I was sitting on a couch in middle of a room in a museum and staring at a magnificent painting that I always adored.  The lights are beautifully dramatic.  Chiaroscuro is stunningly done as there are wonderful transitions from light to dark throughout the painting.  The reactions of people on their faces speak with a great volume as they tell the viewers the story in the painting.  As a viewer, I feel that I can feel the dramatic emotions that are stirring in this image.  I absolutely love the reaction of the little girl in the middle.  This reaction is a very typical reaction of little children being frightened of something.  This girl’s reaction actually reminds me of my sister’s reactions when she gets scared.  The woman standing next to the little girl on the right side and who is turning her head away from the experiment and covering her face with her hand reminds me of myself because when I see something scary and disgusting, I tend to turn away from what I was seeing.  I can feel being frightened along with the people in the image.  This painting has very similar concepts to the Baroque paintings such as Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s.  “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump” by Joseph Wright is one of the well-known paintings at the National Gallery.  I studied this painting in Survey of Western Art History II during my freshman year of college, and since I studied this image, I became so deeply in loved with this piece I remembered where this painting was placed.  The minute I heard that I was going to London this summer, the first thing I thought was this painting.  Thus, I was very excited to finally see this painting in presence.

Today, I visited the National Gallery, an art museum that holds a tremendous amount of paintings done by well-known artists including Claude Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio.