Gloomy Sunday in or near Knightsbridge

A walk through Green Park and Hyde Park to the V&A.

The Serpentine

Go easy on the eyeliner, fellahs

Rose Wiley at Serpentine Sackler gallery

(click photo to enlarge)

Canvases patched, spliced, layered

In 1928 the V&A was given a collection of 16th century stained glass, mainly from the workshop of Gerhard Remisch, from Steinfeld and Mariawald Abbey, which was closed in 1802. Says the V&A: "In the nineteenth century, after the 1798 French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars that followed, huge quantities of stained glass were removed from churches and monasteries in France and Germany. England became the primary market for this glass. John Christopher Hampp (1750-1825), a German cloth merchant who had settled in Norwich in 1782, and his partner William Stevenson were responsible for bringing to England much of the continental glass now to be found throughout the country. Much of this continental glass was used in churches to replace the glass destroyed during the sixteenth-century Reformation. Quantities of it were also set in the windows of private residences and chapels of the newly rich industrialists and by the mid-nineteenth century there was a well-established tradition of stained glass collecting in England. "

On the right, beyond the blue reflections, is St Simeon in the temple beholding the holy spirit - the dove was a sign that he would see Christ before he died -

 Looking more closely, and having just puzzled over Rose Wylie's paintings, I found these panels puzzling in a different way ... that man with the staff, for instance, what's he doing there ... and why does the statue of Moses(?) have horns ...

 Both panels are filled with a concatenation of fantastic architecture -

 ... and just look at the shapes of the glass, some of them very tiny ...

As I headed for the tube, the 12,000 light bulbs of Harrods tried valiantly to cut through the late-afternoon greyness -