Guy Fawkes and Parliament, 1605

February 4, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Jewish Budapest comes to life again

≪ Previous: Right wing Mothers in war time USA

English Catholics had endured religious discrimination since 1570, when the Pope had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, releasing her subjects from allegiance to her. Even worse for Catholics, the Spanish Armada of 1588 confirmed to the Tudors that all Catholics were potential traitors. Catholic recusants were steeply fined, or worse.

So 1603 was going to be an important turning point. After 45 years on the English throne, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I seemed to be about to name King James VI of Scotland to succeed her as King of England. Despite his mother, the executed Mary Queen of Scots, being Catholic, James had been raised as a Protestant. So why did he marry a Catholic, Queen Anne of Denmark? The secretly-Catholic Earl of Northumberland sent one of his staff to Scotland, to assess how English Catholics might fare under the new king.

Certainly the new king did end the hated recusancy fines and did give important posts to the Earl of Northumberland. English Catholics breathed a sigh of relief. But not for long. Rather than tolerate a new era of religious tolerance, the bitterly disappointed Catholics decided to take action.

Participants in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and to kill King James I

November 1605

Some plotters from the Midlands got together in mid 1604. Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Jack Wright, Thomas Percy and Guy Fawkes met in a London pub. Fawkes had been recruited in Flanders, where he had been serving honourably in the Spanish Army, as he was an expert on gunpowder. They discussed their plan to blow up Parliament House, and shortly afterwards leased a small house in the heart of Westminster, installing Fawkes (with a fake name) as a servant to Thomas Percy.

Catesby recruited Ambrose Rookwood, Francis Tresham and Sir Everard Digby. Both Rookwood and Digby were wealthy and owned large numbers of horses, essential for the plan. Tresham was Catesby's cousin through marriage, and was brother-in-law to two Catholic peers, Lords Stourton and Monteagle. Eventually there were 13 plotters.

With Parliament due to open on 5th November 1605, the plotters had to collect and install 36 barrels of gunpowder below the House of Lords, intending to blow up King James and all the Parliamentarians when the king opened the new session. So why did it go so terribly wrong?

Apparently English spies reported back to King James' first minister Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury, and made the link between Fawkes and Catesby. According to Neil Jones, the government could have intervened at that stage, but they bided their time to get propaganda value for the great “discovery” on the day of the intended explosion.

Fawkes was to light the fuse and escape to continental Europe. To coincide with the explosion, Digby planned to lead a rising in the Midlands and kidnap King James's daughter, to install her as a puppet queen. In Catholic Europe, Fawkes was to argue the plotters' case to various governments, hopefully to secure their support.

Everything seemed ready. But at the end of October, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Catholic Lord Monteagle, suggesting that he stay away from the Parliament’s opening day. Who sent it? Neil Jones suggested two possibilities: a] that one of the plotters, Monteagle’s brother in law Francis Tresham, was actually a Stuart spy and b] that the letter was a fake, written by the king’s main minister to set up the plotters for certain failure. In either case, the letter should have been a clue to the plotters, but they went ahead with their plans. Catesby, Wright and Bates set off for the Midlands, unperturbed.

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl Salisbury ordered Westminster to be searched. The search found Fawkes and his gunpowder underground, so the plotter was immediately arrested. The other plotters escaped from London for the Midlands, as quickly as they could.

In the Midlands, the plotters raided Warwick Castle. But the end came quickly when the local High Sheriff rode in with his soldiers and killed Catesby, the Wrights and Percy; and captured Thomas Wintour, Rookwood and Grant. Under torture the survivors implicated the Jesuits in the gunpowder plot, and ordinary Catholic homes everywhere were subject to destruction.

In late January 1606 the trials began, and naturally Westminster Hall was packed out. Under instructions from Earl Salisbury, the Attorney General laid the blame squarely on the Jesuits, before ordering the punishment for traitors: they’d be hanged, drawn and quartered. Their body parts would be publicly displayed.

All were found guilty of high treason. Digby, Robert Wintour, Bates and Grant were executed in Jan, with Thomas Wintour, Rookwood, Keyes and Fawkes soon after. Only Tresham was spared a trial and a hideous execution, leading Neil Jones to again suspect that Tresham was indeed a double agent. Percy, the Earl of Northumberland was imprisoned in the Tower until 1621.

Every Catholic in the nation felt the wrath of Parliament and the distrust of their Protestant neighbours. New laws were passed preventing them from voting, and from working in the most sensitive professions: the law and the armed services. They paid a hefty price throughout the remainder of the 17th century, including perhaps in the abdication/expulsion of King James II in 1688.

In the meantime, 5th of November became a night of thanksgiving in churches, sermons, fireworks and throwing the “guy” (an effigy of Guy Fawkes) onto bonfires throughout Protestant Britain every year, and thence to colonies across the British Empire. Throwing the guy on the bonfire was the yearly highlight of my entire childhood, even though Guy Fawkes didn't devise or lead the plot to assassinate King James I.

↧

Jewish Budapest comes to life again

February 8, 2013, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Helene Hanff and Frank Doel - a 20 year relationship

≪ Previous: Guy Fawkes and Parliament, 1605

In the late C18th the royal court of Hungary granted the Jews freedom of religion, trading rights against payment of special taxes, and permission to live anywhere in Obuda - privileges granted only in Obuda (not in Buda or Pest)! Later, Count Ödön Zichy II (1811–1894) and his wife were noted for their dedication to promoting art and industry in Hungary. He was particularly famous for founding the Oriental Museum in Vienna and the countess was much loved for inviting Jewish families to live on Zichy family property in the district.

By the time the Obuda synagogue was built in 1820, the local Jewish community had become the largest Jewish community in Hungary. This new synagogue was thought of as one of the prettiest synagogues in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Obuda synagogue

built 1820, sold in 1970 and reopened 2010.

Within one generation, in 1850, the Obuda population was one third Jewish and two thirds Christian. Obuda might have been the smallest of the three towns that were united in 1873 to form Budapest, but it proudly took its place in the newly cosmopolitan city. Only after Jews were allowed to move into the action-packed city of Pest did the Jewish community of Obuda shrink. However even after WW1, the Obuda district was still 10% Jewish.

An Obuda synagogue had been built in 1737, and although not much is known about it, this first building possibly had a copper roof. But a great deal is known about the second synagogue which was built on the same site in 1820. The second synagogue, bigger and fancier that the first, was designed in a classical style by architect Andreas Landesherr. I assume the synagogue board of directors asked for a pediment and six Corinthian columns on the exterior, to look like a classical Greek temple. Carved classical ornamentation, that could have been found on any C19th building, was only partially Judaicised by adding the Ten Commandments. And there were two tiers of round-arched windows along both sides.

But inside, the building looked every inch a synagogue. As the book Jewish Budapest: monuments, rites, history has shown the bimah/table for reading the scrolls had four corner columns in the much loved Egyptian Revival taste. Each obelisk was well decorated with carved, classical ornament, capped by a sphere capped by an eagle. The ark for the scrolls was flanked by classical columns, and topped by a crown Tablets of the Law. The women's gallery ran along the northern and western walls.

Let us leap forward into the 20th century. The capital city, Budapest, was 23% Jewish in 1939, Pest more so than Buda. It was a thriving, educated and cultivated community.

Despite the Holocaust, and the mass emigration of Jews and others in 1956, Hungary is still home to around 100,000 Jews, a very large community by post-WW2 standards. Most live in Budapest, which is enjoying a revival of Jewish culture. Yet in the 1970s, the Jewish community wasn’t using the Obuda synagogue any longer and so the building was sold. Used for a long time as a TV studio, the lovely old building was not re-inaugurated as a synagogue until recently.

Districts of Budapest
On the west side of the Danube, you can see Buda.
East of the Danube, you can see Pest. Note districts 6 & 7
To the north you can find Obuda, in district 3.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a Jewish Quarter started to form in Pest, particularly in the 6th and 7th districts (see map). I have never seen the annual Jewish Summer Festival, but locals say it is an important sign of the modern Hungarian Jewish community’s ability to live a public life. The centre of the festival is the elegant Dohány Street Central Synagogue (1859) in the city’s former Jewish Quarter, along with the Jewish coffee and cake shops, restaurants and music centres.

When Obuda synagogue’s was reopened in 2010, it was an important part of that year’s Jewish Summer Festival. Music had always been central to the synagogue’s fame, so it was appropriate that The Boban Markovic Orchestra, a Serbian gypsy brass band ensemble, would participate in the rededication of the building. [I love the idea that, pre-WW1, both Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns played the synagogue's organ].

Visitors also might like to consider the Jewish Budapest Sightseeing Tour. It starts along the Danube river, then St Stephen’s park, the World War II victims’ memorial, Dohány Street Synagogue and New Leopold district, the Jewish garden, the Jewish Museum, the Tree of Life and the Temple of the Heroes.

My husband's favourite coffee house/music bar in the heart of Jewish Budapest is Spinoza House. He says it reminds him of the vibrant inter-war era that he loved. Of course he wasn't born till after the war, so I presume he is reliving his parents' memories :)

↧

Helene Hanff and Frank Doel - a 20 year relationship

February 11, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Sir Stamford Raffles

≪ Previous: Jewish Budapest comes to life again

In my younger son’s last year at high school, he asked me one night if I could read a novel, review it and submit it for his English class the next morning. The conversation went like this:

Me: are you insane?
Him: sorry mum but I am desperate.
Me: no, never, not on your life. It would be cheating.
Him: this doesn't count towards my final results, but I will never get into the university faculty of my choice if I don’t get each assignment in.
Me: too bad. When did you receive this assignment?
Him: three weeks ago. I didn’t do it because I don’t like reading crappy old novels. But you do!
Me (hurt): Sheesh. I got into the university because I did all my high school essays! Whether I liked the subject or not.
Him (sensing a weakness): ok, I will look after your computer for the rest of your life, if you do this one thing.
Me (giving up): alright. Give me the slimmest novel ever written in the entire English-speaking universe. Make sure it is a book I already know very well!

Thus I came to re-read 84 Charing Cross Road, written by Helene Hanff and published in 1970.

Cover photograph

used for the book: 84, Charing Cross Road

The book told the true story of American writer Helene Hanff (1916–97)’s 20 years of correspondence with Englishman Frank Doel (1908–68), chief buyer for the London bookshop, Marks and Co. Hanff didn’t have any money but she had a passion for out-of-print British classics which she could not find in New York. Doel read her impersonal first note (in response to a newspaper advertisement) in late 1949, and from then on, the two “strangers” became closer and closer.

The letters weren’t just about books, although Chaucer, Jane Austen, John Donne, Samuel Pepys and others were what this particular American yearned for. Hanff understood how difficult it was that bombed-out London was still suffering from food rationing which did not end until July 1954. She personally helped the shop's staff, sending them delicious and otherwise unobtainable food parcels. Soon Hanff was corresponding not only with Doel, but with his gentle, patient wife and with all the staff at Marks & Co.

Hanff’s obituaries, published in 1997, were full of information that I did not know about. Her letters to London evolved into accounts of life in New York and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In one letter, she described making her first Yorkshire pudding from a recipe sent by one of the staff. In return, the staff sent her first editions of her favourite poets and Irish linen tablecloths, embroidered by Frank Doel's next door neighbour.

Hanff lived a very modest life herself. Her one-roomed Manhatten flat started to fill up with precious second hand books that arrived from London. Of course the Anglophile American longed to travel abroad, to “see the England of English literature”. So why oh why didn’t she travel? The book does not give a definitive answer, but The Telegraph does. As the years passed, she could never afford to make the trip. Single and childless, she lived a hand-to-mouth existence as a writer of children’s history books, television scripts and magazine articles, but regarded herself as a failed playwright. And perhaps she feared the idea of travelling thousands of kilometres from home, all alone.

Hanff had a very special relationship with Frank Doel, with the bookshop and with London, but it was a relationship based solely on paper. In January 1969 Marks & Co informed her that Doel had tragically died, before she had ever met him face to face. I wept when I read this part of the book. And of course the bookshop had to close.

Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road, to examine the now-empty shop two years after Doel had died. She was delighted to spend quality time with Frank Doel's widow and daughter, women who treated the American with as much affection as Frank himself would have done. Hanff also tried to see all the places of literary and historical interest that she could reach from London, knowing that she would never travel across the Atlantic again. It was blissful.

Hanff died in 1997.

I too am a passionate Anglophile and bibliophile, so I suppose I have to thank my son for getting out the Hanff book once again. But don’t try that stunt again, son!

↧

Sir Stamford Raffles

February 15, 2013, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Modern architecture for VERY small homes

≪ Previous: Helene Hanff and Frank Doel - a 20 year relationship

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) was born in London. I had imagined that colonial officers were the second or subsequent sons of decently comfortable families who knew they would never inherit their fathers’ estate or business. But Raffles was neither well-born nor well educated. His parents chose, or had to send him to work as a clerk in the East India Company when he was only 14.

According to Victoria Glendinning’s newest biography, Raffles's views were modern. As well as being clearly anti-slavery and against the capitalist exploitation of rural workers, he disliked cock-fighting and gambling, distrusted missionary proselytism and despised capital punishment. Raffles was a free trader, not an exploiter of distant populations. But was he an imperialist? The historian Bernard Porter said yes, but a decent sort of imperialist.

Despite his charming looks and useful connections, Raffles might not have been the most popular man in the Company. Well-born competitors did not like this upstart competing for their jobs and spouting radical ideas. They found him aggressive and overconfident.

Portrait of Sir Stamford Raffles

painted by George Joseph in 1817

Now in the National Portrait Gallery

It all happened very quickly. In 1805 Raffles was posted in Malaya; Java was seized from the Dutch in 1811 and Raffles was appointed the Lt-Governor of Java; he was knighted in 1817; and Singapore was founded in 1819. As governor, Raffles might have slipped back into traditional colonising behaviour – but he did not. Instead he introduced partial self-government, banned the slave trade, restricted the opium trade, led an expedition to rebuild Borobudur and other important local sites, and ended the hated, exploitative system of land management practised by the Dutch.

Why did he choose Singapore as the centre for the East India Company’s empire? Clearly the small island was geographically half way between India and China. But there may have been two other reasons. Firsly there were no dreaded Dutchmen on the island of Singapore. Secondly Raffles believed that Singapore had once been a fine city in the original, pre-Muslim Malayan civilisation.

Until Raffles signed the treaty in 1817, the area had boasted nothing more sophisticated than fishing nets and village life. So it was the treaty that secured the transfer of control of Singapore to the East India Company. Clearly the island state has changed since 1817!

Victoria Glendinning was impressed with her subject’s sensitivity towards, and interest in local culture. Raffles went out of his way to learn the local languages, especially Malay. And he was a passionate collector of Javanese cultural artefacts and manuscripts.

Raffles had been forced to return to London in 1817 to vindicate his reputation at the end of his term as Governor-General of Java. Still, he used the time wisely, writing and publishing a learned book on the History of Java. Sir Stamford, as he styled himself, was no colonial dilattente, sipping gins in plantations, remote from real life.

Raffles Place and Sir Stamford Raffles' statue located on the river in Singapore

Raffles had two beloved wives. The first, Olivia, died in 1814; the second, Sophia, had the five children, wrote the books and promoted his post-mortum reputation. This was a family that stayed together, even in steamy jungle conditions, filled with deathly tropical diseases. What a terrible shame that four of the five beloved children died in childhood and the fifth died at the end of adolescence.

Raffles himself ran his health into the ground by overwork. Soon after he returned to Britain in 1824 and with the Singapore matter settled, Raffles turned to his passion for botany and zoology. This talented man was a founder (in 1825) and first president of the Zoological Society of London and the London Zoo. He planned to stand for Parliament, but he died in his early 40s.

The part of the story that is not clear is why Raffles was thought of as unsuccessful by other colonial officers in that part of the world. before his Singapore action. Clearly he was sacked from his posts in Java and Sumatra, and criticised for going beyond his official authority. It is easy for us moderns to guess that Raffles’ unilateral abolition of slavery in Indonesia was not going to go down well with the Company. And we can understand that his first constitution for Singapore, which outlawed gaming and slavery, was not likely to be applauded by his peers.

But was the East India Company ruined in SE Asia? Hardly. Yet when Raffles retired through ill health and returned to Britain, he received no compensation and no pension, and was even required to pay back some of his salary. Clearly he was being severely punished by the Company he had served since he was 14.

This was strange.. since in London, in 1817, he had been lionised. He was taken up by Princess Charlotte and was knighted by the Prince Regent. The collections of antiquities and animals that Raffles brought back from the East were hugely valuable because they brought him celebrity, and this made it hard for the East India Company to dismiss him.

Raffles collected wonderful cultural objects during his years away, objects that may well have disappeared from the history books. Unfortunately for us, their ship back to Britain in 1824 sunk and lost a lot of their precious treasure trove. Fortunately for us, the objects that did not drown are now in the British Museum.

Raffles Hotel, Singapore

I came across Raffles twice in Singapore; once seeing his statue at the quay and once drinking gin slings at his famous hotel (both unveiled in 1887). Readers should try the gin slings themselves AND read Raffles and the Golden Opportunity by Victoria Glendinning, published by Profile Books in 2012.

One Heart and Mindis a one-act play, written by the members of Act IV Theatre Company, that concentrates on the last twenty years of Stamford Raffles’ life. Historical events have been accurately drawn from Raffles of the Eastern Islands by C E Wurtzburg and Raffles by Maurice Collis. The conclusion of this rags-to-riches-to-rags story was that Raffles was eventually destroyed by the East India Company for propagating a humanitarian philosophy that was way ahead of its time and for founding Singapore without the permission of Head Office.

↧

Modern architecture for VERY small homes

February 18, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: The Orphan Trains: USA 1853-1930

≪ Previous: Sir Stamford Raffles

These days more young people are marrying later, having their first child later, remaining single or not having children at all. At the same time, more older divorcees and widows are surviving alone and are choosing not to remarry or move in with their families. Thus a larger proportion of the housing stock in every city will need to be for single people.

Exterior of The Cube, 2011

Photo credit: The Melbourne Age

The question is: can housing for one person be compact, comfortable and well built? The Cube Project, as presented in The Age Newspaper in 2011, is the work of Dr Mike Page at Hertfordshire University. He wanted to build a very compact home, no bigger than 3 x 3 x 3 metres on the inside, in which one person could live a decent life with a minimum impact on the environment.

His first cube was unveiled in April 2011 in St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh, as a part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. Built from sustainable materials, the Cube included a lounge/dining area with a table and two chairs, a kitchen and a bathroom, and a bedroom upstairs with a small double bed. The space was divided into three levels connected with clever space saving stairs and custom-made furniture. For example, the two chairs transformed into a sofa. Appliances included a fridge, stove, oven, sink, microwave oven, cupboards, a washing machine and a composting toilet. The home had two-metre head height throughout.

Interior of The Cube, 2011

Photo credit: The Melbourne Age

The Cube was designed to generate all the energy it needed, given its two solar modules. It was a well-insulated building, with space-heating and a regular supply of hot water. Water use was minimised by the use of Ecocamel low-flow, high-performance showers and taps that provided 100 litres of hot water per day, at 40c degrees. Electrical demand was estimated at around 150W on average, including energy for high efficiency LED lighting, a laptop computer, a low-energy LED TV etc.

Stephen Sainsbury is a Sydney-based architect who specialises in building small, but perfectly formed houses. He started EcoShelta years ago, making a series of very small buildings based on traditional Japanese joined-wood pavilions. With a floor area of just 3.6m x 3.6m, his house was marginally bigger than Dr Mike Page’s Cube but efficiency was still the most important factor; everything folded away neatly, even bedding and the fireplace, while the chimney winched up to the roof.

Sainsbury started pre-fabricating aluminium framing elements with infill panels: walls, ceiling, roofs. They were flat-packed and dropped into remote areas by helicopter, often being erected in one day. Saisbury created his own way in achieving space via staggering a series of levels. Even in an inner city location, Sainsbury might use the ground floor for the entry, storage and bathroom; the second and third floors for living space and the top floor for bedrooms.

Sainsbury's ground floor in Newtown, Sydney

Photo credit: The Australian Newspaper

The total footprint of this house, including garden and pool, is tiny.

Sainsbury understood that good design was imperative to ensure people were happy living in these very small spaces. I love the notion of very small homes, but it is not just claustrophobia that I worry about; rather I wonder if four storeys involve a great deal of climbing.

↧

The Orphan Trains: USA 1853-1930

February 22, 2013, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, Paris: 1919-41

≪ Previous: Modern architecture for VERY small homes

This blog has been very involved in analysing programmes dedicated to saving children and young people from orphanages, poverty, chronic unemployment, lack of potential marital partners after WW1 and extermination by the Nazis in WW2. The label “Migration” has been used so often in this blog, it almost requires a sub-set called “Child and Adolescent Rescue”. But I don't remember any topic dealing with intra-national transporting of children.

It was estimated that in the 1850s there were 30,000 homeless children aged 6+, in New York City alone. In 1853, a young minister called Charles Loring Brace moved to New York to study. He was horrified by what he saw and instantly recognised that without protection by a responsible adult, these children were without any hope of a decent future.

He dedicated himself to their rescue. Only by removing the children from the poverty and grime of the city streets and placing them in Christian farm families, could those children have a future. Rev Brace recognised the need for labour in the expanding farm country, and proposed that his children be sent by train, to live and work on farms. He believed that farmers would welcome homeless children, take them into their homes and treat them as their own. Note the emphasis on expanding farm country – if the New York street children were merely transplanted to another grimy, industrial city, the probability was that they would become street children in the new city as well.

cover of Stephen O'Connor's excellent book,

showing the orphans dressed for selection

So in 1853, Rev Brace founded the Children's Aid Society to do the endless tasks involved in the legal mass movement of children. His organisation planned the train trips and raised the money for travel and accommodation. The children were not necessarily orphans: there were also neglected children from married or single parents, runaways and prostitutes. So the Children’s Aid Society made efforts to get parental consent wherever possible; in turn, the natural parents were promised that their children would be sent to individual foster and adoptive families, not to institutions.

Besides the Children's Aid Society, other agencies placed children in the programme. These included both the New York Juvenile Asylum and the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York.

The children would be placed in homes, not as indentured servants but as unskilled labour who could help the farming foster-parents on their land. In fact the records said that older children placed by The Children's Aid Society were to be paid for their labours. I wonder if that happened.

As with all our rescue programmes, the motives for moving young people on the Orphan Trains were multiple:
A] to help populate farming communities in the western states by strong white people,
B] to provide a better future for New York’s street children in good Christian families, and
C] to rid New York and other city streets of grimy street urchins.

The Orphan Train Movement lasted from 1853-1930 during which time 150,000 children were shipped from eastern cities and and placed with rural western families. Each train would start its journey full of young people, stopping at stations along the railway line as advertised in the local newspapers, leaving small groups of children at each stop en route. Indiana was very popular, in the early decades.

advertising poster from Troy, Mo in Feb 1910

recruiting foster parents and specifying condition

The children did not know where they would be left nor who would select them and take them home. Posters advertised the arrival of children and just before the train pulled into a station, the children were cleaned. They were then shown off and inspected before crowds of prospective parents.

Placement into new families was not as professional as we would hope for today. In the best circumstances, there was an attempt to match adopters' wishes with children selected by welfare workers prior to the train trip, so that each child was sent to a specific, matched family. In many towns, vetting of farming families was left to local church elders who would try to weed out the alcoholics and wife beaters. Sometimes would-be foster parents merely examined the children’s teeth and muscles in the market place, in order to select the healthiest potential farm workers.

By 1910, the posters were announcing where the distribution (sic) of children would be, and specifying what the obligations on the foster parents would be: the transported children were to have schooling, church and clothing exactly the same as the natural-born children. Applications to foster a child had to be made to a nominated committee of upstanding local citizens.

The administrative records were far from complete. But as the PBS film The Orphan Trains suggested, the transition from one side of the country to the other must have been painful and confusing. Their biological parents may not have been the best in the world, but most train-children wanted desperately to see them again. And Rev Brace understood the dilemma. He wanted desperately to improve the children’s lives… “And yet, you are perplexed what to do. The human soul is difficult to interfere with. You hesitate how far you should go."

The Children's Aid Society liked to point with pride to success stories. The orphans, when they grew up, produced two governors, one congressman, one sheriff, two district attorneys, three county commissioners as well as numerous bankers, lawyers, physicians, journalists, ministers, teachers and businessmen.

cover of Renee Wendinger's excellent book,

which focused on New York's newsboys and bootblacks

Many others of the New York orphans went on to lead ordinary lives, raising their families and working towards a peaceful, productive future. But some of the children definitely struggled in their new life in the West. Some of the farmers saw the children as nothing more than a source of cheap labour, easily exploited. And there was also evidence of physical or sexual abuse by foster parents.

The question with the Orphan Trains, as it was with the Barwell Boys and the Stolen Children was: who in authority was on the spot, to supervise the placements and protect the children?

Programmatically, the successes and failures of The Orphan Train Movement focused welfare professionals’ and academics’ minds, leading to modernised child welfare reforms, including child labour laws, adoption, foster care, health care, state schools and vocational training.

There are two main sources of information today. The Orphan Train Heritage Society of America in Kansas re-establishes broken family trees and preserves the history of the Orphan Train Movement. The Victor Remer Historical Archives of The Children's Aid Society in New York holds the official records about children’s programmes (Orphan Train, foster care and adoption) operating from 1853 on, annual reports, and The Children's Aid Society lodging houses, industrial schools, convalescent homes, health centres and farm schools.

Readers might like to locate:
DiPasquale, Connie, A History of the Orphan Trains.

O'Connor, Stephen Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, Chicago UP, 2004.
PBS transcript of the film The Orphan Trains.
Wendinger, R Extra! Extra!The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York, Legendary, 2010.

↧

Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, Paris: 1919-41

February 25, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Rethinking historical "truths" eg Richard III

≪ Previous: The Orphan Trains: USA 1853-1930

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) was born in the USA. Then in 1901, the family moved to France when her father became a minister of the American Church in Paris and a director in an American educational institute. Young Sylvie stayed in Paris until 1905, then lived for some time in the USA, then some years in Spain. Once World War One broke out in 1914, Beach made her permanent home in Paris where she studied French literature.

There was a small bookshop in rue de l'Odéon that caught Beach’s attention and it became the centre of her intellectual and social life. Run by Adrienne Monnier, this Left Bank bookshop called Maison des Amis des Livres was something of a meeting place for established French writers and an inspiration for younger, would-be French writers.

Amazingly Monnier helped Beach open another such bookshop in 1919, even though it would have been competition for her own. Paris was of course delighted that the war had ended, but there was still a great deal of pain and loss in November 1919.

Shakespeare and Company bookshop, now

Rue de la Bûcherie, Paris

The brand new Shakespeare and Company Bookshop and library quickly became popular with French writers and readers, but also with English writers and readers. So less than two years later, in 1921, Shakespeare and Company moved to bigger premises in 12 rue de l'Odéon, almost opposite Monnier’s bookshop. It ran first as kind of lending library, and almost immediately the many local and expatriate writers were borrowing books and giving her their own new writings in exchange.

Beach’s timing was perfect since a literary revolution was emerging in 1920s Paris. Writers like James Joyce (1882-1941), DH Lawrence (1885-1930), TS Eliot (1888-1965), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972) were no longer teenagers and had been writing even before the War. But these men became the Lost Generation, artists who rebelled against the useless carnage that had been the Great War. They had no interest in defending the world and its absurd pre-war values.

The Lost Generation came from different countries and wrote in different languages, but they all needed a place to call home, especially the expatriates. So Sylvia Beach went out of her way to extend them food, drink, books, conversation, warmth and comfortable seats. It is said that these artists and writers, mainly men and mainly single, loved to spend time in her airy Left Bank “home”. Readers never knew if they would bump into James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas or even D.H Lawrence in the Shakespeare and Co Bookshop.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, c1920

Photo credit: Princeton University Library

This reminds me very much of the salon that Gertrude Stein ran for her local and expatriate artists in the same time period. Gertrude and her brother Leo Stein opened a home, salon and painting studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank. They provided support, food and patronage to established and up-and-coming artists, welcoming Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin, Henri Rousseau, Chaim Soutine, Ernest Hemingway and many others.

Of all the writers Beach helped, she was most supportive of Irish author James Joyce(1882-1941) who spent nearly 20 years in Paris, the longest and most productive stretch of his life in exile from Ireland. At the urging of Ezra Pound, Joyce arrived in July 1920 with the goal of finishing his very controversial work, Ulysses.

Sylvia Beach was preparing to publish Ulysses at Shakespeare and Co, so she sought subscriptions from potential readers, and received among the replies a clear refusal from George Bernard Shaw. Shaw had started to read Joyce’s book, but hated it. In his response to Beach, Shaw described Ulysses as “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but . . . a truthful one”. On the other hand, the writer Ezra Pound supported his friend Joyce and attacked George Bernard Shaw. The novel was finally published at Shakespeare and Co bookstore in 1922.

The Depression of 1929 hit Paris very badly and worse still, the late 1930s was a time to prepare for the next war. Expatriate writers and artists went back to their own countries. The end of Beach’s involvement, although not of the bookshop itself, came during World War Two. Beach was interned, her books were safely hidden and her Company closed in 1941. After the war, she continued living in her Paris home. Was that the end of the literary circle that gathered in Shakespeare and Co.?

Not quite. Another American, George Whitman, arrived in Paris after the German soldiers went home and founded a bookshop in 1951. From the beginning of his career there, he decided to allow travellers, writers and artists to doss down, in exchange for helping to clean the ship, build the shelves and sell the books. Whitman clearly modelled his shop after Sylvia Beach's, only in the 1950s it wasn't the multi-nation Lost Generation who loved the shop. Instead it was the American Beat Generation, especially Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

Beach died in 1962 and left Whitman both her book collection and the rights to the name Shakespeare and Company. Whitman grabbed both.

You might like to read the book Shakespeare and Company which was written by Sylvia Beach herself, with an introduction by James Laughlin (1991).

↧

Rethinking historical "truths" eg Richard III

March 1, 2013, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Why did Breaker Morant and Daisy Bates marry????

≪ Previous: Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, Paris: 1919-41

During 1st or 2nd year as an undergrad history student at Melbourne University, a lecturer put a historical novel in the reading list. I had read many historical novels before and since, but it was not clear at the time why reading this slim novel would make the students better historians.

The Daughter of Time is a 1951 detective novel by Josephine Tey (1896–1952) which concerned one of the novelist’s favourite fictional characters, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. The inspector was confined to bed in hospital with an unusable leg, and was going insane with boredom. One of his friends wanted to stimulate Grant’s mind so she proposed that the inspector should research and solve a cold case, a mystery that really did occur in history.

Grant was invited to use his best police officer's skills to investigate the murders believed to be committed by King Richard III in c1483. The questions Grant had to ask were: did King Richard kill his nephews, the princes in the tower? and if the king was innocent, why did everyone believe that he was a heartless murderer of small children?

The tragic young princes in the tower,

painted by Sir John E Millais, 1878.

Royal Holloway collection

It took Inspector Grant a long time to find and read the relevant historical documents because laptops had not yet been invented and library visits on his own leg(s) were impossible. But his detective skills were well honed, and he finally came to believe that King Richard III was nowhere near the Tower of London when the boys died, and had no motive to send someone else to do the deadly deed.

Far from being a cold-blooded monster, the 15th century king appeared to Inspector Grant to be a man torn by the very real issues in front of him -- sad, regretful, depressed, consumed by something that happened in the past. Inspector Grant, who had expected to find a heartless man driven by greed and the desire to rule, eventually understood how great myths were constructed; how the victorious Tudors ensured that their version of history would endure.

For Melbourne University students who were studying medieval history, and even for those who weren’t, the novel was important for thinking about historiography i.e the study of the methodology and development of history as a discipline. The book explored how history was constructed, and how certain versions of events come to be widely accepted as the truth, despite a lack of evidence.

Steve Weingartner as the hunchbacked, clubfooted King Richard III
in Shakespeare's play of the same name.

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

So how do I assess the impact of this novel about a modern policeman who uses his detective skills on an old, unchallenged bit of history? The inspector found that King Richard was not a child murderer, nor a monstrous hunchback; that so-called facts were fabrications of Tudor propaganda. Whether Inspector Grant was right or wrong about King Richard, the take-away message is all historical beliefs cannot be taken as the truth until challenged. History was written, or deliberately falsified by the winners, and there may well have been another story that was forgotten over the decades. Dwell In Possibility wrote it best: Our first question shouldn't be “what happened?”, but rather “who was telling us about what happened?” Anomalies that seem to have been ignored or explained away by generations of historians need to be re-examined.

One last thing. Investigative techniques improve with time, so hidden evidence from the late C15th may be discoverable only now. It is the modern historian’s task, based on reliable evidence, to analyse and rectify historical injustices.

This post was originally written in early 2012, before the body of King Richard III was located in an archaeological dig in Leicester. Scientists are now convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the skeleton was indeed that of the king who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. So in Feb 2013 I went back to re-read my favourite Plantagenet historian, A.J.Pollard, to remind myself of his findings in Richard III and The Princes in the Tower, published in 1991 by St Martin's Press. "The balance of probability is, therefore, that Richard III did indeed order the killing of his nephews before mid-September 1483. Other explanations of their deaths during his reign which have been offered are based on nothing but speculation".

Paul Lay wrote (History Today Dec 2012) that Richard's reign was brief, unsuccessful and sullied by blood. But Richard was truly the victim of Tudor propaganda, through the poison portrait of him painted by Shakespeare. This would be true if the body under the Leicester car park turned out to be Richard, or not.

For a reanalysis of a more modern historical event than King Richard, consider Florence Nightingale historiography. Most people in the universe unquestionably believe that Florence Nightingale was a heroic, religious woman who sacrificed her personal life to mop the fevered brows of soldiers in the Crimean War. She alone, with a little backup from her 35 obedient helpers, saved the young soldiers from terrible post-battlefield deaths, in a hospital far from Britain.

Once she was back in Britain and saw the statistics, even Nightingale realised that the volunteer nurses saved no soldiers from death; that the lack of decent hospital conditions in the Crimea may have actually contributed to extra deaths. But the saintly reputation remains untouched.

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (published by Penguin Classics in 2005) is the 1857 autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale’s during the Crimean War. Seacole’s offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war was refused, but she wasn't daunted. She left for the Crimea where she acted as nurse and mother to wounded young soldiers. She also ran her business, the British Hotel.

Of course autobiographical material needs to be VERY carefully evaluated but why did we not know Seacole’s name until 10 years ago? Could Seacole’s Caribbean blackness not compete with Nightingale’s background of staunchly Unitarian landed gentry? Was Seacole knowingly whitewashed out of mid-19th century history?

Florence Nightingale (above)

Mary Seacole (below)

↧

Why did Breaker Morant and Daisy Bates marry????

March 4, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Monet's garden in Giverny - in real life and in art

≪ Previous: Rethinking historical "truths" eg Richard III

Margaret Dwyer (1859–1951) was born into an Irish family. Her mother died when Margaret was still a baby, so she was raised by relatives and given a decent education. But it did not seem to be a happy or stable childhood.

Apparently something messy had happened in Ireland and the young woman felt obliged both to leave the country and to create a new biography for herself. In 1882 Daisy O'Dwyer emigrated to Australia.

I am fairly confident that in 1884 in Queensland she married the poet and horseman who later went on to fame as Breaker Morant. But it was not a happy marriage. Perhaps Morant was a bit of a horse thief! In an era when women never left their husbands, she left Morant, but there was never a proper divorce. Nonetheless she moved to New South Wales where she met and married the bushman/drover Jack Bates (1885). They had a son in 1886 but this marriage was also not a happy one. And there was perhaps a third marriage that was poorly documented.

Daisy Bates in her desert tent, 1921

Photo credit: National Library of Australia

In 1894 this gutsy woman returned to England, leaving her two+ husbands and one son in Australia. Life in England must have been a terrible struggle but fortunately she found a position as a journalist.

While still in Britain, Daisy Bates heard about the poor treatment of Australian Aboriginals, and offered her investigative and journalistic expertise to The Times newspaper. In 1899 Bates sailed back to Australia and spent the rest of her life studying Aboriginal history, rites and community life. For a woman who looked like a well educated, professional and slightly prudish journalist, it was amazing that she lived in primitive conditions out in the vast, bleak Australian bush.

Daisy Bates was commissioned to investigate stories of cruelty within some of the aboriginal communities. At first she saw herself as an informal protector of the Aborigines, and then in 1910, she was formally appointed as a Travelling Protector. This gave her the legal right and responsibility to examine the conditions under which aboriginal families lived and their employment situation on white men’s farms. Bates took to the Aboriginal welfare cause like a duck to water, writing reports on their needs for food, clothing, medical care and housing.

In an Australia that had just federated (1/1/1901), two aspects of welfare policy distressed her in particular – a] the forcible assimilation of black youngsters into white Australian childcare arrangements instead of leaving them with their own parents and b] the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by European men.

Now fully familiar with local communities, she even compiled a dictionary of several Aboriginal dialects. But if we want to assess her legacy in total, we can do no better than reading her own work The Passing of the Aborigines, first published by the University of Adelaide in 1938.

In 1934 Daisy Bates received the Order of the Commander of the British Empire. Australia had a living treasure in this special Aboriginal welfare advocate and anthropologist, but living treasures are rarely paid decent salaries. In 1951 she died a pauper, still wearing the Victorian clothes she brought from England in 1899.

Whether Daisy Bates was truly progressive or was the inevitable product of Victorian thinking has been argued in Green Left, but that is the subject for another post.

Harry Morant (1864–1902)’s early life was as difficult to unravel as Daisy Bates’. It seems that Murrant (as he was then) was born in Somerset in 1864, but alas his father died that very year. His mother worked hard to keep her family alive, but clearly Harry thought life would be easier in Australia. He left Britain in 1883.

Morant had an unusual range of skills. He was a drinker, drover and brilliant horse trainer, yet he was also a bush balladeer/poet who could often be found published in Australia’s most influential C19th weekly magazine, The Bulletin. This was a man who moved from state to state; from farm to country town to city centres, never settling anywhere in particular. He had more lady friends than any other man in Australia!

Lieutenant Harry Breaker Morant

South Africa 1899-1902

In 1884, Morant met Daisy O'Dwyer on a cattle station in Queensland, both of them freshly off the ship from Britain. The educated Daisy had been hired as a governess for the children; the hard drinking Morant had been hired as a horse trainer and trader. The marriage that was conceived in lust.. was ill advised, hastily organised and brief. How could two less suitable people find each other in this huge nation? Perhaps Ms Bates was having a naughty moment, agreeing to marry some rough trade before she thought better of it.

My favourite line comes from The Monthly. "While the Breaker was riding the South African veldt, doing the Empire's dirty work, Daisy Bates was beginning her lifelong journey into Australian mythology". After 1884, the two were never to meet again.

In 1899 Morant and many other British-Australian travelled to South Africa to help Queen Victoria and the Motherland, loyally joining the war against the Boers. Most Australians know the story of Harry Morant because of the hugely thought-provoking film of 1980, Breaker Morant. He was as successful with the horses and the women in South Africa as he had been in Australia.

Only towards the end of the Boer War did Morant and his friends come to grief. They were involved in the killing of Boer prisoners and the killing of a German missionary who had seen Australians shoot the Boers. Despite the fact all three Australian officers had insisted they had simply been following British orders, the men were charged, tried and swiftly executed by a British court and British soldiers.

Australian historians insist that British forces chief, Lord Kitchener, had indeed issued an informal order that troops fighting the Boers should “not take prisoners”. British historians believe Lord Kitchener said no such thing. But in any case, what was the British army doing, executing loyal soldiers from the colonies?

↧

Monet's garden in Giverny - in real life and in art

March 8, 2013, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: My Dream Home III: I have fallen in love

≪ Previous: Why did Breaker Morant and Daisy Bates marry????

The Melbourne Winter Masterpiece exhibition called Monet’s Garden: The Musee Marmottan Monet Paris will open for business in May 2013. In light of this upcoming blockbuster, which will attract viewers from across the state and the nation, there are three questions I would like to ask
1. What did the gardens look like in Monet’s time?
2. How accurately did Monet represent his gardens in his art? and
3. How well have the gardens been maintained today?

Claude Monet (1840–1926) lived for 43 long years in Giverny, 75 ks NW of Paris, from 1883 until his death. In the early years in Giverney he planned the house, adapting it to the needs of his large family. Monet’s two sons with his first wife were born in 1867 and 1878, and his second wife had 6 children of her own!

Claude Monet
The Japanese Bridge, 1899
89 x 93 cm
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Giverny Garden’s own history notes that it wasn’t until 1893, ten years after his arrival at Giverny, that Monet bought the piece of land adjoining his property. It was crossed by a section of the Epte, itself a tributary of the Seine River. With the support of the prefecture, Monet had the first small pond dug, even though his neighbours were not happy about his strange plants. Eventually there were two parts in Monet's garden: a flower garden called Clos Normand in front of the house and a Japanese inspired water garden on the other side of the road. The two parts of Monet's garden provided perfect landscapes for the artist to paint.

The land was divided into flowerbeds where flower clumps of different heights bulked up to create a strong impression. Fruit trees were everywhere and Monet mixed the simplest flowers with the more exotic flowers. Monet did not trim and clip his plants within a cm of their life. In fact the central alley was covered over by iron arches on which climbing roses grew seemingly at will. Other rose trees covered the balustrade beside the house.

Later on, the pond was enlarged to its present day size. The irregularly designed water garden was inspired by the Japanese gardens that Monet knew from the wave of Japanese taste that swept across Europe in the late C19th. In this water garden was the famous Japanese bridge covered with wisterias, some smaller bridges, weeping willows and a bamboo wood.

Claude Monet
Garden in Giverny, 1902
89 x 92 cm
Belvedere Museum Vienna

This was definitely life copying art! The artist selected and replanted, according to how he wanted the paintings to look. He must have loved the results because there are 272 paintings done around the water garden, plus the Grandes Decorations panels that can be seen at l’Orangerie Museum in Paris (Giverny Impression). And it didn’t matter how accurately Monet depicted the plants since he was not a professional botanist; he was more interested in colours, light and moving water-based reflections.

Monet died in 1926, aged 86, the last of the original Impressionists. His son wasn’t interested in the gardens so the neglected property was bequeathed to the French Academie des Beaux Arts. From there, the paintings were rebequeathed to Musee Marmottan. But noone put money into the house and garden. Only in 1977 did Gerald van der Kemp and Gilbert Vahe examine and repair 50 years of neglect in the house. They opened the estate to the public in 1980, but the bridge was still severely damaged and the pond was disappointingly covered with green muck.

James Priest took over in 2011, focusing on the gardens. Because the Monet estate is closed in Giverny’s wet and nippy winter, Priest has concentrated on flowers that bloom during spring and summer. I didn’t know how accurately they reflect Monet’s taste but Sophie Matthiesson noted that the densely packed flower boxes, filled with riotous colour, recreated what Monet called his paint boxes. In their sloping bed, laid out in parallel rows, they would have appeared very familiar to Monet, staring out from the upstairs windows of the house.

Monet walking in his garden. 1921
Photo credit: The Sunday Times

↧

My Dream Home III: I have fallen in love

March 12, 2013, 12:00 am

≫ Next: American taste and money; English art treasures

≪ Previous: Monet's garden in Giverny - in real life and in art

In writing My Dream Home I: green, airy, full of treasures three years ago, I acknowledged that the concept of a personal dream home had flitted in and out of my consciousness, but it never had any fixed form. That particular blog post helped to clarify and solidify the dream.

Brighton, East Sussex. The Deco sun terrace is facing the water.

I said back then that the spouse and I had two collections we were proud of. We had thousands of superb books and dozens of superb paintings, both of which would have taken centre place in our living room (paintings around the ground floor walls; books on the mezzanine gallery). The floor needed to be naturally cooling in our hot summer (slate) with a very large Persian rug over the floor for the winter. A very wide fireplace would have been the focal point of one wall, almost like an inglenook in Arts and Crafts homes. The window had to be floor to ceiling, and had to look out directly onto the garden view.

In My Dream Home II : water frontage I tackled another aspect of the dream, both in terms of a beautiful view over the ocean and a healthy beach-based life style.

Now in middle age, I am in a good position to selecting my ideal, for-ever home. It is somewhat ironic that I am LESS picky now than I was years ago; today there would be only four mandated elements:

1. The house must face the beach. This is not negotiable.

2. The side of the house that faces the beach must have ceiling-to-floor glass windows. No blinds or curtains to reduce the impact of a wall of glass will be necessary, thank you.

3. The garden must come right to the front door. Semi wild and green – no concrete drives, hedges clipped within an inch of their lives or quaint cobble stone paths. Terraces are perfectly acceptable, but not on the ground floor. If concrete parking spaces are required, they can be located behind the house.

4. The most important room will be the study, filled with bookshelves, really comfortable chairs and large desks.

I don’t mind if this dream house is Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, Arts and Crafts, Californian bungalow, Vienna Secessionist or Deco. And I don’t want to worry too much about mundane concerns like the kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms and the laundry.

The wall facing the ocean is entirely glass.

The study is ideally fitted out for an academic

Be still, my beating heart. An elevated art-deco style home in Brighton, with a large sun terrace overlooking the marina, came onto the market (Country Life magazine, September 2011). Apparently Roedean Way is considered one of the most sought after locations on the South Coast, and naturally it has amazing sea views. So let me check the requirements noted above:

1. direct access to the sea? tick
2. walls of glass in the rooms facing the sea? tick
3. semi wild and green garden, right to the front door? tick
4. a comfortable study, filled with bookshelves? tick

View from the house to Brighton Beach and to the marina

Failing full access to the sea, I am almost prepared to settle for river frontage, as long as the rooms facing the river have ceiling to floor glass walls as before. The coffee table and chairs on the balcony above the River Dart (Country Life magazine 2012) are my idea of paradise on earth.

Dartmouth in Devon, above the River Dart

↧

American taste and money; English art treasures

March 15, 2013, 2:00 pm

≫ Next: Australia's amazing aerial medical service: 1928

≪ Previous: My Dream Home III: I have fallen in love

The British Forbes family originally made its money from trading between North America and China in the C19th. The first Forbes to migrate, Bertie Forbes (1880-1954), left Scotland for the USA in 1904. He founded Forbes magazine, a business and finance magazine, in 1916 and became an American citizen the very next year. His son, Malcolm Forbes (1919-90) later took over the struggling publishing business, turning it into a success. Despite Malcolm’s lavish parties, he was not successful when he stood for political elections in New Jersey in 1957. But he did have SOME good luck - at the death of his brother in 1964, Malcolm acquired sole control of the company.

In the meantime, examine Old Battersea House (late C17th) which is one of the oldest homes in that part of London. I would like to know who built the house (Sir Christopher Wren has been mentioned more than once)? Who later bought the house? And what it was used for? Christie’s certainly believed its handsome baroque proportions both inside and out, with grounds sloping down to the Thames, would support the Wren theory. One thing is for sure: much of the land belonging to the handsome manor house was sold in the 1920s after being vacated by St John's College, an Anglican college for priests.

Old Battersea House
built in the late 17th century

The leaders of the fight to save Old Battersea House from demolition were Col Charles Stirling and his wife Wilhemina, the sister of the wonderful artist Evelyn De Morgan. They lived in the house, leased from local government, starting in 1931 until Wilhemina’s death in 1965. The Stirlings' art collection, ceramics and furniture were bequeathed to the De Morgan Foundation and are on view at the nearby West Hill Library.

This house over the river from Chelsea was to be demolished when the estate was being developed, and only a public outcry and an Act of Parliament saved the estate from being razed to the ground. The manor house was given English Heritage listing in 1954. Sadly Old Battersea House lay empty and neglected for years, a mere shell until the above mentioned Malcolm Forbes saw it and its stunning proportions in the early 1970s. Architects Vernon Gibberd and Malcolm’s son Christopher Forbes restored and modernised the house, to serve as the Forbes family home whenever they were in London. It included 10 bedrooms, a baroque hallway and panelled drawing rooms.

From my perspective, Old Battersea House became even more significant because it housed one of the world's most important collections of C19th British art. According to Christie’s, the drawing room was to die for. It had the stars of the art collection, including works by revered Pre-Raphaelite masters Millais, Holman-Hunt, Rossetti and Hughes. There was also a stunning Orientalist work by John Frederick Lewis, and several important Scottish pictures. Through the door into the library a visitor could see Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones' St George and the Dragon. And oh what famous visitors the Forbes invited!

The drawing room

Wilhelmina Stirling would have been pleased that the house became home to a new collection of wonderful pictures painted by artists that she once knew well. Three of the main rooms on the ground floor were devoted to works from the De Morgan Foundation collection, including paintings by her maternal uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (l829-l908).

The State Bedroom had a display of art in tribute to Queen Victoria, which was lovely, but I wonder why American millionaires had a special devotion to a long dead British queen. Certainly Malcolm’s three sons did not. Thus many of the Victorian works were sold off in an auction spanning two days and three sessions at Christie's London in February 2003. Then there was another art sale at the Lyon and Turnbull auction-rooms in Edinburgh in December 2011.

Let me mention a few of the paintings put onto the market. William Holman Hunt was represented in this collection by his first life-sized figure (est £1.2-1.8 million). Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ canvas depicted the legend of St George and the Dragon (est £1.2-1.8 million). Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, one of Queen Victoria's favourite artists, had a work celebrating an elegant Victorian sporting aristocrat (est: £800,000-1.2 million). Two stunning Sir John Everett Millais works were included (Trust Me £800,000-1.2 million and For the Squire £800,000- 1.2 million). The Portrait of Miss Amy Brandon Thomas, by Whistler, was not even given an estimate.

The leading sculpture in this sale was Frederic, Lord Leighton's best known composition, Athlete struggling with a Python (est £600,000-800,000).

How extraordinary that the collection, which had been assembled by Malcolm Forbes and his son Christopher so carefully since 1970, has been broken up and sold off only 40 years later. Now the House itself is on the market.

The state bedroom

↧

Australia's amazing aerial medical service: 1928

March 19, 2013, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Detecting disease in 17th century portraits

≪ Previous: American taste and money; English art treasures

The founder of one of Australia’s most beloved organisations was the Reverend John Flynn (1880–1951), a minister of the Presbyterian Church. In 1912, he established the Australian Inland Mission to minister to the spiritual, social and medical needs of people in the Outback. Flynn lobbied strongly to create hospitals in remote areas and was delighted that the Australian Inland Mission soon established 15 nursing homes and bush hospitals in remote locations.

Even more urgently, Rev Flynn witnessed the daily struggle of pastoralists, miners, railwaymen and settlers living in remote areas where just two doctors provided the only medical care for an area twice the size of Europe. Flynn’s planned to provide a medical safety net for these people.

The Royal Flying Doctor Museum, Alice Springs
built in 1939 and opened as a museum in 2008

Rev Flynn was fortunate to met Hudson Fysh, a founder of QANTAS, at just the right time. In 1927, QANTAS and the Aerial Medical Service signed an agreement to operate an aerial ambulance. And in May 1928, the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service opened in Cloncurry, Qld.

But his impact was greatest when he linked aeronautical and medical advances with emerging telecommunication inventions such as the telegraph and radio network. At just the right time, the inventor Alfred Traeger conceived of a pedal-operated generator to power a radio receiver. By 1929 people living in isolation were at last able to call on the Flying Doctor to assist them in an emergency.

Thus the Rev Flynn developed a medical-care concept that changed the landscape of rural Australia forever. The Cloncurry base remained operational until 1964 when it was relocated to Mt Isa, long after the name of the service had been changed (in 1942) to the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Those early flights must have felt hazardous since there were no navigational aids aboard the planes; except for crises, pilots normally flew only during the day. Fuel supplies were also carried on flights until fuel deposits were established at importantly located properties in the Outback. Patient comfort was non-existent, as only later did the planes carry all the medical equipment that might be needed.

Fully equipped modern RFDS plane, with patient and nurse

Until the 1960s, the Service had no aircraft of its own. They used contractors to provide aircraft, pilots and servicing, and only then did they start to buy their own planes and employ their own pilots and engineers. Eventually the Service, which operated 21 bases across this wide brown continent, owned 61 modern aircraft with the very latest in navigation technology. The Service’s own history has shown that their medical staff, doctors and nurses, are responsible for the care of 270,000 patients who are 90+ minutes drive from any of the capital cities! Renata Provenzano noted that the R.F.D.S of Australia is the largest civilian-aeromedical organisation in the world!

The Royal Flying Doctor Museum opened in 2008 in the original art deco Radio Station House in Alice Springs. Visitors were encouraged to climb into one of the aircraft and to examine some historic radios, including a Traegar Pedal Radio. There was a large display of historic medical equipment that had been used on the Royal Doctor flights of the past. All that was missing was a woman in active labour or a horseman with two broken legs.

Now the Royal Flying Doctor Service Tourist Facility has undergone a huge redevelopment in 2012 and has reopened with newer, more interactive displays. Outback Magazine of Oct-Nov 2012 focused on the medical transfers and transport of course, but also the preventative health and primary health care. Appropriately the RFDS Café located in the 1939 home of the first RFDS radio operator for the Alice Springs Base.

First RFDS plane.
Photo credit: Museum of Australian Currency Notes

Rev Flynn was given a well deserved imperial honour in 1933. He died in 1951 but the honours kept on coming. He was featured on one side of the Australian 20 dollar note, once this nation moved to decimal currency in 1966, and still is today.

↧

Detecting disease in 17th century portraits

March 22, 2013, 2:00 pm

≫ Next: John James Audubon and the Australian connection

≪ Previous: Australia's amazing aerial medical service: 1928

Several years ago I heard a conference paper on the signs of disease and illness in famous C17th portraits. Art historians in the audience knew that the painters generally attempted to show their sitters in the best light possible, presumably because the artists hoped to have more royal or noble commissions in the future. But the medicos in the audience were certain that in some cases, the signs of disease were so pronounced that leaving out the changes in facial features, bone structure and skin colour was not possible.

Luca Giordano, King Charles II of Spain, c1685

Nowhere in art can the casual viewer see medical crises better than in the portrait of King Charles II of Spain c1685, painted by the court artist from 1692-1702, Luca Giordano. The Spanish Habsburg dynasty in fact ended with this sickly product of generations of intermarriage between cousins; he was physically unable to produce a son. But the young king also suffered from a range of other physical, mental and emotional disabilities. Mandibular prognathism/Habsburg jaw was so pronounced in King Charles II that he was actually incapable of chewing. It does not take a medical clinician to note the very unusual relationship of the soft tissue portion of the King' chin to his nose.

Painted in c1654, Rembrandt's housekeeper/de facto wife Hendrickje Stoffels was the model for the biblical character, Bathsheba at her Bath. Rembrandt may have painted his lover with such a sad face for any number of reasons, including: his troubles with the Church, his impending bankruptcy and her pregnancy outside of marriage.

But Peter Allen Braithwaitesuggested something else. Asymmetrical depiction and clear skin discolouration in the left breast was not an artefact of the portrait’s light and shadow. If Rembrandt painted the features that he actually saw, then perhaps there were already clinical signs of breast cancer. In fact Hendrickje lived for 8+ years after the painting of Bathsheba but she deteriorated throughout this period, particularly towards the end when her general ill health became apparent in other paintings. Historians recorded that she was probably consumptive, dying of tuberculosis in 1663. Is it more reasonable to suggest, from the art, that she died of disseminated breast cancer?

Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654, 142 x 142 cm, Louvre

Recently a very interesting analysis of Nicolas de Largilliere’s Portrait of an Officer appeared in the MJA. Examine the swollen knuckles in both hands, inflamed and reddish. Largilliere was considered to have had a genius for depicting hands, so the all-important accuracy in his art was always found in his paintings. The authors Weisz and Albury concluded that a possible diagnosis in the context of swollen but undeformed fingers could have been rheumatic fever or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

Does disease, intentionally or unintentionally displayed in 17th century paintings, matter? Yes it does. Firstly art historians decode everything in paintings, including clothes, furniture, books, flowers and architecture. So we should be careful about the body as well. Secondly the portraits' models had the full range of illnesses that everyone in the community had in the 17th century, albeit less readily diagnosable than now and not treatable at all. Recognising that the artist wanted to flatter the sitter and would have toned down the sitter’s worst features, we can assume for example that King Charles II’s jaw was probably far bigger and uglier than Luca Giordano dared show. Nonetheless the portraits are a gold mine of medical information, if the viewer analyses the images carefully. Especially if the biography of the sitter is well known.

Nicolas de Largilliere, Portrait of an Officer c1714, Art Gallery NSW

↧

John James Audubon and the Australian connection

March 26, 2013, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Amsterdam's golden age of art is renewed

≪ Previous: Detecting disease in 17th century portraits

The process of printing engravings via copperplate, with its capacity for reproducing fine line and detail, was largely superseded in books by the development of lithography, a cheaper and therefore attractive option for American publishers. So to achieve the stunning results he wanted, bird artist John James Audubon (1785–1851) had to travel many times back and forward across the Atlantic to find a suitable British publisher. In the end, Audubon selected engravers William Lizars in Edinburgh and, later, Robert Havell Jr in London for his treasures.

The long, exhausting project was worth it. Bronwyn Waterson called Audubon’s book, The Birds of America (published in parts between 1827 and 1838), the most beautiful book ever published. Since only 120 copies are known to have survived till today, it may not surprise book lovers that one copy sold at a Sotheby's auction in London in 2010 for £7.3 million or $US 11.5 million. This was apparently a record for a printed book sold at auction. The 435 hand-coloured engravings, bound in four volumes, must have been worth every penny.

Perhaps it was the height of this book, 1+ metre, that grabbed the buyers’ attention. But perhaps the height was itself problematic. I was thinking that even if I could have afforded the £7.3 million, it would be difficult to find a perfect location in the house to place such a large object.

Audubon's masterpiece, The Birds of America, is a very large book

So if The Birds of America is as rare and as famous as suggested, how did the State Library of Victoria obtain a copy? LaTrobe Journalhad lots to say about a certain William Stallard. The state librarian A.B Foxcroft at the time left a handwritten note (dated 1871) to say that Mr William Stallard, the Principal of Western College Geelong, offered the Birds of America to the Melbourne Public Library for £200. It would cost twice that to replace, Mr Stallard had written. But in a curt memo, the President of the Trustees, the infamous "hanging judge" Sir Redmond Barry, noted that £150 was too much. The book was eventually obtained for a very modest £100. A further £16 was spent on restoring the bindings on three of the four volumes.

There is no evidence for when or how Stallard acquired the Birds of America, presumably in England rather than in a British colony. Perhaps the purchase of the Birds was the product of another, more affluent time, before the hardship of colonial life dragged William Stallard into the pits of despair. Apparently Stallard had been dismissed from his prestigious employment for excessive drinking. He eventually took his life by drowning in the Yarra River. What a sad end to a promising life, but how fortunate for the State Library.

The book is on display at the State Library of Victoria as part of its 2013 exhibition, Mirror of the World. Using many of the rare, beautiful and historically significant books held in the Library's collections, the exhibition is exploring five important themes:

'Books and ideas', outlining the early history of books and printing
'The book and the imagination', looking at the way books and texts are imaginatively created
'Exploring the world', investigating how books have been used to explore and document the world including, its landscape, topography, inhabitants, flora and fauna
'Art and nature', looking at how botanical illustrations unite the scientific and artistic worlds
'The artist and the book', highlighting the art of the book and the role of the artist.

↧

Amsterdam's golden age of art is renewed

March 29, 2013, 2:00 pm

≫ Next: Fabergé treasures in the USA

≪ Previous: John James Audubon and the Australian connection

The National Gallery in London was founded in 1824, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was founded in 1870, the National Gallery in Berlin was opened in 1876 and Vienna’s Kunsthistorische Museum was opened in 1891. During this period, the main cities of the western world scrambled to build stunningly impressive art galleries.

Although a museum had been founded in The Hague as early as 1800, by 1863 the Amsterdam city fathers were keen to conduct a design contest for a state museum. When there was dissatisfaction with the submissions, a new contest was held a decade later and this time a winner was announced - Pierre Cuypers (1827-1921). His submission managed to combine two apparently incompatable styles, gothic and renaissance.

The renovated Rijksmuseum, gardens and reflecting pool, April 2013.

On both the interior and exterior, his building was richly decorated with allusions to the 17th century era when Dutch town planners, engineers, traders, artists and scientists ruled the world. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum was opened to the cheer of local residents in July 1885 and soon became Holland’s biggest museum.

Naturally additions and changes were made to the grand building in the decades since 1885, particularly before and after World War Two.

In 2003 the architects were asked: to strip the building of its post-Cuypers additions and to restore Cuypers’ clear layout. To this end, I've been following the Rijksmuseum’s Renovation Blog. According to the current design, for example, the two inner court-yards which were added in the post-war years were broken open, creating a two-part Atrium linked by the open passageway.

At every stage during the renovations, the guiding theme was continue with Pierre Cuypers’ 1885 master-piece, especially his layout. The monumental ornaments were to be returned to the Gallery of Honour, the Front Hall, the Night Watch Gallery and the stairwells. Cuypers‘ genius was best preserved in the library where the original design and ornaments have largely been maintained.

Jan Vermeer, The Love Letter, c1666

44 x 39 cm

Rijksmuseum

Since 2003, the Rijksmuseum has been largely closed; they have been able to invite visitors only into the Philips Wing – the 13 rooms of the museum’s south wing, a section that had already been renovated in the 1990s. Only 400 works from the Rijksmuseum’s holdings have been on show in the Philips Wing, in an exhibition called Masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age. Fortunately the limited number of paintings included Rembrandt’s stunning The Night Watch 1642.

In the interim, many parts of the collection were out on loan, seen by audiences across the Netherlands and abroad.

Naturally the renovations took much longer than intended, endured problems with the contractors and cost much more than budgeted for. In the end, the project cost the good tax payers of the Netherlands over €375 million. Security was modernised, climate control was improved and computer technology was revolutionised.

But it was worth it. After a renovation that took nearly ten years, the new Rijksmuseum will be relaunched on 13th April 2013 and opened to the public the next day. The 80 rooms have been returned to their original 19th century loveliness, including their original decorations and works of art. Only then will the Philips Wing close in April and reopen later as a space for large-scale temporary exhibitions.

Visitors can see up to 10,000 pieces from the collection on display at any one time. This in unlike the Louvre or Kunsthistorische Museum, for example, where more of the treasures are in the archives than are on display. The reopening will also involve renovated gardens and a glass-clad Asian Pavilion, surrounded by a reflecting pool.

The most famous work in the collection is still Rembrandt van Rijn’s Night Watch which will be the final painting to be hung on the wall. Additionally the Rijksmuseum will show a number of Rembrandt’s other key works, including Syndics of the Drapers' Guild and The Jewish Bride. It will also display works by other artists from the Dutch Golden Age, like the incomparable Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Jacob van Ruysdael and Frans Hals.

Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, c1667
122 × 167 cm
Rijksmuseum

I have not visited the Rijksmuseum since 2002 and so have not seen any changes yet. But I am looking forward to seeing a wing fitted out to display its Special Collections. Large sub-collections will include porcelain, silver, jewellery, glass and ceramics, decorated weapons and model ships. Porcelain and silver are my passions.

↧

Fabergé treasures in the USA

April 2, 2013, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Lowry's ordinary home and amazing gallery

≪ Previous: Amsterdam's golden age of art is renewed

I have recently read the book Fabergé: Fantasies & Treasures, written by Geza von Habsburg and published by Universe in 1996.

Carl Fabergé (1846-1920) was born into a family in St Petersburg that created jewellery. The young man, trained in Russia and Germany, was in the right place and the right time. He had luck of course, but he also had great creative skills and beautiful craftsmanship - all three elements bringing him to the attention of the Russian Imperial Court.

He helped out in the Jewellery Gallery of the Hermitage and in time (in the mid-1880s) was named goldsmith and jeweller to the Russian court. His works were first displayed at the 1882 Pan-Slavic exhibition held in Moscow under the patronage of Czar Alexander III.

Napoleon Egg, 1912

Battle of Borodino, Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.
Workmaster: Henrik Emanuel Wigström. Miniaturist: Vassily Ivanovich Zuiev
Tsar Nicholas II’s gift to his mother, Empress Maria Fyodorovna.
On long term long to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Yet it was only when Alexander asked Fabergé to create a special Easter egg for the czarina that this iconic object was first invented. Fortunately for the Romanovs these eggs became an Easter tradition throughout Alexander's reign, his son Nicholas II’s reign and on until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Of the 50 Fabergé eggs ever made, the von Habsburg book concentrated on those in the Pratt collection in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Clearly Carl Fabergé and his brother could not manage all the work themselves. They therefore decided to establish independent workshops, headed up by a Fabergé workmaster i.e a master craftsman who would produce works of art specifically and exclusively for the House of Fabergé. Nothing would be accepted by the Fabergés until and unless it had been approved by Carl.

So if there were many workmasters, why were their so few eggs ever completed? Apparently it took two years just to prepare for every single egg. Yet so famous were they that of the many thousands of jewels and art objects made by Fabergé, most peoples’ minds go straight to the relatively few Easter eggs.

My favourite was the Napoleonic Egg of 1912 which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the victory of the Russian armies over the dreaded French emperor. Made of gold, enamel, diamonds, platinum, ivory, velvet and silk, this tiny egg was only 11.2 cms high. Yet it opened into 6 signed miniatures, each richly framed, which were later found in an album of drawings from the workshop of Henrik Wigström. Wigström had been one of the famous Fabergé workmasters who created stunning art objects during the 1903-1918 era.

Fabergé and his workshop made the most beautiful objects out of gold, enamel and hardstone; his picture frames, cigarette cases, clocks and silver animal decanters were created for the ruling families of Europe or any other patron wealthy enough to spend limitless sums of money. So it is appropriate that the book also presents gold, enamel, and hardstone pieces by the artist-jeweller. If I had to select which objects in the book were the most splendid, I would certainly select the guilloche enamels. von Habsburg did not reveal Faberge’s most zealously guarded secret i.e the process used to make his enamels.

Fabergé left Russia in 1918 and died in Switzerland in 1920. In 1924 sons Alexander and Eugéne re-opened Fabergé in Paris, where they continued to make the art objects that their father had been so successful with. To distinguish their pieces from those made in Russia before the Revolution, they used the trademark FABERGÉ PARIS.

Enamel guilloche picture frame,
9 cms high, c1890

workmaster's mark of Viktor Aarne St Petersburg,
Photo credit Christie’s London 2010
Realised £16,000 (USA $26,000) at auction

Louisiana heiress and philanthropist Matilda Geddings Gray (1885–1971) collected her first object by Fabergé in 1933, before just about anyone else in the USA. Over the following years, Matilda Geddings Gray amassed one of the best Fabergé collections in private hands, including the Imperial Napoleonic Easter Egg..

This book was written as a companion to the catalogue of the travelling “Fabergé In America” exhibition. The surprising element for me was that the author was almost as interesting as Carl Fabergé. Archduke Géza of Austria (b1940), is the son of Archduke Joseph Francis of Austria (1895–1957) and the grandson of King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony. Géza also happens to be a very experienced writer about Fabergé and was the curator of some important international Fabergé exhibitions. In 1966 he joined the staff of Christie’s auction house in Switzerland. In 1980 he became Chairman of European Operations for the company. Later he became the Chairman, in New York and Geneva, for Habsburg Fine Art International Auctioneers.

His work specialised in silver and gold, objects of vertu and Russian art. Habsburg served as the curator and organiser for Fabergé, Jeweller to the Tsars (1986-87), an exhibition held at Kunsthalle in Munich. Then while on the board of the Fabergé Arts Foundation, von Habsburg was chief curator of Fabergé, Imperial Court Jeweller (1993-94), which was shown in St Petersburg, Paris and London. He also served as guest curator of Fabergé in America (1996-97), which toured five cities in the USA.

For more stunning Fabergé objects and details about the donors and recipients, see the Fabergé Revealed Exhibition of Mar 2012. It shows the Bismark Box, an imposing Imperial presentation box that carried the donor’s portrait; it was inscribed by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Alexander III of Russia to His Serene Highness Prince von Bismarck Chancellor of the German Empire 1884. The German imperial chancellor was Europe’s most powerful and influential statesmen, and must have deserved the 90 carats of diamonds.

↧

Lowry's ordinary home and amazing gallery

April 5, 2013, 2:00 pm

≫ Next: Manet, portraits and the good life in Paris

≪ Previous: Fabergé treasures in the USA

Laurence Lowry (1887–1976) was born in Stretford Lancs. In 1905 the teenager was a student at the Manchester Municipal College of Art, where he studied under the French Impressionist artist Adolphe Valette. Valette also put Lowry in touch with current artistic developments in Paris.

By 1915 Lowry was studying at the Salford School of Art. It was here he mastered industrial landscapes and began to establish his unique style. Lowry eventually became famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial north of England of the early C20th. His distinctive paintings were best known for dullish cityscapes, and match-stick humans and animals. One of his favourite districts to paint was Salford, an area he knew very well.

Lowry, Coming Out of School, 1927,
35 x 54 cm,
Tate

Often times his images were crowded with people, but they were rushing and isolated individuals, not people having a wonderful time. In 1939 John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Lowry's first solo exhibition in London, saying: 'I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern industrial England”.

In 1948 Lowry had enough money to buy a modest home in Mottram, Greater Manchester called The Elms. It was not the most attractive house in the world, but as he had always remained single, there was never any need to move to a nicer place. The dining room was his studio and most of the wall space was covered with paintings and drawings completed during his time there. Now that the home has been given Listed Status, the new owners plan to restore the staircase which winds up the centre of the house and has lots of intricate detailing. An original cast iron stove, original doors, window shutters and floorboards will be renovated and the fireplace will move back from the lounge back to its original location in Lowry’s bedroom.

The Elms, Mottram in Greater Manchester

In the 1950s, the artist liked to spent his holidays at the Seaburn Hotel up in Sunderland, focusing on scenes of local ports and coal mines. He must have really loved the northern industrial scenes.. since he painted them often. In fact while Lowry composed many of his northern views as imaginative reconstructions of different places, some were named after specific streets. Art dealer Richard Green noted that Coronation Street 1957 is the same street in Salford after which the famous, eponymous TV soap opera was named three years later. Was this life copying art or art copying life?

Lowry often befriended and bought works from young artists he admired, including James Isherwood whose works hung on the Mottram studio wall. He supported other young careers by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. But the paintings he bought for his own pleasure were not contemporary. When the money started to roll in for his own works, Lowry purchased a number of works by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882). How strange that an artist who painted stylised, lonely people in tough northern cityscapes should be particularly inspired by a sensual Victorian Pre-Raphaelite.

Lowry

The Fever Van 1935

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Lowry died in 1976 aged 88, just a few months before an important and successful exhibition of his work was held at London's Royal Academy. The artist was buried in Manchester, leaving a very large estate, valued at £300,000 plus many works of art. Since then, a collection of Lowry's work has been put on permanent public display in a newly built art theatre and gallery complex, The Lowry, on Pier 8 Salford Quays Manchester. The complex contains 2,000 square metres of gallery space displaying 400 of Lowry's paintings plus other artists' work. It was all collected by Salford Museum and Art Gallery from the 1930s on, but the works didn't move into the new Manchester complex until it opened in 2000.

Amongst the other galleries that have since organised retrospectives of his works, Tate Britain Millbank is showing Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life from June-October 2013. The Tate exhibition has 38 of his best loved works, starting from his 1934 works.

The Lowry theatre and gallery complex in Salford Quays, Manchester

↧

Manet, portraits and the good life in Paris

April 9, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Canadian soldier-heroes, 1917-8: Alfred Munnings

≪ Previous: Lowry's ordinary home and amazing gallery

Artist Edouard Manet (1832-83) has been well analysed in the last decade. In 2003, Madrid’s Prado focused on the artist's relationship to his art predecessors and in 2011, Paris’ Musee d'Orsay located him among his contemporaries. Now an exhibition called Manet: Portraying Life is focusing on the portraits he painted. This exhibition was organised by the Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House London, in collaboration with the Toledo Museum of Art Ohio. The show wowed them in Toledo!

Although he lived only until 51, the Impressionists' leader in Paris created many paintings in general, and portraits in particular. Manet painted his family, friends and many of the famous personalities in French art and literature. 50+ of these works have been collected from all around the world, so now I have to ask why do we know so much about his images of modern city life but not much about his portraits.

Manet, Portrait of Zola, 1868
147 x 114 cm

Musee d'Orsay

Two critiques of the exhibition have been useful. Richard Dorment of the Telegraph noted that Manet placed portraits of real people against settings fabricated in his studio. Thus the line between what should have been seen as a true portrait and what was best understood as a genre painting was not always clear. This shifting ground between portraiture and genre went right to the heart of Manet’s modernity. In some pictures Manet used portraits in the way theatre directors used actors. He added all the ingredients of a boulevard farce about money, sex and modern life, seen through the eyes of the quintessential flâneur.

But Richard, even Manet's quest for modernity was ambivalent! On one hand he was a risk-taker in his art and often found himself excluded from the official Salon by art experts in the early years. On the other hand, his very large painting Le Dejeurner sur l'herbe 1863 looked as if it came straight from Renaissance Italy a la The Pastoral Concert c1510 by Giorgione or Titian. Could an artist be backward looking and modernist at the same time?

Adrian Searl of the Guardian believed almost all of Manet’s oeuvre was portraiture, whatever genre he was painting. This was most obvious in Music in the Tuileries Gardens 1862, which is displayed in a room on its own. Visitors can easily see all the tiny portraits embedded in this small outdoor scene, a snap shot of leisure and pleasure in Paris.

The London exhibition opened with a room devoted to the artist and his family. In one, his wife played the piano; in another there was an impressionist portrait of his wife with a cat on her lap. Berthe Morisot, the artist who married Manet’s brother, was painted with a Bouquet of Violets in 1872. Searl’s point was that Manet painted from life, so everyone who appeared was a kind of portrait.

Manet really was the organising father of impressionism! He and his wife welcomed the artistic and literary personalities into their home for a salon every week. And friends often dropped into Manet in his studio or joined him at a table in his favourite cafes. But he was rarely a true impressionist in his art, as Monet and Pissarro were.

Manet, Portrait of Antonin Proust, 1880
130 x 96 cm
Toledo Museum of Art,

The catalogue is important because many people won’t be able to get to London before the exhibition abruptly closes next week (14th April)!!! As a lasting piece of literature, the catalogue explores Manet's portraiture and reviews his growth over his career.

Of all the works described and explained in the catalogue, I particularly loved two. Firstly the portrait of Émile Zola - partially because Manet developed a modern approach to this genre, but also because Zola was a very fine thinker and writer. Secondly the portrait of Antonin Proust, a childhood friend of Manet who went on to become a journalist, politician and, importantly, the Minister for Culture. This gorgeous portrait reminds me of the 1867 portrait painted by Henri Fantin-Latour of Manet himself. The top hat, gloves and cane represented a debonair man about town.

The first in a new series of cinematic art exhibitions from museums around the world, called Exhibition Screen, is about to start. The Royal Academy’s exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, will be captured for cinema screens worldwide and shown in Palace Cinemas in Australia on the 27th and 28th April 2013. Manet lovers in other countries should check Exhibition Screen for their own dates.

↧

Canadian soldier-heroes, 1917-8: Alfred Munnings

April 12, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Spanish paradors - staying in luxury and historical accuracy.

≪ Previous: Manet, portraits and the good life in Paris

Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) was born in Mendham Suffolk in 1878, son of a miller. When he finished his apprenticeship, young Alfred painted rural scenes, gypsies and horses which sold well and were hung from time to time in the Royal Academy.

The First World War meant that families had no money for luxuries.. and art objects were no longer being bought. Munnings attempted to enlist in a Hampshire regiment, but he was knocked back every time on health grounds. Finally in 1917, he was given a civilian job in a horse depot near Reading, checking tens of thousands of Canadian horses for disease and treating them. Only then could the horses be sent to serve in artillery, cavalry, or supply units in France.

Munnings, Canadian Troops at a Musical Evening in France,

27 x 33 cm, 1918

Taylor Gallery London.

I am very grateful to the Canadian War Museum for their references. They believed that Canadian history owed much to Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a New Brunswick newspaper baron who'd moved to Britain. As a friend of Sir Sam Hughes, Canada's Minister of Militia, Lord Beaverbrook had been given charge of overseas military records. Intent on publicising Canada's wartime achievements, he produced a detailed account of Canadian operations, launched a programme of military photography that included the sale of prints, pioneered front-line cine-photography, and published a daily newspaper for soldiers, The Canadian Daily Record. Whatever one thought of his politics, Beaverbrook’s salute to Canadian families was heroic.

The crucial role Canadians played in the Second Battle of Ypres (April 1915) was a top priority for Beaverbrook. In 1916 he commissioned a British artist, Richard Jack, to recreate it in paint. Then, with 100 artists being despatched under the auspices of his Canadian War Memorials Fund, Beaverbrook covered the Belgian, British and Canadian armies operations all over Europe. The project eventually brought Canada some 800 military paintings and sculptures.

It was this Canadian War Memorials Fund art programme that Alfred Munnings joined in 1918, specifically to paint the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and Canadian Forestry Corps.

Perfect! For an artist who loved horses and loved painting them, Munnings was in his element. Throughout the history of warfare, horses had played important roles - as pack animals, transporting infantry, hauling artillery and in cavalry operations. And European armies of course included specialised cavalry units.

Munnings, Canadians Felling a Tree in the Vosges,

51 x 61 cm, c1918

Canadian War Museum

And not just horses. France and Britain needed timber for the war effort but logging skills were more readily available in Canada. So in early 1916 the British government asked that a forestry battalion be raised in Canada for service in Europe. The Dominion acted quickly; 1,600 men were recruited and money was spent on both logging and milling equipment. The 224th Canadian Forestry Battalion was sent.

Three more forestry battalions were raised, and soon the foresters numbered some 22,000. Attached personnel (Canadian Army Service Corps, Canadian Army Medical Corps, Chinese labourers, prisoners of war) brought the total strength to 31,000. Many Canadians who would otherwise have been ineligible for military duty were able to serve in the forestry units. Munnings was delighted, in April 1918, to be assigned to paint the Canadians at work. He first went through the Normandy logging camps and from there he travelled to eastern France.

Munnings, Gen Jack Seely, Commander of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade,

1918

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

When Munnings was recalled to London in mid 1918, he completed some works and transferred 44 paintings to the Canadian War Memorials Fund. The artist considered his experiences with Canadian units to have been among the most rewarding events of his life.

Canadian War Museum, Ottawa

The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa is Canada’s national museum of military history. The concept of a military history museum originated in 1880 but the current building that we see in the photo didn't open until 2005.

↧

Latest Images