May 24
Today we went to see the Wallace Collection. The Wallace
Collection just happens to be near Oxford St which is THE STREET for shopping
in London. I think some of our scholars were a bit distracted by all the
beautiful shop windows. Oxford Street is currently canopied by hundreds of
Union Jack flags and was very festive looking (maybe the professor was a bit
distracted too). But we have a job to do and carry on we must!
The Wallace collection is an excellent, high quality
collection of fine art, furniture, decorative arts and arms and armor. The collection
was amassed over five generations and was given to Britain in 1897 by Lady
Wallace, widow of the last descendent in this branch of the Wallace Family. The
family was based in both London and Paris and the collection reflects that
influence.
One of the most famous images in the Wallace collection is
“The Swing” 1767 by Jean-Honore Fragonard. This is a very flirtatious piece
from the Rococo period. This painting is
beautifully executed and has a sense of lightness and humor.
I am particularly excited by the furniture collection. The
Wallace houses some of the finest pre-revolution French furniture in the world.
Of particular note on the furniture is the work of Andre Charles Boulle (1642-1732).
He was the cabinet-maker to the king during the reign of Louis XIV. He lived in
the Louvre and his special appointment to the king protected him from the rules
of the furniture guild. This allowed him to work with both wood and metal.
Boulle invented and perfected a technique of marquetry that resulted in twin
furniture pieces with figure-ground reversal. So he stacked brass and
tortoiseshell on top of each other, cut his design through both pieces. So one
furniture piece was brass with a little tortoiseshell and the other one was
tortoiseshell with a little brass.
We stopped for lunch in St. Martins of the Field (famous for
their musical concerts). They have created a café in the church crypt so we ate
our lunch in a beautiful brick, groin vaulted space and shared the floor with a
few dead people. They weren’t very hungry so it all came out ok.
After lunch, we went to the National Gallery. This is a
beautiful museum with paintings from the Middle Ages through Cubism. Some of
the artists represented in this museum were DaVinci, Rubens, Turner, Rembrandt,
Gainsborough, VanDyke, Monet, Renoir, Degas and a large format Seurat painting.
On a typical day, the students have some questions that they must answer about
the museums that we attend. On this day it was more of a scavenger hunt and
they had a list of paintings to find in the museum and then list the room
number in which they found it. The students seemed to enjoy the change of pace.
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| Oxford Street |
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| Twin Boulle Cabinet |
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| Twin Boulle Cabinet #2 |
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| Wallace Collection Room |
After all this museum stuff, Sally and I went back to St.
Martin in the Fields and enjoyed a little Baroque music to go with our
experiences of Baroque paintings. The concert was delightful and included two
of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos (#4 and #50). It was a lovely day and we are
very tired.
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