Blog 5: the National Gallery
By Isaac Overman
May 31 2022
For our excursion today, we went to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. This of course brings up the Tate Modern and the inevitable comparison between them. The National was everything a fine art gallery should be. It had hundreds of paintings for different centuries and varied styles. I would find it a impossible to have no love for the gallery. It decimated the Modern in my opinion. The building was just as impresive as the Tate but with a better catalog of works from the greats. The Tate lacked some of the big names that I assosiate with great modern art, but the National had at least one famous work from most great painters up until the 20th century. Anyway, the paintings that jumped out at me where “La Pointe de la Hève” by Claude Monet and “Coastal scene” by Thèo van Rysselberghe.
These two paintings share the same century and were relatively contemporaries. But Rysselberghe was apart of the post impressionist movement where Monet was of the old guard by this time. Both portray beach and cliff scenes. They are both excellent but different in the way that they are painted. Monet uses slightly longer brush strokes than Rysselberghe and is a little more crisp with his lines. However, Rysselberghe uses a unique style of pointillism that had just been invented to make it looks stunning but very different. I love both works for different reasons. They are only separated by a single wall and I think that’s how it should be. They are looking at the same things but painting them how it speaks to them and that is the strength of the National Gallery. It has art spanning many centuries. It demands the attention of its viewer. As it turns out, so does the rain. As several of us left, it began to fall a little more rapidly. So we all had beers and lunch in the upper room of the Lemon Tree Thai fusion Pub. As it rained outside, Ben told more jokes and Braedon polished off yet another Guinness. I realized that this is what London is all about—grey weather and new friends.
Theatre in London U of A 