If could be anywhere in the world right now, I'd be in London, England. In a museum. In the National Gallery. In the section with the eighteenth-century paintings.
Some of my favorite paintings are in that eighteenth-century area. They have a lot of Gainsboroughs, including one of a well-off couple out for a stroll, looking like they own the place! (They probably did.) There's the biting satire of Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode," about an arranged marriage that ends in cuckolding and suicide. There's Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, completely free of vainglory: he looks haunted, bringing to mind his own quote, "A battle lost is the only thing worse than a battle won."
One painting I particularly remember is by Joseph Wright of Derby. It shows a man conducting a scientific demonstration where you put a bird in a chamber and pump out all the air so the bird can't fly, to show the properties of air. (Tough luck for the bird.) The spectators include some little girls, who watch the proceedings with horror and turn away. In a way they see things more clearly than the grownups. It's a painting that dramatizes the dark side of the Enlightenment.
Of course, the National Gallery has a lot of other stuff that I like. In the nineteenth-century section there's a French painting of a tiger in the jungle terrified by a storm. In the seventeenth-century section there's a picture of Jesus facing a High Priest with an unusually intelligent look. And the entrance has some delightful modern mosaics, including one of the twelve Greek muses among whom you can recognize Virginia Woolf and Greta Garbo.
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