December 2nd – 6th Back in Business (NOT!)

I’ve deleted about half of the pictures that were stored online in my Google account so I should be able to post pictures through to the end of our trip.  (Buggers!  they haven't given me back my space yet! and they said they would.!!!)

To commence, we’ve spent the last few days visiting some new sites. On Tuesday we went to see a portrait exhibition at Mapfre (a Spanish insurer) which has a space permanently dedicated to temporary exhibitions.   This one traveled from the Paris’s Pompidou center and consisted of around 10 rooms of portraits created by artists beginning around 1900 up through 1994 or so.  Artists like Matisse, Picasso, Du Buffet, Francis Bacon, etc.  It was interesting as it had both paintings and sculptures, but no pictures allowed.

On Wednesday, we set our sights on the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; it has both a school and a museum.  Former students include among others; Sorolla, Picasso and Juan Gris.  The museum has a small but significant collection and includes artists such as Goya, Zurbaran, Sorolla, Rubens, and Correggio.  It also has Goya’s cabinet, a collection of many of his engraving plates from several of his series.   On our visit we were also able to see a large collection of Rodin prints called the Ombres, ‘Shades’, series.  Probably around 100 small images dealing with Dante’s Inferno and related subjects it is there temporarily and was just icing on the cake. 

Thursday, we visited the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) here in Madrid; it is the third largest palace in Europe after Versailles in France and the Schoenbrunn palace in Vienna.  There are 24 rooms open to the public and each one is a work of art.  It is full of beautiful works of art and decorated in as lavish a style as any we’ve seen in Versailles or anywhere else.  Also on view are the royal collection of armor and the royal pharmacy, which Deb particularly loved.   We were quite fortunate in that when we arrived we were able to walk right up and buy tickets to enter.   It started getting a bit crowded with various tour groups coming through but we were able to linger and let them get past us so we could look at leisure, but I can only imagine what it must be like in the summer when it’s hot and overrun with tourists.   We were extremely surprised when we left and got a look at the line waiting to get in to the palace and 80% of them must be Spanish.    Walking back to catch the bus home we got a taste of what the Christmas crush in Madrid can be like.   It seemed as if 90 % of Madrid’s 4 million populations were filling Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol, and all the streets around the old quarter.   We walked for blocks and blocks in a seething mass of lock step flow.  I’d compare it to my clown car observation on the busses.  Plaza Mayor has a Christmas market that was just stuffed with people, sort of ‘And now K-mart shoppers over in the Christmas aisle’.   Just full of temptations for little people, candy, noise makers, bubble blowers, a little merry-go-round, etc.   They have started lighting the decorations that hang over the streets so in the next few weeks I’ll post some pics of those too.