Speaking about art
galleries of London we should first of all mention The National Gallery,
The National Portrait Gallery and The Tate gallery. The National
Gallery contains one of the richest collections of paintings in the
world. The range of the collection is wide. It represents all the
leading schools of European painting from the 13th to early 20th
centuries, for example pictures of Rembrandt, Turner, Monet, Picasso,
Van Gogh and other great masters. Another gallery is the National
Portrait Gallery where there are oil paintings, water colors, drawings
and sculptures. The Gallery constantly changes displays and holds the
annual portrait competition for young artists. The Tate Gallery is one
of London's best-known art galleries, opened with the financial support
of Sir Henry Tate, who also gave a collection of 65 paintings. The
Gallery contains a unique collection of British paintings from the 16th
century to the present day. It regularly holds special exhibitions. The
most famous museums in Britain are the Victoria and Albert Museum and
the British Museum. The Victoria and Albert museum is one of the world's
outstanding art museums. It is situated in south central London. The
museum was given its present name in honor of Queen Victoria and her
husband Prince Albert. The British Museum has a priceless collection of
antiquities from almost every period and every part of the world. It
houses collections of drawings, coins, medals and ethnography. Stanley
Spencer is one of the most original of modern British artists. He was a
painter of imaginative and religious subjects, landscapes and occasional
portraits. "Swan Upping" is one of Spencer's best known pictures. This
painting has an air of lightened reality; the light reflected from the
water suggests moonlight, yet events take place in the foreground in
daylight. There is anxiety in the immobilized swans and the face of the
woman on the bridge, a mood enhanced by the serrated edges of the clouds
and the flame-like branches of the tree on the right. An ordinary scene
made to appeal extraordinary. Spencer's works are well represented in
the Tate Gallery collection and the exhibition reveals the full range of
his output, from early drawings done while still a student to his late
self-portrait, painted a few months before his death in 1959.
