Trafalgar Square

CH and I had a great day in London today. We began at the Science Museum, with the exhibition Drawn by Light, which was excellent. There are some extremely famous images on display, but also many less well-known ones; and it not only shows brilliantly how the art and craft of photography have developed over the past 150 years, but by juxtaposing images from different eras it demonstrates common threads running through the history of photography - for instance there are examples of war photography from the Crimea and from Vietnam, social documentary shots from the 1920s and the 1970s, and astonishingly ambitious composite images created from multiple exposures back in the C19th. This exhibition finishes in London on 1st March, but it will then move to the National Media Museum in Bradford for three months - I think you'll have gathered that I highly recommend it! There's a good review from The Observer here.

We then yomped through to Trafalgar Square and saw Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the NPG, which also received a resounding WOW!! from the judges - I had so many favourites in this exhibition, I hardly know how to start listing them. The really impressive thing for me is that by focusing on his portraits of his friends and people he personally admired, the NPG have stepped neatly around Singer Sargent's reputation as a facile society portraitist and placed him in context as a man with links to the inner circles of the artistic and cultural life of Europe and the USA at the turn of the C20th. They must be doing pretty well out of it too - I don't remember ever having to queue for tickets for any exhibition there before, and even with timed entrance the place was crammed. Very sensibly though, the exhibits are only named and numbered on the walls: all the descriptive text for each piece is printed in a free guide which you're given along with your ticket, which means that rather than the usual ruck for possession of the sight line to the wall labels everyone is able to stand back a little way from the paintings, making for a pretty relaxed atmosphere. The Guardian review of this exhibition is here.

I'm away to become horizontal now - I'll catch up with all your journals tomorrow.