WWI: The National Gallery of Art

In 2014, I spent a day in London’s National Gallery of Art.

In my mind, and in cyberspace, I looked at photos and paintings, hunting information, and trying to peel back what happened there in World War I.

A rewrite of one of my chapters prompted a visit, and while I’ve been to the art gallery five times, I needed to know what my heroine would see in 1914.

As in, was the museum even open?

The release that year of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men and Cara Putnam’s Shadowed by Grace brought World War II art stories into the consciousness of moviegoers and readers.

The stories of Nazi looting and efforts to find and save great works of art are a thrilling drama of passion and war.

Google will tell you all about it, no matter how many “I”s you put after World War!

World War I and the museum

But what about World War I, when the airplane wasn’t capable of bombing a large building across the English Channel? Were the British worried about their treasures?

They were concerned about terrorists.

Homegrown ones.

According to Wikipedia, at the National Gallery on March 10, 1914 (five months before war was declared):

“The Rokeby Venus was damaged  by Mary Richardson, a campaigner for women’s suffrage, in protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day. Later that month another suffragette attacked five Bellinis, causing the Gallery to close until the start of the First World War, when the Women’s Social and Political Union called for an end to violent acts drawing attention to their plight.”

Did you catch that? They closed the museum against the threat of domestic terrorism by suffragettes but opened it again at the start of the war.

British officials obviously knew who could do real damage to their fine works of art!

Zeppelins did eventually cross the English Channel and do damage to London, including a bombing that happened not far from the National Gallery of Art.

It’s important to remember the King of England was the Kaiser of Germany’s first cousin, and the Kaiser directed his zeppelins to be careful about what they bombed. Apparently, the National Gallery was not worried.

That let me set a scene early in my novel at the National Gallery of Art, after they walked past the statue of Lord Nelson on top of the very tall column in Trafalgar Square and past the four enormous bronze lions I like so very much!

The next problem became: what paintings would my heroine have seen?

I had to find items that fit my novel’s issues, as well as paintings that were actually in the museum at the time.

I’ve always loved the Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, for example. I once sat on a bench and nursed a baby while admiring it. The theme was perfect!

But the London museum purchased the cartoon in 1964.

Never mind.

How about Rembrandt? He’s always a favorite.

Unfortunately, the museum also purchased the perfect painting useful for the story after World War II.

The Mystic Nativity

As I tell my children, there’s always a nativity painting in an art museum. I found a Botticelli that served my purposes beautifully: The Mystic Nativity.

Purchased in 1846, thank you very much!

The painting was important for my story because the writer and artist John Ruskin named it.

One of my characters admired Ruskin, and having this painting added depth to the story.

Baedeker’s London and its Environs provided additional information about what would be in the gallery. The only edition I could find online was from 1900, but anything in it would have remained the same fourteen years later!

(See the advantage of using travel guides here.)

My heroine and her companions continued through the gallery and admired paintings by Turner — landscapes like those sketched by one of the characters.

They also stopped in front of The Arnolfini Portrait, which gave them an opportunity to admire the illusion created in the fifteenth century. They got so caught up in their discussions that they lost track of time and needed to run back to work.

I also enjoyed their discussion and finished my day’s writing just in time to go to a work event myself:  painting.

It was the perfect ending for the day!