I popped over to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to have a look at the newly opened Sainsbury Wing of the gallery.

The wing has been only opened last month and it’s free to walk in. I was up the stairs in no time. I walked around read some of the wall plaques and noticed a few pieces I know of.

A lot of the artwork in this gallery is using a technique called gold water gilding. The artist would use a soft clay and then apply a highly polished gold leaf onto a wet damp surface. When it was dry it would be polished again to make it shine and often stamped into for decoration. Bermejo as you see above used this method to great effect.

There are works by the Dutch and Italian masters in this section. From the comical, to the imaginable. You have art that was probably in very religious settings in their heyday. And when you’re bored with the newly opened section, you can always walk across and look at the other famous works in the main gallery.