I'm in The Alchemy Experiment café having an okay mocha and a really quite hot cheese and jalapeño pastry
Edit 16:00: Ugh, they've mopped the floor by the counter using a very scented floor cleaner. I wish cafés would not do this. It's not as if unscented cleaning fluids are hard to obtain. Cafés should smell of coffee not of some unidentifiable intense synthetic floral scent.
One of the museum attendants at the Hunterian (a pretty young woman) just said "I love your arched feet, beautiful!" and smiled.
Later on I chatted with her about the museum building and how I think that museums should treat the buildings as part of the exhibition. She agreed and said that only last week she had asked one of her colleagues a question about the floral decoration at the top of the pillars, apparently he just shrugged and said he didn't know.
The Hunterian Gallery is simultaneously harking back to an older tradition of gallery display and bringing it up to date with an explicit challenge to the visitor to make connections between seemingly unconnected works.
So there is a mixture of the usual obvious themes and paintings from the seventeenth century juxtaposed with pictures from the twentieth.
The title of this painting is The Patriot, but I have no idea why
Hector's farewell to Andromache is the largest painting in the Hunterian collection. It shows several bare and sandaled feet. Seeing them prompted me to muse on what artists do deliberately and what they do without thinking. Andromache's feet are bare but free from any obvious sign that she walks barefoot, they look soft and very free of calluses. Is this deliberate on the part of the artist? Were the feet of the artist's model similarly unblemished and the artist just painted what he saw?
@ninalanyon What did the Artist mean? Did the Artist actually mean anything other than that's what they saw? And do we read far too much into what we see, and 100% the oppositte of what the Artist intended? Maybe it's better to just go with what you like, what you see rather than what somebody else tells you.
@ninalanyon Oh it is. It came as a surprise to me as through much of my life going to Glasgow was going to football and Glasgow was a city that embraced the car. So when my daughter went to Glasgow University and I spent more time there I discovered just how walkable it is, how green and arty it is. It's a city I have grown rather fond of, despite the rain
Today I visited the Hunterian Gallery and the Hunterian Museum but I started by walking through the Botanic Gardens and various highways and byways between there and the museum.
One of the hot houses in the Botanic Gardens
Cheltenham had (has?) lions, Glasgow has Scottie dogs
One of the garden entrances
One of the many bars
I have no idea what this means
But this seems to be commemorating the public baths
