Someone Stole the Lake!

Even though today's glorious weather seemed to encourage everything except indoor activities, I headed to the Courtauld Gallery this morning to take advantage of their free-admission Mondays and to revisit some old favourites. The Courtauld Gallery is definitely one of London's gems, and (maybe because of the fantastic weather) the intimate rooms were much less crowded than they had been during previous visits, and in most cases, as I approached a given piece, I had it all to myself--a rare luxury in a London gallery of this calibre. I wasn't expecting to see anything new, but in fact there were quite a few pieces that I don't remember seeing before, including not one, not two, but three new-to-me paintings by one of my favourites, Pierre Bonnard: Woman in an Interior (1906), which features Marie Boursin, whom Bonnard would marry in 1925;

Two Oxen (1912);

and Landscape with Olive Trees (1924).

Other paintings that I remember from previous visits but which I think I've yet to show you on these pages include: Georges Braque's The White Boat, Antwerp (1906),

Charles Camoin's The Port of Marseilles (1904-6),

Walter Sickert's Queens Road Station, Bayswater (1916),

Vanessa Bell's Arum Lilies (1919)

and The Conversation (1913-16),

Duncan Grant's Still-Life: The Dinner Table (1912),

Winifred Gill's Still-Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box (1914-15), painted on the back of a laundry-box top,

Georges Seurat's Horses in the Water (1883-84),

and Gabriele Münter's Street in Murnau (1908).

New favourites that I encountered for the first time today include: Prunella Clough's Bypass I (1960),

Keith Vaughan's Delos (1962),

and Jean Arp's Static Composition (1915).

The colour in many of the Courtauld's 14th- and 15th-century Italian paintings is rather amazing; these wonderful, small images made from tempera and gold leaf date to around 1421 and originally decorated the high altar of the church in a Florentine convent.

My next stop after the Courtauld was at a relatively new exhibition space in Somerset House, the Terrace Rooms, which is yet another beautiful series of rooms in which to see art in London--the inaugural exhibit is a collection of London photographs by Richard Bryant.

After all that indoor-time, I headed to St James's Park for a proper spring stroll,

but the park obviously didn't feel like cooperating, since I soon found out that the lake is in the process of being cleaned and refilled (for the first time since 1991), meaning that the usually picture-perfect park will be a bit less perfect until at least the end of April. (This is what it usually looks like.)

The National Trust now uses this next building as a site for one of their stand-alone gift shops; Blewcoat School was originally built as a school for poor children, and remained in use as a school until 1926.

A strange installation of umbrellas caught my attention as my bus passed Channel 4's headquarters. I tried to figure out what the umbrellas were supposed to be,

and quickly realised that the piece was one of the TV station's trademark gimmicks of transforming something that initially appears confusing into the number "4," just by altering the viewpoint.