The London Traveler

One of the London Festival of Architecture’s most interesting exhibitions is a show at Southwark gallery, charting the unvisited reaches of the Thames Estuary.
As you head out of London along the Thames, the glitzy office blocks and shiny residential developments disappear. Instead, there are sheds, warehouses, the strange concrete shapes of water towers, chimneys, power stations and cargo terminals. And mile upon mile of gloomy marshland.
It’s a landscape that looks its best with grey skies – moody and unloved. A landscape where history has come and gone, leaving only stumps of old forts in its wake.
This …read more

Comments Off

The National Gallery’s new exhibition showcases the work of Pompeo Batoni  – an eighteenth century Italian painter whose speciality was portraits of foreigners ‘doing the Grand Tour’.
One of his sitters wears a spectacular kilt and plaid that quite takes your attention away from the fine Roman ruins against which he is posed. The British tourist away from home was just as easily recognisable in the eighteenth century as he is now!
But even if you’re not particularly interested in eighteenth century tourists, Batoni’s paintings are a fascinating record of what really drove the art world in the eighteenth century. He highlights …read more

Comments Off