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| Self-portrait of Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun |
I'm not one for sitting at home, frittering away days-off with Jeremy Kyle and Bargain Hunt, so I decided to get up and go to London. I think I mentioned before that I like doing this around my birthday - visiting the capital, floating anonymously through the grand halls of a museum, learning about the Aztecs, the first hot-air balloon flight or the eating habits of anklyosaurs and dodos.
At the time of my birthday however, swimming to London was just about the best way to get there. Floods had submerged the tracks beyond Maidenhead. Reading Station was filling with sharp-elbowed commuters and short-tempered railwaymen. I gave it a miss, postponing any londinium-adventuring in the Big Smoke, until today.
Smart move. This morning the sun was pleasantly beaming through the glass as the train sped by the fields and factories of east Berkshire. I flipped open my Kindle for a while and very happily switched my phone off.
Today it was the turn of the National Gallery. The Gallery is situated just behind Trafalgar Square. If you stand on its stone steps, you can trace a line right through Nelson's Column, all the way down to Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster, which looms in the background. I stood there for a little while, admiring the view and the antics of some street artists entertaining a crowd below, then I went inside.
There's something about fine art that resonates in a uniquely personal way when you see it. I stood inches from paintings by Cezanne, Constable, Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissaro, Canaletto, Seurat, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Holbein and many others. I really felt it. It was as though I was wandering through the richest, most sumptuous of grand halls, where old masters called out to me, silently pleading with me to understand, to get what they got, to see what they could see and to feel how they felt as they stood in front of canvas with palette and brushes.
Canaletto for example, has to be seen to be believed. His exquisitely detailed paintings of Venice capture the tiniest, most intricate parasol in a crowd, a gondolier's pole, the swirling energy and life of a great city and the vibrant colours of sixteenth century Italy in full-swing. You can almost hear the voices, the music, the fanfare, the water lapping around the Doge's palace.
Meanwhile, Turner fills a canvas with loose brush strokes, almost smudging and mixing colours on the canvas and an atmosphere emerges that makes you feel it, like you've never felt anything before. It's a mist over the sea, it's a rainy day over the Thames with a steam-train powering through the torrent, it's an old warship being tugged home for the last time against a sunset ocean. Masterful.
Monet, the wizard of Impressionism, swipes his paint-laden brush so obviously, so quickly and so well, that in no time at all, you're joining him on the banks of the Thames, a snowbound Argenteuil, or his Giverny garden where he's showing off that Japanese bridge again. There was even one Monet, a beach-scene, where you could actually see grains of sand trapped in the paint, there since the very day he took his easel to the seaside in 1871.
There were portraits that were so real, so incredibly full of life that it would have been no surprise to hear them speak. One even bore an uncanny resemblance to somebody I know!
I felt eyes searching me for something, for an answer to the human condition perhaps: the wife of a slave-owner sitting with a melancholy expression, boring straight into my soul, a group of partying French aristocrats welcoming me into their wooded enclave, a girl caught in repose with just a silk cloth to cover her modesty who looked surprised (but not afraid) to see me interrupting her bath-time...
I could go on. It's better though, if you go and see what I mean. I got a feel for the size and the scale, the colours and the tone, the light and the shade as I wandered around these great rooms of art. If I'm honest, I felt a little drunk by the richness of it all. You know that feeling when your shoulders start to relax? It was as though I'd imbibed the finest of wines, feasted upon the most luxurious foods and heard tales of old from exotic travellers with paintbrushes. It was quite wonderful.
I should take a day off more often.
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