One of the boons of London is free museums. No matter how many times you've been there, there's always something to see that you hadn't noticed before.
This weekend some of the Thamesreach faithful went to the V&A to be, well, research geeks.

Lady Katherine of Great Chesterfield suggested it - she's on a Tudor textiles research kick right now - so ( Read more... )

Just for fun while we were in Bruges and Ghent, I started noting the different styles of rosaries that were shown in the late-period paintings. It gave me something to focus on while studying the rich and startlingly clear and crisp images of the 'Flemish Primitives', which is the collective description for those painters who worked around the same ( Read more... )

My sweetie and I spent a splendid holiday Monday with Master Paul and milady Anne, perusing the new V&A medieval galleries and then going on to see the Staffordshire hoard display at the British Museum.

Paul and Anne live outside the Royal City, and so they squeeze as much as they can out of occasional visits, including raids on the associated ( Read more... )

I forgot to add this item to my report about the Memling in SintJans Museum:

I saw my first Bosch painting in person. It's a triptych, on loan to the Memling in St Jans while something else of theirs is on tour.

It's a scene of the rapture, or of the end times when the holy head for heaven (one side of the triptych) while the lost are eaten, tortured ( Read more... )