Best Art Tour Ever!
Well, close enough to, really. And that's not hype. Not yet another meaningless or delusional, counts-for-nothing, unsupported "opinion".
 
Rather, it's a proper, weighed up, substantive judgement.  It's a substantive judgement because it's based on something. What it's based on is 1) it's the National Gallery - which gives you pole position to start with! And 2) it stems from a clear-eyed, forthright look at the alternatives. Gasp! Shock! Yes, we tell you, for example, that there is a free alternative to our not-free tour! Let alone the other tour "possibilities". Lists them - and sets out the pros and cons. Pros and cons that are homely old facts - as opposed to the fluff of unsupported "opinions". Sort through those pros and cons and voila you've arrived at a proper, carefully considered, substnative judgement. Something real, something that's got some honest-to-goodness nutritional value!
 
And on that note, well, let's turn to the menu. What's on offer - both in terms of the NG itself and the guiding (tastings available):
 
"You've been nailed again, eye-popped. Life has just been adjusted."
 
 As the wonderful Simon Schama puts it, "Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to rearrange your sense of reality." And on that note (warning?) you are cordially invited to a levee - a levee? or a close encounter with sex and violence in Trafalgar Square? - with the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Dyck, Goya, Constable, Turner, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.
 
Arnolfini

Which is by way of saying, "In the National Gallery, as perhaps nowhere else, you can walk through seven centuries of European painting, on the mountain-tops. And, as always on the mountains, it's useful to have a guide, a companion who can spot things that you might miss and trigger thoughts that might not occur to you on your own." Let alone the fact that the National - "the single best picture gallery in the world" - covers 10 acres, has 75 galleries, and houses 2,300 of the world's greatest paintings! Here's a taster. It's Margaret "engaging with" Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Adoration of the Magi. And here's a grab from her exploration of the Arnolfini Wedding.* Here's a measure of how special this tour is: the Arnolfini Wedding painting and I go back a long way. I've spent a lot of time looking at it, know it fairly well. But having Margaret take me through it was like seeing it in High Definition for the first time. I'd missed the red pattens. Hadn't clocked that the bed was on the first floor and what that imports, hadn't spotted the second window, etc. It's wonderful stuff. And as long as I'm at it, well, here's some plain speaking about this one - why it's a better deal than the alternatives (the audio wand, the "free" in-house tour, etc.). And for a last bow, well, just this. Scion of generations of hard-headed, salt-of-the-earth types (the bad boy of American vice presidents excepted) I am, I don't have a lot of time for "aerie fairy", "pseud's corner" art "criticism". Doesn't float my boat. One of the many things I loved about Margaret's tour was that that kind of "discourse" was conspicuous by its absence! It was all good, solid, down-to-earth information. Stuff that you could actually see - as opposed to away with the fairies flights!

*See the image above.

The National Gallery Tour
takes place every Tuesday at 10.45 am.

Meet just outside the exit of EmbankmentTube.

EmbankmentTube is on
the Circle, Bakerloo, District & Northern Lines

Guided by Helena, Margaret, Molly or Tom