Week of March 14th 2011: National Portrait Gallery (London)

Well, I'm in the middle of a big post on some of the places I ate in Europe but tech genius Nikki can't sem to find a way to edit it on my tablet. Seriously, if anyone has the blogger app for Android - can you edit posts that you started on a computer or only ones you wrote on the app?

Anyways, I'm somewhere between New York and Virginia (possibly Delaware) and I figured that instead of watching Nightmare Before Christmas for the 50th time, I should probably update my blog. Don't worry, its on in the background so I can listen to the music... oh yes, about the museum -
The National Portrait Gallery in London is located in Trafalgar Square which is a sight to see on its own. In fact, when I was there they had a giant ship in a bottle and a countdown until the London Olympics next year so that was fun to check out. Kevin thought it would be good for me to meet him in the Square so we could see the museum together during his lunch break. Many of the museums in London are donation only so you don't have to worry about spending a small fortune to go wander through the galleries if you only have a short time.

We entered the museum and weren't sure which hallway to go down first and decided left seemed as good of a direction as any. After we'd been through about half a dozen rooms and a dozen paintings of John the Baptist with Jesus we figured we were probably in the Christian wing. Kevin explained that England has more Christian paintings than most countries because they were sent there to avoid being destroyed when other countries went through religious persecution. A lot of them were really incredible and spanned the height of an entire wall. It was interesting that a lot of artists chose to create the same scene (as I mentioned above, the scene of Jesus's baptism was a common one).
From there we wandered through Dutch paintings and then later European portraits. Around this time Kevin had to get back to work and I was getting a little antsy so i wandered around until I found my favorite paintings, the impressionists. Here was what I had been looking for! I wish we had gone through the right down when we entered because it would have been nice to see those paintings with Kevin.


If you like art, I definitely recommend seeing the National Gallery but try to go in with a plan. I think I would have enjoyed it more if i was able to see my favorite paintings first and then wander to everything else after.