Amazing Rare Things

These two prints are by Maria Sibylla Merian from here
The colours when you see them in the exhibition are so rich and vibrant, very very beautiful

The exhibition is worth the price of admission alone to see these incredible Leonardo Da Vinci drawings. what I have never appreciated before is how detailed they are and how small they are. I have worked with students looking at a facsimile of one of his drawings A3 size, but in the exhibition the drawing is barely 3X4 inches, its tiny.

Leyla was very keen on the metamorphosis paintings.

I loved the colours in these fish paintings. images from here
We went Saturday afternoon as Daisy is doing a project on flowers. she stood and did some drawings whilst I entertained Leyla. The Queens Gallery is a beautiful place, once you have seen the exhibition you can wander round the permanent collection which includes beautiful Caravaggio's, Canaletto's and Rembrandt as well as some rather ginky jewellery and ceramics.
I could have sat at the Canaletto for ages, it is of a view of the Thames painted from Somerset house looking down towards Wrens newly built St Paul's. All you can see for miles are the spires of all the churches he built after the great fire of London. Now only a handful are left, I had always assumed that many were destroyed during the second world war but unbelievably they were knocked down by over zealous Victorian developers who were more brutal than the corrupt idiot town planners of the Sixties.