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, but then perhaps we have our own networks etc and we don't need the institutions in the manner they believe we do.  I certainly keep my distance, particularly here, in the Infernal City.

 

     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.  On a much happier note I did notice a flock of new bakeries, not in the city centre but in semi-suburban Hills Rd.  I presume that's where the creativity now lies, away from the centre.

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.

 

St Michael, Cambridge

Twas Michaelmas season

They'd got corn and pears in

And all the fields cleared save some rakings and thythes

Cote prygon flocks muster

Round beans shelling cluster

And done are the whettings o reap hooks and scythes.

     It is Michaelmas.  A blustery day here, with leaves spinning across the sky on the wind.  I suppose we all ought to be eating goose.  Here, however, are the photos I took of the exterior of St Michael's church in Cambridge. 

     After photographing the exterior of Great St Mary, I braved the rush hour 'crowds' and photographed St Michael's.  The church stands on Trinity St., a few hundred feet north of Great St Mary.  Not as grand as its southern neighbour, nor as unprepossessing as St Edward and St Bene't further s.  Oblong plan with projecting s tower and n porch.  The tower like that of St Edward is very plain, but none the worse for that; it originally had a blunt, diminutive lead spire.  Short nave, longer chancel.  Mainly Decorated Gothic.  Fine west window. S. aisle plastered, whitewashed, and scored to resemble ashlar masonry.

     The church essentially belongs to the rebuilding undertaken from 1325 onwards when it also became the chapel for the now defunct college, Michaelhouse.  It was later also used simultaneously by Gonville College.  Both colleges were eventually subsumed into other institutions, Michaelhouse into Trinity, and Gonville into Gaius, and St Michael became parochial once more. With the growth of the colleges, commencing in the 1820s, the parish was slowly denuded of parishioners until in 1908 parish was amalgamated with that of Great St Mary.  It entered into a period of some uncertainty for much of the twentieth century.  Various alternative uses were proposed and then rejected.  Eventually it became used as a parish hall.  The chancel, and s chancel aisle, were retained for worship, and the nave and the north aisle repurposed.  Kitchen, toilets etc were installed in 1966.  George Pace was the architect.  Controversially, work including a brick wall betwixt the nave and chancel.  In 2002, St Michael's became the 'Michaelhouse Centre', more popularly known as 'Michaelhouse Café'.  The interior was redesigned by Archimage, and included the removal of Pace's brick wall.

Great St Mary, Cambridge II

Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge: interior towards the west end. Line engraving by J. Le Keux, 1824, after J.P. Neale. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pkfjy8nn

As I walked in Petty Cury on Trinity Day,
While the cuckoos in the fields did shout,
Right through the city stole the breath of the may,
And the scarlet doctors all about

Lifted up their heads to snuff at the breeze,
And forgot they were bound for Great St-Mary’s
To listen to a sermon from the Master of Caius,
And ” How balmy,” they said, ” the air is !”

And balmy it was ; and the sweet bells rocking
Shook it till it rent in two
And fell, a torn veil ; and like maniacs mocking
The wild things from without peered through.

Wild wet things that swam in King’s Parade

The days it was a marshy fen,
Through the rent veil they did sprawl and wade
Blind bog-beasts and Ugrian men.

And the city was not. (For cities are wrought
Of the stuff of the world’s live brain.
Cities are thin veils, woven of thought,
And thought, breaking, rends them in twain.)

And the fens were not. (For fens are dreams
Dreamt by a race long dead ;
And the earth is naught, and the sun but seems :
And so those who know have said.)

So veil beyond veil inimitably lifted :
And I saw the world’s naked face,
Before, reeling and baffled and blind, I drifted
Back within the bounds of space.

I have forgot the unforgettable.
All of honey and milk the air is.
God send I do forget. . . . The merry winds swell
In the scarlet gowns bound for St. Mary’s.

Dame Rose Macaulay 1881-1958

     And so to the interior.  And, as I have said in a previous post from years ago, it is a worldly place, where the civic and University, and the near constant flow of tourists combine to suppress the numinous.  It must be a hard task for the clergy to maintain even a modicum of the spiritual in such an environment.

     Entering through the s porch one immediately feels the weight of the galleries that fill the aisles; massive constructions encompassing the whole nave, the remains of an 18th liturgical 'refit', designed to accommodate the University for ceremonies and specifically the Sermons that then punctuated the academic year.  That original scheme centred on a 'three decker' pulpit of extraordinary design; the two lower desks for the clerk and the rector faced e while behind them pulpit itself, tall and proud in the form of an octagonal tower.  See above There were additional galleries at the w end and filling the chancel arch.  Local tradition has it that the galleries were designed by James Gibbs.  Whether that is true, they do give a good sense of what a Medieval church looked on the eve of the Oxford Movement.  Apart from the side galleries everything else was ripped out during Sir George Gilbert Scott's thoroughgoing mid 19th century restoration.  I don't think there were any other architectural interventions until the Post war period when the then Vicar Mervyn Stockwood brought in George Pace (an Anglican establishment architect if ever there was).  Pace was responsible for a re-ordering of th chancel and, I think, a new vestry at the W end.  (Could be wrong about the latter.) 

     As for the architecture, the nave is all, everything else an afterthought.  And it is pretty spectacular 'all singing, all dancing' Late Gothic.  The architect, it is pretty certain, was John Wastell, who we have encountered at two other buildings in E Anglia: Peterborough Cathedral and King's College Chapel, just the other side of Senate House Hill.  The interior façade is rich and restless.  There is scarcely any inert wall surface.  The arcade is very tall and slim and the clearstory double.  Construction commenced in 1478 and was completed just at the start of the Reformation.

     For all that magnificence the interior feels ill at ease.  There is an awful lot of contemporary semi-religious clutter, everything feels temporary, and nothing quite comes up to quality of Wastell's work.  It is also for an Late medieval East Anglian church surprisingly dark., and over-pewed.  It is a building I feel I would find it very difficult to pray in.

     Like St Edward's, Great St Mary was the stage for the radical middle stage of the Reformation in England and Wales.  The Reformer Martin Bucer was buried in the church in 1551.  With the Marian reaction his remains were exhumed and publicly burned on Market Hill.  A vindictive act.

Kettle's Yard

     "I thought we'd make our way to Kettle's Yard, if that's alright."
     "I was hoping you'd say that."

     Well, not exactly a verbatim transcript of our conversation on Tuesday morning as we were leaving 'Hot Numbers Coffee' on Trumpington St. And that's about it - if you've read this blog before you will know all about Kettle's Yard and why it is so unbelievably special - on with the photographs!!!

St Edward, King and Martyr, Cambridge I

     Tucked away, in the remaining warp and weft of the Medieval city, stands St Edward's church, midway betwixt St Benet and Great St Mary.  From King's Parade you enter a narrow, atmospheric alley between shops - St Edward's Passage.  In a short while you emerge in a small urban space, quite picturesque, almost village-y.  Sadly that atmosphere is not maintained at the e end on Pease Hill, where the massive Guild Hall looms over all.

     St Edward's, is itself a rather village-y affair, humble with an interesting mix of materials particularly the use of plaster, which here and elsewhere in se England suggests the 18th & early 19th century.  There is a slim w tower, short nave (no clearstory), and chancel with two large chapels that were built to serve two of the University colleges - Trinity Hall on the N & Clare College on the S.*  They were apparently constructed post 1446, though the s chapel, if I didn't know better, looks entirely Dec to me (Yes, I know the tracery is probably 19th century or later).  It reminds me somehow of the s elevation of the chancel of St Benedict in Lincoln, although they are in fact completely different designs.   I can't help feel the design would be improved by a high pitched roof.  Wide, flat e end; e window by Sir George Gilbert Scott.  The church has been rather harshly restored at some point in the 19th century, probably by Brandon.  The west window and door are particularly regrettable.  I think Sir Albert Richardson worked here in the 20th century.

    A long time ago, when we were teenagers, a friend and I worshiped in this church one Sunday morning, sitting behind two elderly ladies, one of whom spent the whole service loudly criticizing the priest.

* Reginald of Ely, the first master mason of King's College chapel, has been suggested as the designer of these chapels, but the evidence is flimsy.  Firstly there is the question of the window in the s chapel.  It is supposed to be like Ely's tracery at King's College Chapel, but I can't see it.  Secondly, how can we trust the current tracery anyway?  If it was Ely's work it would be incredibly anachronistic.  Nearly a hundred years out of date.