Pushkin

St. James Palace in London, down the street from Buckingham Palace.

It's the official residence of the British monarchy, built in the 1530s by Henry VIII.

It's not opened to the public, but you can apply it to go inside, which I did not long ago.

It's not that hard. As a soldier with a machine gun standing by a little cottage,

he tells me to go inside, and then a man named Desmond Shaw Taylor comes and gets me.

He's the curator of the Royal Art Collection, early middle aged, distinguished,

a kind of high-end exuberance.

Look at that building now, it's kind of missing a bit.

It's a nice jumble.

I came here to see a painting bought by Queen Victoria nearly 150 years ago.

It's called the Roll Call.

Inside the palace, there's red everywhere.

Royal red, red carpets, red wallpaper, all the trim is in gold.

The rooms are massive and almost entirely empty, except for the art on the walls.

Enormous canvases spanning many centuries everywhere,

and in a kind of hallway not far from the entrance, there it is. Roll Call.

1874.

The absolute point of the roll call is that it has a single, brilliant image idea.

The painting depicts a group of British soldiers in the Crimean War,

which is a war England and France fought against Russia in the 1850s.

In roll call, there's just been a battle,

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