It was so nice to see the small retrospective of the work of Jean Cooke at the Garden Museum. She was still very much around when I first went to the RA – diminutive, but terrifically feisty, always at the heart of discussions with strongly expressed views.

Here she is in 1958:-

John Bratby from the RCA:-

Hortus Siccus (1967):-

Pansies:-

A beautiful, pioneering exhibition.

One of the pleasures of visiting Greenwich yesterday was meeting Pieter van der Merwe, a former, long-standing curator at the National Maritime Museum, who turned out to be the brother-in-law of Ann Hartree, a person of considerable influence in the craft revival in the late 1970s through the establishment of the Prescote Gallery in a barn on Anne Crossman’s family farm west of Banbury. She held the first exhibition of Romilly’s work in maybe 1982, but closed the gallery in 1985 and moved to Edinburgh. We lost touch with her. It turned out that Pieter had written an obituary of her for the Independent which wasn’t published and I am publishing it now in her memory, together with a photograph of her in her youth:-

Ann  Hartree was a key figure in the British crafts scene of the late 1970s, when she created the Prescote Gallery in Oxfordshire and made it a nationally significant showcase for ‘designer-makers’ in furniture, textiles, bookbinding, jewellery, ceramics and glass, and toy-making, with painters and sculptors also represented. Any list would be invidious –and long– but includes names such as Fred Baier, John Makepeace, Anne Sutton, Terry Frost, Richard Batterham, Steven Newell and David Linley: the last two, and others, had their first solo exhibitions there.

Gallery impresario, however, was a late departure for someone who started as a talented and trained musician, an area to which Hartree later returned as an active promoter in Edinburgh.  She was born in 1933, elder of two children of Arthur Eddy, an accountant, and his Scottish first wife, Nancy Hamilton. With her younger brother John (later permanently hospitalized as a severe epileptic),  Ann stayed with their father after that marriage broke down and, starting in 1941, gained four more half-siblings by his second to May Lindsay. By then, partly owing to WWII, she largely lived – holidays included – at the boarding school in Seaford run by her two paternal aunts. One of them, Enid, was musical (as was Ann’s mother) and a friend of Dame Myra Hess, who left her a Steinway grand piano later passed on to Ann, but it was an unsatisfactory childhood and made her a challenging as well as driven personality. In 1951 she joined the Royal College of Music to study piano and viola, and from 1954 began teaching music at Gresham’s, Holt, in Norfolk – a boys’ boarding school where she rapidly became an inspiring acting head of the subject, and stayed in lifelong touch with some of her pupils. She regretted leaving after her marriage in September 1956 to Richard Hartree – a good amateur French-horn player – whose career in industry took them to south Wales, where their elder daughter was born in 1958. A son and second daughter followed after the next work move in 1959 to live at Cropredy, near Banbury. There they met the politician Richard Crossman and his wife, with children of similar ages, and from 1965 Ann resumed part-time music teaching and played first viola in the Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra. Friends gained at this time included its conductor Guy Wolfenden, the painter Terry Frost and family, and John Makepeace, then making furniture for Prescote Manor, Anne Crossman’s inherited 16th-century family farm.  From 1967 to 1970 the Hartrees were in Montreal, before returning to Oxfordshire where Ann’s fundraising enabled conservation of medieval murals in St John’s church, Hornton, and she began collecting work by craftspeople exhibiting at the Oxford Gallery under Joan Crossley-Holland. By the time Dick Crossman died in April 1974 (his son Patrick following by suicide in 1975) the Hartree marriage was also under strain. The two Ann(e)s then joined forces, with Mrs Crossman using the publishing royalties from her husband’s political diaries to convert farm outbuildings as the Prescote Gallery. She ran its buttery, serving up to 300 people a day, while Ann Hartree fitted out and directed the  gallery itself, including monthly changes of exhibition, with a stable of talent of eventually over 125 designer-makers and artists, all of whom went on to further success. Lord Donaldson, then Minister of the Arts, opened it in May 1977 and from 1982 there were also annual Prescote shows at the Warwick Arts Trust in London and others more occasional at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and the Edinburgh Festival. The project coincided with increased arts funding under the Labour government and the early years of the Crafts Council (est. 1971), but this did not have its own gallery until 1991, making Prescote a leader in the field during its seven years of existence.

It closed in 1985 when the Hartrees divorced and Ann moved to Edinburgh for family reasons, but for a time continued mounting shows there under the Prescote banner. Her later years were again more occupied in promoting music, both personally and as a director of the Hebrides Ensemble (1993–2001). Her two successive flats in the New Town became frequent rehearsal spaces for musician friends, with small orchestras sometimes squeezed in amid her ecletic mix of Prescote furniture, art and design, home clutter and the hard-worked grand piano. For thirty years she presided as both generously hospitable supporter of those who shared her enthusiasms and a grand-matriachal agent provocateur, much loved but often contrarily infuriating. When cancer recurred after successful early treatment, her decision that further cure was worse than the disease was typically resolute, and she insisted that only immediate family know of or attend her funeral. Others from all aspects of her life, and as far as Italy and Hong Kong, defied her self-effacing perversity at a crowded memorial concert in Edinburgh on 14 April 2018. ‘All stuff and nonsense!’ would have been her familiar verdict, while also secretly enjoying favourite pieces by Grieg, Schubert and Brahms, played by talented professional friends – including on the Steinway, which she had made a final gift of to one of them.

Ann Hartree (née Hamilton-Eddy), musician and crafts gallerist; b. London, 8 April 1933, d. Edinburgh, 28 October 2017; m. Richard Hartree [1931–2020], 1 September 1956 (div. 1985); he and their children (two d. one s.) survived her.

Pieter van der Merwe

I have been reading about attitudes to France during the reign of William and Mary and Marlborough’s wars, so was pleased to see the extraordinarily aggressive nationalism evident in Thornhill’s iconographic programme for the Greenwich Painted Hall. William and Mary on clouds of glory:-

Greenwich Hospital as a monument to liberty, charity and protestantism:-

Britain’s wealth built on its overseas empire:-

It’s a surprisingly aggressive bit of propaganda:-

I spent the day on a tour of Wren’s Greenwich, organised by the Society of Architectural Historians. We started at tye Queen’s House, whose history is itself pretty complicated, looking so coherent, but actually with an immensely complicated building history which Gordon Higgott expertly unravelled. Originally commissioned by Anne of Denmark, as I understand it, as a hunting lodge, facing south on to the deer park with private apartments to the north and a large room between the two halves, straddling the main road.

I was most interested by the painted decoration in the Queen’s Bed Chamber, not least because the ceiling painting is apparently unattributed, which seems surprising given its sophistication and the house is so well documented (doesn’t look like Thornhill to me):-

Here is Inigo Jones by William Dobson (c.1642):-

A view of the Queen’s House:-

And the impressive painted decoration in the curved part of the ceiling of the Queen’s Bed Chamber by Edward Pearce Sr.:-

An interesting case study of successful restitution based on careful documentation and international collaboration (by the way, Factum Foundation have well developed plans to take on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry).

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/bakor-monoliths-nigeria-restitution-chrysler-museum/

I attended the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Wren, an unexpectedly impressive service, helped by being under the dome of St. Paul’s and a reminder that he was born into a high Anglican, if not Laudian tradition, in the rectory at East Knoyle, moving aged two to the Deanery at Windsor, which meant that he could observe the court at close quarters. He was described by Isaac Barrow after the Restoration as ‘a miracle of a man, nay, even something divine’. And his first architectural work was for his uncle, the Bishop of Ely. So, he was presumably comfortable discussing the liturgical requirements of the new City Churches and of St. Paul’s itself.

Yesterday, I explored the gardens and grounds of Parham House in its beautiful setting in a vast deer park just to the north of the South Downs.

Today, I explored the house a very atmospheric set of rooms, whose character seems to reflect the tastes of the 1920s and 1930s when the house was bought by Clive and Alicia Pearson who bought good and appropriate furniture and presumably asked Oliver Messel to paint the decoration in the Long Gallery:-

I have never been to Parham before, the site of this year’s Garden Museum Literary Festival. Almost as enjoyable as the talks was the opportunity to explore the garden, which is unexpectedly extensive, looking out towards the Downs:-

As a small postscript to my recent post on the Hopkins’s work on Manchester City Art Gallery, it is probably worth adding that they had been involved in museum projects for a long time before they renovated the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2002.

First, as I have already mentioned, they drew up a Master Plan for the development of the V&A in 1987, following the creation of the Board of Trustees as a result of the National Heritage Act in 1983. This was the beginning of a big change in the way the national museums operated in which they were required to manage (and fund) their buildings. I am not sure how much remains of the Hopkins’ Master Plan, but I suspect that it was very important in a number of ways: in treating the complex of buildings as a totality; and developing a Master Plan for its future development for the first time. The only bit I remember being done was the opening up of the so-called Index Corridor which runs east-west beyond the entrance hall with prominent graphics by Pentagram, which was symbolically important in helping visitors navigate their way round the building, but the total renovation of the V&A has continued to be guided by an overall Master Plan, greatly to its benefit.

The second huge project they were involved with was a project to develop the Royal Academy in the late 1990s. They won a competition in 1998 when Philip Dowson was President to connect the main building to the building in Burlington Gardens which had been the Museum of Mankind and which the Royal Academy was negotiating to buy. It was a hugely ambitious project which survives in the model held by the Royal Academy:-

The idea was to connect the two buildings with a glass atrium between the two (there is a drawing in the RA Collections which is reproduced in Nicholas Savage’s excellent book on Burlington House: Home of the Royal Academy of Arts). The costs of the project grew to (from memory) £89 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund turned down the application for funding, which killed the project, much to Michael Hopkins’s frustration. But I suspect that some of the thinking helped inform the work they did so successfully in Manchester.

Howard Smith, one of my readers, has tried to post a comment about Sir Michael Hopkins, but has not been able to and the truth is that I don’t know how the system works myself, so I am posting it myself, because it refers to one of their works which is less often referred to involving the total renovation and reconstruction of the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2002 (I might add that I remember visiting it myself not long after it opened and being very impressed by the way it combined the original Charles Barry building with the old Athenaeum behind, a model of sympathetic and intelligent stitching together of two historic buildings and an important moment in marking the move of the Heritage Lottery Fund as it then was from supporting prestige London projects to a much wider distribution of funding):-

MANCHESTER ART GALLERY

Michael Hopkins and Partners were responsible for a significant expansion of Manchester Art Gallery, completed in 2002 for the Commonwealth Games. This is their only art gallery project, as far as I am aware and is not as well known as their other buildings in the UK. I was a member of the curatorial team that helped deliver it. The brief was complex: to link two important buildings by Sir Charles Barry, the Grade I City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum, respecting their integrity whilst creating a new building on an adjacent car park site. This was achieved by inserting a glazed atrium, enabling views through from adjacent streets that features an imposing central staircase (echoing that in Barry’s Art Gallery) flanked by exposed lifts. A dramatic bridge with glass-block floor is at first floor level. Hopkins’s muscular modernism of steel and glass contrasts successfully with the beautiful mellow stonework in Italianate style of the former rear of the Gallery. The new building has two floors of galleries and educational facilities. The existing historic galleries were sensitively refurbished to current standards, retaining elements of decoration from an earlier scheme. The Athenaeum’s first and second floor (formerly a members’ lecture theatre) were converted into display spaces.

Viewing the Art Gallery’s façade little is revealed of the extensive changes but walking around the now completed street block, one encounters the new build exterior: exposed concrete frames, bronze sub-frames and stone panels complementing both historic buildings. Throughout the new build, Hopkins and his team devoted tremendous care in the detailed design, for example with the lighting modules and subtly modulated cast concrete ceiling panels. They provided Manchester with a first-class gallery that plays an important role in the city’s cultural life.