Dreich day pursuits

Because we’re in a city, and a city with some spectacular art scattered about it, we used this rather dreich - though much less frightful than we’d been led to believe - day to visit the National Gallery of Scotland for the first time since it was all done up.

On this occasion I was fascinated by several works I’d never seen before - mainly because I was on a mission to see something famous - and the above painting is one such. Because I’m blipping on my phone, forgive me a copy and paste moment:
Jan Steen
(1626 - 1679)
Dutch
A School for Boys and Girls about 1670
Oil on canvas
This painting - Steen's largest school scene - is not merely a light-hearted view of a chaotic classroom. It demonstrates the evils of inattentiveness in a school without discipline.
The moral is emphasised by two features in the painting: a print of the great scholar Erasmus which is discarded onto the floor at the right; and a child who offers a pair of spectacles to the owl near the lantern, illustrating the Dutch proverb 'What use are glasses or light if the owl does not want to see?’

Isn’t that fabulous?

And now I’m off to bed. Cities are very tiring to the country bumpkin - especially cities as full of visitors!