Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Today’s free day was filled with 2 visits. The first was to Glasgow Cathedral (built and extended over 300 years, starting in the 1100s). Amazing place and very few people visiting today as they were closed for an event from noon. The stained glass, in particular, was phenomenal.

The next visit today was to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (6 passengers in an Uber was challenging!). We arrived just before 1pm and were present for the pipe organ recital at 1pm! How lucky was that!!

I found the most interesting bit to be the areas that focused on the Glaswegian art, artists (e.g. the Glasgow Boys), and designers (e.g. Mackintosh). Yes there were also French artists and Dutch masters, as well as one of the most famous of Salvador Dali’s paintings. Interestingly, yesterday our tour guide explained that when the gallery purchased the Dali from Dali himself in 1952, just a year after it was painted, there was a lot of backlash from the art students at the time about how the money could have been better spent on them, but most importantly he told us that the gallery purchased the copyright to the artwork from Dali directly—no lawyers were involved in the transaction. Supposedly, the revenue from this copyright ownership has kept the gallery in revenue sufficient to maintain the buildings, buy more artwork etc. Very shrewd, even very canny!

One of the other really interesting things was how they approached writing about everything on display. It was all in plain language, and there was no ‘wanky’ and pretentious writing about anything.

But best of all were the signs that dealt with things like racism, colonialism, slavery, stealing of artefacts etc. head on. Kudos to them!!

Tomorrow we leave Glasgow for the Highlands.