Art banishes gloom as I rush to London's museums before Covid-19 forces closure

I can date my first memory precisely: 20 July, 1969. My parents sat me before our television and proclaimed with solemn gravity: "Remember this, Ellen. You're watching history. You may live your whole life without something this important happening again." I didn't really grasp why Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon that afternoon was so significant, but I knew it was a big deal.

Twenty years later, I was more conscious of the reasons for the history-book moment as I watched the Berlin Wall tumble. The next history maker was far less pleasant. A regular workday collapsed into horror on September 11, 2001 as our world changed forever. After that, frankly, I could have done without any more epoch-shaping events in my life. And yet here we are again.

We're all used to watching horrible diseases ravage developing countries. We give money. We say prayers. We don't imagine it will have much effect on us. Who in Europe or the US, just two short months ago, could have predicted how quickly normal life can tip into an apocalyptic drama? Who can say how far-reaching the impact of Covid-19 will be?

I suspect that, much as it was in the weeks following 9-11, the secret to fighting the dread is going to be making extraordinary efforts to keep life as normal as possible. For me, with the closure of London's museums on the horizon, that meant making my way into an eerily quiet capital to drink in the two exhibitions I'd planned to see this spring. Staying six feet away from other humans, trying not to touch anything and regularly sanitising my hands, naturally. I got there just in time. Cultural institutions locked their doors 48 hours later.

If you need cheering up, it's hard to go wrong with the exuberance of the British Baroque or the merry excess of George IV's collecting mania, now sitting in splendid isolation inside Tate Britain and the Queen's Gallery.

The Baroque was a truly international movement, starting in Italy as the Catholic church's response to the reformation. If protestants were going austere, the Pope would fight back with magnificence. The trend for enormous classical buildings, opulent decor, fanciful frescoed ceilings, luxurious clothing and complex, multi-layered music spread quickly. Even protestant countries adopted the style, though they streamlined it a bit and stripped most of the bombastic religious images out of it.

In Britain the Baroque aligns with the late Stuarts. It was the look of choice for Charles II after his restoration. He was heavily influenced by (and probably jealous of) his style-setting first cousin Louis XIV of France (Le Roi Soleil). Charles' successors James II, William and Mary, and Anne all followed suit. The Tate's show, called British Baroque: Power and Illusion, focuses on how those rulers and their courts used the style to dazzle the country with their authority.

While there are interesting lessons in political history here, at its core this is simply a beautiful collection of things to look at. There are lots of sumptuous portraits of women in billowing silk and men in flamboyant wigs. (This may be the best era in fashion history for women. For men, condemned to shoulder-length curls, tights and ballooning short pantaloons, not so much.) There's an exquisitely-wrought silver chandelier, a font cover carved by Grinling Gibbons alive with putti, fruit and veg, an enamel and diamond portrait pendant of William II that would set any jewellery collector drooling, and some beautiful examples of pottery and furniture that show off the growing interest in the exotic Far East. The silver and gold loving cup in the shape of an oak tree, topped with a royal crown, is a masterpiece of the smith's art.

An intriguing section digs into the Baroque's obsession with fooling the eye, with photo-realistic flower paintings, the famous tromp l'oiel door from Chatsworth's music room with its painted violin hanging on a nail, and an amusing box that throws scenes painted on three sides into perfect perspective when you look through the designated eye holes.  There's a whole room devoted to the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren and his followers, with models, paintings and architectural drawings. In the next the curators try to bring to life the age's passion for exuberant walls and ceilings, often adorned with life-sized gods, goddesses and royals occupying heaven. One wall has an enormous reproduction of the view into the great hall at the Naval College at Greenwich, while the others have photos and sketches of  examples elsewhere in the country.

This exhibition wasn't quite as much fun as the Victoria and Albert's take on the Baroque in 2009, which included music, costume and much more of the decorative arts. But it was still a joyous outing, made more memorable by the sparsely populated galleries.

People were even thinner on the ground at the Queen's Gallery, a little-known secret that's rarely crowded even when London's operating at capacity.

The Queen's Gallery sits next to Buckingham Palace and exists to share treasures from the Royal Collection with the general public. While the source is always the same, exhibitions vary to show off items under different themes. For a bargain £13.50, you get into exhibitions for a year (that can be as many as three if you time it right), audio guide included.

While under normal circumstances I wouldn't have jammed two big shows into one day, George IV: Art and Spectacle is a fitting companion to the Baroque. George loved excess, was one of the monarchy's greatest collectors and was a big fan of his predecessor Charles II. George was particularly intrigued by the Catholic branch of the Stuart family that still existed in exile, ousted by his own protestant Hanoverians. There's an intriguing collection of Stuart memorabilia here.

That's probably the most humble of the many collections on view. George's irresponsible spending made him an unpopular king but left perhaps the biggest artistic legacy of any monarch since the Civil War. A savvy consumer of great painting, his purchases included priceless Rembrandts and some of Lawrence's greatest portraits,  on show here. His love of adornment gives the exhibition the glittering, diamond-studded circlet of national flowers familiar from the queen's image on stamps, and a whole range of over-the-top costumes and accessories from his lavish coronation. The Royal Plate had been liberated from its usual display at the Tower; a range of golden tableware that was supposed to be arrayed behind the monarch at state banquets, in an echo of Medieval tradition.

If, as I have, you've been a visitor to all of the Royal palaces, you will have seen most of this stuff before. The charm of the Queen's Gallery is that it brings items together to tell a story. And what we get here is a view into a man of impeccable taste, with greater depth and sensitivity than his historic reputation.

He collected a range of searing political cartoons lampooning him, suggesting a decent sense of humour. He commissioned multiple, beautiful portraits of his favourite sisters and his daughter, suggesting a soft spot for at least some of his fractious family. The books, prints, maps and memorabilia from Wellington's campaigns against Napoleon, including a captured French marshal's baton of command, demonstrate his intense interest in the greatest political events of his time. His love of Jane Austen, who ... when vigorously encouraged ... dedicated Emma to him, obviously shows his excellent literary taste. The presentation copy is here, in its original three-volume form. Most poignant are white marble and gold gilt copies of famous imperial arches in Rome. George desperately wanted to go on the Grand Tour, as his aristocratic peers would have done, but as heir to the throne he wasn't allowed to do so. These items show a desperate yearning for an Italy he would never see.

My two favourite items in the show, however, were the things I'd never seen before because they're not usually on display in the palaces' public spaces. The first was a pair of Humphry Repton's famous red books. An early example of visionary marketing, Repton would bid for potential work by presenting a watercolour of a landscape as it existed and then, with the movement of a flap, the landscape as it could be with his help. His before-and-after scenes were all the rage in the early 19th century, but few survive because they were essentially working design tools. The other is a suite of Oriental-style furniture created for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Lifelike, small Chinese sages hold up a console table, each dressed and presented with distinctive facial expressions. On either side loom porcelain pagodas, originally made in China but enhanced in Europe with tiny ormolu dogs and bells on every level. They are gob-stoppingly magnificent and possibly worth the price of entry on their own.

Sadly, now they sit in an empty gallery, seen by even fewer people than would normally pass by in the private East wing of Buckingham Palace, where they normally live.

With only a handful of people out and about, London's museums and tourist destinations last weekend were glorious. It was like an almost-private view. I wanted to stop time, so I could experience the same at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert. But time marched on. Covid-19 marched on. The museums are closed, and there's no telling when they'll open again. Just like the businesses that are shutting down, our cultural institutions will take an enormous financial hit from this crisis. I can only hope that while they're inaccessible, people gain a greater appreciation for what they're missing and flock back through all those august portals when this significant moment in history has passed.