Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

I’m a slow museum goer.  I like to read all of the text as I go through, and when at an art museum, I tend to find a few paintings to focus on for, say fifteen minutes each, looking closely, and then backing up again, trying to discover the secret to the artist’s technique in the brushstrokes.  And so I’ve found the process of visiting museums in London frustrating for the same reason that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience: the collections at most of the museums I have visited here are just too expansive to see everything in a single afternoon.

The most extreme example is the Victoria and Albert Museum: each room is overwhelmingly full of objects, and almost every object is accompanied by a full paragraph of text.  So fairly early in my visit there, I abandoned trying to read everything and even walked through some rooms without stopping, in order to use my time to really get a sense of the full extent of the museum.  Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed the few exhibits were simpler, less cluttered, and more focused, such as the sequence of Peter Rabbit illustrations (which was a fun surprise).  However, among the clutter I also stumbled on some amazing contemporary pottery within the Japanese exhibit, simply because it happened to catch my eye.  In an entirely different part of the museum I saw some oil sketches by John Constable that looked surprisingly impressionist, compared to his typical, more realistic, complete landscape paintings.  Over all, I was able to see plenty that I found interesting, despite skipping items and full exhibits along the way.  However, the experience was somewhat stressful, since I knew that I had so little time to see so much.

In some of the art museums that showed mostly paintings I ended up needing to skim the collections as well.   On my first visit to the National Gallery, I ended up looking at only the rooms that featured impressionist and post impressionist paintings since I love looking at paintings by these particular artists, and therefore spent a lot of time in front of each individual painting.  (I discovered a new favorite Van Gogh painting, and a photo of it is attached to this post.)  When I went back about a week later to see the rest of the museum, I still had to skip a lot of paintings and captions in order to get through see a variety.  The skimming process inevitably led me to focus on finding the more famous paintings, such as Van Eyke’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait and Hogarth’s Marriage A La Mode series, and although these were not all that I looked at, I wish I could have spent time looking at more of what the museum had to offer.   It’s a strange trade off to be in a museum with a lot of amazing art, but to not get to see all of it because of the sheer quantity and quality throughout.  My experience in the Tate Britain was similar, though to a lesser extent: there was an entire wing devoted to Turner paintings, many of which were truly breathtaking to look at, and I found it difficult to decide how to ration my time in order to move on to other parts of the museum.

Van Gogh painting (photo from National Gallery website)

Turner Painting (from Tate website)

The Sir John Soane Museum was an exception because it was much smaller than the other museums that I visited and included very little text.  However, I had little access to information about what I was seeing, so I left feeling much less satisfied than when I left the larger museums.  I definitely prefer a museum having too much on display that I want to see, rather than not enough.  I still cannot figure out whether most museums in London are more text heavy than those in the States, or whether I just read very little of it here simply because there is so much to see.  Either way, I think that I could return to a few of the museums that I visited every day for a week, and still have more left to discover there.