Day 6 – Last Day in London

The Rosetta Stone

On our agenda for today were two of the most famous museums in London, the British Museum and the National Gallery. This is a holiday weekend in the UK (May 1 in a bank holiday) and so both museums were jam packed. The crowd was five or six people deep around the Rosetta Stone and it would have been difficult to get a close up look.

Assyrian Human-Headed Winged Bull (behind me)

The British Museum is kind of a bittersweet museum to visit because on one hand it has the greatest collection of artifacts anywhere in the world, but then you have to remember that most of it was acquired when “the sun never set on the British Empire” so the means used to acquire some of the pieces is a bit suspect. One good example is the Elgin Marbles, which are fragments of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. These were acquired under dubious circumstances by Lord Elgin in 1801 from the Turkish government which ruled Greece at the time. In recent times the Greek government has been trying to get them returned and the British Museum has consistently refused.

One of "Elgin's Marbles"

In the Elgin Marble shown in the picture, it is one of a sequence of an original 92 metope panels depicting battles between the Lapiths (legendary people of Greek mythology) and the Centaurs. Spoiler alert: The humans win!!! Probably why we don't see Centaurs today.

Virgin of the Rocks (close-up)

The National Gallery certainly has one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world with works from all the major masters. Just to mention a few:  'Sunflowers' by Vincent van Gogh, 'The Ambassadors' by Hans Holbein the Younger, 'The Arnolfini Portrait' by Jan van Eyck, 'The Madonna of the Pinks' by Raphael and probably their greatest piece 'The Virgin of the Rocks' by Leonardo da Vinci. For me, the works in these museums were of major interest as I had studied most of them in my Art History class last year and it was fantastic to see them in person. We also find new painting we like. Jeanne especially liked Van Gogh's 'Long Grass with Butterflies' which we had never seen before.

Sunflowers by Van Gogh

For dinner, we had wanted to try one of the historic pubs in London like the Lamb & Flag which was a hangout of Dickens back in the day. However once again it was massively crowded as tomorrow is a bank holiday, as were the next 5 or 6 pubs we tried. In fact it was extremely crowded throughout all of Covent Garden, but finally we stumbled into one of the newer pubs which was also crowded but happened to find a seat as two people were leaving and had an excellent Steak and Frites dinner. Everything worked out for the best in the end.