In the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery Building, room 26 (one out of the 9 dedicated to The Victorian era) you can find several portraits by the Londoner George F. Watts: the portraits of great figures as reflections of a great nation. That's the link in Watts' intention. It really draw my attention this extract from a letter he wrote and sent to The Times in 1887: "The character of a nation as people of great deeds is one, it appears to me, that should never be lost sight of it".
That is why we, Spaniards, shall never forget ours, nor let anyone have it distorted or mistreated. Check this out: http://blogs.libertaddigital.com/almanaque-de-la-historia-de-espana/
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I started out my walking in the National Portrait Gallery by running away from the first crowded rooms in the second floor dedicated to the early Tudors, Elizabethan age and The Stuarts, and went down the stairs to take a look at whatever I might find in the Victorian "Science and Technology" section:
- Robert Stevenson (1803 - 59), builder of the first railway between Birmingham and London, among other deeds, and Daniel Gooch, who laid the first telegraph cable between UK and America.
- The famous portrait of Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) by John Collier and that of his "bulldog", Thomas Huxley (1825 - 1895). Apparently Huxley was very interested in matters of education of science and defined Darwin as "the ideal man of Science". Darwin was a shy man who, apparently, intend to set himself aside from later-on controversies. Also, the portrait of Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903).
It as nice to see Faraday's portrait, who is presented as a natural finding of Sir Humphrey Davy. Faraday is referred to as an experimentalist scientist, a man of great insightful thinking who manage to obtain impressive conclusions out of cheap and simple experiments.
I perhaps should study this matter in some detail. One is tempted to think that modern discoveries are bound to the handling of costly pieces of machinery and sophisticated technology as the only way to occur but, however, all-time breakthrough discoveries were in occasions rather simple, and were achieved with quite small sums of money. Although of different levels of significance, I can recall here the aforementioned case of Faraday, and those of Leidenfrost with a hot spoon and Osborne Reynolds on the stability of a stream of ink in a bath of water.
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I came back to the second floor afterwards and took a glance at the "Science and Industry in the 18th Century" section. An opposed comparison with Faraday's experiments can be set against those of Joseph Priestley. His experiments were funded by the members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the lunatics. Some portraits of several of its members are displayed in room 13, that of James Watt (1736 - 1819), among them. His condensing steam engine appeared in 1765.
Further on, in room 19, I found interesting the contribution of John London McAdam in devising an effective design to improve significantly the surface of pavements and roads. It would be interesting to learn how this gentleman was able to sell his idea to the Parliament members and put it into practice.
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The introduction to the Romantics left the thought in me that all generations (from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake or Mary Wollstonecraft to Byron, Keats and Shelley) were a pack of cowards. Perhaps, they search for freedom, but after the sight of Napoleon menace, the horror of war and the emptiness of the after war, sought refuge in landscapes, esoteric places and the inners of mind and soul after .
The life of Ayuba Soleiman Diallo (1701 - 73), a well-unknown figure for me till today, well deserves a check-out. He wrote his slavery adventures in Memoirs (1734), when he was my age.
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