My first item of business for the morning was to pick up my laundry. I managed to do that quickly, and we had a bite of breakfast at our accommodations here in Fitzrovia. I have been eating Italian colazione for the past few weeks, so when we came across a jar of peanut butter and a toaster here it seemed like home! No doubt I am just better off with a cappuccino and a small roll.
Our plans for the day were to meet up with our friends in Brentford for lunch and then return to town for a play in the evening. John had purchased tickets to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time before we left Los Angeles. However, when I pulled the order out of my binder this morning I noticed that he had bought tickets for the matinee, not the evening show. I am glad I caught that one! So we made some quick calls to rearrange the schedule and discovered that we had about two hours to fill before the show.
We had been to London so many times that it is hard to do something for the first time. So looking on the map I was happy to discover one cultural attraction that we had never checked off our list, The Royal Academy of Art. John seemed a little doubtful about both the destination and my ability to take us there with the aide of Google Maps, but he went along anyhow.
The Royal Academy is one of the oldest art schools in the world. It was set up to “improve” British painting in the eighteenth century. The idea was the young painters would study there with established painters, and that both old and new painters could exhibit their work there for the public. It still does the same work today.
John thinks that a museum building is as much a part of the experience as the collection. So I had a feeling he would like the Academy as it is housed in a grand old Palladian palace. However, since it’s an art school, the young artists have to put their stamp in the building with cool things like this staircase.
We stumbled across a tour of the private apartments. The academy was originally the home of the Earls of Burlington. The third Lord Burlington had William Kent redesign the house and paint classically-themed scenes on the ceilings. This is one of them. That front-facing camera on the iPhone is so useful when it is not giving me a tragic reminder of how old I am!
We had a rather enthusiastic — well, for a Brit — guide who pointed out all the features. We spent a good deal of time looking at a famous work there, William Powell Frith’s A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. While I had seen reproductions of the work before, I never had much of an idea what it was about. Our guide provided the fascinating details to explain why the Victorians so loved this work.
It is hard to get a good picture of the work with a phone, so here is the same picture courtesy of Google Images. Almost everybody in the painting was a well-known person at the time. Anthony Trollope is on the left with the big white beard. William Gladstone, the prime minister, is just to his right. The Archbishop of York stands upright in the center of the painting and right next to him is the less-than-upright mistress of the Prince of Wales! Our guide asked who the tall many behind on the right might be.
John immediately identified him as Oscar Wilde. Our guide was impressed and explained how the picture as a whole is an attack on Wilde and the aesthetic movement he represented.
From there we went on to the Summer Exhibition. This is not like your usual museum show because everything there is for sale! But as they are English and putting price tags on things would be rude, when you get your ticket you get a small book which discreetly tells you the price of each piece. We loved the updated version of a Greek kouros which could have been ours for a mere £12,000.
Art galleries are not usually painted in bubble gum colors.
We came across this piece and couldn’t decide if it was a photo or photo realism. At any rate, it reminded us that school will start all too soon.
The most important show, at least without price tags, were the works of Joseph Cornell. I have to be honest and admit that I had never heard of this American artist who died in 1972. Calling the show “Wanderlust” is deliberately ironic because he never left the northeast United States. He was one of the first Americans to work in assemblage and his signature works were carefully designed shadow boxes like this one.
On leaving the Academy, we admired monumental sculptures old and new in the courtyard.
The Royal Academy is across the street from Fortnum and Mason and we stopped in there briefly to admire perfectly formed and displayed carrots on sale for £10 a bunch. I wonder if anybody actually buys food there or if the whole purpose is to just convince Chinese tourists to part with a fistful of Yuan in exchange for some tweedy tea towel.
We also walked past Saint James’s Piccadilly where a wedding was going on. I suspect that if anybody could afford to buy their groceries at Fortnum and Mason, this happy couple could.
We went on the the theater. Our original tickets warned of a “partially blocked view,” but when we picked them up we were told that they had been switched and that our new seats would be great. And indeed they were. Seated in the second row of the Grand Circle, our view of the stage looked like this. Of course, I have to follow rules so this picture is an official one for the press. The set is probably the most important thing about the play. The floor and all three walls are covered in thousand of tiny LED lights and the whole stage at times seems to explode in pulsating light. The play, for those of you who have not seen it or read the book on which it is based, is about a 15 year old autistic boy who tries to discover who killed a neighbor’s dog. In fact, the play opens with the rather realistic corpse of the dog with a pitchfork stuck in it.
John was not wowed by the first act, but by the end of the play he was really taken in by the story. Being vaguely “on the spectrum” myself, I found the family drama not that engaging. But it is a lot more interesting than the usual West End stuff, so I am glad it is a big hit.
We found our way to Waterloo station and then went off to Brentford to meet with our friends Vicki and Jerry.
They live on the old Grand Union Canal. There are swans there.
