I can’t really say that today’s trip to the National Gallery was a highlight of my time in London.\u00a0 As great as it is that the museum\u00a0offers us a chance to view some of the world’s greatest paintings,\u00a0it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.\u00a0 Personally I would have rather gone to the British Museum again.\u00a0 Physical artifacts interest me much more than paintings.\u00a0 Still, I won’ t pretend that I\u00a0wasn’t moved by certain works of art.\u00a0 They were few, but those paintings that did move me to some emotion other than vague interest I will always remember.<\/p>\n
As one goes to the Louvre to see\u00a0the Mona\u00a0Lisa<\/em>, one goes to the National Gallery to see the impressive collection of Monets and\u00a0van Goghs, and of course the immortalizers of the English countryside, Constable and Gainsborough (though perhaps the collection at the Tate Britain is more complete for these two).\u00a0 I’ll admit that upon entering I\u00a0did make a beeline for\u00a0van Gogh’s Sunflowers.\u00a0 It has long been one of my favorite paintings and seeing it actually sitting on a wall in front of me was an exhilarating experience.\u00a0 His technique is just so interesting.\u00a0 It’s almost pointillism (for those of you familiar with painting technique, or Sunday in the Park with George<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0The few pieces of da Vinci’s artwork made me feel small, almost unworthy to be looking at them (you have to understand, for me da Vinci is a god).<\/p>\n However, I think what made me the most happy about this museum was one painting: A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal<\/em> by Johannes Vermeer.\u00a0 Perhaps I simply love Colin Firth too much (plays the role of said artist in the movie version of\u00a0Girl with a Pearl Earring<\/em>.\u00a0 watch it.\u00a0 it’s fantastic) but there is just something about\u00a0Vermeer’s paintings that makes me want to crawl inside the frame.\u00a0 Perhaps it is the fact that all of them have virtually the same background (he painted them all in his attic studio), or perhaps it is his use of color and the play of light against the figures in his work.\u00a0 Perhaps it is the simplicity of the scenes themselves, the normalcy of everything.\u00a0 Whatever the case, his work inspires me to go home and pick up a paintbrush.\u00a0 His figures just seem so real, like people the viewer has met before but can’t place.\u00a0 This work of art is what made me look back on this trip as an enjoyable one.\u00a0 It’s hard for me to describe just how much I love his work, so seeing it was amazing.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the Pitmen Painters art is supposed to make us stand up and take notice.\u00a0 It’s supposed to make us feel something, something indescribable that is unique to the person viewing it.\u00a0 Though I didn’t feel that way about many of the paintings in the National Gallery, the few that did left me feeling winded.\u00a0 I’m not sure\u00a0I would go back again, but I will definitely remember the feelings I had when viewing those paintings for a long time to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t really say that today’s trip to the National Gallery was a highlight of my time in London.\u00a0 As great as it is that the museum\u00a0offers us a chance to view some of the world’s greatest paintings,\u00a0it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.\u00a0 Personally I would have rather gone to the British Museum again.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[739],"tags":[1472,1473,910,1343,995],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campbell","tag-johannes-vermeer","tag-leonardo-da-vinci","tag-national-gallery","tag-pitman-painters","tag-van-gogh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}