Who’s Your Impressionist Daddy?: Day 2

The 2nd day of our London trip was only nominally in London. Up relatively early for breakfast, we made a couple of local tube connections to Paddington Station, thence bound via overland via choo choo to Oxford. Home of colleges and college students, as well as our target: the Ashmolean Museum. As has been previously discussed (I think?) when we were formulating this trip part of the impetus was a review for an exhibition entitled Pissarro: Father of Impressionism. That was the anchor for the day , but a lot went in to making it happen.

There’s a true thing about Europe that we have not yet gotten used to: train travel is efficient and mundane. In the States, John never having lived in the northeast corridor, a train trip was a frippery. We’d plan a trip to Portland and say “you know what would be cute? Taking the train down!” And, you know, it was. Nice change of pace, no driving. We’d occasionally think about taking one of the headline Amtrak routes, to Chicago maybe, or down the West Coast to Los Angeles maybe. Never once did it occur to us to use the train just as public transportation. Here, well… trains are everywhere. They go everywhere. England in particular has laid tracks the way the US paves highways. Dots on the map for which you’d be hard pressed to explain the purpose of their existence nonetheless have at least a train depot, and maybe not every train stops but at least one or two will. “Where can you not go in England by train?” is probably an answerable trivia question, but we suspect it’s a short list. Point being (there’s a point?!) train travel is… well, boring. In a good way. You get to the station, look on a board just like at an airport for your train to see what platform it’s at, go through a little security checkpoint, then walk along the train to your car and hop in. Seats are nicer than coach on the airplane, but in the same ballpark. And… that’s it. The train starts moving. You don’t need a safety lecture, you don’t wait on the runway for clearance to take off, you just start moving. And then you get where you’re going and you just… get off.

Look, I know that reads like a pointless paragraph, but the very mundanity of the train was the story for these European neophytes. It’s still cool just how simple it is, all the way down to train stations being waaaay more centrally located than most airports, so when you arrive you’ve actually… you know, arrived at where you were going. There’s not another hour of grabbing your bags and getting a cab or whatever.

Case in point, we walked out of the train station in Oxford, took a left, and were crossing a bridge into what could only be described as “Oxford proper” within 3 minutes. That said, “proper” is an odd word choice here. John had… well, let’s call them romantic notions about the state of Oxford. Too many period dramas, too many books set in the 1700s (there have only been like 4, but that was apparently enough). In any case, John’s idea was that when we weren’t visiting the museum we could stroll the campus and just sort of enjoy the sedate, collegial atmosphere. Yeeeaaaah… not so much. The High Street in Oxford is as commercial, and as densely peopled, as any in Europe. We’re pretty sure some portion of the colleges there were graduating that weekend, adding to the mayhem. There was no atmosphere to be absorbed, unless it was the body spray of the American Eagle shopboy/models. Alas.

The exhibit, thank the heavens, was not a disappointment. Honestly, in the past month if nothing else we’ve learned loads about what good curation looks like in museum exhibits. Like the Donatello in Florence and some things to come up later, the Ashmolean did a fantastic job of placing Camille Pissarro in context with his artistic -cedents, both ante- and des-. If you’re like us and didn’t know much about him – he was older and more practiced than most of the impressionists. Several of them looked up to him and his work, and he happily collaborated with many of them. You can watch the stylistic elements flowing back and forth between them if you are educated enough or, thankfully for us, you are shown by means of skillful exhibition. There were a few particularly fascinating examples of works by e.g. Cezanne and Pissarro that were painted simultaneously and in the same location. It very much highlighted what they shared and where they differed. We also saw a comprehensive examination of Pissarro’s print-making, of which the man himself was so proud that he sought to exhibit not just the work but a step-by-step demonstration of his process for printmaking at one of the Paris Salons. Heads stuffed and feet barking a bit, we walked down… well, swam.. the High Street to a lovely restaurant that, what with me misreading the character of the town in general, I’d taken to be a charming little bistro from their website, but was in fact closer to The Cheescake Factory only with good tea. Still, it wasn’t a half-bad meal and, fat and happy, we sauntered back to the train station for our scoot back into the Smoke (people call London that right? Maybe 200 years ago?). We gave ourselves the night off in anticipation of another fine day of art and culture.