I stayed with the Renaissance Italians, seen so many times in books and now, in the original.
The outlines were familiar, but the colours so much more intense. It also took a while to adjust to the size of the works.
What is there of the Renaissance in Jakarta? Galleries exhibit modern Indonesian sculptors and painters.
Perhaps the Renaissance is reflected at third or fourth remove in the Graeco-Roman features of Dutch colonial buildings - in the colonnades, pediments and atria of palaces, museums and courts.
I took a tour of the state rooms of the Presidential Palace during the school holidays, along with hundreds of school children in uniform, and their parents. They had travelled all night by bus for a day in Jakarta, and would travel all night to go home, taking with them their photographs to show their friends where they had been, what they had seen.
After the Gallery I stood on the Thames Embankment near Lambeth Bridge, among people photographing the Houses of Parliament, to draw at dusk.
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