The Thyssen Bornemisza and the Prado

To Madrid for a few days to see The Wyeths and the Spanish Realists exhibition at the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum. It was, for me, perhaps the best double-bill ever. It confirmed my belief ‘Snow Flurries’ by Andrew Wyeth is my favourite landscape of all the landscape paintings in all the world, in all of space, in the entire universe. His dry-brush watercolour, ‘Flock of Crows’ - a study for the same - I found simply heart-breaking. Happily, I'm not afflicted by Stendahll syndrome, but if I were I'm sure these two would set me off. Of the Spanish Realists, Antonio López García has long been my main man. We also took time to pop into the Prado. We ignored the other 200,000 exhibits and sought out, ‘Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes’ by Rembrandt. I ‘collect’ Rembrandts, in a manner of speaking. This is one of the lad’s finest. It’s up there with the ‘Danaë’ in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. It’s inexplicable to me how the human hand can do such work.