Rossetti's Redheads At Guildhall Gallery

Guildhall. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

Problems
1 Where can you see London's traitional historic buildings and paintings for free?
2 After you've seen the national Gallery and the Tate, where next?

I had no idea that London's Guildhall contains an art gallery. A visit here offers several delights:

1 Even at night when everything is shut, enjoy the atmosphere in the pedetrian courtyard in front. The lights inside the church reveal the stained glass windows from outside. You can see busts of Shakespeare and wren on the front wall of Guildhall.

Rossetti's Redheads
If you have time, go inside. The shop on the right has a delightful cushion for sale at £30 showing Rossetti's Redhead, his redheaded girlfriend who he married when she was dying. She's the one who he buried with his poems; then he dug up the coffin to retrieve the poems.

Her long red hair had supposedly grown after her death (and filled the coffin according to one account I read). If you must know, I'll tell you what I found. I investigated. I am always keen on finding a practical and scientific explanation for any supersititions or supernatural nonsense. I assume that the people concerned are not entirely nuts and overcome by emotion. They must be observing a fact and attributing a bizarre cause. I recall reading the simple but slightly yukky explanation that after death your hair and nails appear to grow because the rest of the body is dehydrating and shrinking.

Let's end on a more cheerful note. Rossetti coined the word stunner to describe the redheaded subject of his paintings. He made redheads popular. (Natural in those days, no help from supermarket hair dyes.)

Reading the captions on the paintings in Guildhall is a wonderful revelation and insight, into the lives and fashions of Victorian England. The comments on the paintings inspired me to look up the painters' and models' lives in the internet.

That picture of his girlfiends as the dying or dead Ophelia floating in the river, was painted with the model lying in a bath of water. Rosetti, as his romantic name suggests, was of Italian origin on one side, but is now firmly part of the history of England and the whole world.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and phtographer, author and speaker.