Review of The National Gallery, London

This is my review of the National Gallery for my Silver Arts Award PartC. Enjoy!

On the 12th October, I attended The National Gallery in London with my mum and best friend Lydia. I chose to go to the National Gallery because I knew that there would be painting relevant to my challenge in Part B of Unit 1. The art form is fine art which is what I'm concentrating on because my challenge is to learn how to paint water and just like I thought, I found lots of paintings of water or that contained some form of water.

The gallery is huge, beautiful, full of wonderful arcs and mosaic floors and the walls and ceilings are breathtaking. There are many different painting by various artists to intrigue everyone. I had never been to an art gallery of just mainly paintings before. I've been to the Victoria and Albert Museum and other museums like the history, science and toy museums in London and in Edinburgh. It was a very exciting visit.

My friend and I went to all the rooms available and looked at every painting. We took pictures of our favourite ones and the ones which contained water (obviously only if we were allowed which we were)because I knew that painting water was what I was going to do for my challenge. It was very fun and I had the opportunity to look at many famous paintings up close including ones with water which me because I could see the brushstroke or techniques used and compare them which gave me an idea of how to paint water effectively. On top of all of this, I got to see some of the most famous, well-known paintings that I know of and have talked in lessons, like the Water-Lily Pond by Claude Monet, Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh and more!

There wasn't anything that wasn't good about the visit apart from obviously there was a lot of people there and some of the rooms were closed so I didn't get to see all the paintings. But overall, I really enjoyed the visit.

I would recommend the National Gallery to anyone interested in fine art because it offers so much and is a very interesting day out.

I learnt about lots of new artists and saw more paintings of artists that I knew about. Also, by looking closely at the painting of water that I found, I learnt that they used horizontal brush strokes in many different colours and shades. The reflections of light were really light, almost white if not white already and water is not always blue like it is assumed always. Also I compared three different paintings and found that even though the brush strokes were all horizontal, they differed in size and thickness on each painting. All of this will help me a lot when I paint my own water because now I have more knowledge about it and seen close up examples. Observation really does help!

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1 Comments

  • On 9 January 2016, 19:21 [Deleted User] commented:

    This is an amazing review! By the way everyone I'm Lydia the best friend

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