Plague and Pastoral

I can’t remem­ber ever hav­ing been in the Wal­lace Col­lec­tion before — and it’s actu­ally quite offput­ting — so much STUFF !  Brings out my min­im­al­ist tend­en­cies in a quite over­power­ing way — it’s just as well they have turned the court­yard into a really nice café.

We had actu­ally gone for an exhib­i­tion of two treas­ure hoards from Ger­many, bur­ied by Jews flee­ing pogroms dur­ing the Black Death — masses of gold coins and trinkets, some of them abso­lutely exquis­ite — but­tons and clothes orna­ments, what would have to have been sewn on suc­cess­ive gar­ments they were so valu­able.  And Jew­ish wed­ding rings — with tiny gold build­ings on. A coin from the Schw­abisch Hall mint in one hoard.

The day before, to Constable’s Por­traits at the National Por­trait Gal­lery — pas­toral por­traits, in that many of them are coun­try people, in their best togs, but non­ethe­less from their ruddy com­plex­ions and nar­rowed eyes, people used to the out­doors and weather.  There’s a pic­ture of his father, one of the few where the sit­ter is look­ing dir­ectly at the artist, which is very power­ful. There’s a new iden­ti­fic­a­tion of an earlier pic­ture as his father, but the sit­ter looks much older so I’m not con­vinced.  To my mind, these show a painter as accom­plished as the one who pro­duces the great pop­u­lar land­scapes — it rounds out his por­trait, if you like.