A Sunday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery (2)

In entering room 28, I was struck in awe as I saw Giovanni Boldini's Lady Colin Campbell portrait. She looks fresh, sexy, young. According to her husband, the youngest son of the Duke of Argyll, the lady was a slut. I must say, however, that it is a pity not to be a slut looking so gorgeous. Oh, woman, do as you please. Your grace is your ransom. I loved the portrait and even now as I have in front of me, I can see how easy must have been to fell in love with this woman.

                                         "Lady Colin Campbell", Giovanni Boldini (1897).
                                                  National Portrait Gallery, oil on canvas.

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I felt curious about the The kit-cat club. No idea about it. I climbed again the stairs in to the second floor, room 9. There is in display the 42 portraits by Godfrey Kneller of such many members of the club. During the period 1702 - 1714, these gentlemen formed a clear opposition to Queen Anne. Whig politicians, and Protestant supporters, they used to meet at Christopher Cat's tavern, near the Temple Bar, famous for its mutton pies, known as kit-cats.

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Later, somewhere, I gazed at Ethel Gabain's canvas portrait of Alexander Fleming (1944). The sons of the Great Britain shall try to forgive me for being an skeptical or, rather, a clear opponent to the vast popular recognition that has draw this man. Fleming did observe, did recognize, did convert accident in science, did had the daring occurrence of thinking, but he did not help to bring penicillin to the common man, absolutely not. In fact, that was his failure. He attempted to purify the Penicilium for a while as to make it parenteral and failed. But, indeed, the success of such endeavor was needed in order to develop a powerful and effective antibiotic for masses.

I read one Fleming's biography one or two years ago, out of an old book of my grandmother _Don't remember the author nor the publisher. Have it in a box, in a dark corner of a long-term storage in Salamanca. Fleming worked with several students in attempting the aforementioned purification, but it did not work out. The students moved later to different posts and positions related only by chance with the subject they covered with Sir Alexander. Perhaps, as it happens today all the time, those young fellows did not have very clear minds upon what to do with their lives: day-dreaming, the nowadays disease of the young. I suffer from it at periods!

My impression is that Fleming was a shy, not very eloquent scientist, unable to convince her colleagues that investing time and money in searching the parenteral penicillin was worthwide. I guess he lost interest and from that time on he start spending more time playing golf, swimming and falling in love with a young student of his. The marvellous case is that the mold swifted in Fleming's medium culture in 1927 and the first experiments were done in the UK with a policeman early in the 40s by Oxford scholars, Howard Flo and Ernst Chain. They actually found the way through liofilization and set the American machine and business mind into motion. I have always argued that 10 years could have been spared, if only Fleming would have showed braveness and social skills.

Gabain's portrait shows a true feature of Sir Alexander: you can see a man bent over a overcrowded table with test tubes, Petri dishes, probettes, and just a small space, no more than one squared inch, to write or repose his elbows. That was Fleming: a chronic untidy and careless man. He himself acknowledges it! During the 40s, Fleming was invited to visit the brand-new labs of Pfizer in US (Pfizer was the first company to produce penicillin at an industrial scale). All was clean and shiny, tidy and polished, not a 40-micron dust particle. Upon his entrance, Fleming commented: "If my lab had been so tidy and clean, I would have never discovered penicillin".

The early years of Fleming are much more interesting, especially his hard-working days as a student, counting microbes at the dim light of a microscope until late in the night, day after day, and his contributions as a field doctor during The Great War. I was impressed at his very simple and cheap experiments (but immensely elegant) with hand-made pieces of glass to show the inadequacy of current antiseptics to cure war injuries.

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Regarding writers in the turn of the century, I shall remember here the portrait of Henry James (1843 - 1916) in room 29 and his A Portrait of a Lady, a book that might interest me for the opposition it settles between the UK and US. (James said that "he could come back to US... To die").

The portrait of Lytton Strachey (1880 - 1932) by Dora Carrington, reading on his bed is nice. I shall read his Eminent Victorians (1918).

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I came to think that if you combine in a cocktail vase Augustus John and the tetric Mervyn Peake, in the way they look in their portraits, and shake it, you get Johnny Depp. The self-portrait and Churchill's portrait (1927) by Walter Sickert (1860 - 1942) are nice. Sickert was founder of the Camden Town group, a club of 11 members working in rented rooms in Candem. There are a group of large, large paintings with generals and high-leveled officials during The Great War in which the Maharaja Bikaner appears... It looks so exotic!

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Let me mention as well the paintings on the photograph negatives by Alexander Bassano of the dancing girls in the Alhambra and Empire Theatres in Leicester Square around 1910 - 1913. Dame Adeline, Tamara, Maud, Topsey, Lydia, Unity, Carlotta, Elise, Gina, etc., etc. I liked the names... The name of a dancing girl named Topsey... I think it is nice and fully evocative of a thousand sins and pleasures and human stories.

I saw more things, but I will save you the nuisance of hearing more... Just a little prize for bearing with me until the end.

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