Marholm and Castor II

     Just a couple of miles south, and in the valley of the Nene, is Castor, a large stone built village, that being quite so close to Peterborough has a slight urban feel to it.  There are however some very attractive houses.  We, though, were there for the church, and rather special it is.  Firstly it has what must be one of the finest, most satisfying Norman towers in the country.  Superlative.  Secondly it has a fascinating early history: St Kyneburga is built within the remains of a massive Late Roman structure - 'palace' and 'praetorium' are banded about by historians. Before you get too excited there really isn't that much Roman to be seen, just the odd sizable junk of masonry.  Anyway a convent was founded here in the 7th century by the Merican Princess Kyneburga, her sister Kyneswitha, (daughters of King Peada), and their kinswoman Tibba who later became a hermit at Ryhall between Bourne and Stamford. The coming of the Vikings put pay to the monastery and later Castor, like Ryhall, became a place of pilgrimage, one of many small shrines that dotted the country before the Reformation.
     History lesson over. The church is charming.  The outside has lots texture from the rubble walls (re-used Roman materials), and a couple of ancient carvings: over the porch, a 'Christ in Majesty', and over the priest's door on the south side of the chancel one recording the consecration of the church.  Inside there are all sorts of cross vistas to be had as this is a cruciform building. The aisled nave contains an altar dedicated to St Kyneburga.  The crossing piers are stout Norman work with wonderful carved cushion capitals - the vault is a late medieval insertion and suitably robust.  The chancel is long and, when we were there, light filled.  The north transept which is Norman, is filled with the organ, but the south transept is early Decorated and austerely elegant and spacious.  But, alas, the furnishings are not commensurate with the architecture, and it is a little cluttered in places.

Marholm and Castor I

     Saturday and a friend popped over.  It was a glorious day and we headed south of the border to Cambridgeshire to look at two remarkable churches: St Mary, Marholm and St Kyneburga, Castor.

     Marholm sits of the southern edge of the Welland valley. Its situation is very beautiful, on the southern edge of the village and over looking a wide pasture that dips down to a small stream lined with willows. The church is small and low, and there cedar trees in the churchyard.  It really is idyllic.  The tower is late Norman, short, blunt and austere.  The chancel, grand and very fine late Perp commissioned by Sir William Fitzwilliam and completed by 1534; the nave between has a Perp clerestory and Victorian aisles.  However, lovely though the architecture is, what makes the church is the connection to the Fitzwilliams at nearby Milton Hall, for this is an estate church and is, as one would expect, immaculately cared for.  It also explains why the church is usually locked - to protect the Fitzwilliam tombs.  Another visit is in order, when there is time to spare to get the key.

Currently reading.....

   'George Fredrick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America' by Michael Hall.  Bodley, (1827-1902) was one of the foremost architects of the late Gothic Revival; and an architect of refined and superlative taste.  The designer of some wonderful churches.  This hefty book, which is lavishly illustrated, is the first monograph to be published on this slightly enigmatic yet highly influential man. Sir John Ninian Comper, Robert Lorimer and Charles Ashbee all trained and worked in his office. 

   Bodley began as the designer of High Victorian churches, before reacting against that very hard type of architecture and returning to the style of Pugin, creating churches that are at once deeply rooted in the English Medieval tradition but open to influences from Europe; and, like George Gilbert Scott, he was one of those late Victorian architects who dispensed with Gothic when it came to domestic design contributing to the emergence of the 'Queen Anne Revival'.  Bodley's mature churches are elegant and refined perhaps even a little patrician, but they represent to me at least an intellectual and sensual anglo-catholic culture I find deeply attractive and satisfying.

Own work: Life drawing XXXVII

   A new departure for me at last Thursday's life drawing class: watercolour.  I've never used it before in the context of life drawing.  Not too bad a result for a first time, perhaps.  But could do better!

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XVI

The Rustiche wagon rolls slowly on.....

Own Work: Life drawing XXXVI

   The two drawings from last Thursday's class - the first pencil, the second biro.  The model retained the pose through out the morning.

Own Work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XV

   The quest to complete all thirty of the Rustiche continues....

The Hard-won Image: Paul Nash at Tate Britain

   In the first, dark room there were trees.  Lots of them lining the walls.  I was standing in the Paul Nash exhibition in Tate Britain, just over a week ago and it was very crowded - very popular, and a little oppressive. But then it was a Saturday afternoon. And on the walls are a series of mainly watercolours, mainly of trees.  The types of trees are clearly articulated. Figures are rare and those there are seem somewhat awkward.  There is a general tightness of technique.  It is very pastoral and delicate.  And there the main themes of Nash's work are established.  He remained faithful to them throughout his working career.
   Even in the the second room, where the contrast in subject matter and technique could not be greater, the themes remain.  This is the first of two rooms dedicated to Nash's response to conflict.  In this case World War I.  The work on display is on a far greater scale to that first room, the medium is now oil. That particular change seems to have come out of the blue.  There is a sense of place and there are trees too, blasted and shattered things.  These are not images so much of a world shattered by mechanized warfare, but a world denuded of meaning, shorn of immanence.  Victim, perhaps of Modernity itself.
   Nash (1889 - 1945) is credited with being among the first Neo-Romantic artists.  Neo-Romanticism is a rather nebulous grouping of 20th century British artists - there was never such a thing as a manifesto - but what they did do was combine Romantic sensibility with elements, such as the visual language, of European Modern Art. Neither does it share the formalism of the Bloomsbury group such as Roger Fry, for it is an art of place, sensibility and ideas.  And, I think, Nash is first and foremost an intellectual artist.  And one, I suspect, for whom the image is hard-won.  There is an almost utilitarian quality of the painted surface, none of the sensuality of paint one would associate with an older contemporary such as Singer Sergeant or Lavery. Although the work he produced in the high intensity of WWI is influenced by the Vorticists, which, I suppose, represents the high point of British Modernism, his interests, and his aims, are essentially different from theirs.  Nash's attitude to Modernity, like those of the other Neo-Romantics, was ambiguous.  And this, it can be argued separates the Neo-Romantics in general from European Modernism.

   I would also argue that it was the two great cataclysmic conflicts of the twentieth century, WWI & WWII, that (partially, at least) released Nash from the tightness of technique and awkwardness of composition I mentioned above. A change forced upon him by the exigency of putting oil on canvas at a time of emotional turmoil.
   Pictures of Nash seem to show a large robust man with a face like a Hanoverian monarch.  These images belie the truth that Nash's health was seldom good and the effect on him of the battle fields of the Western Front was traumatic. To recover he buried himself in nature, in place, and the work of this post-war period we see the growing influence of European Modernism.  Perhaps my favourite work of this period is 'Wood upon the Downs', a work of strange mystery. Nash seems to have absorbed any number of, sometime contradictory, influences - Cezanne, de Chirico; and I think it telling that of all those influences the most important to act upon Nash was that of the Surrealists, an art of the mind if ever there was.  The art of this period was on the whole new to me.  I found the interiors and the assemblages of found images the most intriguing.  But still Nash was, like British art itself has continued to be throughout the 20th century, obsessed with both place and object - the extraneous subject to the canvas.  Nash's interest in contemporary Modernism perhaps was partly utilitarian in that it provided him with a language in which he could explore certain themes both intellectually and emotionally upon the canvas.
   In the final two rooms (there are six in all), the rooms dedicated to work Nash produced in the last five years of his life, there is some of the most moving and a times radiant work produced in the last century by any British artist.  'Totes Meer' of 1940-1, with its great swelling sea of crashed German aircraft, is truly outstanding work of deep emotional impact and resonance, but it those last landscapes painted when he was to all intents and purposes dying and was living in Oxford, that all those influences and interest reach a synthesis which of all his work seems the most effortless.  In these final works he returned to one of the places and subjects of the early works of that first room of the exhibition, the Wittenham Clumps - a group of trees that sprout from a couple of hills on the southern edge of the Thames Valley on the Berkshire/Oxfordshire border.  A place rich in cultural and historical resonances. Nash first visited them in 1911, and said that they were of a 'beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten'.  I think the same could be said for his art.