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.

     William Stukeley, the antiquarian, was the parish priest here in the 18th century.

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 recognized Bawden images. This exhibition, which was curated by James Russell, (who was also responsible for curating the Ravilious exhibition), does justice 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 other British artists 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 an 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.

Own work: Design for a Moumental Gateway

     Last week and I finally got around to making a something of a sketch design I did months ago.  Mixed media on watercolour board. 40.3 x 54 cms

St John the Baptist, Harringworth

     A came over and after High Mass at St Mary's in Stamford we headed off on a very short jaunt to Harringworth on the Northamptonshire side of the Welland valley - another absurdly attractive stone-belt village.  Very sleepy under this summer's unrelenting sun.  Quintessentially an English scene.  At first glance quite a conventional church, with west tower and spire, aisled nave and unaisled chancel, but things are always more interesting, more individual than that.  And that's what makes visiting an old church like Harringworth worthwhile.

     The oldest part of the structure is the tower - Transitional, built of limestone and richly coloured ironstone.  The spire is later, and oddly has carved heads above the broaches.  The rest of the exterior is Decorated and Perp.  One thing I noticed quickly was the difference in size between the north clerestory and the much smaller south.
     The interior is spacious, perhaps even a little uninspiring - not really a place of mystery but still beautiful.  Another chance however to compare and contrast the two mismatched clerestories - I think the north is Late Medieval except for the west bay which appears to have been rebuilt sometime after the Reformation; I think it is either Elizabethan or Jacobean.  The tower arch has very beautiful Transitional capitals.  The chancel screen is Medieval, and there are a couple of grand benefaction boards either side of the s door and the east window is rather fine; however the notable thing about the interior is the family vault that occupies the eastern half of the north aisle.  "Like something out of a M R James ghost story", I said, gazing down through the railings to the sealed door.

   Next to the church is the Manor House, an house of the late 17th century. And well worth inclusion in this post.

Carreg Cennen Castle

     Standing there with a great pastoral landscape heaving and undulating around us like a great, green ocean it was hard to think that not so far away from us, behind those blind bracken covered hills on the horizon was a different, scarred, landscape of industrialisation and the 'world of telegrams and anger' - Swansea, and the small industrial towns of the Tawe valley and southern Carmarthenshire. This landscape seemed much older, much more settled and at ease with itself.  Of course it really isn't as simple as that but standing there amidst the wreck of Carreg Cennen Castle it was easy to think it was. Le Pays de Galles Profonde.

     Carreg Cennen Castle sits on a great crag of limestone, at a dizzying height above the tiny Cennen river that flows on to meet the Towy at Llandeilo Fawr.
The history of the castle is complex, changing hands many times throughout the Middle Ages, but site started off as an administrative centre in the Kingdom of Deheubarth and at the end of the War of the Roses it was awarded to Sir Rhys ap Thomas, who is now buried in St Peter's Carmarthen, before passing to the Vaughans of the Golden Grove, the Cawdors and finally into government ownership in 1932. (Thankfully the castle retains one, at least, of those beautiful 'Ministry of Works' signs.)  Architecturally speaking the important event in the castle's history is its capture by Edward I - most of what can be seen dates from the period shortly after when it was completely rebuilt by the Giffords who had been granted the castle in 1283. The best bit, apart form those breath-taking views is the mural passage leading to a cave under the castle. (Flashlights are provided for hire for this but we found the light on my mobile phone a very useful supplement.)
     Looking at the plan of the castle I was struck, given the irregularity of the site, by its regularity; a plan that displays its origins in the Late Antique.  It's always said that such designs were brought back to the West by the Crusaders impressed by the Eastern Roman and Islamic fortresses they encountered. The Crusaders, I think, were pretty overawed by the walls of the Imperial City of Constantinople, indeed it is thought that they were the inspiration for Edward I's mighty fortress at Carnarvon, which is a sort of mimetic model of the 'Holy City of Byzantium', in the same way that some scholars have understood Umayyad Damascus, but it must be remembered that both the Eastern Romans and the Arabs were essentially working in a continuing Late Antique tradition, an example of this can be seen the walls erected around Cairo in 1087-92 (a maidan was even laid out in the shape of a Roman hippodrome), or in the country houses erected in the Syrian Steppe by the Ummayad elite, and whose plans follow that of the Roman fortress - even the name for such a residence 'qasr' is derived from the Latin 'castrum'.
The shadow of Rhufain - Rome - is very long.

St Cynnog, Defynnog

     I realize I've ben a bit lax of late when it comes to posting - apologies.  Last week I was in Wales visiting with the bf.  On the Thursday we went over the Brecon Beacons and down into the valley of the Usk and that excellent market town of Brecon, which I have blogged about before.  On the way we stopped off at the attractive village of Defynnog in the Senni valley, being attracted by the strong, severe church tower. We were not disappointed.  It is a place of almost serene beauty.
     The tower is a rather martial, confident design - the belfry windows, as you can see, are tiny.  Like most medieval church towers in Wales it is unbuttressed but, like the tower of St Peter in Carmathern and the tower at Llangathen the ground floor has a pronounced batter.  Defensive or structural, I wonder? but here the simplicity seems particularly at ease in the spectacular landscape.  The church is equally as simple, really nothing more than a long rectangle with a projecting s porch and a large chapel to the n of the chancel.  Though looking back at the photographs I took, there seems to be some sort of disturbance to the s wall of the nave that suggests there may have been some sort of projecting chapel at some point in the past.  That said I really know nothing of its history except that the projecting eaves etc, which give it quite a domestic air, suggest a Victorian restoration. The lychgate is certainly Victorian. There is perp tracery in both the east windows, and Gothick at the west end of the nave, what intrigued me however were the round headed windows elsewhere - were they original or Late Victorian?  Either way a very satisfying design.
     Pushing open the door I was met with a surprise.  Firstly the door jamb seemed unending, (quite a surreal moment!), as though the wall of the church was immensely thick.  It soon turned out not so for built right against the edge of the doorway was a wall running across the whole width of the nave.  We had stepped into what was in effect a tall, narrow narthex - that was the second surprise. The narthex had sliced the nave into three parts with the west end divided off as a vestry (not a vestry but a schoolroom - 06.08.2018).  When, I wondered had this all been undertaken? Not recently I think.  Not that the subdivision of the nave meant a cramped place of worship.  The interior is broad and spacious, and - delight of delights - it is still lit with oil lamps.  Betjeman and, indeed, John Piper would have been pleased.  Fittings were not that exciting, except for a number of wonderfully evocative ledgerstones in the n chapel. In all, however, eminently satisfying.

Alas I was too interested in the architecture and landscape to notice the yew trees in the churchyard.  One in particular is immense, and is very old - ancient in fact, being at least 5,000 years old.

(06.08.2018 - turns out this was not the only treasure we missed, there's memorial immured in the tower that dates back to the 5th century, that is to somebody who quite conceivably had lived during the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain. Incredible.)