Back to London

Just a quickie for today. I made it back to London yesterday and, dodging the Marathon, took in parts of three of the cultural heavyweights - the British Museum, the National Gallery and Tate Britain. There are a couple of things I want to talk about properly but I haven't finished digesting them yet. In the mean time here are my first thoughts:

1 The terrapin has come home - all is well with the world.
2 The back door is without doubt the best way into the British Museum and the staircase it leads to leads to all the best bits - the Islamic gallery, the modern African displays, the Korean gallery, the Chinese porcelain, the temporary exhibitions of prints and drawings and the Japanese gallery. It also goes past India and Egypt but they don't do so much for me.
3 Woodcut is a remarkably versatile medium and there is no longer just one Japanese aesthetic.
4 Seeing too many Dutch and Flemish paintings at once makes you lose the will to live.
5 Titians are just plain gaudy.
6 I'm on the right lines with regard to technique and my understanding of illusion; my execution is not as far off as I thought either, its just my priorities are so different to most of what I saw.
7 Tate Britain's rebuild makes the place quite unpleasant. The rooms and doors which are temporarily shut off completely destroy the flow of the galleries and the way it is currently hung does not pay much regard to the restrictions. I'll be interested to see it when its finished but probably won't return until then unless there is a particular thing I want to see.
8 Leonardo, Rembrandt and Degas really were very good at what they did.