St Bartholomew's Hospital

     Back to my visit to The Smoke.  After the Richard Dadd exhibition, I did some shopping on Jermyn St and Piccadilly before a hurried Pret lunch and the Metropolitan train into the City.  My goal was Smithfield and St Bart's Hospital and the recently restored Great Hall & Hogarth Stair.  As you can see from the photographs it was a wet and miserable afternoon.  We remain, however, in the same cultural world as Burlington House, and the early 18th century 'battle of the styles'.

 
     So, as usual, a little history.  St Bartholomew's Hospital was founded by Rahere in 1123.  He is a semi-mythical - real though many stories and legends have been spun around him.  I am sure, for instance, that as a child I was told (by the children's magazine programme 'Blue Peter', no less) that Rahere was  court jester to King Henry I.  In other accounts he was a minstrel.  Either way, after a misspent life, he went on pilgrimage to Rome and there suffered a 'life changing illness', repented, and entered into the priesthood.  Or something like that.  Rahere's initial foundation also included the Augustinian Priory of St Bartholomew.  The east end survived the Reformation and now forms the wonderfully atmospheric parish church of St Bartholomew-the-great, where you will also find a fine Late Gothic tomb on the north side of the chancel purportedly Rahere's burial place, see below.  A church where one can feel the old London, before the glossy towers took over. (In fact if you want to experience that old densely-packed London of alleyways and chop houses I highly recommend a walk around the area to the north of the church.*)

     The hospital survived the Reformation, and the other vagaries of history and remains - uniquely among such City instituions? - on the same site.  In 1723 the architect James Gibbs was appointed to the Trustees, and work began, in the early 1730s, on the replacement of  medieval and later buildings.  Gibbs conceiving the new hospital as four separate, rather palatial-looking buildings, grouped rather formally round a square.  Each building shaped, in plan, a little like a dumbbell.  The style is vaguely neo-Palladian - a design that doesn't quite obey the strict rules of Burlingtonian Palladianism.  Both the proportions and the details, from that perspective, aberant.  The North Wing, containing stairs and hall, was the first part of St Bart's to be replaced. The Great Hall is a vast, monumental space - a triple cube approx. 90 x 30 x 30 ft., occupying the entire first and second floor between the two terminal wings.  It was, perhaps, one of the largest secular spaces in the City when built. The Baroque plasterwork is by J B Michele, who also did the staircase ceiling.  The Hogarth staircase is in the eastern wing.  It is a dark, rich space.  Hogarth painted two vast canvasses 'The Pool at Bethseda' & 'The Good Samaritan', and others in his circle supplied the decorative panels.  It was, as I've said, a dull old day, and the there were conservation blinds in the windows, so perhaps it isn't fair to pass critical judgement, but I have to confess to a little disappointment.  A nice try and all that but not quite as good as his father-in-law James Thornhill.  It does, however, remain one of the few painted staircases of the that period to survive in London.

     Gibbs was one of the very few British architects to have trained under a serious European architect - maestro Carlo Fontana in Rome.  He was therefore steeped in the Roman Baroque tradition.  We have encountered Gibbs's work before at Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, and Houghton Hall in Norfolk.  Even considering the problems he encountered from the Palladian faction under the Earl of Burlington, it was a remarkable life - from rural Aberdeenshire, via Rome, to London.

Credit: St Bartholomew's Hospital, London: Elevation and a Plan of the Courtyard, with armorial Emblems of the Hospital and the Dedicatee.  Engraving after B Cole. Welcome Trust.

* there are other areas of this type to explore in the City: between Ludgate Hill & Victoria St; s of St Mary Le Bow; and s of Cornhill.

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.

St Peter & St Paul, Rock, Worcestershire I

     On our way to Bewdley, in Worcestershire, (a week ago today, in fact), we stopped off at St Michael's, Tenbury Wells; that remarkable creation of the Rev Sir Arthur Gore Ousley, and the architect Henry Woodyer. I posted about the exterior here.  An original and idiosyncratic riff on the Gothic style by a pupil of William Butterfield, who himself was no stranger to the idiosyncratic and the original. An unexpected, rather shrine like, rather urban object in the midst of a bucolic and remote part of England.  Trusting in the internet, I believed we could finally get to have a look inside.  I was wrong, thwarted, the church was closed.   

     Not wanting to disappoint you, approaching Bewdley, ahead of time, we made an unscheduled visit to the church of St Peter and St Paul, Rock.  However, it was not to be our day, for it too was locked.  The weather too had taken a turn from sunshine to overcast, blustery and cold.  Still some photographs of the exterior of what is the one of the most important Romanesque churches in the county.  It has been linked to the school of Herefordshire masons we have encountered before at Kilpeck and Leominster. That early work is largely confined to the n side of the nave and the chancel.  The doorway, as you can see, is pretty grand, no money spared.  The rest of the church was rebuilt in the later Middle Ages, when a s aisle was added to the nave and s chapel to the chancel and is not to be sniffed at. The tower is particularly fine.  Sandstone, some nice textures.  Church restored in 1861 by F Preedy, who sounds like a character in a novel by Dickens or Trollope.

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.