The Fitzwilliam Museum II

     

      I've neglected this, my final post on my stay in Cambridge.  Apologies.  There is a quite a bit going on at the moment.

      Back to the Fitzwilliam Museum and its rehang of four its thirty-three galleries of art. (The galleries of Italian, Spanish and Dutch art seemed to have escaped, as have the galleries dedicated to the applied arts such as ceramics.) The results in the four are mixed in that you can walk into two of them, 'Nature' and 'Men Looking at Women', and, ignoring the introductory signage, think nothing is amiss.  However enter Gallery 6, which contains the Medieval and Early Renaissance collections is completely trashed by the rehang.  Gallery 3 is no better.  The only purpose all of this serves, and one I suspect the museum failed to foresee, is to demonstrate just how poor contemporary art, including my own, actually is.  Even the rather dull portraiture of the 18th century wins in the first round; it is just so much more technically competent.  
     I cannot help but feel how different this world of contemporary, regime sponsored art is from the work and lives of the majority of arts working in Britain today.  I doubt many of us are receiving Arts Council funding. 

 

     Anyway some random photos of the stunning entrance hall of the museum as recompense:

     My final day I took the train to Bury St Edmunds, that deeply attractive town in Suffolk to look at the cathedral, but more of that in subsequent posts.

     I suppose I should sum things up.  The college was utterly delightful, the city perhaps less so.  Oh, all the buildings were still there as I remember them, but things were subtly different.  Trinity St was still vibrant and deeply attractive.  There were, however, far more tourists than there used to be - their presence, in such numbers, explains the almost entire closure of colleges to visitors, and yet, for all that, there were, for instance, empty shops in the city centre, particularly in that unhappy area of Market St. and St Andrew's St.  At times there was a slightly uneasy atmosphere, particularly around the market, which seemed a little frayed.  There were also less local independents and more generics - this was especially true of eating out, where the likes of Byron, etc. predominate.  I shall, however, be back.  There is nowhere quite like it.

     As for food, the best experience was the Cambridge Chophouse on King's Parade, and Rocco on Regent St, and then there was the homely, soothing gnocchi at Stazione.  By far the worst experience was at Cote Brasserie, on Bridge St. where the Boeuf Bourguignon was so badly presented it was an insult.  There were moments when I wasn't quite sure what I was eating.

Exhibition: Autumn Gathering

     Pleased to relate that this morning de delivered four paintings to Aberglasney for inclusion in the new Studio Cennen exhibition 'Autumn Gathering'.  The art works are; 'Foliate Head'; 'Bethania, Chapel Morriston'; 'Sardis Chapel, Ystradgynlais'; and 'St Mary, West Walton'.  The exhibition runs from Wednesday 28th October until Thursday 5th November.

Currently Reading....

     'The Duke's Children' by the seemingly inexhaustible Anthony Trollope.  The final novel of Trollope's six novels about the aristocratic Palliser family, and Trollope's penultimate novel.  It was originally published in monthly instalments in the magazine 'All the Year Round' - a common procedure in the 19th century, which did allow for a wider readership.  When published in book form in May 1880 by Chapman & Hall, it was as 3 volumes.   I have decided to follow that pattern, giving me time between volumes to complete the other three novels I have on the go.

      As with the Barchester Chronicles I came to 'The Duke's Children' through one of those BBC adaptations which sadly seem so thin on the ground these days.  Not that I remember the original broadcast of the early 1970s, but the repeat sometime about a decade ago on BBC2 of a weekday afternoon.  And a treat it was.  Some 26 episodes in all, the work of the thoroughly scurrilous writer, the priapic Simon Raven.  A man worthy of a blogpost all to himself.

     However, my trip to London, to see the current Richard Dadd exhibition at the RA, in the last couple of days has put a spanner in the works, for instead of taking the 'The Duke's Children' (a hard back edition by the Folio Society, which has an eloquent forward by the politician Roy Jenkins) with me, I decided to buy a vintage Penguin paperback from Skoob Books in Bloomsbury.  I plumped for 'The Waterfall' by Margaret Drabble, one of her novels that give the lie to the 'show don't tell' school of literature. So now I have five books on the go.  So much for my good intentions.

St Peter & St Paul, Rock, Worcestershire I

     On our way to Bewdley, in Worcestershire, (a week ago today, in fact), we stopped off at St Michael's, Tenbury Wells; that remarkable creation of the Rev Sir Arthur Gore Ousley, and the architect Henry Woodyer. I posted about the exterior here.  An original and idiosyncratic riff on the Gothic style by a pupil of William Butterfield, who himself was no stranger to the idiosyncratic and the original. An unexpected, rather shrine like, rather urban object in the midst of a bucolic and remote part of England.  Trusting in the internet, I believed we could finally get to have a look inside.  I was wrong, thwarted, the church was closed.   

     Not wanting to disappoint you, approaching Bewdley, ahead of time, we made an unscheduled visit to the church of St Peter and St Paul, Rock.  However, it was not to be our day, for it too was locked.  The weather too had taken a turn from sunshine to overcast, blustery and cold.  Still some photographs of the exterior of what is the one of the most important Romanesque churches in the county.  It has been linked to the school of Herefordshire masons we have encountered before at Kilpeck and Leominster. That early work is largely confined to the n side of the nave and the chancel.  The doorway, as you can see, is pretty grand, no money spared.  The rest of the church was rebuilt in the later Middle Ages, when a s aisle was added to the nave and s chapel to the chancel and is not to be sniffed at. The tower is particularly fine.  Sandstone, some nice textures.  Church restored in 1861 by F Preedy, who sounds like a character in a novel by Dickens or Trollope.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

     To Worcestershire over the weekend and a visit to family.  On Saturday night we settled down to watch the recent British film, 'The Ballad of Wallis Island'.
     Charles Heath (Tim Key), widower, and double lottery winner, lives alone in a large house on an island off the British coast.  Travel there is by a daily skiff from the mainland (twice a day if they are lucky).  Such is the lingering intensity of his grief, Charles dreams of reuniting his dead wife's favourite band, the British folk duo MacGyver Mortimer (Tom Basden & Carey Mulligan).  Excellent film score by Adem Ilhan. Charles's plan, of course, goes awry, but in the ensuing emotional turmoil new possibilities emerge.  A charming, whimsical film.  Atmospheric and rather moving at times.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

2025

Producer:               Rupert Majendie

Director:                 James Griffiths

Cinematographer: G Magni Agustsson

Last night we also watched the inexecrable 'Madfabulous'.  The story of Henry Paget, the  5th Marquess of Anglesey.  What an absolute mess of a film.  I can't think of a single redeeming feature.

Madfabulous

2025

Producer:               Nadia Jaynes, Sean Marley

Director:                 Celyn Jones

Cinematographer: Laurie Jones

Own work: Sketches Preparatory to a New Painting

     Thought I'd just share with you some sketches I've done in the past week towards a new architectural painting.  It hasn't a name yet simply because, well, because it is based on a printed version of a design by Inigo Jones for part of one of his designs for a vast new palace he designed for King Charles I, to replace the muddled structures of Whitehall Palace.  These designs remained on paper but proved influential in the burgeoning Neo-Palladian movement in early Georgian England.  This Neo-Mannerist design, that combines elements of Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio, is however nothing like the sterile creations of Neo-Palladianism.  It has drama and heft, physical and emotional.  Oh, btw you really can forget any idea that Jones was a Palladian; he was essentially a pragmatic eclectic designer who, magpie-like, took ideas from where ever he fancied.

     The illustration, I am basing this new work on, comes from William Kent's 'The Designs of Inigo Jones', the engravings being the work of the architect Henry Flitcroft.  As with the illustrations in the Vitruvius Britannicus of 1715, there is the possibility that the original Jones designs were altered in the engraving process to make them conform to the aesthetics of the new, and insanely dogmatic, architectural regime.

The Fitzwilliam Museum I

     On my recent holiday in Cambridge I spent Wednesday morning at the Fitzwilliam Museum.  Here are four paintings from the British Landscape Tradition that caught my eye, by Hockney, Spencer, and Samuel Palmer.

     

Ce qui entend le plus de bêtises dans le monde est peut-être un tableau de musée.

     This last painting, ‘View of Lee, North Devon’,1834-5, also known as ‘Autumn Landscape with view to the Sea’ by this deeply mystical artist, has, since the major (and controversial) re-hang of 2023, been accompanied by an information label that chides the artist thus: ‘Palmer’s landscapes show no sign of the industrial age that was making its mark on the environment.  Nor do they register the poverty of agricultural workers, which was worsened by the Poor law, introduced the year this work was made and which sent many in poverty to the Workhouse.’  Why should he?  Artists are under no moral obligation to do so.  To paraphrase a recent article in The Critic: art owes us nothing. 

     Certainly, those self-same criticisms could be levelled at Hockney and Spencer, but for some reason or another they are not so graced.  Hockney, after a teenage flirtation with ‘It’s grim up North’, forsook sooty Bradford for sun-drenched middle-class Los Angeles, and later became a chronicler of haut bourgeois London: aristocrats, fashion designers, writers, photographers, bankers, and the like.  Spenser’s landscapes show very little ‘sign of the industrial age that was making its mark on the environment’.  And a quick survey of the other paintings on display failed to elicit any similar comments.

     What is so threatening in Palmer’s work, to deserve this?  I can only deduce that this was, in fact, a purely arbitrary act, one designed merely to shame and humiliate.  Pour encourager les autres.  Such reductive comments fail, at a profound level, to understand to the creative process itself.  A work of art is a complex and messy thing, whose origins lie a web of often conflicting motivations often as not from the sub-conscious.  A definitive explanation of a painting is beyond us all whether we have a piece of paper to say we are qualified, or not.  At some level we are confronted with a mystery.