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| While every sign and security guard says 'No Foto', I couldn't help but document the surprising discovery of a motorcycle on the floor of the National Gallery. I suppose that puts me in the camp of the Photo Liberation Front, a group of artist-tourists sick of being reprimanded for taking photos in museums! |
If you happen to be in London, I recommend a visit to the
National Gallery on
Trafalgar Square, which houses one of the best painting collections in Europe. The original building (there have been lots of extensions added) was designed by
William Wilkins in the 1830s, and is the
neo-classical heap you'd expect of a big national institution of the 19th Century.
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| A broader shot of Boris Anrep's murals in the National Gallery lobby |
I've visited many times, but the particular path I walked last November led across a delightful mosaic of 'The Pleasures of Life', and discovered a cartouche labelled 'Speed', which of course features a motorcycle! The entire entry and mezzanine level floors are covered in mosaic murals, but the upper right mezzanine is where you'll find the bike. The image is stylistically rooted in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and depicts a readheaded woman astride a
'flapper bracket', with a fishtail exhaust beneath her high heels. The exhaust is distinctive; a sedate production item, and not a full-house racing 'Brooklands Can', and very much in the style of a four-valve Ariel single-cylinder ca.1930, or perhaps a Rudge.
As the mosaic covers the entire floor around the grand 1889 staircase (by
Sir John Taylor), it's not easy to find an information plaque explaining them, but a quick search revealed the artist as
Boris Anrep, a member of the
Bloomsbury group, which included the writer
Virginia Woolf, economist
John Maynard Keynes, and painter
Vanessa Bell. Anrep was a Russian lawyer who abandoned his practice in 1908 (age 25), to study art in Paris and Edinburgh, eventually settling on the mosaic as his chosen medium by 1917. He spent WW1 as a Russian officer in
Galicia (an ethnically diverse kingdom in the Austria-Hungarian empire, now straddling Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic). In 1917 he was sent as a military attaché to London, and never returned to his homeland, probably because of the Revolution in Russia, as well as his burgeoning art career, and the commissions for mosaics which kept him busy the rest of his life.
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| A search revealed a photo from the Getty Images Archive of Anrep working on Oct 28 1929 on this very mosaic, 'Speed' |
Anrep's work at the National Gallery began in 1928, the 'Labours of Life' and 'Pleasures of Life', of which the
Flapper on a motorcycle is part; the mosaics took 5 years to complete. In 1952 he returned to lay the 'Modern Virtues' at the foot of the staircase, which incorporates portraits of Winston Churchill, Dame Margot Fonteyne, and
Bertrand Russell...whereas the earlier mosaics included
Virginia Woolf and
Greta Garbo, but no attribution is given for the woman on the Ariel.
If you're interested, there's a
book available on Anrep's National Gallery work here.Email me to subscribe to updates from The Vintagent!
