I have been reading an excellent book, Plaster Monuments and the Power of Reproduction by Mari Lending, a Norwegian architectural historian (it wasn’t on my reading list). It’s about the desire on the part of nineteenth-century museums to collect reproductions at least as much as originals in order to demonstrate the history of art in as systematic and comprehensive a way as possible.

Things I have learned from it:-

1. Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture was inspired by a collection of casts in Dresden.

2. The collection of casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was acquired before the majority of the cast collection at the RA by bulk order from Monsieur Getti, who was the official caster at the Musee Napeoleon (i.e. the Louvre).

3. Lord Elgin had casts made of the Elgin marbles before he removed them. These were used to show how much the originals had corroded between the time when they were acquired and an article in the Illustrated London News in 1929. This was partly why Duveen wanted them ‘restored’ when they were installed in his new galleries.

4. Friedrich August Stüler’s Neues Museum acquired its collection of casts from the Berlin Academy.

5. At the time of the foundation of the Metropolitan Museum, it was expected to be a collection of casts, not originals, on the grounds that it is ‘harder and harder to get hold of the chefs d’oeuvres of antiquity’. America was expected not to try and create ‘ideal and impossible museums, filled with masterpieces of original art, but museums mainly composed of reproductions’.

6. Edward Robinson, the fifth Director of the Metropolitan Museum, had previously been Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but stood down when Isabella Stewart Gardner and others got rid of the casts from the MFA in 1905 while Robinson was away in Europe. He was promptly appointed Curator of Classical Art at the Met. and its Director in 1910.

7. One of the greatest collections of architectural casts, still extant, is the Hall of Architecture in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which was assembled at great speed at the behest of Andrew Carnegie. But no sooner had the Hall opened than John Beatty, who had assembled, lamented how the ‘Institute’s dependence on casts, reproductions, and paintings of a rather sentimental Victorian tradition would seem to be one of the weaknesses of the permanent collections’. This is the first sign of the institutional shift in taste against casts, motivated partly by changing tastes, but also by the increasing difficulty of obtaining casts, due to the reluctance of museums to allow their monuments to be copied. The change in attitude was evident at the same time in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston’s determination to deaccession its cast collection.

8. Charles Swann much preferred his experience of the portal of the church at Balbec in the Musée de sculpture comparée in the Trocadéro to his experience of the real thing, frustrated by having to endure the reality of its surroundings.

9. Walter Benjamin was the first person to translate Proust into German. Benjamin saw the usefulness of photography in the experience of works of art since it ‘can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens’.

10. Josef Albers chucked out all the casts he discovered on arrival at Yale’s School of Fine Arts in 1950 (the fine arts as a title was also chucked out and he made the nude models pose in their underpants and bra), but Paul Rudolph retrieved them from the basement of Street Hall to enliven the wall surfaces of his new brutalist Art and Architecture building.

The book is incidentally illustrated with wonderful images of cast collections, including those of the the Soane Museum, Crystal Palace and the Met (before and when they were sold off).

In its honour, I am posting a picture of our redisplay of Thomas Lawrence’s collection of Italian architectural casts which was previously boarded up in the RA Schools where the cast collection apparently narrowly escaped being chucked out as recently as 2000:-

And our cast of the Farnese Hercules, given to the RA by the Prince Regent in 1815, which has come out into the daylight to animate and vitalise the experience of the basement vaults:-

The architects involved in the development of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry have, not surprisingly, launched a defence of their scheme in Architect’s Journal, which attempts to be scrupulous within the requirements of the current owner, a New York based venture capitalist who has been behind the development of Soho House.   There are some minor inaccuracies.   The Factum Foundation scheme is not for a pure bell foundry;  it recognises that church bells are a declining market.   Instead, it proposes maintaining the existing use of the bell foundry as a fine art foundry, including the making of bells, and the character of the building as an economically sustainable, working environment, rather than turning the historic parts of the bell foundry into a wine bar and losing manufacturing from Whitechapel.  

Under these circumstances, I don’t think Historic England should support change of use, not least because they are compromised by having acted as paid advisors, particularly now that they know there is an economically viable alternative:-

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/31/44-architects-defends-plans-for-whitechapel-bell-foundry-scheme/10034093.article

We walked down to the other end of the beach across the fields to the tumbledown barn and then along the track which runs alongside the warren with distant views across the estuary towards Caernarvon:  sea holly and evening primrose and then across the dunes to the sea:-

Back through the forest:-

This article has only just appeared online and seems to get closer to Chipperfield’s intentions – his doggedness and lack of obvious ego (at least in this project) than anything else so far written about Burlington Gardens:-

http://www.designcurial.com/news/royal-academy-by-david-chipperfield-6274523/#.W21T2G2qpPM.twitter

I was worried that the vegetable stall was defunct, but this morning I found multiple varieties of tomato for sale – mostly, Tastyno, but, also, a packet of Bloody Butchers and the larger Octavio, plus fresh runner beans and courgettes, all grown, I presume, on the farm behind and available on a system of trust whereby one puts payment in the box alongside:-

Off to The Marram Grass for lunch:-

Everything is local:  Anglesey seabass, Anglesey mackerel, Menai mussels.   Anglesey water ‘filtered by an ancient layer of glacial gravel’. Snowdon Lager. Local wines from the Conwy Valley (£60 a bottle, so I’m not trying it for lunch).    They’ve got grapes growing on the veranda outside:-

This is the Mackerel Mousse with sheep’s yoghurt, goat’s cheese, Jaspel’s cider jelly and preserved local fruit:-

And mussels:-

I used to go there for breakfast to use the wifi.

I have been pondering the report in today’s Times that museum chiefs are perplexed that the numbers of people visiting the London museums are down. But this is surely inevitable given anxieties about terrorism: nobody from Tunbridge Wells is going to be particularly keen to come to London if there is a chance of being blown up, even if they can get there, given the state of Southeastern trains (it may not have escaped people’s attention that the teenager recently prosecuted for terrorism had been planning to blow up the British Museum). The other issue which is more problematic is the way that international tourism gradually creates its own special places, which domestic tourists and people living in cities then try and avoid. I feel this myself when I come out of Westminster tube station. You are in tourist-ville. The National Gallery has generally managed to avoid this atmosphere, but Trafalgar Square has not. The answer surely is what one does to attract non-metropolitan visitors, rather than lament their absence.

Morning:-

Evening:-

The end of the day:-

I have always been fascinated by Bodorgan, a house which stands prominent on the Malltreath Estuary, but is very severely secret, closely guarded from all forms of public access by the fierceness of its gamekeepers.

The house was apparently designed by Samuel Cooper, who moved to Beaumaris in 1776 and worked as assistant and clerk of works to Samuel Wyatt at Baron Hill, the other big house on the island. After finishing work at Bodorgan in 1783, he drew up designs for Plas Newydd.

I had been told that one gets a good view of the house from the footpath on the other side of the estuary. This is not strictly true. There is a gap in the trees from which one gets a very distant view of the garden façade and the boathouse on the shore below, but this view leaves one not much the wiser as to the character of the house (and this is taken with the nearest I have to a telephoto lens):-

But at least we had a nice walk through the woods:-

And got a good view of the estuary itself:-

I have been reading about Caspar Purdon Clarke, the fourth Director of the V&A, who took over from John Henry Middleton in 1896 and left in 1905 to become – unsuccessfully – the Director of the Metropolitan Museum.

I hadn’t realised that he began life as a student of the National Art Training School in South Kensington before joining the Office of Works as an architect, working on the Houses of Parliament before transferring to the Works Department of the South Kensington Museum and travelling to Egypt to help on the construction of James Wild’s Church of St. Mark in Alexandria. In June 1874, he went as Superintendent of Works on the Legation in Teheran, where he was able to act as an agent for the acquisition of Persian objects for Christopher Dresser and recommending the creation of plaster reliefs of the Achaemenid stone reliefs at Persepolis. In 1876, he applied for a post as Assistant Keeper, but was turned down. It was only in 1883 that he became Keeper of the Indian Museum, transferring to the art collections in 1892.

He was interested in inherited design traditions and how they are passed down within the building profession through practice and word-of-mouth (this was part of the philosophy of the National Art Trining School), which, not surprisingly, made him a popular figure as a Freemason on both sides of the Atlantic.