Tate Britain Art Museum

Visiting the Tate Britain Art exhibition in Milbank London, England was an explosion of English art and culture that had opened my mind about the way that I viewed art. This was one of my favorite field trips so far. I had enjoyed disguising and exploring elements of paintings and sculptures that I had never thought of before with my classmates and thinking by myself what things mean to me. This experience had allowed me to enjoy art as a form of entertainment, imagining stories in the paintings and giving personality to the characters. Now I have opened my mind more to themes among areas of museums and galleries as well as the utilization of all parts of the buildings and outdoor exhibits. The building itself is a work of art with figures like Athena above the entrance. Before this day I have not been to many museums or had thought that I would have enjoyed it. Now I go to museums more often on my own.

Before it was an art gallery it was a prison. Millbank is named after a mill that was owned by Westminster Abbey. The area where the mill would later become the site for the prison. The building that would be the original part of the Art gallery today before any adding on to it was built in 1821. It had cost £500,000. Even at this time, it was already regarded as a great structure. Six chambers had surrounded the governor's house and three miles of passages that were easy for guards to get lost in. The prison had sent 4,000 prisoners to Australia for a year of exile. The prison had become no more in 1890.

I think that it was a great idea to remodel this old prison into an art gallery. To me, this is a great example of repurposing that I have seen a lot of while I have been in London and other countries around Europe. I love how a lot of structures can be hundreds of years old and are not condemned and destroyed. They are restored, added on to or repurposed. This reflects in the city of London that is constantly under construction, become increasingly modern but at the same time keeping the relics of the past. This is amazing to me because in the U.S. it is not unusual to see a build that is nowhere near a hundred years old being destroyed. Also added that my country is only 240 years old so there are not a lot of great structures before that.

The Tate Britain has five galleries in England. These are Tate Britain in Milbank London, Tate Liverpool, Tate St. Ives, Tate Modern and the newest gallery in Bankside that was introduced in 2000. The first is the one in Milbank. It had originally opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art. Henry Tate would give his conclusion to the gallery in 1889. The name of the gallery would be changed to the Tate Britain in 1932.

Tate sugar was started in 1878 by Henry Tate. It was producing sugar cubes in a Thames Refinery in London’s East End. In 1921 the company had merged with Lyle and sons to become Tate and Lyle. Now producing cane sugar and syrup.

In this exhibit, two paintings had resonated with me. The first had really opened my imagination to art more as an active story and had great details. It was also just fun to disguise and what I feel like was the first painting that we all actively responded to as a group. This was Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables. I had liked the use of circles in the painting. From the fruits, trees and even the young lady’s body, there were many circular objects. We had disguised the detail of two workers in the backward and their importance. This had made me realize that even minor details have a bigger impact on art. One of my favorite parts of the painting was that she was wearing blue and the blue seemed like it was presenting her breast just like the blue on the plate was bringing more attention to the grapes on it. The next painting that I will be talking about is important to me because I was in a small group of others to disguise what we could find out about the painting. The painting is The Sempstress. The painting depicts a woman sewing in the late hours of the night in a very small room that does not even have a door only a curtain in front of the doorway. There was a poem that one of my group members had found that was about this painting. The next week I had gone to the Tate Liverpool.

Lemon, Johanna and Daniel Peter “Milbank Prison”, http://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/ n.d.