Picture by Sisley

I thought that working at the National Gallery would be some sort of spiritual, artistic experience. I thought I’d wander nonchalantly around its august rooms offering sage pointers on early Italian frescoes and the Flemish Masters to visiting Greek philosophy professors and Judi Dench. Before long, having impressed my superiors, I’d be asked to deliver lectures to visiting Slade students on the mocking majesty of Magritte (all of this from a history of art paperback gleaned from a charity shop in Camden Town just the week before).

I thought I’d be Sister Wendy Beckett without the wimple spouting sagely and reverently about ‘The Virgin in Prayer’ instead of which by day three, I was bored absolutely shitless and wishing I’d never applied for the post of Gallery Assistant in the first place.

Not to mention the uniform.

I don’t like wearing uniforms (I would not have been a good Nazi) and once curtailed my St John’s Ambulance career before qualifying for one. Women they say love a man in uniform but you never see those calendars appearing in the local mall of hunks dressed in St. John’s Ambulance uniforms - or gallery assistants for that matter.

The National Gallery, especially in the main pre-Sainsbury building, is a labyrinth. The bowels of the place are a maze of tunnels and stairways which somehow lead back to the central staff dressing rooms and recreational area. It brings to mind what The Pentagon may be like underground: a subterranean spider-like grid where human skeletons are found in out-of-the-way runnels clutching documents never delivered. 

They told me on recruitment that it could take me several weeks to be able to get used to its wynds and corridors and they were not wrong. Venturing forth from the central pod you feared could lead you to musty rooms where Sir Anthony Blunt had met his final end a la Edward the Second, the red hot poker now bleak and cold.

Other than the beautiful image of a prayerful Virgin Mother by Sassoferrato, her robe a brilliant blue, her eyes downcast in solemn shadow, the other picture that stuck with me was Sisley’s ‘Seaside: Langland’, one of a serious of studies he’d painted off the Gower Peninsula in the 1870s. It’s just an impressionistic image of a large boulder in a choppy sea but it is a captivating work. A pointillist mix of blues and purples and greens and greys expertly contorted into the figurative by a master. I looked at it closely every time I was posted to that particular little Sisley exhibition space and was mesmerised by its magic. But, there are limits…

I left on the fourth day and never returned. A tear of shame fell from the Virgin’s eye.