I did some genealogy research online in the morning and then headed over to Somerset House with the intention of visiting the Gilbert Collection and the Hermitage Rooms. The Hermitage Rooms, however, closed for good a couple of weeks ago. The Gilbert Collection of Decorative Arts will also be closing and its contents given to the Victoria and Albert.

Over a forty-year span, Arthur Gilbert* and his late wife Rosalinde amassed a huge collection of gold and silver, snuffboxes, Italian mosaics and portrait miniatures from their home in Los Angeles. Arthur was born in Britain in 1913 (in London) and, in 1996, gave his collection to that nation, which earned him a knighthood in 1999. There are about 800 objects, and I think I saw them all! Room after room, poorly lit, except for the one that held Sir Arthur's furniture from his office in California, with a wax figure of him seated at his desk in his apparently signature tennis clothes.

A large part of the collection included his micromosaics, made from tiny opaque glass (tesserae), that look like paintings until viewed with the large magnifying glass they hand each visitor. The micromosaics included tables, vases, pictures often copied from real paintings, snuffboxes, and jewelry, mostly Roman from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, but the collection also includes pieces from as early as the sixteenth century. Giacomo Raffaelli was one of the foremost mosaic artists.

The gold and silver was made up of huge, opulent ewers, cups, dishes, chalices, vessels, and a couple of "royal" gates. However, there was one particularly nice and rare ewer made in the Bronze Age (c. 2500 BC) in what is now Turkey, and is one of the earliest gold vessels in the world.

There was an exhausting number and variety of snuffboxes, very elaborately crafted. I tried to look at each one individually but it was difficult to keep my focus. I got tired of the audioguide commentaries, too. It's a shame, because they get lost amongst themselves. A half dozen of these boxes in a museum the size of The Hyde would be perfect.

Then there were the Florentine hardstone mosaics, called pietre dure, comprised of hardstones inlaid in wood and marble in cabinets, tables, clocks and pictures. Lastly Sir Arthur collected approximately 80 enamel portrait miniatures.

In addition to this, there was a temporary exhibition, Seaman Schepps 1881-1972: America's Court Jeweller. I don't even know what to say about this one--I was so exhausted by the time I reached these rooms that I barely absorbed any of it! It was big, outrageous jewelry with big precious and semi-precious stones, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, and worn by Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn and the like.

Fortunately Gord called to suggest we meet for dinner. I had a little time to spare so I browsed an exhibition, What's Next for Schools?, at the adjacent Sorrell Foundation Young Design Centre. Between now and 2025, every secondary school in England and half of the primary schools will be rebuilt or refurbished. The exhibition looked at how involving the students in the design process and giving them some say can be beneficial to the designs while at the same time giving the children valuable life skills. There was a short film that demonstrated this with a school in Nottingham, I believe, where they got involved in the design of a new school uniform, and another school in Glasglow where the students came up with the idea to design a classroom with an indoor tree house.

We had an excellent dinner at Veeraswamy, the oldest Indian restaurant in Britain, opened in 1926. The flavors were delightful. Thank you Michael and Roz for suggesting it.

*I looked online and discovered that Sir Arthur died in 2001. I guess the museum hasn't updated their displays in quite a while because the information about him implies that he is still alive and playing tennis every day.