In the Orchard

Skiing is over and I'm en route back to Dublin from Norway, with a stopover in Edinburgh. My flight wasn't till later in the day, so I spent a couple of hours this morning in the National Gallery, where there is an exhibition on of Scottish painters entitled "Picturing Landscapes & Framing the City 1730–1930". It's a really nice exhibition and some of the paintings have short critiques written by school children, as well as the usual professional summary. The schoolchildren are amazingly insightful. Today's blip is "In the Orchard", painted in 1886 by a well known Scottish artist James Guthrie, and I cannot resist including the critique by Hamish, a primary school pupil from Orkney:

"In this painting you can see a girl and a boy picking apples from an orchard. There are geese winding between the trees and in the background you can see a big brown block which is supposedly a house or a barn or a woolly mammoth depending on what you see. The artist used a pallet knife in the less defined areas like the bottom left or the top right.  But in the more detailed areas you can really see the details like their hands are muddy and the their cheeks are red, most likely meaning that it is cold and that would make sense since since it looks like Autumn or Fall. The artist painted it so many times that it looks a bit posed. "

The extra is "The Quarrel between Oberon and Titiana", painted by Joseph Noel Paton in 1849, showing a scene from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream".  Lewis Carol,  of Alice in Wonderland fame (a mathematician at Oxford University whose real name was Charles Dodgson),  was particularly taken by this painting and counted 165 fairies!