A very, very quick trip to Liverpool for research purposes - to see Millais's An Idyll of 1745 - skied so badly in the Lever Art Gallery that one could hardly see it properly at all (my enthusiasm for keeping C19th styles of picture hanging fades rapidly when one wants to see something up close), and Maurice Greiffenhagen's toe-curling An Idyll in the Walker Art Gallery (yes, I'm writing a piece about Idylls ... and ecology ...). But of course there was time to see other stuff too: various soap-and-cleanliness stuff at Port Sunlight (I hadn't realized, incidentally, until purchasing today Brian Lewis's "So Clean." Lord Leverhulme, Soap, and Civilization that there is a whole complicated colonialist narrative around him involving the Belgian Congo, the South Pacific and the Island of Lewis). And he collected some very strange sculpture ...
And then in the Walker I found an Arthur Hughes with both lichen and an inscribed tree ...
and masses more Victorian scuplture
(and of course, Victorian architecture on the streets).
But what truly struck me was Liverpool's artistic acknowledgment of its past: its wealth built on slavery and then its proximity to the Lancashire cotton trade, above all. However have I not previously known about Cumbrian artist Paul Scott? - wonderfully politically imaginative; using - here - transfer art to mimic old Wedgwood style, but with images bringing out the local past, environmental wreckage, and so on.
And then, outside, in the grey dank summer air, various statues have been re-dressed through the "redressing" project - here is Gladstone,
and here, Queen Victoria.
Part of me was on a hasty prospecting trip - would it be feasible to bring a group of students here, as part of a Victorian Britain and the World course? I'll be back, I'm sure ...
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