On September 14, 2003, the New York Times (
visit link) ran the following story about the National Gallery:
"ONE OF A KIND: LONDON; National Gallery: Watch Your Step
By Benedict Nightingale
How many visitors who walk into London's National Gallery, and continue up the stairs to its landings and side vestibules, notice what's beneath their feet before they turn left or right? If they looked down, they'd find they were treading on Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo and T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and Lord Rutherford, who is seen splitting a round, black atom into zigzags.
They're all on the floor, depicted in simple yet surprisingly realistic style in mosaics made of tiny marble and glass tesserae and colored coral, peach, gray-green, ocher and 40-odd other delicate hues. You might think a Byzantine artist had been time-warped to Britain to portray not only a selection of 20th-century geniuses, but also a miner, a Covent Garden porter with baskets on his head, cricketers, footballers, a Christmas pudding and some mud pies.
Actually, that wouldn't be so fanciful a thought, for the creator of all 50 of these square, circular and polygonal mosaics saw himself as working in a Byzantine tradition. He was Boris Anrep, a Russian diplomat and artist who lived in London both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. There, he was befriended by the painter Augustus John and the influential art critic Clive Bell, each of whom is commemorated on the gallery floor: John as Neptune, giving marine gifts to Alice in Wonderland, Bell as a Bacchus whose oddly grave, sober stare belies the grapes scattered in his hair.
In 1926 Anrep's wife left him for another painter, Roger Fry, and he decamped to Paris, but not before he'd been inspired by the pavement artists outside the National Gallery to ask its director if he could embellish the drab floors inside with his own evocations of contemporary life. The first set of mosaics, The Labors of Life -- a farmer washing a vast pig, a student beside a dinosaur skeleton, a contortionist twisting his body backward until his toes hit his mouth -- was finished in 1928. Then came The Pleasures of Life, with a girl symbolizing Speed by riding pillion on a motorbike and two bright young things incarnating Profane Love by smoking a cigarette and canoodling with a young gentleman, respectively -- and, in 1933, The Awakening of the Muses.
That particular clutch of work included a fastidious, aloof Virginia Woolf as the Muse of History and a fine, strong Garbo raising a garland as she embodies the Muse of Tragedy. But the most imaginative mosaics, representing the Modern Virtues, didn't appear until 1952, when Anrep was 67 and had seen an Allied victory he celebrated with Defiance: Churchill in his boiler suit, towering over a clawed, fanged beast shaped like a swastika.
Some mosaics have been slightly eroded by time -- in Defiance, the white cliffs of Dover are now its off-white cliffs -- and some are hidden by booths hiring headsets and selling advance tickets. Sadly, you can't see Loretta Young symbolizing Anglo-American friendship by filling a loving cup with wine or Edith Sitwell reading her poems while fearlessly crossing a chasm filled with terrifying animals. But most have survived the tramp of a trillion tourists surprisingly well.
In Leisure, Eliot demonstrates his versatility by contemplating both Einstein's formula, E=mc2, and the loops of an affable-looking Loch Ness monster. In Lucidity, a pensive Russell removes the last remaining garment, a blindfold, from the young woman representing Truth he's just pulled up from a well.
In Humor, the socialite Lady Diana Cooper, dressed as Britannia, crowns a paunchy, grinning Mr Punch. The mosaics are always quirky, often witty, sometimes absurd -- and there's nothing like them in any gallery I know. Benedict Nightingale"