Invention is a woman (and other fragments)

Today was the opening day of the Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 show at the Tate - which was wonderful.  The emphasis is on professional women artists, and their training, and obstacles, and in some cases the shocking misogyny that they faced: no news there, of course, but the problems of writing history on scant evidence was well brought out.  The catalogue is good, too - so I mostly took photos of details ... starting with the painting that opens the exhibition, Angelica Kauffman's Invention (1778-80).  And these are from her Colour - same date - an endearing little chameleon, and tranche of rainbow.

There was a whole room of very diverse botanical paintings - this is a small corner of Mary Moser's Flowers in a Vase (1759),

and this - please say it's some kind of dandelion? - from Martha Mutrie's wonderful tangle of Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield (c. 1855-60).

and some of these also had butterflies, and birds (Clara Maria Pope, Composition of Flowers, in the Vase Presented to Edmund Kean, 1818).

Then there were some mid-Victorian favorites, like the exceptionally gloomy For the Last Time, by Emily Osborn (c. 1864).

Peculiarly few cats - this kitten is in Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's very sub-Burne Jones The Deceitfulness of Riches (1901).

There were a fair number of works from private or obscure collections - great to see these, and two in particular were new to me: Marianne Stokes' image of modernity, The Passing Train (1890),

and this truly weird painting by Florence Caxton, 'Woman's Work': A Medley (1861) - which is, I believe, currently for sale, but I promise not to buy it,

even though, among other delights, it has Barbara Bodichon perched on top of a wall.

And outside, Millais, in the rain, under some very weirdly pruned, or polled, plane trees.

If you can get to this exhibition - do so!  It's on until mid-October.

 

banners, various

Back in Cambridge again for a few hours, for the funeral of my dear friend Francis O'Gorman - a beautiful, solemn (for which read - emotionally devastating) service:  very Victorian; very High Anglican; very - of course, since he'd planned it himself - appropriate, all the way through.  It was only lacking in black horses and plumes.  But what Francis couldn't have planned, of course, was the beauty and aptness of the tributes to him - and the combination of love and loss that they contained.  I don't think I've been to such an affecting funeral in a very long time.

En route - the Cambridge encampment - bigger than ours at USC (you can't see that here); orderly in the extreme; the familiar chants; the familiar placards against the genocide, including from Jewish groups; not a policeman or security officer in sight.  Shall I repeat that last statement?

After the funeral, a reception at Newnham, with copious champagne that most of us were very glad to get our hands on, and, it being Oxbridge, sandwiches.  And the banners!  I've never been in Newnham hall, which is decorated with elaborate plaster like a wedding cake that's being entered into an icing competition - and hanging from one end, banners reading BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO BECOME / ONE DAY WE'LL ALL PARTY ON  THE FORBIDDEN BALCONIES and DISOBEDIENCE - LIBERATION and GIVE US BREAD BUT GIVE US ROSES and SOLIDARITY FOREVER - I can't really see these hanging inside Bovard ...

A long day - and I'm now in London - but one for which I was so very glad to have been able to be present.

 

Liverpool miscellany

To the Lady Lever gallery this morning, to see Another View, an exhibition of C19th and C20th British landscape artists - a small, three-room exhibition (it turned out), largely from stiff in the Whitworth and other Liverpool collections, but there was hardly anything that I'd seen before, and I was glad to have gone.  To be honest, the most fun that I had was when I was waiting for the thick rain to clear, and decided to rework Millais' Spring (Apple Blossoms) and turn it into something much more sinister.  

One of the most interesting things in the exhibition was an album by Anna Holt that included watercolors that she made on a plantation in Savannah in 1851: the Holt family fortunes came in part from cotton produced by enslaved people in the southern states.  

So that was a good prelude for the later part of the day: first to Birkenhead Park, which was designed by Joseph Paxton in the 1840s - before he moved on to the Crystal Palace.  It was opened in 1847: Charles Olmsted came to visit in 1850, and it - designed as a People's Park - inspired Central Park in NYC.  One can see this in the artificial rockery, for a start ...

Then there's the Swiss Bridge - the only covered wooden bridge in the UK;

and a Roman Boathouse.

On to the Liverpool Docks - complete with a monument to the working horses of the port - 

- where I'd really been looking forward to visiting the International Slavery Museum.  In fact, I was a bit disappointed - they told the story well; but there weren't nearly as many primary artifacts as I'd hoped, and I was especially disappointed how badly hung/lit Richard Ansdell's The Hunted Slaves was - I'd really wanted to see it, and to see the detail, but the glare off the glass made that impossible.  The best bits?  The emphasis on African culture at the start of the exhibition;

and some of the new art work at the end of it, like Alison Welsh's By a Lady (2007) which references both a British anti-slavery document from 1847 and today's child trafficking.

A quick scamper through the other floors of the building (the Slavery Museum is on the top floor of the National Maritime Museum) revealed a rather fetching rat, demonstrating that there were lots of them on board ship.

... and then back out onto the more cheerful and entertaining aspects of the docks.

 

A Room With(out) a View

I'm with Lucy Honeychurch on this one - I do like my rooms to have a view.  This looks about two feet onto the wall of a Chinese warehouse built in 1864.  The small hotel in the late Georgian Liverpool town house row looked promising enough on line (and was well within research budget means) - and indeed, it seems friendly, even if the wallpaper (there's a tiny little bit visible under the window) is so jungly that I'm very tempted to draw tiny tiny insects on it.

I'd intended to go to Birkenhead Park (much Victorian landscape design) when I arrived in the late afternoon, but it was so grey and drizzly that I stayed in and finished and posted all my grading whilst eating M&S salads.  You'll get a sense of the attractiveness of L'pool this afternoon - lots of stalls selling bubble machines ...

... just in case you thought Research only takes me to super-picturesque places ...

 

Blake, Runge, and some tulips

To the William Blake show at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum - a really interestingly curated show that brought out Blake's intellectual and visual connections both with Europe and America, and with the theme of revolution more widely still.  There was (probably because the exhibition is moving on to Hamburg) a good deal of Philipp Otto Runge (I saw a big Runge show there in maybe 1979, and vividly remembered the large and weird painting with peonies and (not visible here) lots of cherubs, though the owl was new to me.

Also - Cambridge gardens, and tulips: it was another summer's day.

 

Ely Cathedral

How have I never been to Ely Cathedral before?  It is huge and breathtaking.  It also contains a very good stained glass museum - but alas, having been trampling over the Cambridgeshire fens looking in vain for the Northern Lights, it's now 1.30 a.m. and I'm going to bed rather than downloading a million pictures from that too ....

 

Cambridge

A wonderful local history project - almost every house in Kingston Street and Gwydir Street and some others have home made blue plaque installations, showing who lived there in the very late C19th - clearly some school class learns how to use census data ...

A Ferris Wheel on Parker's Piece.

... and Emmanuel College for dinner, and to see its amazing huge spreading Great Oriental Plane Tree, dating back, very probably, to the first decade of the nineteenth century.

But very, very, very tired, thanks to two incessantly screaming babies on the flight, in the seats opposite mine.  So sleep seriously beckons.

 

off to England

... at LAX.  Not pictured : my frenetic expression (and mug of black coffee) as I download grading to do on the flight (I sure know how to have fun); or my expression of relief as I send off an overview review article ...