With Eli at a play-date Audrey and I rode our bikes to the National Gallery.
The gallery is currently showing a huge range of Pre-raphaelite paintings from the Tate. I've long loved the Pre raphaelites. They were a group of English painters, poets and art critics founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rosetti
Their paintings have a focus on nature and realism. Although the group was largely secular many of their paintings draw on religious stories or famous scenes from history. There are also a lot of beautiful female portraits (many of them the flame haired Elizabeth Siddal or Jane Morris) typified by their big pouty lips and slightly far-away/mournful gazes. I've loved the paintings for years as Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a long standing permanent collection and I used to wander round there rather than studying in the library next door.
Audrey liked the paintings but not to the degree that I did. She liked the landscape (or is it seascape) below painted by John Brett of the English channel. The gallery had lit it fabulously well and it was beautiful.
'Work' by Ford Maddox Brown has been my favourite painting for decades, I love it's social commentary and complex but elegant composition. There's a couple of copies of it (a big one and a small one - I've seen both previously) and it was kind of like meeting up with an old friend when I saw it in the exhibition.
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