It was really the icing on the cake, after recent culture-vulturing, especially having half a dozen of my all-time favourite paintings hanging in one room. To wit:
Picture the scene; on one wall, Lord Leighton's 'Bath of Psyche', and 'Medea' and 'Morgan le Fay' by Sandys.
On the second wall, Waterhouse's 'Magic Circle', 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'St Eulalia
On the third, 'The All Pervading' by George Frederic Watts, and 'Love Locked Out' by Anna Merritt...
On the fourth, works including 'Lament for Icarus' by Herbert Draper.
Also in the room (where I would happily have set up home) was a beguiling bronze figure of Circe by Edgar Bertram Mackennal, who has a new fan in me. Photos of sculptures seldom convey much of their presence and power...
Elsewhere some pretty intricate works by the likes of Alma-Tadema.
Burne Jones was also well represented...
as was Rossetti and Albert Moore, but they don't do it for me so much. (I find the absence of narrative subject matter in Moore a bit unsatisfactory, but there we go...)
Many of these are borrowed from Tate Britain, and I had missed them there. The rest of the museum at Brum is pretty interesting, including the Staffordshire hoard of broken up but intricate Saxon treasures, more paintings from various periods, Ancient Egyptian stuff, a room full of Buddhas, and a little display about Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who became an abolitionist after some interesting adventures.
On the way back I found a cheap book shop, and bought among other art books 'Magic and Myth, the art of John Howe.'
