Tuesday 15 May 2012

The Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre


Guild Hall (centre) & Art Gallery (right); line shows extent of amphitheatre.
Executive Summary
Ambling along Gresham Street, taking a detour into Guildhall Yard transports you into a microcosm of London history and architecture. Lining the tranquil square, you’ll find the guild church St Lawrence Jewry (rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire of 1666), the late twentieth century Guildhall Art Gallery (rebuilt after being destroyed in the Blitz) and the medieval Guildhall, the ceremonial and administrative centre of the City of London and its Corporation. Guildhall Yard encompasses even more history than these three remarkable buildings suggest: during building work for the new gallery it was revealed that they sit atop the site of an ancient Roman amphitheatre. Head for the Guildhall Art Gallery to see a selection of the City of London Corporation’s impressive (and free!) art collection, and the evocative remains of the Roman amphitheatre.

The Great Fire of London, 1666, after Waggoner
Recruiting in the Guildhall, Charles Wakefield, 1920
Go There...
... For surprisingly vivid eyewitness accounts - in oil paint - of London's triumphs, tribulations and proto-celebrities, and a chance to enter a Roman amphitheatre accompanied by rampant applause.

Must-Know Info
Opening Hours: Monday – Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday 12pm-4pm   Admission: free (small charges for temporary exhibitions)    Nearest tube: St Paul’s or Bank

Sir Matthew Hale - Fire Judge, 1670, John Michael Wright
Background
The Corporation’s art collection was ignited at a pivotal moment in London’s history: the Great Fire of 1666. In the wake of the devastating fire, which destroyed five sixths of the walled area of the medieval city and rendered at least 65 000 people homeless, a panel of judges was appointed to assess property claims. They worked three to four days a week without pay, listening and deciding on cases quickly and efficiently: without them, legal wrangling and contradictory interests would likely have fatally undermined London’s rebuilding and recovery. Instead, the City effected a Phoenix-like rise from the ashes: in less than ten years the entire area had been rebuilt (save for a few parish churches). In gratitude to the judges, the Court of Aldermen commissioned portraits of them to hang in the newly restored Guildhall. It was from this nucleus that the Guildhall collection grew over the centuries through commission, bequest and acquisition. While twenty of the twenty-two original portraits were damaged during the Blitz, two survive alongside a diverse collection that now numbers over 4500 works reflecting the city’s social, political, aesthetic and physical landscapes.  

The first Guildhall Art Gallery opened in 1885, with the aim of making the City of London Corporation’s accessible to public view. This educational and philanthropic gesture was a leitmotif of Victorian society, simultaneously responding to a widespread perception of an ‘increased Taste in Art’. The building was destroyed during an air raid in 1941 – luckily much of the collection had been safely stowed underground in Wiltshire – but it was only in 1988 that work began on a new permanent Gallery. While digging the foundations, the Museum of London Archaeological Service discovered the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, the existence and location of which had long been the subject of popular speculation. Immediately declared an Ancient Monument, the ruins precipitated a redesign of the building, which eventually opened in 1999 (with the Amphitheatre open to the public since 2002).

Interior, first floor: you can see the top of the Copley painting on the right.
Curation & Interpretation
Copley's massive painting spans two storeys
Of the vast collection, only about 250 works are on display at any one time. Currently, the main section of the gallery has a strong nineteenth century focus and curatorial approach: paintings by Millais, Leighton, Constable and Landseer amongst others jostle salon-style against walls of rich Pompeian red, reflecting the influence of the Royal Academy in the Victorian era. 


Spanning the height of two floors, pride of place is reserved for John Singleton Copley’s The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782, one of the nation’s largest oil paintings (543 x 754cm). Commemorating a dramatic British victory over Spanish forces for possession of Gibraltar (where the British had long been besieged), the painting was commissioned to honour the officers who had bravely withstood the siege, though it also included the relief fleet that arrived a month after the battle. Copley’s ability to coherently integrate multiple narratives, dramatic points of view, and named individuals was what won him the commission, but – with so many stories, personalities and interests to represent – it was also what led to the painting taking eight years to complete rather than the estimated two. Today, the monumental work acts as a connecting device between the upper level and the ground floor, which houses more of the expansive collection as well as temporary exhibitions.

The Roman amphitheatre with its flourescent gladiators and spectators.
Downstairs are urban and river scenes of the city, from "eyewitness views" of the Great Fire to grandeloquent ceremonial processions: a kind of pre-photographic scrapbook of the city’s life and times. Further down, a sub-basement contains the scant remains of Roman Londinium’s 6000-seater amphitheatre. Integrating this feature into the gallery must have been no mean feat, and, as a result, entering into its sparse and sepulchral darkness after the warm collusion of the galleries above is slightly jarring. Only the remnants of the eastern entrance’s stone walls remain, with some suggestions of draining flues and animal pens, so it must have been quite a challenge to make a coherent exhibition from the space. Joining the rest of the dots for your imagination are black and fluorescent green projections of the seating area and computer-meshed outlines of gladiators and spectators that make you feel like you’ve stepped into an early online role-playing environment. Curiously-stencilled light filters dapple the basement with spectral patterns and the cranky whirr of dusty technology, while, as you reach the end of the original entrance and enter the arena, the roaring applause of the crowd is cued. Plans are apparently afoot to reopen the amphitheatre as an entertainment venue, enlivening the echoing space once again with living applause (although spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy events are scheduled to replace public executions and fights-to-the-death).

Millais's popular companion paintings: First Sermon and Second Sermon
Best in Show
Don’t miss John Everett Millais’s charming pair of paintings First Sermon (1863) and Second Sermon (1864), featuring his five-year-old daughter Effie. In the first painting, sitting bright-eyed and upright in the old high-backed pews of All Saints Church, Kingston-on-Thames, Effie’s little face holds a look of concentrated decorum. The work was such a hit at the Royal Academy exhibition that Millais went on to paint a companion piece depicting the little girl’s second visit to church, in which the novelty has worn off: in his speech at the next Royal Academy Banquet, the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently framed it as a warning against “the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discourses”.

Anecdotal Aside
Much of the City of London Corporation’s collection consists of portraits of royals and other influential political and civic figures, including a visually arresting 8ft, £150 000 marble statue of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher which stopped me in my tracks. In 2002, the recently unveiled sculpture was decapitated with a cricket bat (and a metal bar, when the bat couldn’t hack it) by a man who had kept the weapon of assault tucked in his trousers to avoid security. At the subsequent trial, he claimed the act was a satirical vehicle to highlight such issues as “globalisation, the environment, religion, capitalism, the third world war, greed, the music industry, terrorism, Tony Blair, America and Afghanistan”. The work was restored and returned to display (behind bullet-proof glass) at the Guildhall Art Gallery: Perhaps if the statue had been in keeping with Thatcher’s moniker of the “Iron Lady”, the damage would not have been quite so costly…

Postman's Park: you can see the memorial panels under the roofed area.
Parting Shots
After a visit to the Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre, carry on along Gresham Street, turning right into Aldersgate. At the London City Presbyterian Church, step into Postman’s Park (near the site of the former headquarters of the General Post Office) where many postal employees would spend their breaks. Today it is better known for G.F. Watts’s Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, which commemorates individuals who died to save others. Begun in 1900, the memorial represents each through a hand-painted panel of several tiles with a description of the incident. Though short, they are often unexpectedly literary (William Donald of Bayswater… “drowned in the Lea trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weed”), intimate (Herbert Maconoghy, schoolboy from Wimbledon… “his parents absent in India, lost his life in vainly trying to rescue two schoolfellows…”) or bizarre (Sarah Smith, pantomime artist “who died of terrible injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion”). 

When the memorial opened, only four of the planned 120 plaques were in place: Watts added another nine during his lifetime, and his wife Mary oversaw the installation of another thirty-four. It was said that Watts had hoped that such extraordinary acts of heroism by ordinary people – what makes a nation truly great – would continue, and that society would continue to commemorate them rather than its material possessions, but it wasn’t until 2009 that a new tablet was added to the memorial. Leigh Pitt, a print technician from Surrey, died on 7 June 2007 rescuing a nine-year-old boy who was drowning in a canal. His colleague approached the Diocese of London to suggest adding him to the memorial and, since then, the Diocese has decided to continue considering suitable names to be added to the memorial in the future.

Thursday 10 May 2012

Time for a Cuppa: The Twinings Tea Bar & Museum

Twinings Tea Shop: pediment and statues added 1787
Executive Summary

In my adolescent years I was given to the wild excesses of Twinings Earl Grey, an imported box of which cost half my monthly allowance in Cape Town. So when I came across the original Twinings shop on Fleet Street recently while scouting the area for a local history adventure trail I was designing for kids visiting Dr Johnson's House, I found myself eagerly crossing the threshold…

Tea may be seen as quintessentially British - the ideal accompaniment to any social occasion and the first port of call in dealing with crisis - but until the late 17th century it was a beverage largely unknown in Europe. Nestled in Fleet Street, Twinings Tea Shop boasts a long and colourful history: a history visually announced by the languorous sculptures of two ‘Chinamen’ (rather cringeworthy by postcolonial standards) which flank the pediment above the door. Established in 1706, the Twinings tea shop is the oldest shop in London still owned by its founding family and located on the original site, not to mention holding the world’s oldest continually-used company logo. In the back of the shop is one of London’s tiniest museums, but well worth perusing over a nice cup of (free) Earl Grey.

Go there…
… To try a new or unusual tea in the free, help-yourself ‘Tea Bar’ while looking at nineteenth-century prints of monkeys harvesting tealeaves in Ceylon or checking out antique tea caddies (you, not the monkeys, though I wouldn't put it past them). It’s also a fun place to take tourists (the box sets of tea make great gifts too), or to meet a friend to catch up over a cuppa.

Must-Know Info
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday: 8.30am-7.30pm, Saturday – Sunday: 10am – 4pm  Closest Tube: Temple

Background
Jean Carolus, Afternoon tea, 1879 (oil on canvas)
Afternoon tea, c.2012. Still a stylish affair...
Straddling the border between Westminster and the City, the location of the Twinings shop on Fleet Street was a cunning move on the part of Thomas Twining, thronging as the area was with aristocrats who had been displaced by the Great Fire of 1666. And, given the prohibitive tax on tea, it was only the aristocratic who could initially afford to drink this exotic elixir, stored under lock and key in beautifully ornate caddies. With the knowledge and connections forged of working for an East India Company merchant in his early career, Thomas was well placed to corner the legitimate market, though tea smuggling was rife. In fact, tea leaves were cut and dyed with all manner of toxic substances to preserve and make it attractive for sale – the veritable heroin of its day. 
 
Royal Wedding blend, 2011
Tea grew to great popularity in the eighteenth century alongside the rise of tea gardens, giving the coffeehouse and pub a run for their money, and gradually changing the eating patterns and social habits of the nation. Previously the evening meal was taken in the late afternoon, but with the rituals that grew up around afternoon tea, such as accompanying it with cakes, buttered toast and elegant company (hoorah!), dinner became a much later affair.  Originally providing liquid refreshments in the form of tea, coffee and drinking chocolate alongside dry tea for sale, it was the latter that made the family’s fortune. Under Queen Victoria, the family received an exclusive Royal Warrant to provide its wares to the royal household. Centuries on, and very little has changed: a special commemorative tea was released in 2011 for the royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton (a delicate White Earl Grey with ‘light rose petal flavours’ and a ‘bright, sparkling amber colour’), and there’s no doubt a special release brewing for the Queen’s Jubilee. But Richard Twinings – Thomas’ grandson – was also instrumental in the passing of the Commutation Act, which dramatically lowered taxes on tea (from 119 to 12.5%), making it accessible to all classes and wiping out the tea smuggling underworld.

Curation & Interpretation

It’s worth noting that the tiny museum at the back of the shop does not purport to tell the history of tea (for that, you can catch glimpses at the London Docklands Museum, or hopefully a more comprehensive account once the defunct Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee reopens). Rather, it’s the museum of a dynasty, intertwined with the evolution of a brand. Portraits of notable Twinings patriarchs line the walls of the shop like the corridors of a country estate, each perching somewhat proprietarily over a niche of products for sale: pastel-hued tealeaves of variously fruity persuasions or the coveted tea of the month display.  
 
The portraits bear you along into the tea bar and museum at the back, the journey into the past completed by horse and carriage: printed across one wall is a C19th photograph of a delivery cart parked outside the store. Cases contain collections of notable tea caddies, family portraits, royal charters and early packaging, an eclectic mashup of objects and ephemera with little interpretation or evidence of curatorial intent. Perfect, however, for letting your eye alight on an unexpected treasure over a steaming mug of Lapsang Souchong.
 
Anecdotal Aside
Thomas Twinings’ son Daniel, who took over the family’s growing tea concern, was the first to export tea. He included amongst his patrons the governor of Boston. And we all know how THAT turned out.

Incidentally, what does 'tradition' taste like?
Parting Shots: The Taste of Tradition
In 1831, Twinings launched the Earl Grey brand, named after then Prime Minister Charles Grey (who is now more famous for the eponymous tea than for the electoral Reform Act of 1832 or his role in the abolition of slavery). The distinctive taste came from infusing black tea with the oil of the bergamot orange from South-East Asia. The origin of the blend has become a source of myth and legend. My pick is the idea that it was a serendipitous accident caused when a gift cargo of tea from China to Earl Grey absorbed the flavour of the Bergamot oranges stored alongside it on the long journey. In 2011, after almost 200 years of Earl Grey tea as the ultimate cipher of ‘genteel contentment’ (according to the Telegraph), Twinings decided to oomph up the citrus overtones, only to be barraged and boycotted by outraged teadrinkers across the nation declaring it was so bad they’d ‘rather drink PG Tips’ <cue collective intake of breath at the sheer audacity>. Twinings has since capitulated by (re)introducing Earl Grey: The Classic Edition. Now that’s what you call a storm in a teacup!

Saturday 17 March 2012

Dr Johnson: The Definitive Englishman

Twilight at Dr Johnson's House, 17 Gough Square
Portrait of Johnson by Joshua Reynolds
Disclaimer
I’ve recently started volunteering at Dr Johnson’s House, doing some education and interpretation work, which I’m really enjoying. It not only feels like a home, it also comes complete with a family of staff comprised largely of eccentric retired volunteers who always bring along A. a cardigan (it can be a tad chilly inside) B. a whole lot of good stories, and C. baked goods. As such, it’s hard not to be positively biased towards the place!

Executive Summary
If you’ve ever wondered about the man behind the most influential dictionary in the history of the English language, and the subject of the first modern biography (James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791), you’ll find the answers in a captivating four-storey Georgian townhouse just off Fleet Street. A short-sighted tea addict who went from relatively obscure Fleet Street journalist to renowned literary celebrity; a man who could coordinate the myriad meanings of over 42 000 individual words but still couldn’t balance his books (he continually took in waifs and strays even as the bailiffs arrived imploring him to pay outstanding bills for milk), Johnson (1709-1784) was a man wrought by complexities and contradictions. He’s also the second most-quoted Englishman after Shakespeare, given his ability to let rip a pithy phrase or witty rejoinder at a moment’s notice (always assiduously recorded by Boswell). After all, it was he who famously said ‘He who is tired of London, is tired of life’ – that ubiquitous sentence so beloved of city tourism marketers and makers of bespoke teatowels – which is reason enough to find out more about the man himself.

Go there…
The cosy parlour, with portrait of Francis Barber and self-portrait of Joshua Reynolds
…If you’re looking for a retreat from the hustle and bustle of The City. The peaceful interior invites you to sit in the chairs, on the window ledges and at the tables; to make yourself at home with Dr Johnson. It’s also worth spending some time flicking through the facsimile copies of the original 1755 dictionary and memorising some of the choicer definitions for ‘spontaneous’ use in dinner party conversation.

Must-Know Info
Opening hours: Monday – Saturday: 11am – 5pm, Closest Tube: Chancery Lane
Admission price: £4.50 adults, £3.50 concessions
  
Background
Pull up a chair in the library
Built in 1700, Johnson’s house - restored to the era in which he lived there (1748-1759) - is one of very few of its time remaining in London. While undoubtedly the building’s most famous tenant, he was followed by many others: at one point, the house became a hotel, followed by a printing works, and eventually fell into disrepair. Luckily, in 1911, and despite advice to stay well clear of the venture, liberal MP Cecil Harmsworth bought and restored the building, discovering that most of its original features (panelling, open staircase, wooden floorboards etc) remained unchanged. In restoring the house, Harmsworth was keen to encourage an atmosphere that was homely and inviting – you can pull up a chair and relax in the study or peer out on Gough square from the comfort of a windowseat – with period furniture and carefully-selected Johnsonalia, yet free of the cluttering ‘bric-a-brac’ typical of historic houses and traditional museums. Opened to the public in 1914, during the Second World War Dr Johnson’s House was used as a social club for the Auxiliary Fire Service. It sustained minor bomb damage but lived to tell the tale…

Portrait prints of Johnson's circle line the withdrawing room
Curation & Interpretation
Harmsworth’s guiding spirit remains in evidence curatorially. The house is pared down but cosy, giving a sense of Johnson’s rather modest means while still delivering evocative portals to his personal and professional life: a porcelain tea set owned by his dear friend Mrs Thrale; a portrait after Joshua Reynolds (one of Johnson’s closest friends), presumed to be of Johnson’s Jamaican-born manservant (and later heir) Francis Barber, who cheered the lexicographer immensely after the death of his wife, and who went on to become one of the first black schoolmasters in England; a great wooden chest that once belonged to famous actor (and prior pupil of Johnson’s) David Garrick, who staged Johnson’s neoclassical tragedy Irene at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1749. 

Good food, good conversation: the Literary Club
Each room features a roomcard with an overview of the use and appearance of the room, as well as detailed information on particular objects and images, while the recent addition of a superb audioguide provides another means of engaging with the space. A few discreet museum cases – the contents of which change periodically – highlight specific topics such as the arduous nine year process of compiling the Dictionary, but otherwise there are few overt interpretative interventions into the space. Most effective is the brooding cluster of portrait prints of Johnson’s various friends – artists, playwrights, professors, preachers and more – in the withdrawing room. The graphic gallery not only signals the extent of his intellectual and social circle (despite his curious tics and bad table manner, his trenchant conversation made him much in demand as a dinner party guest), it also has the effect of making you feel like you’ve just stumbled into one of his famous literary club meetings.

Why Dr Johnson’s Dictionary is Awesome
Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 was not the first English dictionary – dozens had already appeared in the previous 150 years. However, often their words were extremely rarified and not of much common use, or, like many in Nathan Bailey’s commercially-successful An Universal Etymological Dictionary (1722) they were undermined by definitions that were too general (‘Strawberry: a well-known fruit’; ‘Black: A colour’) or circular (‘Wash: to cleanse by washing’) to be of any help.  Johnson’s revolutionary idea was to capture the multitude of different ways in which individual words could be used, both literally and figuratively, by describing them in use. So he began his enterprise by reading hundreds of literary, legal, religious and medical texts by the writers he believed to be of the highest merit – Shakespeare, for example – and highlighting the best and most diverse uses of words he came across. It was up to his amanuenses to effectively ‘copy ‘n paste’ these examples alphabetically under various words in a manuscript that began to take on rather monstrous proportions (and was no doubt filled with margin notes, asterisks and haphazardly inserted pages), as Johnson encountered words like ‘put’, which not only defy specific rather than generalised explanation but also, apparently, encompass ‘66 primary meanings and 14 secondary notations’. The use of illustrative quotations and idiomatic language, as well as several levels of definition, has prevailed in dictionary production ever since, and led to the popular spin-off beloved of speechwriters everywhere: the dictionary of quotations (Thomas Jefferson used Johnson’s original dictionary in precisely this way).  

From Fry to Fue: How did Johnson handle 'naughty' words?
As the definitive English dictionary in Britain, North America and the colonies for the next one hundred and fifty years, Johnson’s dictionary had a profound influence on writers, philosophers, scientists, politicians and others from William Wordsworth to Mary Wallstonecraft, John Stuart Mill to Charles Darwin. As the fourth edition was at hand during the writing of the US constitution, Johnson’s dictionary is still consulted when lawyers debate the original meanings and intentions of specific terms, such as ‘declare’ and ‘war’ (I’m not even kidding: this came up as an issue in 2001 with the ‘War on Terror’, and again with Libya last year). As much as its reach extends beyond its original writing in both time and geography, the Dictionary is also a sociocultural artefact: it reflects an eighteenth century passion for organisation, categorisation and the conspicuous display of expanding, systematised knowledge (staged in the British Museum, public lecture halls, and institutions such as the Royal Society and Royal Academy). Finally, it contains the fingerprint of Johnson himself: his literary tastes, his hobbyhorses of moral disdain (‘Stockjobber: a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares’), his self-deprecating humour (‘Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge…’).

Anecdotal Aside
Statue of Hodge, Gough Square
On the opposite side of Gough Square from Dr Johnson’s House is a statue of a cat sitting on a dictionary, with a clutch of oysters at his paw. Johnson’s beloved cat Hodge – for whom he personally went out to buy said oysters (much to the chagrin of Boswell, who was unimpressed by this sentimentality) – is as much an object of pilgrimage as Johnson himself, and visitors sometimes come to the house entirely to ask for more information about the cat.

Parting Shots
There appears to be an innate human tendency, when confronted with a dictionary and five free minutes, to look up taboo words. In case you’re wondering, Johnson excludes the crudest of four-letter words, but includes ‘arse’ (‘a vulgar phrase’), bum, fart, turd, and piss. Johnson, praised by some ladies for excluding the most ‘naughty’ four-letter words, allegedly replied, ‘What, my dears! Then you have been looking!’

Sunday 26 February 2012

Leighton House Museum: A 'Palace of Art'

Unexpected gilt and mosaic interior: The Arab Hall
Unassuming red-brick façade: Leighton's House

Executive Summary

Home of C19th artist and socialite Frederic, Lord Leighton, Leighton House is renowned for its breathtaking gilded ‘Arab Hall’, an ‘Oriental’ fantasia that would induce sheer paroxysm in Edward Said. The house is also a shrine to a moment in British cultural history when a new aestheticism was being shaped in painting and design, and the status of the artist was being renegotiated in Victorian society. An evocative environment that fuses neoclassical paintings and Turkish tiles, taxidermied peacocks and William Morris wallpaper, it feels like the country house of an eccentric V&A curator who’s been slowly siphoning off the collection.

Leighton's busy studio, c.1880s
Go There…
… to impress a date or friend with unexpected splendour (the unassuming brick exterior gives nothing away) and to ponder the relics of late Victorian celebrity, which is infinitely more interesting than present incarnations.

Must-Know Info
Address: 12 Holland Park Road, London, W14 8LZ (closest tube: High Street Kensington)
Telephone:  020 7602 3316 Admission: £5 adult; £3 concessions
Opening Hours: Daily (except Tuesday): 10am -5.30pm; Guided tours on Wednesday at 3pm

Portrait of Leighton in Vanity Fair, 1872
Background
Frederic, Lord Leighton came from a well-off family who moved around the Continent throughout his childhood, exposing him to a rich variety of cultural influences which he complemented with studies in Florence followed by a few years in Paris, mingling with the likes of Ingres, Corot, Millet and Delacroix. A dedicated artist by the age of 15, by his mid-thirties Leighton was earning a generous income in England from his increasingly popular neoclassical history paintings (Queen Victoria bought one of his works when he was only 25). In a shrewd career move, Leighton created a home that would double as his calling-card – and befit the status of president of the Royal Academy – showcasing not only his own art, but an expansive collection of other artists’ works (Burne-Jones, Watts, Sargeant, Millais). It also embodied his eclectic interior aesthetic, and middle class individuals (for whom taste in interiors was at a significant point of malleability) as well as the working class could, at various points, tour the house or admire lavish images of it in the Victorian equivalent of Garden and Home.

Red flocked wallpaper in the dining room
Built incrementally between 1866 and 1895 – when the final addition of a top-lit picture gallery was completed – Leighton House was designed simultaneously as studio, spectacle and home (though the former two elements predominate). Art and sociality are clearly intended to mingle: his light-drenched first floor studio, for example, also sports a minstrels’ gallery, once bestrode by clients (for a better view of monumental work), guests, and the musicians who dazzled at Leighton’s A-list soirees.

Masharabiya latticework window from Egypt
Drawing of the Masharabiya, C19th
Curation, Restoration & Interpretation
After years of benign neglect and a multitude of incarnations – including being used as a children’s library, with the Arab hall’s sparkling dome disguised under layers of lining paper and emulsion – a recent £1.6 refurbishment presented the opportunity for the house to be restored to its former glory.  Leighton’s furniture and collection were auctioned off after his death: some items have found their way back, some replicas (such as a copy of Corot’s series Four Seasons) have been commissioned by artists and craftspeople still using the same technique as 150 years ago, and other period furniture has been brought in to recreate the spirit and appearance of the house as closely as possible. The veritable archive of black-and-white images (prints, drawings and photographs) of the house and collection in its heyday (for its interiors were as much the subject of discussion as its influential owner) gave curators and conservators a lot of material to work with. Meanwhile original samples found beneath utilitarian overpaints, allied to contemporary descriptions of the house’s curious hues, helped restore it to its splendid original colours: the sage green walls of the drawing room or the Pompeian red flocked wallpaper and scarlet floorboards of the dining room, where Leighton curiously ensured that his seat was always a little higher than those of his esteemed dinner guests.  The result is a resounding success, the only detraction the starkness of the garden that seems at odds with the house – though that may just be a consequence of visiting in February!

Spartan bedroom and simple single bed
There are various ways to engage with the house, the artist and his collection: Ipod tours available on the museum's website, guided visits, and lavishly produced information cards in each room. These offer informative but not invasive interpretative material, and it is equally possible to just wander from room to room, conjuring up a personal mental image of Leighton from a composite of visual delights. Even without the knowledge that Leighton burnt his private papers, never married and, although immensely popular, appeared to have only a few close and sustained friendships (his dying words, apparently, were ‘give my love to the Academy’), the ratio of lavish social/public to personal/private space – a single, rather Spartan bedroom that is hardly distinguishable from the butler’s bedroom in the basement, and, tellingly, no guest room – offsets the general opulence with a note of vulnerability.

Peacock blue!
Death of Brunelleschi, 1852
Best in Show
I could have lounged in the sun-drenched studio for hours, and it’s important to set this room at the centre of one’s visit, as it is from Leighton’s identity and practice as an artist that everything else flows. While much of his collection of objects and artworks are absent, the studio still has an industrious, slightly charged aura to it (as if a model, sheet loosely draped around bare shoulders, is just preparing to step inside), with maquettes, plaster casts, and sketches clustered on a window ledge, art lining the walls, and some of Leighton’s works poised on easels in the corner. I found the tender portraits of family members - his father and younger sister Augusta - worked into his youthful work Death of Brunelleschi (1852) touching, and having spent a lot of time in Florence, it's hard not to feel partial to the man who solved the greatest architectural quandary of the age. Don't miss the the taxidermied peacocks in the entrance hall: not only do they add to the exotic frisson of the ground floor interior (the Arab hall glints suggestively to your left as you enter), they also pick up the exact turquoise (I think it's actually called 'peacock blue') of the William de Morgan tiles that line the surrounding walls.

 Study of Dorothy Dene, 1884
 Anecdotal Aside
In later life, Leighton’s favourite model and muse was a poor young woman named Ada Alice Pullen, left to raise three younger siblings when her mother died. Pullen rechristened herself Dorothy Dene, a name which she felt better befit a star of the stage, a calling to which she aspired. Leighton provided much of her financial support, and also engaged the services of an elocution expert to attend to her ‘singularly unpleasant Cockney twang’, which he believed was an obstacle to her acting career. She would go on to appear on the London stage for a decade in second leads and supporting roles (though the limelight unfortunately eluded her) in works by Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Anyway, the story goes that the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who knew them both, used them as the models for Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1912), and its later musical adaptation My Fair Lady (1956). Whether or not the story is true, some of Leighton’s most memorable paintings are those modelled by Dene...

Sunday 12 February 2012

A 'Middling' Experience: The Geffrye Museum of the Home

Twilight at the Geffrye Museum of the Home
Porcelain tea set, Jingdezhen, China, c.1750-1780
Executive Summary 
 From teacups to textiles, pets to petit-fours (actually, I didn’t notice any mention of pets… perhaps I should bring this absence to the Museum’s attention), the Geffrye Museum offers a glimpse through the keyhole of middle class English domestic interiors from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

A hall in 1630
Go There If...
...You’re looking for retro décor inspiration, or a meander through time that offers a genteel afternoon tea en route. Don’t go there if the niggling insistence on calling the middle class ‘the middling sort’ (in order to avoid anachronism: the term ‘middle class’ only came into common use in the C19th ) gets on your nerves.

Must-Know Info:
Address: Kingsland Road,  London,  E2 8EA  (closest tube: Old Street)
Telephone: 020 7739 9893 Admission: Free
Opening Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday and bank holidays 12am – 5pm, Closed Mondays

Background
Housed in the former C18th almshouses of poor Shoreditch ironmongers, the Geffrye Museum opened in 1914, after the local council was persuaded by leading members of the Arts and Crafts movement to turn the buildings into a museum linked to the local furniture industry. The aim was to enlighten and inspire the local workforce with exempla of excellent artistic and technical value. Over time, the collection and mandate were widened to represent English domestic interiors more generally, and in 1991 the museum became an independent charitable trust, leading to new developments and displays.

Cutaway drawing representing a merchant's house, c1640
Curation & Interpretation
The Geffrye Museum has a very clear and coherent interpretative strategy: each period of domestic interior featured in the museum offers a wall panel with an overview (cunningly signalled to audiences with the large title: OVERVIEW), including a contextualising timeline and cutaway house drawing. Acting like hyperlinks from the main overview, you’ll find immaculately exhibited objects in glass display cases, audio stations for listening to extracts from related documents of the period (etiquette books, novels, etc), and replica items or material samples for you to touch (hoorah!) The imposing interpretative framework may suit visitors who want highly structured viewing experiences, but it tends to overshadow the possibility for eccentric and serendipitous encounters with objects. 

'Life in the Living Room', 1600-2000...
One of the benefits of the ‘overview’ room, however, is that by offering in-depth information, it forecloses the need for copious explanatory material that could distract from the reconstructed interior that follows. These reconstructed interiors are all ‘living rooms’ (parlours, drawing rooms etc) enabling the viewer to explore change and continuity across a single domain, though after a while you yearn for a C17th privy, a C20th suburban garage! The rooms offer two modes of interpretation side-by-side on a little stand: the descriptive (information about style, furnishings etc) and the anecdotal ('It is mid-afternoon, and the female members of the family have gathered in the drawing room. Mother catches up on matters of fashion and literature by reading her monthly magazine.’). And yet for all these 'living rooms', there is a tangible absence of life...
The Museum's paintings capture a sense of home better than its reconstructions

Highs & Lows
The curious thing for a Museum of the Home, is that it doesn’t feel homely at all. The reconstructed interiors - while admittedly beautiful and pristine - feel oddly sterile, bereft of the life, laughter and conversation of living, breathing inhabitants: a house, but not a home. Occasionally, a glass of milk or a tiny plate of dainties on a table hint in this direction, but they manage to look entirely calcified, rather than suggesting the imminent return of an inhabitant to reclaim their snack.  I realise that when you’re dealing with priceless original furniture and ornaments, you can’t invite visitors to lounge in the parlour with their feet on the table, and I'm not suggesting something tacky like wax models, but I’m convinced that one could subtly evoke a sense of lived presence nonetheless. Perhaps this could be achieved by using the odd sound installation - snippets of conversation, strains of music - or moderated light settings (they have appropriate lighting objects for each era, but these are merely on display) to create mood and convey how these affected the visual perception and mood of space and surfaces: the play of candelight on porcelain, a flickering gas lamp, or the more uniform illumination offered by electric light (currently the default mode for the whole museum). Adding an extra, sensory dimension to the display would give it that inexplicable, affective element that goes into making a house a home. 

Ugly, but comfy-looking velvet sofa, c.1928
More positively, the building in which the museum is housed is amazing and there is a great cafe and contemporary exhibition/education wing (when it's not the depths of winter, the garden is apparently rather wonderful too). I also really liked that there were spaces set aside for visitors to browse the library of related books, pull up a chair and read further if anything piqued their interest. There are diverse talks organised for adults (I was primarily at the museum for a lecture on Domesticity and Homosexuality in the Postwar Home, an event that is part of a festival tracing untold LGBT histories in London Museums) and great craft activities and online learning resources for kids. The Museum’s website is incredible, with a high quality interface for exploring the collection digitally.

The drawing room of an 'artistic' young couple, 1890
Best in Show
Don’t miss the etiquette and household management manuals – such as Mrs Beeton’s – scattered throughout the museum. And, in the more recent rooms, you can also trace changes in self-presentation by spotting the reading material (novels, magazines etc) carefully positioned to look ‘casual’.  My favourite period room was the 1890s drawing room of an ‘artistic’ couple (I don’t know why but it feels like the scare quotes hide a more nefarious reality), who have rejected mainstream taste for a heightened sensitivity to beauty in art and design. According to the informational panel: 
The ‘artistic’ young couple who live in this house have had a busy day visiting galleries and curiosity shops, and have purchased a piece of pottery from Liberty’s on Regent Street. It will be displayed on the overmantel above the fire. They are about to dress for dinner, and will then spend the evening at the theatre attending a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera 'The Mikado'. Ah, a couple after my own heart.
Loft-style apartment, c1998

Parting Shots
All in all, a somewhat 'middling' (defn: average, unremarkable, not at either extreme) experience, though unmissable if you're into interiors. Also would have expected a wider range of eccentric designer goodies in the gift shop...