Art, Cars, and Tales from Two Crypts

French Frog having lunch in the crypt



French Frog Outside the National Gallery

Today was filled with adventures, as we hustled to Trafalgar Square to attempt to photograph moving vehicles. Unfortunately, most of the traffic was going pretty slowly. The bicycles seemed to be going faster than the cars. But we managed to get some good shots. After an hour or so, we went across the square to the National Gallery and spent an hour or two exploring the many famous paintings there.

And there are many: Monet's The Water Lily Pond; Van Gogh's Sunflowers; Botticelli's Venus and Mars; Degas' After the Bath; Cezanne's Bathers; Henri Rousseau's Surprised!, a tiger creeping through the bushes, to name just a few. Almost the first paintings we looked at were a set by William Hogarth entitled Marriage A-la-Mode. These were among my favorites. The paintings tell the story of an arranged marriage between a poor viscount and a wealthy young lady. The first scene is of the scheming fathers arranging the deal. Next comes a portrait of the young couple. She appears quite bored, and he has a young lady's cap sticking out of his pocket in a telltale sign of infidelity. A further scene is of the viscount and his young prostitute seeking the services of a quack doctor to help them deal with their syphillis symptoms. Then we see the unfortunate wife caught by her husband in a scandalously compromising situation with the lawyer who arranged the marriage, Silvertongue. The solicitor murders her husband and then flees the room through a window in his night attire. In the final scene the guilt stricken wife poisons herself and dies while her greedy father pries her rings off her fingers. This is a fine commentary on the morals of the upper class in Hogarth's day. In another of his paintings, called The Graham Children, four children cavort in the foreground while a cat very closely watches a caged bird in the background. Another painting relevant to what we learned at the Tower of London was The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, by Paul Delaroche. She was one of the unfortunate victims beheaded at the Tower, and the painting shows her bravely kneeling over the executioner's block while a cleric prays in the background and the executioner waits patiently with his axe.

Lion Statue at Trafalgar Square

The spiral staircase at St. Paul's

Our afternoon was spent hanging out in two different crypts. We had lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt at the church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields. The brick arches of the ceiling and the coolness of the underground room lent a certain eeriness to a delicious lunch. Two members of our group also tried the brass rubbing that can be done there. Then we headed to St. Paul's Cathedral, designed by famous architect Christopher Wren. Incredibly, he had no formal training as an architect, but was completely self-taught. St. Paul's was bombed a number of times during World War II, but luckily came through the war reasonably intact. We finished our tour downstairs in the crypt, where Christopher Wren, Admiral Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington are buried. Today the front steps of the church seem to be a preferred destination for the lunch crowd from the nearby offices. Also among the diners were numerous pigeons. It is here that the bird lady from Mary Poppins offered people the chance to feed the birds for tuppence a bag.