Wednesday was a very British day for us.
After the usual late start, we took the Tube - Piccadilly Line, of course - into Central London. We left at Westminister where we walked passed the houses of Parliament. There is a sweet little park just beyond the Queen's Entrance where we found a familiar work of art.
Our destination was that most English of all art museums, the Tate Britain. Most of the major works of English art from 1500 to the present are housed here in a grand old building. We took the audio tour. It was fantastic. They not only provided great and interesting narration, but by using the a device which looked rather like an iPhone they also provided a additional visual materials as well. We were not supposed to take pictures, but John slipped a few snaps of the camera in. Some of them came out better than others. Here's a favorite - a really bizarre Elizabethan picture.
This was not included on our audiotour, so I have minimal idea what it was all about. But I was surprised to learn just how highly symbolic many of the most apparently realistic pictures could be. It made me aware of my own limitations as viewer and how I create meaning when I look at art - oh, well, deconstructionism is best left to another day. The real glory of the Tate is its huge collection of paintings by JMW Turner. There are about ten galleries just devoted to him, and these only show a small collection of what the museum has at any time.
More surprises for me. I usually think of Turner for his impressionistic paintings, like the one above, but these were disparaged in his lifetime and were not publicly displayed until the postwar period, long after the French impressionists had been accepted as great artists. The English seem baffled by people like Blake or Turner who do new things in art as much as they love people who are merely eccentric.
And eccentric was the theme of our next museum adventure. We went to a museum which even most Londoners know little about, The Sir John Soane's Museum. This astonishing little place is in a row house near Lincoln's Inn, one of the two ancient law schools.
They made us check the camera at the door, so I do not have of my own pictures to give an idea of the insanely cluttered interior of the house. I did find a few on a Google image search, however.
The real glory of the collection comes in the "Old Painting Room" where they have the original oils of Hogarth's series, The Rake's Progress.
After leaving this oddball museum, we went to Soho where we sat at a cafe on Old Compton Street and drank some mineral water while watching the world pass by. John was absolutely certain he saw Rupert Everett walk down the street. We were hungry, so we decided to eat at a small Chinese restaurant which had an available outside table. Soho is filled with these cheap all you can eat Chinese buffets, and I suspect they are all are dreadful as the one we chose. But we had a minor celebrity surprise here. John yelled out to a guy passing down the road, "Hey, Pete." We had seen a documentary at a film festival in Los Angeles and this guy was one of the principal subjects of the film. John had to get his picture taken with him.
After this minor brush with fame, we walked over to Trafalgar Square. It was an unusually hot day for London with temperatures in the high 80's. So people were cooling down by frolicking in the fountain there.
I hope that boy was just wringing out his pants....
We bought half-price tickets to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a comic retelling of the classic Hitchcock film. It was quite amusing, and the little bits of comic shtick helped you understand just how absurd the plot of that story is.
We caught the last train west for the night. Unfortunately, the day did end on a sour note because when we arrived in Hanwell where we had parked the car near Boston Manor Station, we found that the battery was dead. We took the bus back to Brentford, and dealing with the car will be part of our last full day's adventures.
