my computer's desktop background for years. (I wish I could take a picture of the painting!) In person, the painting--the colors--were everything I hoped. Also, funnily enough, it's rated the greatest painting in Britain. I wonder if my previous choice of this painting shows that I'm subconsciously a Brit.
  • Seurat's Bathers at Asnières (Asnieres) was everything I hoped.
  • The museum has other good examples of pointillism besides Seurat. (All the good-quality examples of pointillism I've previously seen anywhere else were all Seurat.)
  • I liked van Gogh's A Wheatfield, with Cypresses.
  • Francesco Guardi and Canaletto drew good, detailed pictures, mostly of Venice.
  • Richard Wilson, an 18th-century painter, was an early romantic.
  • I can now identify how Renoir paints women.
• the special exhibit on French landscape painters, Corot to Monet. I was amused by this quote I spotted in the exhibit:

  "[Monet] takes pleasure in discovering traces of humanity everywhere; he wants to live continually in a human environment. Like a true Parisian he takes Paris with him to the countryside, he cannot paint a landscape without including well-dressed men and women."
  

  Emile Zola, "a close friend of Monet"

Though clearly a first-rate, well-presented museum (if you don't believe my comments above, simply examine the extensiveness of the gallery's web site), I'm surprised to admit I have fonder memories of other museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago. I think I enjoyed the Art Institute more because its scope is much wider/larger, meaning there's more opportunity to find exhibits I like. Meanwhile, the National Gallery, including the parts I haven't yet visited, is entirely limited to paintings.