Great to see. The Raphael court has always been my favourite single room in the V&A, I always make time for it whenever I visit. The scale of the cartoons is brilliant, you feel very small looking up at a five metre wide tapestry in such a cavernous space. It's especially nice on the rare occasions you find yourself alone in that room, which has happened more than one would expect in central London museum.
The V&A is really wonderful, I've missed it this year. One of the best kept "secrets" is the top floor, which houses a huge ceramics collection and is a haven in what can be a very busy museum. Often there are only a handful of people up there. There's a small lift you can take: pass through the Raphael court, up the stairs, on your left.
Hopefully I'll find myself there in the not too distant future.
The collection of musical instruments is nice. Not as big as the Dolmetch collection at the Horniman. Also some lovely pre-raphelite and other notable design pieces, furniture, old fabrics. Great museum to wander in. Never regretted time spent there. And the archivists are really nice people. Well worth talking to.
One of the best cafe for casual student-affordable dining in the area. I meet people there all the time, when in London (I live overseas) because its friendly, cafeteria, budgetable if they want to 'shout you' a meal. Crowded.
They were used to create tapestries now in the Vatican, at least the surviving ones. It’s really fun to see both sets on the same trip. The cartoons are a bit livelier than the tapestries. It’s sort of like when you hear a bootleg of a song demo that sounds better than the finished, published version.
This makes me wonder when the term cartoon got relegated to "a simple drawing showing the features of its subjects in a humorously exaggerated way, especially a satirical one"?
The V&A is really wonderful, I've missed it this year. One of the best kept "secrets" is the top floor, which houses a huge ceramics collection and is a haven in what can be a very busy museum. Often there are only a handful of people up there. There's a small lift you can take: pass through the Raphael court, up the stairs, on your left.
Hopefully I'll find myself there in the not too distant future.