Museum #2 - I'm on a roll!

Trip Start Mar 01, 2005
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Trip End Jan 01, 2006


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Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Today I went to the Burell Collection and then Pollock House and gardens. The Collection was all these different sections of artifacts like ancient egypt, islamic art, gothic art, chinese art, stained glass, paintings, ancient greece, etc. all collected in the lifetime of this one guy Sir William Burell. My favourite was the painting section. Maybe about 30 paintings but my favourites were the one's done by Edgar Degas. He's famous for his many paintings of ballerinas. Almost all done in pastels it was cool to look at them up close and see how he did it. That's the famous name I can remember. I also like the few bronze sculptures done by Auguste Rodin. So detailed. In every person, the bone structures and muscle definition were so clear and lifelike. Very cool. That's another name I recognized. Obviously not very artistically inclined, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. All the paintings were really cool. Burell amassed over 9000 items in his life. He gifted them to the city to be put on display back in the 60's I believe. Not sure when he died, but the city had nowhere to put them until 1983 when the Museum was opened. It's a grand building. Really big and lots of glass. It's set in this huge park called Pollock Country Park I believe. Pollock House is a private house owned by the Maxwell family and they donated the land for the Museum to be built on. The whole area is huge and green. Very nice. So I had to take a bus there because it was quite far out of the center. I only spent about 2 hours in the museum. I can only look at sculpture of bowls, plates, and vases from all over the world for so long. They just don't intrigue me as much as the paintings do. The paintings all had descriptions of the artist and how they worked, etc. beside them. There was also a room full of tapestries. UNREAL. The tapestries were like 50 feet tall and then even wider. It was unbelievable to imagine the time and concentration that would have gone in to making such huge pieces. There were also lots of arches leading into different parts of the museum. Some were from the 1200's in Provence, France, some Spain/Portugal, and some 13/14th century English arches. That was cool too. Free entry too! Definetely recommend the place. Then I walked down to Pollock House which wasn't free to go into so I just went to the cafe and had something hot to drink. So windy and rainy, then sunny windy and rainy again. Gotta love that Scottish weather. Never lets you stay miserable for long! I walked around the house outdoors through the gardens and the old stable square where they had these HUGE Clydesdale Horses. Gardens were really nice. They had some hairy highland cows too which were funny. Anyway that was my day. Off to Edinburgh tomorrow so talk to you later.
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