Tate Britain, on Millbank in London - New

Christine and I wanted to visit Tate Britain's new lay-out of pictures in the galleries. We took the train to Charing Cross (signal failure at London Bridge, change there to platform 6 and then to platform 5). Charing Cross was Chris's uptown station when she commuted into London. She knows all the lines into Kent and nearly all the stations' names on them. So if anyone deserves her photo under the clock it is she. By the by, that clock is still on BST!

 We walked round to Whitehall to board an 88 which goes round the back of the Tate.

 And one can see at the front why a bit of accessible ramp-work wouldn't go amiss. It's only been like the law since 1972.

 The refurbished rotunda clearly has fans.

 Now to the re-hanging and new lay-out of the galleries. Pictures are hung in chronological order from the 17th century to now. They are hung neither in genres, styles, nor schools. Hence, there are many curious, startling alignments.

 Take the mid 19th century. We have a pre-Raphaelite (in fact a Rossetti) next to symbolistic mysticism and, as above with a rather post-Constable impressionistic sky from Matthew Cox.
The hanging in this room is very Victorian. The walls are stacked to the ceiling with pictures. So to see poor old Millais's Boyhood of Raleigh you have to crane your neck some.

 Interestingly I've recently learnt that Beatrix Potter was tutored a little by Millais, who was a friend of her father and lived quite near in south Ken.

The wall of Pre-Rafs has this Holman Hunt upon which Beatrix Potter commented that is was 'all in focus'. Very clever Holman, but that would be optic unknown to anything Biological Science has yet discovered. In fact it isn't 'all in focus' but the depth of field is huge.

We both like the effort below principally because it's the Pool of London with Butler's Wharf and Hay's Wharf on the right, because those must be tea clippers. Eddy, Chris's dad, worked there as a docker post-war and banged on about it until 2003.

The Tate's hangers are being very mischievous below. Alma-Tadema next to Sickert! They're having a laugh. Still, same decade of the 19th century.

The next two were on either end of the same wall. The seated nude is by Matthew Smith (born in Halifax) and painted in 1916. The drive back to Sandringham of their gracious majesties  is by Sir Alfred Munnings and painted in 1921, I think. Both, for me, are influenced by photography. The first in terms of framing and angle; the second is surely taken from a photo with the latest high-speed 1920s camera and a 50 mm lens. And awful composition/framing for an academician; well I think so.

 The Turner and the Constable rooms remain much the same. And it is good to see youth being drilled in the fundamentals of modern art.
Back in the late 19th century when the Turner bequest was given to the Tate, I think some of the canvases were catalogued by Ruskin as 'unfinished'.
I thought to myself, considering those vast canvases of drenched colour, the joy of it is that Turner knew this was (modern) art and so did Ruskin. One cannot really see anything, like Tintern Abbey for example, but so what?

And again the shock of juxtaposition. Because the two pictures below were painted in the same decade, they can be hung together. Lowry hardly able to render a human figure properly is next to a master of it, Lucian Freud, showing his sister strangling a kitten.