After the Arthur C. Clarke award on Wednesday night (again, congratulations to Emma on her win for When There Are Wolves Again!), I had time on Thursday to look at a couple of art museums in London – and then was inspired to check Belfast’s offerings the next day.
I must have walked past the Courtauld Gallery a hundred times or more. It’s just inside Somerset House, which I have visited for both business and pleasure. There are three floors of superb art. It reminded me of the Mauritshuis in The Hague – very digestible. Just to pick two items from the permanent collection that jumped out at me (these are the Courtauld’s own photographs):
This is known as the Courtauld Bag; an intricately decorated handbag made from a single brass sheet, ornamented with silverware, presumably made for a rich woman in the Mosul are of what is now Iraq in the 14th century. Amazing stuff.
This needs no introduction. The Courtauld has only two van Gogh’s, but if one of them is “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear”, there is no reason to complain.
There is a lot more, especially of the Flemish and Dutch masters and the Impressionists, but this is going to be a long post anyway so I’ll just recommend that you see for yourself.
For £4 extra at the moment you can get into a temporary exhibition exploring Barbara Hepworth’s use of color. I have had an affection for her work since my Cambridge days, as one of the six copies of her Two Forms (Divided Circle) was on display in the Memorial Court gardens in those days. (It has now apparently been moved to Downing College.) One doesn’t think of her as a particularly colourful artist, but the case is well made. Here is her Sea Form, a 1958 bronze which allowed her to experiment with the patina.
I have no excuse for not previously visiting the Courtauld. I have every excuse for not previously visiting the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration which has been open under that name only since June 2026, which is after the last time I was in London. (It was previously the House of Illustration, from 2002 until it closed for relocation in 2020.) As of this writing, Quentin Blake is still alive and turns 94 later this year.
There are three floors, the top one displaying a fairly small selection of Blake’s own art. The very first thing you hit once you come in is a couple of illustrations for Waiting For Godot from 2021 (when he would have been 88). Quentin Blake and Waiting for Godot are two things I had not expected to see linked (though in fact he did a lot of sketches to accompany theatre reviews in Punch in the mid-century).
There are also a set of characters from Macbeth as played by crows – here, Lady Macbeth and a Scottish Doctor.
One gets a real sense of how Blake feels that his art has a purpose.
The middle floor had a small exhibition of work by Welsh / Sri Lankan artist Murugiah, which has vibrant colors and movement but the only piece that really got me was the wooden sculpture, “Compassion”.
But the ground floor currently holds a fascinating history of LGBT comics, including one where I snorted with laughter at the translation from the original Dutch – yeah, “awesome” covers some of the meaning of “geil”, but not all of it. The standards are all there, notably Alison Bechdel, but there are some more obscure items as well such as Sapphowoman, the lesbian superhero of Belfast from around 1990.
The museum is in Clerkenwell, in a 19th-century engine house and coal stores which used to be part of the Water Board’s operations. The nearest Tube station is Angel. Well worth a visit.
In parentheses, I also went to an exhibition about 1996 in the Barbican. This was not substantial, mainly Spice Girls and European Championship with a bit of Blair and Blur and other stuff. Still, it is odd to think that it is as far in the past now as 1966 was then.
On Friday, back in Norn Iron, we ventured forth en masse to the Ulster Museum, but determined to look at the art collection on the top floor as a priority. There is a temporary exhibition highlighting the museum’s textiles collection, which had to be completely rebuilt after almost all of the hundreds of stored artifacts were destroyed by an IRA firebomb attack in 1976. (The explanatory displays make no reference to who planted the firebombs, but it is not difficult to find out.) I didn’t get any good pictures of the exhibits, which need to be seen in three dimensions anyway, but here is the museum’d promotional video. Unlike the rest of the museum, you have to pay for this bit.
The museum’s regular art collection is better than I remembered. Even U appreciated it, as she sometimes does, here with “The Patron (The Festival of Saint Kevin at the Seven Churches, Glendalough)” by Joseph Peacock, painted in 1813.
I love the expression on the face of Miss Cherry Crawford (1768-1845), the only woman admitted to the Brotherhood of the United Irishmen, whose son was one of the founders of the museum. The portrait by Joseph Wilson was painted in 1789 when she was 21 and full of rebellion.
Finally, Sir John Lavery painted his wife Hazel (who also used to appear on Irish bank notes) watching a German air raid on London in 1917. The planes may not look much like biplanes, an she looks very small compared to the furniture and the window, but there is a tremendous sense of the outside world of war, intruding on the artist’s studio.
I have always tended to start at the bottom of the Ulster Museum and work up, which meant that by the time I got to the art gallery (if I got there at all) I was tired and ready to go home. It was good to ring the changes.
Anyway, that was some very thought-provoking holiday art.