Category Archives: Uncategorized

William Morris Gallery

After walking in Epping Forest, we stopped off at the William Morris Gallery, which occupies Water House, the third house that Morris lived in in Walthamstow, after being born in Elm House in 1834, then moving to Woodford Hall in 1840, and to Elm House in 1847, following the death of his father.   I hadn’t been there since the exceptionally intelligent redisplay by Pringle, Richards, and Sharratt, which – deservedly – won Museum of the Year Award.   This was a detail of the wood carving on a Morris and Company bench:-

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A detail of his sample books:-

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Epping Forest

After the glories of the trees in Devon last weekend, we decided this weekend to explore Epping Forest, that area of ancient woodland which connects Chingford to Theydon Bois.   We parked on Golding’s Hill and found it surprisingly easy to get lost in the rides through the woodland copses:-

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Rotterdam (2)

We spent all day at the Kunsthal, which had kindly invited the entire senior management of the RA to compare notes on our respective operations, as well as provide somewhere to discuss key priorities for next year.   They run 25 exhibitions a year on a staff of only 38, on subjects which are wider ranging than ours, including Dinosaurs, James Bond and Jean-Paul Gaultier as well as Munch, Giacometti and Henry Moore.   It’s in a building by Rem Koolhaas, opened in 1992.   The big difference is that 47% of their funding comes from the city, and less than 1% from Friends:-

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Rotterdam (1)

I wandered back to the hotel by way of Museumpark, a big civic space intelligently laid out by OMA, connecting the Boijmans Museum to Het Neuwe Instituut and the Kunsthal:-

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Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

I had only half an hour before the Boijmans Museum closed:  not nearly enough time to see a major European collection, austerely, but beautifully displayed in spookily empty galleries.   I liked The Last Supper by Jörg Ratgeb:-

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More Trees (2)

I have been wondering whether or not to post photographs of Devonshire trees.   But am now doing so as a record of their autumn magnificence:-

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Albert Irvin RA

I wish I had known Bert Irvin better.   He had a studio just down the road on Stepney Green, upstairs in an old Jewish School.   But I never saw it.   I only saw him at gatherings at the RA, where, I now realise, he was a central figure of the postwar generation whose experience of art was formed by exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism at the Whitechapel and Tate.   One of a group who met at Northampton School of Art in the early 1940s.   400 people came to pay their respects at the memorial event at Tate Britain which is testimony to how much he was liked and his work admired.

Albert Irvin RA, Blue Anchor, 1989. Acrylic on canvas. 2130 x 3050 mm. © Royal Academy Collection.

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Chatsworth (8)

Having burdened my readers with multiple posts about Chatsworth last week, and particularly about the garden statuary, I am now able to say, thanks to information supplied by the Chatsworth archive, that none of the statues I photographed are from the original garden layout.   The original statues were presumably cleared away in the fashion for the picturesque later in the eighteenth century.   Those that are in the garden now were all bought by the sixth Duke who was a passionate and knowledgeable collector of sculpture both for his Sculpture Gallery and outdoors.

Diana and Apollo are recorded as being on the South Lawn in the sixth Duke’s diary on 20 February 1841.   They were bought from Francesco Bienaimé on 2 March 1841 (£100 each):-

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Dingle’s Fairground Museum

In the afternoon I walked through the Devon countryside to the local farm which has been converted into a museum of the fairground with ageing dodgems and roundabouts which have been rescued from street fairs, complete with detailed provenance, and ancient one-armed bandits from the 1930s which were legalised in 1960:-

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Early morning in Devon

I got up early to see the first light frost on the grass, the newly cut hay below the lawn and the trees in early autumn:-

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