Walked to Tate Modern going past St Paul’s Cathedral

then onto the Millennial Bridge

and across the Bridge (looking back towards St Paul’s)

Looked at Tracey Emin’s exhibition. Tracey Emin is probably Britain’s most highly regarded living artist. Her work is very autobiographical. The exhibition covered her past 40 years of work including her health issues with cancer, deaths of loved ones, terminating her pregnancy, sexual assault. Her works can be very emotionally intense. One of her sculptures was outside on the lawn.

Had to have a look in the Rothko room.

We had lunch at the Modern Restaurant. We missed going on our last visit to London so were happy to be back again as we have gone every other time we visited.

Starters: liver parfait and asparagus

From Tate Modern we walked to the Courtauld Gallery

We went to see the exhibition Seurat and the Sea, a small number of works by Georges Seurat that were done over four summer visits to the coast of Normandy. Seurat’s style is described as pointillism as he put dots of pure colour on the canvas instead of mixing paints to create his works. There are not many Seurat works as he worked slowly and died young.

Also looked at a small exhibition of landscapes by women mainly from the 19th century who were basically unknown as artists and have not been exhibited before. The works were all small in size but very accomplished.

The Courtauld has the Manet painting that was one of the main questions on my art history final exam in April.

We tried sitting in the courtyard of Somerset House, which is the building that contains the Courtauld

but we were sent out because some vans were coming in. So we wandered about looking for outdoor seating where we could do some sketching. We saw some interesting buildings

St Mary on the Strand above; Saint Dunstan in the West below

No idea what the below building was called and my iPhone doesn’t help

We ended up at Bread Street, a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, which had no views.

Butter chicken

Fish and chips

Food was okay but not amazing.

Leaving the complex where the restaurant was located, we could see St Paul’s

Never managed to do any sketching.