Saturday, 6-September-2003 10:15 AM GMT
The plaque reads,
PANDORA
Marble
By JOHN GIBSON (1790-1866)
ENGLISH; signed, about 1860
A.3-1922
Given by Mrs John Penn
John Gibson was born in Wales and originally trained in Liverpool, but in 1817 he left England for Rome, where he spent most of his working life. He worked in a neo-classical style strongly influenced by Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorwaldsen. Both these artists were well established in Rome at the time of Gibson's arrival. (Two reliefs by Thorwaldsen are displayed in the British Galleries and several sculptures by Canova may be seen in Gallery 50A.) Pandora is shown just as she is about to open the box, which according tot he Greek myth released the sorrows of the world. This is one of several versions of Pandora by Gibson; another is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.
I write this before I describe our actual trip to the museum itself, and in some way describe my own state of mind by the time I had come down the set of stairs that would begin our journey through the museum. As a summary: tired, having just gotten into London from Gatwick by way of a cab after a flight from San Francisco that began with an early morning limo ride out of my house ten miles south of Santa Cruz, California. I do not sleep on airplanes.
We availed ourselves of the facilities in the museum, and I was as 'fresh' as I was going to get. The most pleasant surprise is that there was no fee for the museum itself, and that cameras were allowed. We had not come in the front, main entrance to the museum, and so we were off on some side corridor.
So I had my camera out and was walking along in a semi-alert state of mind, happy to be in London, a place I'd never visited before, and at least getting to see a museum. Indoor adventure was the preference; outside I did not want to get drizzled on even though the weather was very nice. It was dark though, and that put less of a strain on my sleep-deprived body.
Down the stairs, and in the stairwell on a landing before even getting down to the door that opened into a gallery nearby, there she was. I am a big fan of sculpture to begin with, classic realism being my favorite I suppose (though I couldn't say if that's what you would really call it). This sculpture caught my eye by evoking a resonance with old Greco-Roman styles, and so I stopped and peered at the plaque.
Pandora.
It was like an omen for me. The trip would be good. The day would be fun, and we would arrive in Ireland safe and sound, and it was as if my best friend had managed to find a way to come along with me on the trip, even though they were back in the states. You see, silly it might be, but Pandora happens to be the name of one of Anne Rice's vampires. The one that was around two millennia old, and whose husband is Marius, the artist. The sculptor. So my fertile little imagination ran off and danced about. It was as if I had been greeted by bits of my fantasy life, a place where I spend much time roleplaying and daydreaming. Pandora wasn't one of the characters at the time that I had ever played before (I do now, through an odd sequence of events, however, entirely unrelated to the trip to this museum). She was just representative of it.
So of course, regardless of how I really felt about the sculpture itself, I had to stop and take a picture of both the work and its plaque. I was ecstatic to have my digital camera with me, realizing with a sheer joy that I could take all the pictures I wanted, they were all 'free' and that meant I could take pictures of things like the plaques and then later blow them up on a screen and read them. I could enjoy the museum at a purely visceral level, and not take notes. And I know that pictures with my digital camera are not free, there is the cost of the camera, the extended warranty, the memory cards, the card adapter for the PCM-CIA slot on the laptop, and the battery and electricity to charge the battery. I suppose I could add an incremental cost for the plug adapter kit I needed to charge batteries overseas. But the joy of it is that for all intents and purposes, every picture I took lowered the cost per picture. Yes, yes, I realize that there is some unknown number of pictures that I could take that would blow up the camera and render it in need of repair. That's what the extended warranty was for. And if I manage to get to that point, I expect it to be in the far future. Not after a few hundred pictures.
So, Pandora greeted me in London and at the museum, and off I went looking at things, and taking pictures to help remember and re-live the experience.
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