Dulwich Picture Gallery

1. Gainsborough's Mrs Elizabeth Moody and her Two Sons. The kids were painted in some time after the subject had died.
2. Dulwich Picture Gallery lit by skylights
3. Mausoleum, showing Soane's yellow glass windows
4. Compare the "lid" on the mausoleum with the red phone booth in the distance

After a day at the British Library, I've come down with a case of "culture overload" so I slashed my crazy "gotta-see-it-ALL!" schedule [or as they say around here, my "shed-u-all". I took National Rail to London around noon, and after a bit of confusion in the Tube, walking for miles it seemed through a bunch of winding white ceramic-tiled tunnels to get from the Jubilee to the Circle to the Waterloo & City lines. My goal was London Bridge station, to connect with a National Rail out to East Dulwich. I wanted to visit this gallery as much for the building by Sir John Soane as for the collection of Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, Rembrandts and Rubens inside. Like everything else around here, there is a long and curious history associated with how the collection came to be. I was interested in the mausoleum which is inside the museum. It's suffused with golden-yellow light and is quite lovely, as is the museum itself. It also serves as the inspiration for the red British telephone box. No kidding. Check out the roof of the mausoleum, then compare it to the nearby phonebox.

The gallery's use of greenhouse skylights in 1817 has a really contemporary harness-the-natural-light feel, and such a contrast to the dungeon at the BL yesterday. The guards watched me with interest as I attempted to take photographs of basically everything hanging inside, and told me the collection is organized as into "beer and wine wings." All the Germans, Dutch and English painters are on one side, all the French and Italians are on the other. The special exhibit has just finished, and the next show, covering the Wyeths [NC and Andrew], doesn't start til June. The gallery is right next door to the College of God's Gift [where do they get these names?] which started out as a school for poor boys in 1619, but is now a prep school called Dulwich College. The college chapel was open, and someone was playing the wheezing organ. It was priceless to study the flamboyant altar paintings and murals of saints lit by sunlight, accompanied by a live soundtrack.