Dawn’s office was closing early, so we had planned to go Friday afternoon to the National Gallery to see the British Romantics exhibit. But she ended up working late, and it was supposed to rain, so we go on Saturday instead.

I have no idea who the British Romantics are, when or what they did, but still I’m excited that we’re seeing something. We haven’t been to the Gallery in a while, I think. Not since the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit with Mother Dillon? And the Thomas Gainsborough before that?

We have a little trouble finding the works themselves, though. All Dawn knows is that they’re on the ground floor. We wander around a little before we find a desk with maps and a listing of current exhibitions. There’s a brass quintet playing upstairs, we can hear. Playing Christmas music. But we’re heading down to the west end to galleries C23 to C25.

And when we get there I’m delighted, first to learn that the period covered is late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, which period includes my recent obsession of Britain during the Napoleanic Wars, and secondly that included are William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And in general, the exhibition is all of like sixty-nine works, so it’s sort of perfectly sized. Not too big, not too small.

First up are some romantic landscapes. Think like Elysian Fields, or better yet, think pastoral. Like farm workers viewed from a great distance, surrounded by beautiful scenery, and the distance making their work look idyllic. Romantic.

But then also apparently a theme of this romanticism is a kind of macabre grotesqueries. Included in this are the works by Blake. There’s an etching, two paintings, and two bound volumes. (The bound volumes are under glass, so we can just see a page or two; we can’t turn the pages and peruse.) The one I assume is most familiar is The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, which I guess is the one that Francis Dolarhyde eats in Red Dragon. (Alas. Wrong. That turns out to be The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. That’s at the Brooklyn Museum, still there, not really eaten of course, but anyway not here.)

And then, just for kicks, the Pre-Raphaelites are here. What a treat. First up is Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, (most famous for The Beguiling of Merlin, also not here), with an Ariadne and a Saint Barbara. Ariadne’s face doesn’t seem to be finished, although I’d swear that’s Jane Morris under there, whereas Saint Barbara is apparently egg tempera, maybe, so says the ID information, with a question mark.

Then there’s Rossetti, with two chalk treatments of Desdemona, and an honest to God actual work (pen, though, not painted) of she herself, named for her even, the impossibly beautiful Jane Morris. We used to, Cathy and I, have a poster of Rossetti’s Proserpine on our living room wall, in our apartment on Barton Street. That’s my favorite Jane Morris of all. Oh did I love that face.

A grand little exhibit. They’ve got it until March 18, 2007. Go see it.