Bryan Browning: Grant's Iron Foundry

     Another in my occasional series highlighting the work of that excellent local architect Bryan Browning (1755-1856): the great portal of the former Grant's Iron Foundry.  What a powerful piece of architecture it is, combining the English Baroque school of Vanbrugh and visionary French Neo-classicism of, say, Ledoux. Heady stuff. An heroic, Romantic celebration of industrial power.

     It was built in 1845, the contractors being Gregory & Tinkler.  A late example, then, of Georgian architecture.  For a while, at the end of the 19th century, it was part of Blashfield's terracotta works.  At some point in the 20th century it was painted grey and white, possibly when it was owned by Chas Grey. In the last few years it has been incorporated into a new residential development. Sad to say that this work has not been handled with quite enough sensitivity.

St John the Baptist, North Luffenham

     I've probably said this before, at some time, on this blog, but I love this time of year -  transient, slightly melancholic, the soft sunny days of early autumn are to be savoured.  Yesterday was a fine example of one.

      A appeared, as planned, and we went into Rutland and the attractive limestone village of North Luffenham.  A more work-a-day place than some other villages in the county I could mention.  Perhaps more intrusion of Modernity too - thankfully the primary school is mostly screened from view by some ancient stone walls. The 'forecourt' that is shared by the school and the parish church is a prime example of how Modernism creates uneasy and meaningless public spaces. What is it meant to be?  Car park? Graveyard?  There were headstones.  So perhaps the latter.  This sense of dis-ease continued into the churchyard proper.  All for want of a proper boundary that would separate the sacred from the profane
     Anyway to the church.  A fine building it is. A really liked the spire, and it is a satisfying design.  The church is long and low, the chancel a Victorian rebuild by G E Street of all people.

     The interior is sadly a disappointment - oh the architecture is excellent enough - lovely Early English arcades with that rare thing, remains of the medieval painting - but the church is rather, and unnecessarily, dark having been scrapped and ribbon-pointed (Street again) and it is full of modern clutter. Certainly the church came off worse against Street by two falls and a submission but Street's victory was pyrrhic.  'Unappealing' says Pevsner and unappealing it is. The secular has stolen inside and there are boards for this and that and the whole thing is a visual mess and a terrible distraction from the numinous. It makes we wonder whether those responsible actually believe in the latter at all, and whether all the guff is a way of simply filling the vacuum. I've written in similar vein before I know.  My rant about the mess they've made of Oundle church springs to mind, and I suspect that this blog too often repeats my sense of frustration, despair and loss. The house of God deserves better. There needs to be a great purge.
     Perhaps I ought to stick with those things which are a delight, and there a number which need highlighting.  As I said there are the arcades - check out the capitals and the strange primitive faces that people the architecture (there are some fine Victorian ones too on the outside of the chancel).  Inside the chancel has a fine Dec. sedillia, some nice a memorial tablets, a riot of encaustic tiling (Street's best contribution, but still somehow inappropriate) and a good brass chandelier.
It is a building I dearly want to like, but I feel alienated by how it has been treated.

Own work: Life drawing LIV

     The start of the new school year and back, therefore, to the life drawing studio.  The usual two poses of an hour each.  First drawing using an 'F' pencil and the second using a 'B'

Own work: new collage

     My latest collage: 23 x 13.5 cms on 300 gsm using 'handmade' marbled paper and newsprint, watercolour, gouache and oil pastel.

M R James: The Collected Ghoststories

     I've be reading 'The History of Ely Cathedral', ed Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsey, and there in the first chapter, which deals with the early history of Ely, is an interesting if somewhat vicious, if not plain spiteful, legend from the 'Liber Miraculorum' concerning the 'desecration' of the tomb of the St Etheldreda. The culprits, who were merely curious rather than malicious - and also their families, who were innocent - were all punished swiftly with inexplicable death. It is as much a warning against breaking taboos concerning the dead as it about trespassing upon the sacred.
     This is the world of M R James - academic, antiquary and writer of ghost stories.  I read the whole lot last Christmas, which always seems the right sort of time for ghost stories.  A world of Medieval scholarship (of some obscurity at times) and a world in which the unseen impinges in a malevolent way upon the seen. Is indeed always ready to steal out from the shadows when we least expect it. A world in which the good, and the divine economy itself, is temporarily suspended while a terrible drama is acted out.  An asymmetrical drama at that, where the corporeal is often unable to counteract the spiritual, the occult; where all our Modern confidence, our rationalism, even our agency, evaporates before something that is far older, determined and evil.  A world that embraces the concrete; in which historical detail - James's own scholarship - is used as literary device to authenticate and strengthen the narrative and by contrast heighten the terror, and simultaneously undermine our sense of the normal course of things.  A world that is therefore pregnant with the darkly miraculous, or for want of a better phrase the anti-miracle.  The polar opposite of that divine act of charity that temporarily suspends the normal and the everyday.

     My suspicion is that James used the story from the 'Liber miraculorum' as the basis for 'An Episode of Cathedral History' in which an ancient tomb is disturbed during a mid-nineteenth century restoration and releases a lamia, a female vampire-like spirit from Greek Mythology, into the sedate world of an English Cathedral close.
     Part of that constructed everyday, that makes its eventual dislocation so effective, is James's sense of place.  It haunts his work, and what is more these occult occurrences are not only essentially site specific, an avenging genius loci, but are often object specific, as though the object, the nexus of the haunting, is a vector for a form of spiritual contagion.

     Apart from his time at Eton, first as a pupil and much later in life as Provost, James was an East Anglian.  He was raised in Great Livermere in west Suffolk on the southern edge of the Breckland - the 'Fielding' of John Kirby's 'The Suffolk Traveller', went on to study at King's College, Cambridge; and there in Cambridge he remained, rising to director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Provost of King's until his return to Eton in 1919. A life then lived completely in academia and lived mainly in male company.  Most of his characters are men; he is likely to have been homosexual (sounds less anachronistic than 'gay' in this context).  There seems to be a fear, in some of the stories, of sexual intimacy. Not, I think, as the editor of the particular edition I read, female sexuality, of the vagina dentata. I can't see that that is necessarily culturally relevant.

     There is another theme that in our age carries a more disturbing, contemporary echo: the corruption of children. In 'Lost Hearts' single children are abducted and killed; in the horrific 'Wailing Well' a boy's blood is drained and consumed by 'ghosts'. This late story seems, like 'A Warning to the Curious', to be in the manner of a Medieval 'exemplum' - a short moral story.

    It must be admitted that the stories do vary in quality; some are less haunting than others.  All however are well written and James has a good ear for dialogue, perhaps because the stories were written to be read out, but also as a literary device for establishing the veracity of the events described. The best however are very good literature indeed.

     All art has an afterlife. James's stories have been particularly busy inspiring a number of adaptations on the big and small screen; famously 'The Night of the Demon' - 'It's in the trees! It's coming!' - based on 'The Casting of the Runes', and the series of 'Ghost Stories at Christmas' produced by the BBC between 1971 & 1978, some 8 episodes in all. I remember, as a rather timid child, being frightened by a trailer for 'Lost Hearts'. In recent years four new adaptations have been produced.  Adaptations have also been made for radio and the stage, and let's nor forget, either, Kate Bush's song 'The Hounds of Love' which begins with Reginald Beckwith's anguished cry from 'The Night of the Demon'.

All Saints, Stamford

     Across Red Lion Square from St John's church stands All Saints.  It's appearance, like St John's is of Perpendicular gothic; the nave appears low and spreading, even a little workmanlike as sometimes Perp can be, next to the spectacular, assertive, tower and spire.  There is a element of fantasy too about both porches: the S spiky with buttresses and a huge ogee hoodmould, the N like a miniature castle from an illuminated manuscript has suddenly sprung into 3D. Charming.  Uniquely the base of the E, S & W walls is arcaded - EE along the E &S, Perp on the W.  The culminative effect is of something a little beyond the ordinary.
     Inside is spacious but oddly cave like as though it is partly hollowed out of the sloping ground, but perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised as All Saints was restored by Edward Browning in 1857, though the reredos and the septum (exotically made of Mexican onyx) are by T Treadway Hansom and date from the 1870s, and as at Uffington and Clipsham Browning was good at producing richly decorated cave like spaces.  Church as schatzkammer.  All Saints in comparison to those two smaller churches is not so successful.  It lacks the numinous. Perhaps the budget was not large enough or the scale of the building too big for his talents to come fully into play. For whatever reason in all a bit worldly, and I think it would be fair to say that the interior of All Saints has been ill-served by conventional Anglican taste. Sometimes Protestant use sits ill in a medieval catholic shell. Still there are things to look out for: the fine EE arcade in the nave and the capitals in the chancel; the Late Gothic ceiling of the south chapel; the  brasses to the Browne family, very rich from the wool trade, who paid for the Perp rebuilding of the church as well as founding Browne's Hospital in Broad St, and, I think, Stamford School.

Edward Bawden at The Dulwich Picture Gallery

     Way back in July my friend Penny and I went on a jaunt to Dulwich - it was her first visit and my second.  Fitting then the exhibition at the Picture Gallery was of the work of Edward Bawden the 20th century British artist who was a close friend of Eric Ravilious, whose exhibition in 2015 (eek! I didn't realise it was three years ago!) was the reason for my first visit to that oddly haunting building originally built as part gallery, part almshouse and part mausoleum, but I think the history of the building and its construction is the subject for another post.
     So looking back at our visit, over a month ago now, what is the strongest memory?  Laughter. It isn't what one has grown to expect walking around an exhibition - art appreciation is after all reckoned a pretty serious business, a time of proper, grown up, middle-class contemplation and communion - but in that final room Penny could contain herself no longer such was her delight in and enthusiasm for Bawden's work.  A laugh rang out.  And another, as she moved from exhibit to exhibit. But then that room was a place of infectious delight, charm and whimsy, categories that are quite possibly a little frowned upon in the serious world of art. Or at least where the art of the 20th century is concerned.  An artist, after all, has to have commitment.
     It is most likely these categories of charm delight and whimsy are what are most associated with Bawden; they are - the posters, the illustrations, the applied art - after all, the most readily available, most readily recognised Bawden images. This exhibition, which was curated by James Russell, (who was also responsible for curating the Ravilious exhibition) does justice that to that immense and wonderful output and gives space to Bawden the topographical and the War artist. A slightly different, perhaps more serious, certainly more rounded artist emerges, one from which we can trace more readily the development of technique and style of a an artist who has a strong element of the chameleon.
     Bawden was born in 1903, after Cambridge Art College he attended the RCA there he met and became friends with Eric Ravillious.  Importantly for the stylistic development of both men Paul Nash was one of their tutors.  Nash's strong influence can be seen in early watercolours such as 'Autumn Gales, Great Bardfield' and 'Christ! I have been many times to church'. There is clarity.  Colours are on the pale side and there is none of that Baroque sensuousness you find in the work of John Piper. In many respects Bawden is a more disciplined artist. As with Ravilious paint is lain on the paper in lines rather than washes.  What Bawden seems to have also taken from Nash in these early works is a sense of detachment from the subject, but Bawden added something which was distortion.  Nothing too wild you understand, nothing to frighten the horses, but just enough to heighten that sense of distance. I think that like, say, John Minton, Bawden was essentially a linear artist in that he thought more readily in terms of line rather than mass. Coupled with his love of pattern (which is never far away) Bawden often collapses pictoral space, some times distorting, if not fragmenting the subject for the sake of composition, conforming it to the discipline of the paper.  Perhaps it was Nash's influence but Bawden never became a Modernist as such, by which I mean like a good many British of the twentieth century and beyond he remains firmly rooted in the English Romantic tradition while being influenced by, and adopting, certain Modernist techniques such as collage and linocut.  They are best seen, perhaps, as merely utilitarian, useful weapons in the arsenal, rather than signs of allegiance.  Bawden's work, with its humour, sense of place, its love of the graphic, seems a world away from that of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury.  One thing that really seems set them apart is their reaction to Victorian culture.  Bawden fits with a whole strain of twentieth British art and culture that continued to find inspiration and delight in the nineteenth century; a strain that would finally come to public attention in Pop Art and the Peacock Revolution of the Mid/Late Sixties.

    In many respects Bawden can be placed alongside the Neo-Romantics, such as Piper, but perhaps those things (apart from the sense of place) that separate Bawden from the world of Roger Fry also served to remove him too from the intense world of Neo-Romanticism.
     Bawden's work as a War artist, in particular his series of portraits he undertook in Iraq, shows him grappling with depiction of that third dimension.  The results are particularly impressive, even monumental.  I would single out his portrait of Sergeant Samson of the 1975th Bechuana Coy - a work of immense humanity, where he uses cross-hatching (as well as watercolour wash) to build up the image of an almost sculptural quality. The exigencies of War changed Bawden's topographical work.  It took on a new immediacy and drama, and possibly confidence, as can be seen in two works on display: 'The Canmore Mountain Range' and 'Houses at Ironbridge'.  Both superb, and both in their way uncompromising. And possibly that is what it is interesting in Bawden's work, that balance between the charm and the distortion, that creative friction caused by the competing interests of a man with eclectic tastes.
   My only disappointment, if it can be counted as such, was that on the day we were there it wasn't as busy as I remember the Ravilious exhibition to have been.  And that is a shame.