It is my 24th day in the United Kingdom and today I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum!
The Victoria and Albert Museum (which is named after Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert,) is located in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, United Kingdom, and it is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts, designs, architectures, paintings, photographs, fashion, jewelry, metalwork, and many more. The Victoria and Albert Museum, formally known as the Museum of Manufactures, or South Kensington Museum, was founded 171 years ago in the year 1852. The museum covers 12.5 acres of land, and it holds 2.8 million objects in 145 galleries. Its collection spans 5,000 years of different types of art, from ancient times to the 21st century, from all over the world. Many of the artworks are from Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America. The museum holds the largest collection of metalwork and ceramics from China, Korea, Japan, and the Islamic world. The Victoria and Albert Museum also owns the world’s largest collection of post classical marble sculptures. Many of them are from the Italian Renaissance. The most famous one being Michealangelo’s David. The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the United Kingdom’s most renowned tourist attractions, seeing approximately 1.2 million visitors each year. It is considered to be one of the best museums in the world!
When I stepped foot into the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was unaware of how massive the museum was since I entered through the Underground entrance rather than the main entrance. It wasn’t until I walked through the grand hall and saw the many corridors and stairwells that lead to different rooms was when I realized how large the building was. I got my steps in today. While peacefully strolling through the museum, and analyzing every artwork I saw, I stumbled across a room labeled “Georgian Period (1714-1837).” The room was filled with artworks, instruments, furniture, weapons, and clothing from the Georgian period. One of the artifacts that caught my attention was a dress from the Dutch Republic, (now the Netherlands.) It was an English-style dress that was popular across Europe in the 1770s-80s. It was a beautiful cream-colored dress with white lacing on the neckline and the sleeves. It had a vibrant pattern of different lovely flowers painted onto it. The reason why it caught my attention was because it remined me of the females’ costumes in Shakespeare’s play, The Comedy of Errors. The style of the dress was like the dress The Courtesan at Ephesus wore but, this dress was a little less extravagant than hers.
I enjoyed my time at the Victoria and Albert Museum and if I ever visit London again in the future, I would love to go to the museum again and see the other rooms of artwork that I was unable to see.
Theatre in London U of A 