Tuesday, September 23

Today we took a morning express train to Glasgow.  We visited the Burrell Collection and arrived in time for a guided tour. The Burrell Collection is approximately 9,000 objects donated to Glasgow city in 1944. The collection was amassed by shipping magnate Sir William Burrell and his wife over a 75-year period. It is housed in a purpose-built museum that includes Chinese, Medieval and French Impressionist Art.  There are also antiquities and decorative arts from around the world.


We especially liked the tapestries, including one featuring Vasco Da Gama and some camels, and a Chinese ceramic version of a rhinoceros.  The tapestry with Vasco Da Gama is known as the Camel Caravan tapestry.  It is one tapestry from a set of early 16th-century tapestries depicting scenes from Vasco da Gama's voyages to India in the late 1490s and early 1500s.  The tapestries were commissioned by King Manuel I of Portugal.  Camels were exotic animals and the tapestry weavers and designers had to imagine what they looked like based on the travelers' accounts and descriptions.


After visiting the Burrell Collection, we took a walk around downtown Glasgow.  This included a look at the Wellington Statue, a bronze sculpture of the Duke of Wellington on a horse, famous for the traffic cone that is almost permanently placed on the Duke's head.  The statue was made in 1844 and the tradition of placing a traffic cone on it dates from the 1980s.  The artist Banksy called the statue his "favourite work of art in the UK". 

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