Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
have variously adorned the floors of 10 Downing Street and Hitler's Berlin of
ce.
Unusually, on the west side of the gallery, there are several oil paintings of female
acrobats, a harem's tea party and several full-length portraits from the Qajar dynasty in
nineteenth-century Iran.
China and Japan
In the
China
gallery (room 44), the range of materials, from jade to rhino horn, lacquer
to lapis lazuli, is more striking than any individual piece, though the pair of top-hatted
gentlemen carved in marble stand out in the parade of Buddhas near the entrance
- they are thought to represent Korean envoys. There's a surprising range, from a
sixteenth-century Ming cupboard that's so minimalist, it could be modernist, to a great
Art Deco clock from fashionable interwar Shanghai.
At the main entrance to the adjacent
Japan
gallery (room 45) is an incredible bronze
incense burner, decorated with life-sized peacocks. Amid the wealth of silk, lacquer and
samurai armour, look out for the tiny, elaborately carved, jade and marble
netsuke
(belt
toggles) portraying such quirky subjects as “spider on aubergine”, “starving dog on a
bed of leaves” and “badger dressed in a lotus leaf ”.
18
Cast Courts
Two enormous
Cast Courts
(rooms 46a & 46b),
filled with plaster casts of famous
works of art and architecture, were created at the outset of the V&A so that ordinary
Londoners could experience the glories of classical and ancient art. These newly
refurbished, barrel-vaulted, glass-roofed rooms remain an astonishing sight. In room
46a, a copy of the colossal Trajan's Column, sliced in half to fit in the room, towers
over the rest of the plaster casts, while over in room 46b, a life-sized replica of
Michelangelo's
David
stands among the pulpits of Pisa cathedral and baptistry, and
Ghiberti's celebrated bronze doors from the baptistry in Florence.
Sculpture
Along the south side of the central garden (rooms 21-24), in the V&A's showpiece
Sculpture
display,
you'll find
Bernini
's life-sized fountain sculpture,
Neptune and Triton
,
amid a whole series of top-notch Italian pieces. Other highlights include Canova's
depiction of Theseus astride the Minotaur, and his head of Helen of Troy about which
Byron wrote an eight-line paean.
Auguste Rodin
donated several sculptures to the
V&A in 1914, including his beautifully wrought
The Fallen Angel
, a swirling mass
of rippling bronze, and his sensuous
Cupid and Psyche
, in which the lovers emerge
half-hewn from the white marble. Look out, too, for a torso by Meštrovic, several
strikingly simple works by Eric Gill and an Art Deco fireplace with a relief depicting
society gossip.
Round the corner (rooms 17-20), the museum displays its impressive collection
of
Buddhist sculpture
, from serene, gilded-copper seated figures from Tibet and
Nepal to an entire Burmese shrine. There's also a corridor of
small-scale sculpture
on Level 3 in room 111, ranging from medieval religious ivories and English
alabaster relief panels to German lime-wood masterpieces and a whole collection
of works by Gilbert Bayes, who worked at Doulton, the ceramics company.
(Bayes' Art Deco Doulton frieze from the company's headquarters in Lambeth is
displayed in room 127.)
FUTURE PLANS
Like most big museums, the V&A is in a constant state of flux, with galleries opening and
closing throughout the year. There will be new
Europe 1600-1800
galleries opening in
winter 2014. And with Exhibition Road being made pedestrian-friendly, the V&A have
commissioned a fancy new entrance which should be completed in 2016.
