Victoria and Albert Museum – 25th July 2006
By Megan Claridge, Christy Low and Henry Scott (-items in italics added by parent-)
We went to the V&A Museum in London. There was a new boy called George on the trip with his mum, Roz. We went on a tour with a man called Colin. The first room he took us to was about the work of Raphael. We learned that a cartoon is like a sketch (“a full size design for art work in another medium”) and comes from the Italian word for a large piece of paper. They didn’t have large pieces of paper though and so Raphael would have stuck lots of smaller bits together to get one big sheet. Pope Leo the tenth asked Raphael to do the paintings that would be made into tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel to compete with Michael Angelo’s work on the ceiling. They were sent to Brussels in 1517 to be made into the tapestries. The paintings were a mirror image of the tapestries because the loom was placed above the painting and the weavers knots were on the top side. When it came off the loom, the underside was the finished side. A loom has warp threads that run up and down and weft threads going side to side. We are going to remember this as ‘weft goes left’.
Next we went into the Jameel Gallery where we saw an Islamic fireplace which had the names of 7 Christian martyrs on it! There was also a giant carpet (“Ardabil Carpet”) which had come from a mosque and had some Arabic writing on it that said the man who made it dedicated his life to doing it. It had 26000 knots in it and is the World’s oldest carpet! The warp and weft on it are made of silk because Colin said that wool would not have been strong enough.
After the Jameel Gallery we went into the (‘John Madejski’) garden which only opened a year ago. It had a large stone paddling pool in the courtyard with the old buildings all around it. There was a pink diamond sculpture made of stainless steel that some people argue shouldn’t be there because it looks odd against the old building. We ourselves are divided over it because some of us think the V&A was built for the arts and not necessarily art from ages ago. Colin pointed up at the roof part of one of the buildings whilst we were in the garden. It showed Queen Victoria handing out awards at the Great Exhibition to all the Countries that took part. All the Countries names were written up there. It also had a picture showing that it was better to learn and be wise than to have gold.
Next we went into another art room where we looked at a painting by Rossetti called “The Day Dream”. It was a pre-raphaelite painting which means it was before Raphael’s work (‘he was a renaissance painter’). It was of Jane Morris (wife of the artist William Morris) sitting under a sycamore tree, dreaming of lost love. Unusually, it had a poem by Rossetti under it that had been retrieved from Rossetti’s wife’s grave 10 years after her suicide. The painting was considered sexy for its time. We also saw a painting by Millais, a friend of Rossetti’s, called “Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru”. He painted it when he was only 16 after he saw a stage show. The other picture we looked at was called “The Governess” by Richard Regrave. Colour and children were added later, because the man who commissioned it said it was too dark and sad looking. This was because you became a governess if you were educated but no longer had money. Governesses didn’t get paid, but they got a home and food. In the picture the governess had a letter in her hand which started “My dear child...” and it had a black border around it to show her sadness.
On our way to the next place, we stopped to see a picture of Lorenzo Ghiberti. In it he was holding a pair of doors and later we got to see the doors in the picture in another part of the V&A. They had scenes from the Bible on them, including Noah being naked and drunk. The original doors were once baptistery doors in Florence, Italy, but got damaged by flooding and were removed. The ones in the museum were to scale (huge) to show what they would have been like. Opposite the picture of Ghiberti holding the doors, there was one of Phidias (“also spelled Pheidias”). He was the Greek who sculpted the outside of the Parthenon when it was built. We found out that the Elgin Marbles as they are known were stolen by Elgin from there, broken up, and brought over here.
Finally on our tour, we went into a room where we saw lots of statues of Buddah and found out that a person who teaches Buddhism is called a Bodhisattva.
During lunch we all got to play in the paddling pool which we needed because we were all very H-O-T! Then we got to choose what we did next so we got a “Magic Glasses” back-pack and went to the Glass section on the 4th floor where we all got very hot again! First we had had to handle an object blindfolded and then find it (by recognising its shape) in the museum. We had ointment bottles and a goblet to find. We had some coloured lollipops that we held up to the light and overlapped them to get more colours. There were some magic glasses in the pack, but they were rubbish as they only magnified what you could already see and you’d have done better to just get closer to the glass case! Lastly, we did a sketch of our favourite pieces of glass.
There were a couple of other things that we did at the V&A, like look at some sculpture, including Michael Angelo’s “David” and a lot of smaller pieces including cameos which were made of mother of pearl (“which is also known as Nacre”).
We also went to the Dress Collection which has pieces from the 1500s, but included a special section on the 1960s with clothes that our grandmothers would have worn. We thought they were well cool! We saw a pink velour tracksuit that us girls thought was wicked, Henry thought was “horribly horrible” and Meg’s Mum thought was “Chavvy”!
We loved our day and would like to go back to look at more as there is soooo much there.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was built to house the best examples of art and design following the Great Exhibition in 1851. It was designed by Sir Aston Webb. Queen Victoria’s last public engagement was to lay the foundation stone in 1899. It has over 4 million objects of diverse art from every age and nation and has 7 miles of gallery space on its 6 floors that are all arranged around the central courtyard of the John Madejski garden.