Burwell

   The week before last and our annual trip to Suffolk and lunch at 'The Great House' in Lavenham.  It seems an age ago now. Lunch, by the way, was delicious: Ox cheek and Lentils, Skate, Chocolate Marquise. And that evening our host prepared a scrumptious dinner of fried chicken and a sort of stir fried rice. We were truly spoilt, with a day of good food, good wine and good company.

   On our return journey we stopped off briefly in Lavenham - (apologies for posting, again, images of the Little Hall Museum. I couldn't resist it) - before braving the busy A14.  We had two ports-of-call in east Cambridgeshire before getting home:  Anglesey Abbey and Burwell church. The former was heaving with visitors as it was snowdrop time and also half-term.  It was rather like being in the middle of Cambridge on a Saturday.

   Burwell church was an altogether quieter affair.  A large church, St Mary was rebuilt in the 15th century in a very sophisticated Perpendicular Gothic. There are earlier bits at the west end. The mason is thought to have been Reginald of Ely - some of the motifs in the window tracery match those dating from the first construction period at King's College down the road in Cambridge where Reginald is known to have worked.  The outside is built of flint, although there are a number of flint built churches in east Cambridgeshire very few display flushwork.  I wonder why that is? Anyway inside it's a rather grand affair, perhaps the grandest parochial nave in Cambridgeshire, rather than homely; the nave soaring overhead supported on slim piers of dressed clunch, and light pouring in from every direction through the vast windows.  No expense was spared by the look of it; the walls above the arcades are fully panelled (no inert wall surface at all), and the walls between the immense chancel windows are decorated with oversized image niches. There is a sort of reasonableness to it all, but not much mystery. A delicacy too, an almost brittle quality to the architecture; and the architecture is all, for there are few if any fittings of worth.  A contrast one suspects to the Middle Ages, when colour and fittings would have added, I would hope, that missing sense of mystery.  The church was restored thrice in the 19th century by John Edlin and Blomfield (x2).  I think it must be to Blomfield that the dubious credit goes for the slightly weird green light in the chancel.

 

Own work; Life Drawing XXXV

   Last Thursday's offerings.

London III: The V&A

  Then off to the V&A.  A return visit fro the both of us.  For me it was a return after years away and I was aware of the changes.  The new-look courtyard, with its rather minimalist fountain, was pretty underwhelming. It was very busy but upstairs in the British Galleries things were much calmer.  I particularly wanted to see these galleries (there are two) as the interior designer David Mlinaric, with others such as Christopher Gibbs and the architectural historian John Harris, acted as historical consultant in the representation of the galleries that occurred in the 1990s.  The galleries contain some fantastic objects, and it has to be said some pretty strange things too.  I have to confess to being a little disappointed with the overall, slightly over powering design, but the colours that Milnaric and others helped to choose were fantastic.  No white box Modernism.
   Warning: on no account visit the Twentieth Century Gallery afterwards. They were a terrible disappointment both in terms of contents and display after all that colour and beauty.  Plenty of the white box Modernist gallery, and both it and the contents were drab and banal. It confirmed what I heard a critic say about Modernist design some years ago on BBC4 - something on the lines of: 'It promised so much and never failed not to deliver.'  It certainly gave the lie to the idea that 'good design'  - would somehow elevated the mass produced object and make it, like art itself, into a substitute for the spiritual, for the sublime. Echoes there of T E Hulme's 'spilt religion' and Marx's 'commodity fetishism'.
   I felt the same sense of decline, if not failure at our next port of call.  We took the tube to St James's Park - looking delightful in the late winter sunshine - to the ICA on the Mall.  It was the brother's first visit.  Neither of us were that impressed.  The place looked and felt tired.  A place too, I suspect, only for the initiate.  We wandered off through the West End to an early dinner in the vibrant Dishoom Carnaby, which I've blogged about before.  Pleased to say that our visit went very well - the Black Dhal in particular was unctuously, satisfyingly savoury, and the whole experience excellent.

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XIV

   Another completed painting from the Rustiche, XIV, of Sebastiano Serlio's 'Extraordinario Libro di Architettura'.

London II: The Russian Orthodox Cathedral

     We walked through Hyde Park, and then plunged into the maze of residential streets north east of the V&A our goal goal being the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens.  A building that has been recently been restored, and I was eager to see what had been done and experience its Orthodoxy.

     The cathedral, however, started out as an Anglican parish church, designed in the 1830s by Lewis Vulliamy (although work didn't commence for another decade).  In the 1850s Robert Louis Roumieu designed a sky-rocket of a campanile, which thankfully wasn't built. The present bell tower dates from the 1870s.  The interior, like many post-reformation Anglican churches of the eighteenth century onwards, is based on the early Christian basilican form - nave, aisles and apse.  We've met the form before on this blog.  The interior is very vertical in feeling.  The great columns are made of cast iron.  In 1892 Owen Jones's decoration was replaced by Arts and Crafts architect Charles Harrison Townsend and the artist Heywood Sumner, who decorated the nave walls with sgrafitto and the triumphal arch over the apse with mosaic.  The apse decoration, by Derwent Wood, dates from 1911. The work is excellent, and it was really pleasing to see that the recent restoration has respected the history of the church.

     Researching for this post I was faced with the same issue that afflicted my research on Houghton Hall last year; none of the secondary source materials seem to quite agree with each other.  It could be that the west front is original, and merely modified by Harrison Townsend i.e. the porch, which has very Byzantine detailing.  However the design, which is based on San Zeno, Verona, is nothing like that in 1850s perspective drawing illustrated in 'Victorian Churches', (Country Life Books, 1968).  I suspect that the whole façade is by Townsend in collaboration with Sumner who made the sgraffito decoration in the porch. The central panel over the door is not mosaic as claimed in one guide book. Either way it's a vast improvement on that illustrated.  When a student in west London a friend and I attended the Divine Liturgy one Sunday when the very holy Anthony Bloom was archbishop, and the place, as far as I can remember, was a little shabby.  There wasn't much money available then, I suppose.  Money, judging by what has recently been achieved, is now plentiful.  And rather splendid, and light filled, is the result. Not, thankfully, as lavish as I feared.