An Exhibitionist

Well despite everything I arrived at the RA roughly on time, and as there was quite a queue for the Ladies I went straight into the exhibition.   Fortunately for me the RA have a few couches in their main exhibition rooms so along with some others I was able to sit down to enjoy at least some of the paintings.

The exhibition is pretty complete with an amazing range of well known, and not so well known paintings, and pastels.   I am not normally a fan of portraiture, but I did enjoy a lot of this, and particularly enjoyed seeing the development of his style, and how the paintings made a record of the time society Manet occupied.   I was interested by the rage of style, some portraits, like that of his friend M Antonin Proust on the left being very polished "traditional" Status portraits for exhibition, then others, almost unfinished, certainly painted quicker, which appear to have been retained in the family.

I feel as though the exhibition was almost too complete, with too much on display.   Personally I have a limited capacity for how much I can take in and appreciate in any one visit, and certainly when it comes to portraits of people I don't know or indeed have not even heard of that limit gets a little smaller, but this may just have been my feet talking.  Either way I was quite happy to leave, stop at a local Nero's sit down and enjoy a coffee.

 

Having travelled by train I was forced to continue to the end with my poor choice of footwear, but ahh the joy and relief when I got back  my van and could change into something more comfortable.

 

Maybe it's the influence of those boots (much though I love them) but I intend to feature shoes in my back grounds this week, the lovely the elegant the sexy shoes that we all love but maybe wouldn't want to wear for a whole day.