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From Aleppo to Jerusalem: saving synagogue art and architecture
The main synagogue in Aleppo Syria was built in the Byzantine period. Damaged in the Mongol sack of Aleppo in 1400, it was later expanded and modernised. With the arrival of the Sephardi Jews in Aleppo...
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An 18th century desk - for work or for drinking pleasure?
In the later C18th, when the object called a sideboard was transforming into a large and important piece of furniture, the cellaret was merely a detached receptacle. The cellaret was an elegant piece...
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Haberfield: a VERY early Garden City in Sydney (1901)
From my books on Arts and Crafts, I was fascinated with the new movement in architecture and design that was being promoted by John Ruskin and William Morris as early as 1885-9. At that very early...
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An exhibition of Elioth Gruner's landscapes: master of the light
The son of a Norwegian father, Elioth Gruner (1882-1939)was born in New Zealand and moved to Sydney with his family while still in nappies. Although Gruner received his first art lessons from Julian...
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Can the ex-industrial city of Geelong have an art and tourist revival?
(72)The Financial Review in Feb 2014 wrote that Ford was was closing its Geelong manufacturing works, ending 300 jobs by June and the remaining 210 by 2016. Alcoa reported that its ageing aluminium...
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Isle of Wight - Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Grimshaw
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) reached the peak of his career in 1850 when he was appointed Poet Laureate. But he was finding celebrity difficult to cope with in London, so he sought a quiet...
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World War One cinema - propaganda or reality?
I have examined the art and architecture of World War One in lectures and in this blog, with a focus on all the art forms that were so evocative of the tragedy of war – posters, shrines, cemeteries,...
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Australian and Israeli science - eucalyptus trees, bush fires, honey and swamps.
When you travel in Israel nowadays, it is difficult to believe that 150 years ago the south was total desert (60% of Israel’s land surface). Only a small number of trees grew in the south; the trees...
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Northern Landscapes, Northern Lights - Peder Balke
In collaboration with the Northern Norway Art Museum in Tromsø, The National Gallery in London has opened a Peder Balke exhibition that will continue until mid April 2015. They are displaying 50+...
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George and Mary Watts: Arts and Crafts in Surrey
I can recognise George Frederic Watts’ (1817–1904) paintings fairly easily, especially as his goal was to represent human emotions in a universal symbolic language. I don’t think it was possible to...
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Public sculpture and the history of Melbourne
In "Casting aspersions on state of the art" in the Sydney Morning Herald, 8th Dec 2012, Steve Dow asked should public sculpture be a monument to patriotism, to good artistic taste, or humbly aim to...
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Spanish Civil War: pro-Republican, anti-Fascist art
Spain's boom period had been WWI when it had remained neutral. But after the war (in Sept 1923), the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera grabbed power. The agricultural boom soon...
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Melbourne Hebrew Congregation and ANZAC Day memorials: 1915-2015
Although Melbourne was not planned out as a city until 1835, by 1841 there were already enough Jews to organise a religious quorum. The first organised Jewish congregation was soon established, based...
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Rouen's Joan of Arc Museum - opened in 2013
The Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) must have been horrendous. The endless battles dragged on between English Plantagenets and the French Valois, for control of French soil. In the latter part of the...
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Soldier-poets of the Somme, 1916
The horrors of the trench, mud, heavy and inefficient weapons, tinned bully beef every day, dead horses poison gas and the sheer terror of waiting for death - these were the truths of the Great War....
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Gardens at Wombat Park, Daylesford - a legacy from goldrush and from...
The story of Wombat Park (Midland Highway Daylesford) began in 1854 when grazier William Stanbridge built a modest, timber homestead and began planting a magnificent garden. His collection of exotic...
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Mark Rothko: from expressionism to abstraction
To say that, until the C20th, western art had few visual artists of Jewish ancestry is silly. The Pissarros and Simeon Solomon were not odd exceptions; the culture may have produced verbal rather than...
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Elsa Schiaparelli's true story
This is the sum total of what I know about Elsa Schiaparelli. “Coco Chanel and Schiaparelli launched their fashion houses in the first decades of the last century with equal ambition. Schiaparelli was...
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A Spanish mission in California? No! It is in Western Australia.
The Kingdom of Spain had wanted to establish missions to convert the pagans to Roman Catholicism in New Spain i.e Caribbean, Mexico and most of what today is the south west of the USA. This was to save...
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Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh and other women were there, you know!
Margaret Macdonald (1865–1933) was born into an engineering family near Wolverhampton. By 1890 the family had settled in Glasgow, and after a couple of years in their new city, Margaret and her sister...
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