A Whistler-stop tour of Tate Britain

What better way to spend a dreary Sunday afternoon than to bounce around the free exhibits at Tate Britain. Within the space of an hour, I ventured round galleries featuring:

• a massive tree painting by David Hockney;
• abstract art from the likes of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Meadows, Patrick Heron and Piet Mondrian;
• Bloomsbury Group daubs by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Frederick Etchells;
• pre-Raphaelite portraits by the celebrity brotherhood of Sir John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, together with Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones; and
• later Victorian classics by Sir John Singer Sargent, George Frederic Watts and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

All of which is fine and dandy, but it does make your head spin. An hour is about right as a time-frame for coping. Unfortunately the tea bar was closed for the day at the end of my trip: it might be an "ace café" for all I know, but the museum itself is pretty tasty.