Up UP UP - arty day in London

Yesterday I took my bad cold to London as my friend Judith and I thought we should see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition before it closed. It was indeed a very comprehensive and impressive exhibition of all the great / or at least most familiar paintings, but in a way it was all lost on me because I have seen them all before. I rather wished I could see them with fresh eyes, but no, can't be done.

Ferdinand being lured by Ariel, from the Tempest

A Roman Soldier is reluctant to part from a Celtic Briton, (and she's clearly not in the best of moods about it either)

 The most talented of the group was Millais, and his early pictures stand out for their brilliance, but I think he also lapsed into aestheticism most totally, and fundamentally aestheticism was a commercial movement - a fashion. He did very well financially, you can imagine. In his old age he took to painting landscapes and these are very interesting pictures because they seem to be just for his own pleasure - not to anyone else's taste or fashion.

 The brother I like least, especially in later pictures, is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, because he is the most repetitive. I don't think he was a great help to his mistresses and I think badly of his affair with Morris's wife.

My favourite is William Morris and that is because his commitment to socialism was lifelong and I think he had that fundamental humility - he was not too grand to design wallpaper. He was grateful for simple things like his bed, after a hard day's work. Not just that, I like that his firm created jobs and tried new methods and revived old skills - it is typical of him that he wanted to use traditional organic dyes instead of the new chemical ones in his wallpaper - he was an artist, but he was also in industry. He was faithful to his wife, as far as we can tell, even though she was not faithful to him, (I think he felt he had been unfair to marry someone who did not feel about him the passion he had felt for her) he worked incredibly hard and his friends loved him. He was a romantic who lived in a machine age, which is a kind of curse.

Anyway after the exhibition we visited the shop and I eschewed all the Pre-Raph merchandise and bought a poster of a Lowry which was in the sale! What a contrast. Because Lowry had no truck with all that long skirts and pretty flowers stuff, did he, let alone the knights and fair maidens? He just painted the kind of narrow streets and anonymous crowds he saw around him, without painting like a realist. He was not scared of the masses and their culture like so many modernists, he liked crowds if anything, and tried to show the way a crowd moves in ones and twos and groups. I believe there is going to be a big Lowry show soon, and I might go, but I went to the Lowry Art Gallery in Manchester last year and it seems a bit soon.

Judith and I started by going to Selfridges department store in the morning, which was too soon after Christmas really - the windows were dull and minimalist in the extreme. We could not believe how many top of the range watches were on display - case after case, and shop assistants with nothing to do. But we enjoyed the food hall very much - such a lovely place to do food shopping! if only I was rich! and they have lovely healthy salads and breads so that one would eat very healthily. There were also many luxury foods. We went upstairs for coffee and were not very impressed with the ambience or decor of the french style restaurant - and then we went to the shoe department. I think it was a really splendid array of the most wonderful shoes in the world - they cost hundreds of pounds, but they draw ooohs and aaahs. At the moment there is a sale on. It was great to see that Gordon Selfridge's vision of supplying lovely things that people will desire was still being fulfilled.

We had a fab lunch in Duke Street - don't remember the name of it but there was a fun and attractive range of decorative items on display in the French style dressers, and nice simple food - I had some soup like a chicken minestrone, with toast, and Judith had a spinach and feta omelette - both delicious.