The Scavenger Hunt--Day 45

Hello, and welcome to the 50th post of The Adventures of a Minnesota Yankee in Queen Elizabeth's Court. Give yourself a hearty pat on the back that you've made it this far! Sadly, I don't think this blog will reach 100 posts because I have only 25 days left in London! Anyway, I am going to do things backwards and give you the moral of the story before the tale itself. Never outwardly complain that you have nothing to do because life will dump a heap of things to do on you the moment after you say it. That being said, today did not go as I thought it would, which is another life lesson, I suppose. Late last night (about an hour or two after I went to bed), Art History professor sent us an e-mail with our assignment for next week. She is traveling to the US today for a convention at the Smithsonian Institute, so she won't be here for the rest of the term. However, as she perhaps put it best, "I may be gone, but I will leave things for you to do so that you will remember me fondly." Or something to that effect. Any road, her lovely e-mail told us that our assignment would be to compare King Henry VIII and Queen Victoria using the movies we have watched in addition to a portrait of each monarch from the National Portrait Gallery. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, she wants us to write an eight to ten page paper about said topic, due at noon on Wednesday! I was pretty irritated. She only gave us four days to write the paper! I am not very good at working like this. My left-brained self likes to know deadlines weeks in advance (at least two, please, if you could), not all of this last-minute-oh-by-the-way-ness. Luckily, today was a free day, so I had plenty of time to visit art galleries (I'm not being sarcastic). I should also mention that we had a second part to our assignment, which was to visit the National Gallery next door to the NPG and write a one-paragraph impression for each of seven paintings. Both museums, if you will recall, are located in Trafalgar Square, a short walk from the Leicester Square Tube station on the Piccadilly Line. It was a quick jog from my flat to South Kensington Station, where I boarded the train for Leicester Square. If I was happy about one thing today, it was that the sky was perfectly blue and cloudless, and the sun was shining like it was going out of style. I was glad for the walk in the fresh air, cool breeze, and gleaming light.

I went to the NPG first, and because I have already been there,  I won't spend too much time talking about it. I found the two portraits that I needed to analyze for the paper and took my notes on them. I was really appreciative of a computer room located in the gallery that allows visitors to look up information about any portrait in the entire gallery. I was able to get some identifying information on the portraits and some background about the artists, eras, subjects of the portraits themselves (not that I didn't already know a ton about Vicky and good ol' Hank Eight). It was also an advantage to have been to the NPG before because I wasn't tempted to get sidetracked and waste time unnecessarily. I'm all business when I'm on a mission, man. With that portion of my assignment done, I headed across Trafalgar Square to the National Gallery.

As you may know, London is very excited about its role as host to the 2012 Olympic Games, so it has erected a countdown clock in Trafalgar Square. You can see from the photo that there are 319 days, 7 hours, 56 minutes, and two seconds until the Opening Ceremony (when you consider that the photograph was taken at 11:34 AM GMT).

It's the final countdown!

After stopping to admire the clock, I climbed the steps to the entrance of the National Gallery. Like many world-class art galleries, the National Gallery has helpful maps with images of the paintings that most people come to the gallery to see. Luckily, a couple of the paintings I needed were depicted on the sign, and I could figure out the rest from the information that Dr. G gave us in her e-mail. Now, I won't lie. I was a little resentful of this task at its inception, but I really am an art lover (as long as it's not contemporary art, but I've already told you that). The whole thing soon became like a big scavenger hunt, and I got a little thrill each time I encountered one of the treasures I was supposed to find and take notes on. Unfortunately, neither the NPG nor the National Gallery allows photography, so I would encourage you to search the Internet for images of these paintings. I will tell you that digital images are nothing to the real thing, but I think that goes without saying. The first painting that I had to find was Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait from the 15th century, showing Monsieur Arnolfini with his wife. The portrait is very lifelike, and I loved all the little details in the picture (the chandelier, the dog, the mirror in the background, etc). The second painting was Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, which depicts a rich young Frenchman on one side of the picture and a young bishop on the other. The painting is best known for the distorted image at the bottom, which is obscure to the viewer until the picture is viewed from the right side. Then, the distorted shape turns into a skull, a memento mori (or reminder of death). The point of the picture is that both men of the world and men of the cloth must meet their deaths sooner or later and that the need for salvation is urgent. The third painting was Joseph Wright of Derby's Experiment with an Air Pump, which I really do not like. The painting shows an almost mad scientist demonstrating how an air pump acts as a vacuum to suck air out of a container. His victim is a lovely white cockatoo, who is shown slowly suffocating as three frightened children look on and are comforted by an elderly man who is explaining the ways of the world to them. There are even two lovers in the background who don't seem to care a wink about the bird! It makes my animal-loving self cringe. I wasn't able to find the fourth portrait; I think the professor may have made a mistake with the name, so I put that one off until I knew for certain which portrait she meant. The fifth portrait was John Constable's The Hay Wain, which is absolutely beautiful. I love his work because he does amazing cloudscapes, and this scene just looks so tranquil. I would love to spend some time in a place as nice as that. The sixth portrait was John Mallord William Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed, which is a highly Impressionistic portrayal of a train rolling through the countryside. A detail that I especially love is a little brown rabbit in front of the train (almost impossible to see unless you view the painting in real life or if someone who has seen the painting in real life points it out to you). The final painting was a Monet (the gallery has a lot of Monets, including his Waterlilies and The Water-Lily Pond, both of which are super famous and wonderful to see for real!) entitled Thames Below Westminster, which is part of his "Houses of Parliament" series. The painting is very foggy and looks like it takes place in early morning before the sun has burned away the haze. I love his use of brown and blue in the painting; it's such a great combination. Dr. G also gave us some suggestions for other paintings to see while we were there, but I also found some on my own that attracted my attention.

One was an amazing Da Vinci cartoon depicting the Virgin Mary and Jesus. They keep it in a little room all to itself under very dim lighting. It was wonderful to see a real Da Vinci with my own eyes. Another was a strikingly real painting of a horse entitled Whistlejacket. The portrait is life-sized, and it really commands the room in which it is displayed. It really brings out the graceful elegance of horses in general and of Whistlejacket in particular (it was obviously commissioned by his owner).

We had learned in Art History about William Hogarth and his series Marriage a la Mode, but I had forgotten until today that the series is in the National Gallery. I was delighted to see it in person because I love the symbolism and the fact that the series tells a story with a moral. The series comprises six panels that chart the misfortunes of a man and a woman who are forced into an arranged marriage. In the first panel, the father of the man (a once-wealthy earl) and the father of the woman (a rich merchant) brokering a deal. The earl gets his wealth back so that he can finish building his house, and the merchant gets a nice social upgrade for his daughter. Neither the man nor the woman are interested in the match. The woman is being charmed by the lawyer Silvertongue, and the whole picture is summed up by the two dogs chained together at the bottom of the picture. The second panel shows the couple after their wedding night. The woman has just finished breakfast (at noon!) after a night of playing cards, and the man is slumped over with a hangover and a woman's cap from the night before. An accountant is shown walking out in an exasperated manner with their unpaid bills in his hands. The third panel shows the husband and his mistress being examined by a doctor--they both caught a venereal disease (as shown by the black patch on the man's neck). The fourth panel depicts a gathering at the couple's house. The husband has inherited his father's earldom, and the couple finally have a child (symbolized by the teething toy hanging on the wife's chair). The wife doesn't seem to care too much about the whole situation, though. She is being persuaded by Silvertongue to cheat on her husband with him. The fifth panel finds the illicit lovers interrupted by the woman's husband, who has just received a fatal stab from Silvertongue (he's high-tailing it out the window!) as the authorities barge in the door. The woman tries to explain the state of things to her husband, but he doesn't seem to be a very forgiving sort. The final panel shows the death of the woman. She has taken poison after Silvertongue is hanged for killing her husband. Her child kisses her face one last time (notice the braces on his legs--probably a birth defect from his Casanova father), and her father removes her ring (probably to sell it). The idiot servant who gave her the poison is sternly reprimanded in the right side of the painting. So, the moral of the story is, wives, don't cheat on your husbands; husbands, don't cheat on your wives; and, finally, you should marry for love!

The last portrait that I saw was Van Gogh's famous Sunflowers painting. I love the texture of the painting--Van Gogh captured the look and feel of sunflowers very well. Ironically, the color yellow symbolized hope and friendship to Van Gogh, who obviously did not have enough of either to prevent him from taking his own life. But the very best artists are either insane, deeply troubled, or both. I really like sunflowers, so the painting was really great to see. Like the NPG, the National Gallery has a computer room where visitors can look up specific works of art, and I made use of this service at the National Gallery, too.

After my little morning excursion, I returned home to work on my assignments. All in all, it was a pretty good day. I just wish I had had a little more notice, but now that I have all of the information that I need, I see that Dr. G was not really being as unreasonable as it seemed she was being initially. I think I've been through enough academically to be able to handle something like this.

Lately, I have been watching episodes of a wonderful British comedy show called QI  (Quite Interesting) with Stephen Fry as host, where four comedians (one of which is always Alan Davies) are asked strange questions and then try to answer them. Of course, they come up with ridiculously funny answers that breed hilarious discussions, and it is wonderful. The players all get buzzers that make silly noises relating to the topic of the show, and they also get points deducted or added depending on the quality of their answers (although the scoring system is a bit dodgy at times). The funniest times are when a player gives an obviously bad answer (for instance, "Who builds straw houses?" "Pigs."), and the whole audience laughs while a loud buzzer sounds. I love the British sense of humor so much because it is so intelligent. But Scotsmen and Irishmen are pretty funny in their own right, too. I have been searching for episodes on YouTube and BBC iPlayer, so if you're interesting in laughing yourself silly, you should check it out! I'm glad that I can access episodes online because, otherwise, I would really miss the show when I get back to the States. Which brings me to my next point. There is very little in the United States that is unique. I can find chai lattes here as well as places to pick apples, so I don't really miss anything from America (other than specific people, but people aren't really things, now, are they?). However, there are definitely things I will miss about London: the fabulous tea, British TV, being able to cross the street even when the light is red because everyone else does it and otherwise I'd never get anywhere (uh...Mom? Pretend you didn't read that last part! Don't worry! I'm always careful!), and the phrase "Cheers!" But I am NOT going to miss the high prices!! I guess Paris is much worse, though, so I suppose I shouldn't complain (I've been doing enough of that today).

Tomorrow I will Skype with my parents again and also do more work on my paper. I also hope to take a little bit of time to go back to the Victoria and Albert Museum so that I can see the jewelry that I missed the last time and also visit the cafe so I can grab a cup of tea and admire the beautiful William Morris patterns. Hopefully it will be a more relaxing day than today was.