This next part of our London stories is meant to feel like our time there did; a lot of normal living, albeit in heightened circumstances, along with a smattering of “holy wow!” The daily routine was established pretty quickly; dogs will do that to a schedule. We started off getting up around 7:30-8:00am, but a couple days in there was clear evidence (ahem) that we needed to get an earlier start to the day. After some tweaks we settle on 6:30 as a safe bet to wake Molly from her bed and take her straight to a walk, which works like a charm. Bookend that with going to bed at a decent hour (because we’re going to be up at 6:30!) and we had the bones of a pretty regular schedule. We did little batches of shopping, which had as walking through the neighborhood every day or two to get to the market for a backpack full of vittles, and went about our usual hobbies; writing, reading for pleasure, hanging out or even staring at the boob tube. Of course, that was just the routine, from which we occasionally deviated…

When we initially scheduled this particular trip to London, one of the first pins we dropped on our map was for the “Sargent and Fashion” exhibition at the Tate Britain. (The Tate organization(?) also has the major “modern” art gallery in the city, but we’re fuddy duddies and gravitate to the elder institution.) Most people know John Singer Sargent, if they know him at all, as the guy who did the (infamous) Portrait of Madame X, or as Lisa calls it, “The Woman Who Glows”; she’s not wrong! He was a very in-demand protraitist whose client list would sound like a “who’s who” of high society… if you were rich at the turn of the 20th Century, at least.

Funnily enough, we didn’t get a great look at her on this trip – she gathers quite a crowd, natural light coming in from the ceiling windows led to a glare from some angles, plus – and this is one of those things we hear ourselves say and still don’t quite believe it – we’d already had plenty of time with her when we saw her at the Met in New York City. Instead, we explored this Sargent<-> fashion connection in greater depth. Well.

The link to fashion was frankly tenuous, but it turned out that we didn’t care. Apparently he was known for paying extra attention to how his sitters were styled. They couldn’t just show up in a favorite frock, he told them what to wear and then tended to work with the cloth to produce specific effects. One example is his Portrait of Lady Sasson (link to the image). From the exhibit:

Sargent manipulated the cloak, wrapping it around Lady Sassoon to foreground the play of light on the fabric. The bright pink lining of the cloak, barely noticeable in real life, creates a sinuous diagonal streak which guides the viewer’s eye across the surface of the portrait.

The collection included many we hadn’t seen before including children playing with Japanese lanterns in the garden (Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose), and the ridiculously sensuous Dr. Pozzi at Home. The latter’s vividly scarlet dressing gown made for a particularly dramatic contrast with the starkness of Madame X.

There were dozens of his pieces on display, and he truly was gifted within his chosen subject matter, so it was a delightful afternoon in the galleries.

Then it was “Bonus!” time. This is a consistent phenomenon (that John has decided to name right this very minute) wherein we discover an exhibition outside of the scope of what we were ostensibly visiting a museum to see but is really cool in its own right. We’ve tripped over an extensive review of Beatrix Potter’s sketches and drawings paired with an exploration of her pioneering conservation efforts. Recently in Vienna we went into the Albertina museum to see the sketches by Albrecht Dürer but wandered into an exhibition of spray paint abstraction that was created completely in situ; John particularly loved this one. This time the “Bonus!” was Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, which cataloged a selection (certainly not all) of female artists who were passed over or ignored by the art establishment for centuries. Note that the timeline is mostly set to have a nice round number; it’s not like women have been on easy street in the art world since 1921, alas…

Going out for a day like this is about as long as we were comfortable leaving Molly alone for. Our hosts had told us that we could stretch it further comfortably, but you know how it is when you’re taking care of somebody else’s pets (or kids for that matter) – they can take whatever liberties they want, but the last thing you’d ever want is to push the limit and have an issue arise. We trotted back home and wandered the streets with our sleepy little tour guide. Another day down, another day richer.

“In ancient times,
hundreds of years before the dawn of history,
lived an ancient race of people.
The Druids.

No one knows who they were
or what they were doing.
But their legacy remains.
Hewn into the living rock
of Stonehenge.” ~ N. Tufnel

As we described in our last post, the whole reason for this quick trip across the Channel was an exhibition at the British Museum centered on Stonehenge. It was, however, part of a particularly busy day for us; the kind of day we mostly try to avoid nowadays. It just really couldn’t be helped. We had checked into our hotel in the Whitechapel neighborhood of London, which isn’t necessarily the most centrally located, but with that city’s outstanding public transit system who cares? Speaking of transit, we were in town for the opening week of the Elizabeth Line, a project 20 years in the making which adds a half-dozen or so brand new tube stations and miles upon miles of new track. I won’t pretend to be educated enough about London infrastructure to tell you whether it accomplishes its goals or not, but the stations are clean and modern, and the trains are likewise as comfortable as they are ever likely to be. We took it whenever we could, snug as bugs in rugs. However, our first stop was not via the train. Our first stop was, in fact, about 200 feet from the door of our hotel. Whitechapel Gallery.

To be totally honest, I don’t know if we’d normally be hip enough to know about, much less go to, Whitechapel Gallery. Fortunately cooler people write reviews in newspapers about these things and, to date, they remain willing to sell their papers to the non-cool. The specific reviews that caught our eye were for an exhibition called A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020, and it was indeed a treat. Not only were there art pieces depicting the studio spaces of artists (for example photos of Pablo Picasso and Helen Frankenthaler in their studios), there were actual full-size recreations of several artists’ studios, including a corner of one room mimicking Andy Warhol’s Factory and the actual cage that Nikhil Chopra spent 60 hours in at the Havana Biennele. It was absolutely something different from what we normally would have sought out, and all the more illuminating because of it. John was vaguely reminded of an exhibition we saw at Tate in 2007 called “State Britain.” A law had been passed that required protesters to be X feet away from government buildings, where “X” was some absurdly large number. As a result, part of the circle formed by that distance actually passed through the Tate museum. Museums being what they are, they turned that information into an exhibition where the actual protest barricades drew the borderline exactly through the galleries of the museum. Anyway, it was an incredibly immersive experience. And all that before lunch!

From Whitechapel Gallery it is … enh, a 15 second walk to the nearest tube station. Two trains with a transfer later, we were popping up just a few minutes’ walk from the British Museum*. First, though, was a lovely lunch at The Shell. Random seafood isn’t always our go-to, but we’d just had a week of Italian exclusively, so something simpler felt like a good idea. (Expect a review on our Facebook page shortly.) Then we scooted to the Museum for our timed tickets into the world of Stonehenge.

It was a fascinating display, although if we’d thought about it much ahead of time we’d have been able to predict the nature of it. After all, the certainly weren’t going to haul the stones themselves to London. (Where would they find that many willing Welshmen for starters?**) Instead, the exhibit was focusing on shifts in human culture before, during, and after the age of Stonehenge’s “useful” period. Strange to think, but it was only a few hundred years after its erection that the focus of early religions shifted from skyward devotion to mysteries of death and the soul, at which point giant stone calendars, while useful, didn’t hold preeminence. Yes, Stonehenge became obsolete pretty darn soon after it’s completion. In any event, there were fascinating artifacts on display characterizing the culture within which Stonehenge would have been conceived and executed. There were also depictions of other henges, including an actual “woodhenge” made up of a circle of tree trunks that had been hidden completely underwater until a couple decades ago. A rare positive from global warming.

As busy as this all sounds, we weren’t done yet!

We had a date for tea in the Great Court restaurant, which is the mildly-fancier offering of museum food as opposed to the adequate-but-not-recommendable cafeteria fare otherwise available. Great Court offers high tea in the afternoon, made up of little sandwiches, scones, and sweet snackage. We’d hoped (and were happy to discover) that it made for a pleasant respite in the late afternoon.

Especially since there was an entire extra exhibition at the British Museum that we hadn’t even known about when we booked the trip(!). (See earlier posted thoughts on cultural events going on that are both under-publicized and truly fascinating.) In this case the exhibition was “Feminine power: the divine to the demonic.” This time the focus was on depictions of feminine spiritual beings across the planet and throughout history. One of the benefits of doing an exhibition with a “hot” contemporary focus is that loans from other museums seem easier to come by; we only know this from inference, but the exquisite collection of pieces from literally around the world seemed to support the theory. The exhibition did not have an activist viewpoint – that is, it wasn’t arguing for change. Rather, it was trying to scrape the crust off of these feminine figures that already exist and already are powerful but are rarely given full attention in the current dominant cultures. They weren’t being held up, they are up and merely wait for us to turn our heads in their directions. It was an incredible show.

Wrung out from this last art sprint, we lumbered back to the tube and into our hotel, where we made use of the on-site restaurant to put together a pretty simple meat and cheese plate for dinner. From there it was a good night’s sleep before our (relatively) early rise. After all, we had a train to catch.

*- before anybody asks: yes, we know about the Elgin Marbles and the broader problem of plundered loot on exhibit there. We didn’t look at any of that stuff (no really, we breezed past the Rosetta Stone without turning our heads). The case for boycotting the place entirely is compelling. Our reasoning here boils down to the fact that Stonehenge is, in fact, in England, so the particular exhibition is what they actually should be doing in the first place.

**- this may be the dumbest joke John has ever written, which is saying a lot.