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Executions @ the Museum of London Docklands

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy suit worn by a female and male executionee:

  • on the left, the ‘white muslin gown, a handsome worked cap and laced boots’ worn by Eliza Fenning who was hanged for attempting to poison her employers
  • to the right, the ‘superb suit of white and silver, being the clothes in which he was married’ worn by Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was hanged on 5 May 1760 for the murder of his steward John Johnson, whom he shot in a rage

Final clothing section in the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

(The door on the right of this photo is one of the three doors you had to pass through to enter Newgate Prison. The architect George Dance thoughtfully positioned swags of chains and shackles over the main entrance door at Newgate to terrify and intimidate new prisoners.)

I’d never thought about what happened to the bodies of the hanged after their execution. Turns out that from the mid-16th century the bodies of executed criminals were given to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection and medical research. The thought of being dissected filled the condemned with horror. Fights could break out at executions as friends and family of the deceased would attempt to stop the surgeons claiming bodies. In the same spirit I had no idea that life sized casts of the heads of the executed were often made – there’s a selection of them on display here, which, as the nineteenth century progressed, were used to study ‘criminal’ physiognomy. Alternatively, the casts of notorious criminals were kept in a special display at Newgate where they could be viewed by visitors, who included Charles Dickens.

Death masks at the ‘Execution’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I knew that broadsheets and leaflets were often sold at executions which claimed to give the last speech of the condemned man, along with a ballad poem describing his fate – but I’d never had the opportunity to read some of these before. Ditto the last letters condemned men wrote to their loved ones. There’s not only letters but rings and coins sent by those condemned to transportation instead of execution in the mid-nineteenth century.

I knew that prisoners in gaol were often shackled but I don’t think I’ve seen a collection of the different types of handcuffs, shackles and ‘waist belts’ used for this purpose on display before. Apparently the weight of shackles prisoners were manacled with sometimes meant they could barely move. As well as direct punishment of the prisoner, the sound of all this metalwork clanking through the echoing vaults of the grim prisoner had a demoralising and terrifying psychological effect on other inmates. The practice of routinely keeping prisoners shackled in irons ceased in the 1820s.

Shackles and handcuffs used in Newgate Prison at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I’ve certainly never seen a real actual gibbet before and I didn’t know that they didn’t come in a standard size, but that a gibbet ‘tailor’ took the corpse’s measurements and built the gibbet to perfectly fit. In line with the state of the art interactivity of the exhibition, the display of this real-life gibbet had a gruesome audio soundtrack with the noise of flies buzzing round the rotting corpse.

Wrought iron gibbet cage from ‘Executions’ at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I was at first puzzled why the gibbet was so elaborate but realised that a lifeless body would flop in all directions unless its limbs were very strictly compassed and controlled. The effect can be seen in this illustration of the body of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.

Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex, following his execution in 1701

More criminals were gibbeted in the greater London area than elsewhere in the country. The bodies of murders and highwaymen were gibbeted on heaths located on the outskirts of London and main highways into the capital, especially on the wide open Hounslow Heath which became famous for the number of gibbets.

Capital punishments

Between the first recorded execution at Tyburn in 1196 and the last public execution in 1868, there were tens of thousands of executions in London. Nobody knows the precise number because records weren’t kept before the 18th century.

Right at the start there’s a wall-sized video which shows a scrolling list of all the offences which carried the penalty of capital punishment. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death in a list which became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. London’s courts condemned more people to die than those in the rest of the country combined.

Scrolling list of capital offences at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

Types of execution

Most ordinary criminals were hanged. More florid ways of being despatched were reserved for VIPs.

1. Drawing, hanging and quartering

An ancient punishment for treason, the prisoner was ‘drawn’ or dragged from prison to the execution site, hanged until they were nearly dead, then castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. Thee practice continued into the 19th but by then prisoners were hanged first and then beheaded.

there’s a vivid engraving of the fate of the Gunpowder Plotters who, after being found guilty in 1606, were publicly executed over two days in St Paul’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where they were dragged by horses through the streets, hanged, castrated, disembowelled and cut into pieces.

2. Burning

In 1401 an Act of Parliament made burning the punishment for heresy. It aimed to ‘strike fear into the minds’ of people who questioned the teachings of the church. Women convicted of murdering their husbands or counterfeiting could also be burned to death. By the 18th century they were strangled first.

The exhibition features illustrations of the Protestant martyrs burned at the stake at Smithfield. Over 280 religious dissenters were burned at the stake during the five-year reign of Mary I, known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Besides Smithfield others were burned to death at Stratford-le-Bow, Barnet, Islington, Southwark, Uxbridge, Westminster and throughout England.

Woodcut depicting John Rogers, the first of the ‘Marian martyrs’, being burned at the stake in Smithfield (1555)

3. Boiling

Death by boiling was a rare punishment. In 1531 a cook named Richard Roose poisoned the porridge of the household of Bishop John Fisher, causing two deaths. Henry VIII was so disgusted he declared this crime treason and Parliament passed the ‘Acte for Poysoning’ ordering those who murdered by poison to be boiled to death. Roose was boiled at Smithfield. Eleven years later Margaret Davies suffered the same fate for poisoning four people. Edward VI abolished this execution method in 1547.

4. Beheading

Members of the nobility condemned for treason were often beheaded out of respect for their high status, rather than suffering the agony and humiliation of drawing, hanging and quartering. Most beheadings took place in public on Tower Hill before a large crowd.

5. Hanging

Most ordinary criminals were executed by hanging. There appear to have been two methods. Initially the condemned were placed under a gallows (in the very early period just a tree) standing on a cart. A rope was noosed round their neck and the cart slowly pulled away by horses or oxen till the condemned fell off the back of it and was left dangling. This could be a fairly slow, excruciating death. Laster the ‘short drop’ method was introduced, where the condemned stood on a raised platform and, with the flick of a handle, a trapdoor opened underneath them, dropping them through and making it more likely their neck would snap with the sudden ratchet of the noose. But both methods were far from foolproof and family members or the executioner often pulled the legs of the hanged person to speed up their death.

Places of execution

In the City of London you are never more than 500 metres from a former place of execution. London was packed with them. Early on in the exhibition there’s a useful wall-sized video, with a bench to sit and watch it, which shows maps of London from early medieval times onwards, showing not only ow its street plan grew and developed (interesting in itself) but where the ever-growing number of places of execution were sited (indicated on the maps by entertaining ochre blotches of blood).

1. Smithfield

In the medieval and Tudor periods Smithfield was used for various public purposes, including a livestock market, fairs and executions, as in the burning of the Protestant martyrs mentioned above.

2. Tyburn

Tyburn stood slightly to one side of the current position of Marble Arch at the north-east tip of Hyde Park. It served as London’s principal site of execution for around 600 years. The earliest account records the execution of William FitzOsbert in 1196. Until the late 18th century it was a semi-rural location, easy to get to and easy for crowds to assemble and watch the spectacle.

A huge amount of popular tradition and iconography grew up around the public hanging of criminals at Tyburn. The exhibition contains umpteen engravings and pictures, stores and facts, not least about the carnivalesque atmosphere which reigned along the route of carts transporting convicted criminals from Newgate Prison, via St Giles’s-in-the-Fields church and then along what is now Oxford Street. Many of the condemned went to their execution drunk, in fact it became customary for the cart to stop off at a pub at St Giles where the executioner and victim shared a last pint of beer. This became known as ‘the St Giles Bowl’.

Bernard Mandeville wrote that ‘all the way from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for whores and rogues of the meaner sort.’

In 1961 construction began on new pedestrian subways by Marble Arch and the excavators found large quantities of human bones around the site of the Tyburn gallows which archaeologists presume are the remains of the executed who were buried where they died.

Execution at Tyburn by Thomas Rowlandson (1803)

A lot of slang and catchphrases grew up about the place. The scaffold was known as ‘the Tyburn tree’. To ‘take a ride to Tyburn’ (or simply ‘go west’) was to go to one’s hanging. The ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’ was the public hangman while ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’ was the act of being hanged because of the wriggling, dancing movement of the hanged in their last moments.

The last execution at Tyburn was of John Austin, a highwayman, on 3 November 1783.

3. Newgate

With the closure of Tyburn London’s public executions moved to the open space in front of the rebuilt Newgate Prison. This was to be London’s principal site of public execution for the next 85 years until public executions were discontinued in 1868.

The move meant the end of the great public procession from Newgate to Tyburn. It was an assertion by the authorities of their control over the timing and atmosphere of the executions. The Newgate scaffold featured two beams with capacity for up to 12 hangings.

Newgate Prison itself closed in 1902. The demolition of one of London’s most iconic buildings aroused considerable public interest and relics of the prison were sold at auction. A keystone from the main doorway is on display here, as is one of the heavy wood-and-metal doors (see first photo).

4. Horsemonger Lane

Public executions at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark took place on the roof of the gatehouse, making them highly visible to spectators.

5. Tower Hill

A small number of noble men and women, soldiers and spies were privately executed within the walls of the Tower of London. Many more – at least 120 between 1388 and 1780 – were executed in public on Tower Hill. Beheadings and hangings, were common enough for the ‘posts of the scaffold’ to become a landmark. It was here that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a key ally of Charles I, was executed on 12 May 1641, as part of the political divisions which opened up before the outbreak of civil war the following year.

6. Execution Dock

On the Thames near Wapping, Execution Dock was used for more than 400 years to execute pirates, smugglers and mutineers who had been sentenced to death by Admiralty courts. The ‘dock’ consisted of a scaffold for hanging. The last executions there took place in 1830. Just up the river at Blackwall Reach where it bends bodies of convicts were gibbeted so as to be more visible to boats entering the city.

7. Charing Cross

Public executions took place at Charing Cross in the 16th and 17th centuries. A pillory that locked the head and hands of a criminal into a wooden frame for public humiliation was later erected at the site.

8. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall

The area around the Palace of Westminster was used for public executions, the display of body parts and pillorying criminals.

9. Kennington Common

From at least 1678 until 1800 Kennington Common was the principal execution site for the county of Surrey.

The execution and embowelling of Jacobite rebels on Kennington Common mid to late 18th century)

10. Cheapside

Temporary gallows were erected on several occasions at Cheapside between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were in place for over 100 days in 1554 following the execution of two rebels involved in a Protestant uprising against Mary I.

Ordinary criminals and reprieves

The exhibition contains the story of what feels like 50 or so ordinary criminals, whose names are preserved for some or other aspect of their crime or their trial or their plea for pardon or the way they died. One by one their pitiful stories build up into an upsetting profile of the generally poor and wretched who committed often petty crimes and went to their deaths miserably.

As the number convicted of capital offences rose in the later 18th century the number of reprieves increased, if only to manage down the number of executions which threatened to swamp the system. The exhibition features letters written by the condemned, their friends and relatives and influential contacts. I like the story of the Dane Jørgen Jørgenson, who was convicted in 1820 of robbery but managed to get a letter to the Duke of Wellington for whom he had worked as a during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition includes a letter from the Duke pardoning Jørgenson on condition he ‘transports’ himself out of the country.

The most famous victim: Charles I

Probably the most famous execution ever to take place in London was not of a common criminal or aristocratic traitor but of the king himself, namely Charles I, brought to trial by the Puritan junta and found guilty of treason against his own people. The exhibition devotes a large case to his execution, on 31 January 1649, with several contemporary illustrations and a number of artefacts said to be linked to it, namely a pair of royal gloves he was said to have taken with him, and even the silk undershirt he insisted on wearing to prevent him shivering with cold (it was January in London) which, he told his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, might be misinterpreted as fear.

Later on in the exhibition there are several objects pertaining to the punishment of his killers. 59 leading Puritan generals and MPs signed the king’s death warrant and so came to be known by their enemies as the ‘regicides’. On his Restoration in 1660, Charles II had special agents arrest any of the regicides living in England and track down those who had fled abroad and assassinate them.

Three of the leading regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, had already died of natural causes and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but in 1661 Charles’s Cavalier Parliament ordered their bodies to be exhumed, executed and decapitated. Their heads were displayed on poles outside Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head remained there until 1685.

The most famous criminal: Jack Sheppard

John ‘Jack’ Sheppard was convicted of robbery in 1724, aged 22. Sheppard was one of London’s greatest criminal heroes. Notorious for escaping multiple times from Newgate, he became a symbol of freedom for London’s working classes. An apprentice carpenter, Jack fell into a life of thieving, reputably led astray by ‘bad company and lewd women’. Although eventually executed at Tyburn at the age of 22, his effrontery and skill in challenging authority ensured his story was recounted in popular books and plays for generations. The artist James Thornhill paid one shilling and sixpence to visit him in his cell to draw this portrait.

Portrait of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill (1724)

In the 1850s the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew discovered that ‘chapbooks’ recounting Sheppard’s exploits were hugely popular in low lodging houses, where they were read aloud to illiterate youths. He interviewed 13 boys who confessed to thieving in order to pay for a theatre ticket for the  current play about Jack’s life.

The most famous executioner: Jack Ketch

In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion to seize the throne from his uncle, James II. The rebellion was defeated, Monmouth was captured, condemned for high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Despite asking to be killed with one clean blow, Monmouth’s executioner, Jack Ketch, made a right monkeys of the procedure, failing to despatch the Duke after two strikes with an axe and being forced to resort to a knife to cut through the neck while the Duke made a grim effort to rise from the block to the horror of onlookers. As a result of this heroic failure Ketch’s name became infamous and, eventually, became a byword for public executioners, who, by and large preferred to keep their identities secret.

Transportation

A final section of the exhibition explains how crimes which had previously resulted in execution were amended to ‘transportation’ to the colonies, generally meaning Australia. In fact the first convicts transported out of England had been despatched as long ago as 1718, when they were sent to America to supply plantations there with labour. Thus Moll Flanders, heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel, is convicted of a capital offence but gets it commuted to transportation to British America.

Transport to America ended when that country became independent in 1776 but, as luck would have it, just a few years earlier (in 1770) Australia had been discovered and provisionally mapped by Captain James Cook. Between 1788 and 1868 over 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia from England and other parts of the Empire.

The exhibition includes a few paintings of the first settlement, which are fairly predictable – but I had never heard about ‘convict tokens’ before. Apparently, convicts awaiting transportation presented loved ones with smoothed coins engraved with messages of affection. Often created by prisoners skilled in metalwork, for a fee, the tokens could be highly decorative and became known as ‘leaden hearts’. Half a dozen examples are on display here.

A convict’s love token from the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

The campaign to abolish public executions

The advent of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 marked a sea change in social attitudes. The young queen consciously rebelled against the louche morals of her rakish predecessor, William IV. She wanted a chaste, sober court and her high moral tone and sincere Anglicanism set the style for the new reign among the aristocracy and aspiring upper middle classes. There was a general wish to make all aspects of public life more respectable and, in time, the new mood extended to the utterly disreputable practice of public executions, with all their opportunities for immorality of every description which this exhibition has chronicled.

In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray attended the execution of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, executed for murdering his master, Lord William Russell. He wrote that ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight…I came away…that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’

In 1849 Charles Dickens had attended the execution of Maria and Frederick Manning and wrote a furious letter to The Times criticising the ‘inconceivably awful behaviour’ of the crowd. Describing public execution as a ‘moral evil’, he doubted communities could prosper where such scenes of ‘horror and demoralisation’ could take place.

Prison reform had been an issue since the start of the nineteenth century and combined with the campaign to abolish public executions. The exhibition cites the MP Thomas Hobhouse in 1866 arguing that the spectacle, instead of instilling fear of crime and respect for the law, resulted in the crowds who became ‘hardened and literally acquired a taste for blood.’

The exhibition features a powerful satirical cartoon published in Punch magazine mocking the commercialisation of state executions. The scaffold is a theatrical stage with a sign for ‘opera glasses’ and a booth selling tickets while the mixed crowd is worked by hawkers and costermongers. ‘Ere’s lots o’ the rope which ‘ung the late lamented Mr Greenacre, only a penny an inch!’

The Trial for Murder Mania, illustration for Punch, 1850

After several attempts to move a bill in Parliament, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act was finally passed in 1868 public executions in Britain were officially banned. The last person to be publicly executed in London was the Irish republican Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. Three days later the practice was outlawed.

But it wasn’t the abolition of the death penalty, though. Another century was to pass before that occurred. Only in 1965 was the death penalty for murder in Britain suspended for five years and in 1969 was this made permanent. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty in Britain was finally abolished for all crimes. The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.

Amnesty International

Things take a very earnest turn at the end of the exhibition with a large video screen showing an interview with Paul Bridges from Amnesty International. He reminds us that 55 countries still retain the death penalty (although, admittedly, many have not used it for some time). Nonetheless, Amnesty International recorded 579 executions in 18 countries in 2021.

Summary

This is an outstandingly interesting, comprehensive, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, but mostly grisly and gruesome exhibition, beautifully staged, with absorbing interactive elements. You have two more weeks to catch it.

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Posted by Simon on April 5, 2023

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Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity @ the British Museum

To mark the 300th anniversary of the Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the British Museum has created a landmark FREE exhibition displaying the Museum’s complete collection of Piranesi’s drawings.

Piranesi (1720 to 1778) is often reckoned to be the greatest printmaker of the 18th century. He was extremely prolific, producing hundreds of views or veduti, of Rome in particular, focusing on its ancient ruins, sometimes portrayed as monstrously huge and elaborately decayed, in other series shown as if restored to their former glories.

Into these elaborately staged and dramatic scenes he introduced groups of vases, altars, tombs and other baroque details that were never actually present in ancient Rome, in order to produce finely detailed, elaborate and often fantastical views. (Note the very small chariot and people at the bottom centre of this amazingly cluttered composition.)

Fantastical view of the Via Appia. Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The Enlightenment taste for ruins

It is fascinating to learn that the taste for ‘views’ of Roman ruins was growing in order to cater for the growing numbers of rich northern Europeans making the Grand Tour of classical sites. To cater for this growing market, Italian artists developed and named a new set of artistic genres, including:

  • veduta – a highly detailed print of a cityscape
  • capriccio – a whimsical aggregate of monumental architecture and ruin which never existed in real life
  • veduta ideata – idealised and larger-than-life depictions of the ancient ruins in their supposed glory
  • veduta di fantasia – architectural fantasies

As this list suggests, the taste of the times was for the fantastical, the awe-inspiring in age and size, curly-cued with fantastical details and elaborations. In fact so exaggerated were the size of many of Piranesi’s images of Roman ruins that when Northern tourists actually arrived, they were sometimes disappointed to discover the actual remains were far more modest in scale.

Goethe is mentioned as one of many Northerners who formed their ideas about Rome from Piranesi’s fabulously successful books of prints and, on finally arriving at the Eternal City, being disappointed.

Interior view of the Flavian Amphitheater, called the Colosseum (1766) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Antiques dealer

Although he was born and educated in Venice, Piranesi came to Rome as a young man and made his career there. Not only a frustrated architect and very successful print-maker, Piranesi was also an antiquarian and antiques dealer. He not only dealt in the large number of Roman antiques to be found in and around the city (especially Hadrian’s Villa outside the city which was being uncovered during his lifetime) but he a) incorporated these vases and sarcophagi and reliefs and other detail into his prints and b) he restored many of the antiques to his idea of how they ought to look, often adding his own elaborations.

Thus there are a couple of pieces of sculpture in the exhibition (like the enormous marble horned lion emerging from a lotus) but the commentary also recommends you drop into the Enlightenment galleries back on the Ground Floor of the Museum to check out the two Piranesi vases there.

I’m glad I did, because they are vast, twice the height of a man and so monstrously heavy that, apparently, they simply could not be moved up to the Print Rooms and, if they’d tried, would have broken the floor.

The Piranesi Vase at the British Museum. The vase was discovered at the Villa Hadrian, then restored in Piranesi’s workshop, where other monumental elements were added. It is enormous.

Elements of Piranesi’s style

From below

Architecture is most impressive if seen from below, looking up, especially if features like arches loom over the viewer’s head, as they do in most of the Imagined Prisons pictures.

From the side

Classical art and classical architecture liked to view classical buildings head on, emphasising the clarity and balance of their design, and Piranesi did just that in some of the earliest architectural drawings in this exhibition. But as he matured, Piranesi preferred to look at buildings from the side, creating a more dynamic affect. Here’s a fairly mild example, View of the Campidoglio from the Side.

View of the Campidoglio from the Side. Etching by Piranesi (1761)

You can see how the subject matter is overwhelmingly architectural. Piranesi trained as an architect and throughout his life produced huge numbers of architectural plans, some sensible, some wildly extravagant, yet only once was he actually commissioned to practice some architecture (between 1764 to 66 he carried out restoration work on the Santa Maria del Priorato Church in Rome). There are people in this print, but they’re in a rather disorganised heap at the bottom left and their main contribution is to being out the scale and monumentality of the architecture and the architectural composition.

Light in the distance

Another trick Piranesi used regularly was to make the foreground of an image dark and clotted with the middle distance light and airy. This gives the visual impression of size and scale, as if the building is rising up into a more sunlit region. It’s a trick he used in what are probably his most famous series, the Carceri d’invenzione or Imaginary Prisons, a series of 16 prints that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and awesome machines. (And look at the size of the tiny human figures shuffling along floor or gesticulating on various walls and platforms; it looks like an illustration for an H.G. Wells story about the distant future.)

Carceri Plate VI, The Smoking Fire by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1745)

The Imaginary Prisons series went on to inspire the Romantics and, a lot later, the Surrealists, with their sense of mysterious but looming forces.

People are small

So obvious it barely needs mentioning, but just review how minuscule the human figures are in the Appian Way or the Colosseum or the Imaginary Prisons: this is a monumental architecture of the imagination which is intended to dwarf and overawe mere mortals, including the viewer.

Defender of Roman art

It was fascinating to learn that during the 18th century a controversy developed among critics and writers and artists about the relative merits of ancient Roman and Greek art. More was being learned about ancient Greek architecture and ideas, and its defenders claimed it had greater purity and simplicity, and accused the later Romans of copying everything that was good about Greek architecture and then blowing it up to elephantine proportions and encrusting it with unnecessary details.

By his stage Piranesi had established his reputation as one of the great illustrators of Roman buildings and art, not least via the successful four-volume series Roman Antiquities. he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquarians in London, and a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, so it was not, maybe surprising, that he found himself drawn into controversy with the French Hellenophile Pierre-Jean Mariette.

Piranesi defended the more advanced technology used by the Romans to build larger buildings; the awe-inspiring magnificence of their buildings; but also the Romans’ willingness to absorb motifs from other cultures: not just ancient Greek, but Etruscan and even Egyptian, creating a rich and original synthesis.

In other words, it’s fascinating to learn that his works aren’t just whims and fancies, but the putting-into-practice of a thoroughly worked-out theory of art and art history resulting in the conviction that borrowings from exotic sources and bizarre combinations are the paths to originality and creativity.

Piranesi’s drawings

All the foregoing is by way of introducing Piranesi, his main achievements, his interest in architecture and the fantastical, and his patriotic defence of Rome and its artistic legacy.

But this is not an exhibition of Piranesi’s famous prints. It is a comprehensive display of the British Museum’s entire collection of Piranesi drawings.

Throughout his career Piranesi made detailed architectural drawings, first as an apprentice draughtsman and then for all sorts of reasons: as preparations for the prints, as working sketches of antique pieces to either market them or as studies for larger compositions. Some drawings are huge and portrays vast, fantastical, imaginary scenes which he later converted into prints, while others are relatively small detailed studies of particular aspects, like the drawing here of a sword, or a vase.

The 51 drawings are placed in simple chronological order so the visitor can track Piranesi’s artistic evolution from sensible architectural draughtsman to impresario of the fantastical. Here he is in his early 20s, being sensible and factual.

A colonnaded atrium with domes by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1740 to 1743) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ten years later, here is the source drawing for the hyper-fantastical vision of an Appian Way that I opened this review with, a helter-skelter surfeit of impossible buildings and exotic details.

The meeting of the Via Appia and the Via Ardeatina, seen at the second milestone outside the Porta Capena by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750 to 1756) © The Trustees of the British Museum

If we compare this drawing with the print the differences are immediately apparent. The composition is the same but drawn with surprising freedom and vim, with multiple lines sketching out perspectives and shapes, and with a very loose colour wash creating light and shade.

This lightness of touch and freedom characterises all the drawings which have an expressive charm of their own. I particularly liked the early design for a temple he had drawn, along with careful notes on scale and aspect and then, right at the end, he thought ‘Blow it’ and added a pyramid to the composition.

‘If in doubt, add a pyramid,’ is not a bad rule for life.

When he came to Rome he adopted a yellow paper and washes (as opposed to the more factual white tonalities of his earliest Venetian work) and this palette is compounded in the many later drawings where he used red ink or crayon to really ram home the vibrancy of the composition.

A monumental staircase in a vaulted interior with columns by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750 to 1755) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Although the exhibition features nine prints (including the ones of the Colosseum and the Side View of the Campidoglio and several of the Imaginary Prisons) to give context and show what some of the drawings were preparatory drawings for, many of the 51 drawings weren’t preparations for prints at all, but were finished works in their own right, or studies of details.

There’s are some of the scores of drawings he did of human figures (Standing man in profile), the detailed studies of a Roman sword I mentioned above, studies of ancient vases and what are called candelabra, multi-storeyed stone confections – and countless experiments in architectural fantasy, taken from a wide range of perspectives and points of view – as well as a selection of drawings he did when he visited the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii.

View of the Strada Consulare with the Herculaneum Gate in Pompeii by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (c. 1772 to 1778) © The Trustees of the British Museum

By the time of his death Piranesi was one of the most influential interpreters of ancient Rome. His prints and treatises were popular across Europe and his grand, and grandiose, visions of the Eternal City would define the idea of Rome for generations of travellers and armchair tourists.

This exhibition is a fascinating glimpse into the engine room of his creativity, a look behind-the-scenes of the brightly finished and smooth prints at the much more creative, extempore, roughly finished and, in many ways, more exciting drawings.

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by Simon on February 19, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 19, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/piranesi-drawings-visions-of-antiquity-british-museum/

William Blake @ Tate Britain

This is the largest survey of work by William Blake to be held in the UK for a generation. It brings together over 300 famous and rarely seen works, from the whole of his career, from all of his publications and projects, and sets them alongside works by contemporaries, friends and influences, in a blockbuster exhibition which spreads over 13 rooms.

Engraving

Blake was born in 1757 into a poor family in London’s Soho – his father was a hosier – who, nonetheless, supported his ambitions to be an artist. Aged 15 he got an apprenticeship to an engraver. At the age of 21 he became a student at the Royal Academy. He appears to have been studious, the exhibition contains a typical plaster cast classical statue which students had to sketch along with Blake’s drawings of it.

Distinctive style

Muscles

But from early on Blake developed an idiosyncratic and eccentric way of depicting the human body. Most of his work is depictions of the human body. Most of the bodies in question are naked or draped in simple Biblical robes, and all of them are extremely muscley, with a heavy, musclebound weight which is reminiscent of Michelangelo. Although the curators don’t mention it I’ve read somewhere that this striking musculature is in fact anatomically inaccurate, and designed purely for expressive purposes.

Capaneus the Blasphemer (1824 to 1827) by William Blake © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Flat and close

Other elements of his style include the lack of perspective. Figures almost always appear in a flat space. This gives them dramatic immediacy and directness, as in this striking image.

The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea by William Blake (1805)

Noses

In both these images note the strikingly aquiline noses of his figures. Sounds trivial but its a trademark of his style.

Anti-commercial art

Blake rejected much of the commercial art of his day, came to despise the Royal Academy, hated the way late 18th century art was dominated by society portraits or landscapes of rich people’s properties.

Visual purity

He wanted to forge something much more visionary and pure. This search for a kind of revolutionary purity reminds me of the Republican phase of the art of the French painter Jacques-Louis David, which also features: legendary, classical or mythical subject matter; half naked men showing off their six-packs; in striking poses; flowing robes and togas.

Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Drawings not paintings

But a comparison with David vividly brings out the difference: Blake was never an oil painter. None of his works evince the kind of lavish, luxurious depth and perspective and colour and light and shade of an oil painter like David.

Most of Blake’s images are engravings, of which he produced over a thousand, and a central quality of an engraving is its flatness.

There are also watercolours but, as the curators point out, these have the clarity of line, formality and flatness of engravings which have simply been coloured in.

There is rarely any perspective or depth. The backgrounds are generally sketchy. All the focus is on the (generally melodramatic postures) of the foreground figures.

Cain Fleeing from the Wrath of God by William Blake (1799 to 1809) © The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

Illustrations

Cain Fleeing exemplifies a major fact about Blake’s visual work, which is that the majority of was illustrations for classic works. Over his life he was commissioned to produce illustrations for:

  • Mary Wollstonecraft – Original Stories from Real Life (1791)
  • John Gay – Fables by John Gay with a Life of the Author, John Stockdale, Picadilly (1793)
  • Edward Young – Night-Thoughts (1797)
  • Thomas Gray – Poems (1798)
  • Robert Blair – The Grave (1805 to 1808)
  • John Milton – Paradise Lost (1808)
  • John Varley – Visionary Heads (1819 to 1820)
  • Robert John Thornton – Virgil (1821)
  • The Book of Job (1823 to 1826)
  • John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress (1824 to 1827, unfinished)
  • Dante – Divine Comedy (1825 to 1827)

The exhibition features generous selections from most of these works, for example ten or more of Blake’s illustrations for the Grave or Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, etc.

Bad pictures

What comes over from many of these obscure and little exhibited illustrations is how bad they are. Milky, washed out, strangely lacking in the dynamism which Blake, in his written works, claimed for his art.

Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, Design 113 by William Blake (1797 to 1798)

Bad, isn’t it? All the illustrations for the Elegy are like this.

Towards the end of his life Blake made 29 watercolour illustrations of the Pilgrim’s Progress which are similarly not much mentioned in his oeuvre. Being woke, the curators suggest this might be because his loyal, hard-working and artistic wife, Catherine, is said to have had a say in designing and colouring them, so their neglect is a sexist conspiracy. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just because they’re not very good. Here’s an example.

Illustration four for the Pilgrim’s Progress by William Blake

The composition, the use of perspective, the crappy buildings, the ludicrous posture of the figures, and the badness of their faces – everything conspires to make this picture, in my opinion, poor. And there are lots more of this low standard in the exhibition.

Good pictures

But what makes it impossible to dismiss and hard to evaluate is that Blake was also capable of coming up with images which turned his manifold weaknesses – the lack of depth, the odd stylised postures, the inaccurate anatomy – into strengths. This is true of many of the illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Take this depiction of the fate of the corrupt pope – the very unnaturalness of the postures and the weirdness of the setting work in its favour. To make it a deeply strange and troubling image.

The Simoniac Pope’ by William Blake (1824 to 1827) Tate

Take another of his archetypal images, Newton. The closer you look, the weirder it becomes – not least his musculature which makes him look more like an insect with a segmented back than a human being – and yet, and yet… it’s so weird that it’s true – true not to lived life or anything anyone’s ever seen, but to something stranger, more mysterious and more visionary.

Newton by William Blake (1795 to 1805) Tate

The illustrated books

Of course Blake was also a poet, an epic poet, a writer of immense long epics featuring a mythology and mythological characters he made up out of a strange mishmash of the Bible, the classics and Milton. Not many people read these long poems nowadays although, as it happens, as a schoolboy I read all of them cover to cover in the Penguin Complete Blake edition, so I have a feel for the vastness and strangeness of his imaginary world.

Blake produced the poems in books which featured his own line illustrations and decorations of the handwritten texts.

  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience (edited 1794)
  • Songs of Innocence (edited 1789)
  • The Book of Thel (written 1788 to 1790, edited 1789 to 1793)
  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written 1790 to 1793)
  • Visions of the Daughters of Albion (edited 1793)
  • Continental prophecies
  • America a Prophecy (edited 1793)
  • Europe a Prophecy (edited 1794 to 1821)
  • The Song of Los (edited 1795)
  • There is No Natural Religion (written 1788, possible edited 1794 to 1795)
  • The First Book of Urizen (edited 1794 to 1818)
  • All Religions are One (written 1788, possible edited 1795)
  • The Book of Los (edited 1795)
  • The Book of Ahania (edited 1795)
  • Milton (written 1804 to 1810)
  • Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (written 1804 to 1820, edited 1820 to 1827 and 1832)

The exhibition features many of these illustrations to his own verse. There is, for example, half a room devoted to individual pages from America a Prophecy, which have been removed from the book and framed as prints. Some of them are displayed in double-sided cases set up on plinths so that visitors can walk around and see both sides. The most immediate thing you notice is how very small they are, old-fashioned paperback book size, which makes much of the writing very hard to read without a magnifying glass.

Title page of America a Prophecy, copy A (printed 1795) by William Blake © The Morgan Library

The shorter works

Even his contemporaries struggled with the obscure mythology, strangely named characters (Los, Urizen) and difficult-to-make-out plots of the longer poems. By contrast, two of the shorter works have always been popular, namely the pithy proverbs gathered in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

  • “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
  • “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

and the short and simple poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which contain his best-known and most anthologised poems. Of these probably the most famous is 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

It is undoubtedly a classic, but there is an odd and telling thing about it, which is that has become, over time, essentially, a children’s poem.

And this is emphasised by the illustration Blake did for it, which often comes as a shock to people who are familiar with it as an isolated text before they come to it in Blake’s illustrated version. It’s not just a children’s book illustration. It’s almost a baby‘s book illustration.

Tyger Tyger from Songs of Experience (designed after 1789, printed in 1794) by William Blake

Extremely hit and miss

And I think at some stage during the exhibition, it struck me that at some level, Blake is not a serious artist. He took himself very seriously, the small group of acolytes who gathered round him in his last years – the self-styled Ancients – took him very seriously, and critics and curators ditto, but… his long poems are all but incomprehensible and his own illustrations to his books are strange but often curiously childish and amateurish. His illustrations for Pilgrims Progress or the Elegy are deeply damaging to your sense of him as an artist. Some of the illustrations of Paradise Lost or Dante have a peculiar power, but many feel weak or half-finished. And strange random images throughout the exhibition leap out as expressing something no-one else had conceived or tried.

The Ancient of Days

Because every now and then, his peculiarities of style and technique (he pioneered new methods of acid engraving which the exhibition explains) come together to create something magical and genuinely visionary, something of depth and maturity.

‘Europe’ Plate i Frontispiece, ‘The Ancient of Days’ (1827) by William Blake (1757 to 1827) The Whitworth, The University of Manchester

The curators end the exhibition with this painting, which Blake was working on right up to his final days, at his house overlooking the Thames. Who is it, what is he doing, nobody is sure, although the hand gesture which seems to be creating a sort of compass is, unexpectedly, a negative gesture in Blake’s symbolism, because mathematics and science are the enemies of the liberated and revolutionary imagination which Blake defended and praised.

Still, as with so much of the rest of his ‘thought’ and personal opinions, it doesn’t matter. Again and again the curators have had to admit that nobody knows what this or that picture really means or whether it is illustrating this or that scene from one of his vast mythological books – so much about Blake’s output is scattered, broken up and mysterious, that one more mystery doesn’t make any difference.

At his best, Blake created images of startling power and resonance which, even if we don’t understand their intention or meaning, have stood the test of time. But the high risk this exhibition has taken is placing that dozen or so brilliant imagines amid a sea of ok, so-so, mediocre and downright poor images which do a lot to dilute their impact.

Two gaps

No explanation of Blake’s politics

The curators mention in several places that Blake was a revolutionary thinker who engaged with the Great Issues of his day, and list those Great Issues as political revolution, sexual politics, and slavery, and he certainly did, in his long radical poems and his notes and essays.

The odd thing is you’d expect there to be, in such a big exhibition, some sections devoted to Blake the Revolutionary, explaining his revolutionary views, his support of the American and French revolutions, his ideas of the power of the unfettered Imagination, sexual liberty and his violent anti-slavery sentiments.

But panels or sections devoted to Blake’s beliefs are strangely absent. His views are mentioned in passing, in the context of t his or that work, but you can’t make sense of a work like America A Prophecy without some explanation of the attitude English radicals took to the war their own government was fighting to put down men committed to freedom & Liberty.

No explanation of Blake’s mythology

More importantly you can’t understand a lot of his images without delving into Blake’s own mythology, which was built around praising the power of the unfettered Imagination, in the arts and politics and private life, and which he elaborated out inventing a whole cast of pseudo-Biblical gods and goddesses.

This also was strangely absent – I mean all it would have taken was a panel explaining the symbolic roles of the characters he invented for the epic poems:

  • Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law
  • his daughters Eleth, Uveth and Ona represent the three parts of the human body
  • his sons Thiriel, Utha, Grodna, Fuzon match the four elements but are also aligned with the signs of the Zodiac
  • Los is the fallen (earthly or human) form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas

and so on, to at least give you a flavour of how strange, eccentric, but oddly beguiling his personal mythology could be.

Maybe – I’m guessing – the curators wanted to focus narrowly on his art, and on the technical ways in which he experimented with techniques of engraving, and with the immediate facts of his biography. That would explain why there were rooms devoted to particular patrons such as John and Ann Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland, Thomas Butts and the Reverend Joseph Thomas.

I bought the audioguide. At the end of several sections on specific series of works, it said; ‘If you want to know more about the relationship between Blake and John Flaxman, press the green button’. My point being that all the additional information was biographical. Not one of them said: ‘If you want to hear more about Blake and the French Revolution, Blake and slavery, Blake and sexual Liberty, Blake’s theories of the imagination’ – all topics I’d love to have heard given a modern summary.

This biographical approach also explains why there is a big reproduction of a period map of London with markers indicating where Blake lived over the years. And even an entire room recreating the room in the family home in Broad Street where Blake staged a quirky one-man show in 1809, a show which was a disaster as hardly anyone showed up and the one critic who wrote about it dismissed Blake as ‘an unfortunate lunatic’.

I may be wrong but it seems to me that the curators have opted for a heavily biographical approach to Blake’s work, placing the works in the context of his real life career and biography, his houses and wife and friends and champions and critics. This is all interesting in its way, but not as interesting as Blake’s imaginative universe.

At the age of eight William Blake saw the prophet Ezekiel under a bush in Peckham Rye, then a rural backwater south of London. A few years later he had a vision of a tree full of angels nearby and, a month after that, a third vision of angels, walking towards him through the rye.

Blake really meant it. All through is life he claimed to have visions of angels and other divine beings, dancing and cavorting in London fields and streets. He was a visionary in the most literal sense of the word.

Although – with over 300 images – this exhibition is thoroughly documented and copiously illustrated, maybe the reason I left feeling so frustrated and dissatisfied was because I felt that Blake’s weird, peculiar and compelling imaginative universe had been almost completely left out of it.

There were plenty of framed pages taken from the illustrated versions of his ‘prophetic books’ covered with verse. But the verse itself wasn’t printed out on a label on the wall for us to actually read. There was an introduction to the subject matter of each one, but little explanation of what they meant or what he was trying to achieve.

This exhibition feels like a big, elaborately assembled, beautifully curated and presented catalogue of all Blake’s visual works. A list. A documentation of his works. But somehow, with all the fiery life, rebellion and pride of the Imagination taken out.

Blake’s life is presented as a story of professional frustration – rather than as a life of extraordinary imaginative triumph.

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by Simon on October 20, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on October 20, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/william-blake-tate-britain/

Laura Knight: A Working Life @ the Royal Academy

Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (in 1936) and the first woman to receive a large retrospective exhibition at the Academy, in 1965. She was awarded a Damehood in 1929.

Born in 1877, Knight had a long life (passing away in 1970) and a long and successful career, working in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint until well into the 1960s.

She never departed from the figurative, realist tradition of her youth and was, for this reason, in her heyday, one of the most popular painters in Britain.

Portrait of Joan Rhodes by Laura Knight (1955) © The estate of Dame Laura Knight. Photo credit: Royal Academy of Arts

Given Knight’s mid-century fame, and her role as a pioneering woman artist, it is a little surprising that this FREE display of some of her work is a) so small and b) tucked away in a dingy room through a doorway off of the main first floor landing. There was no signage, I had to ask an RA staffer where it was hidden.

If you google Knight or look at her Wikipedia article, you immediately see a series of highly realistic and vivid oil paintings, starting with the cracking Self Portrait with Nude of 1913, and including the evocative paintings she did during the Second World War (she became an official war artist at the outbreak of war, and her portrait of Ruby Loftus operating industrial machinery was picture of the year at the Academy’s 1943 summer exhibition).

As you explore further online you come across lots and lots of oil paintings of chocolate box scenes of the countryside, especially of the Cornish coast, featuring soulful looking ladies with parasols (before the First War) or in flapper style dresses and chapeaux (after the First War).

In this little display there are only three oil paintings on display here, although they include the very striking portrait of Joan Rhodes (above) and an equally realistic and sensual double nude, Dawn. (It is hard not to be struck by the firm pink bosoms in this painting, though maybe I am meant to be paying attention to the women’s soulful gazes…)

Dawn by Dame Laura Knight (1932 to 1933) © The Artist’s Estate. Photo by John Hammond

No, the bulk of this display is made up of display cases of Knight’s drawings and sketchbooks of which the Academy holds a substantial collection – small, monochrome, often unfinished sketches, which are – to be frank – of variable quality and finish, some were very appealing, some seemed, well, a bit scrappy.

The works are grouped into three distinct themes from Knight’s long working life – the countryside, the nude and scenes from the theatre, ballet and circus.

Countryside

Knight had several spells of living in the countryside – in the 1890s she moved to the Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes and painted scenes of the coast and life among the fishermen and their wives. In 1907 Knight and her husband moved to Cornwall and became central figures in the artists’ colony known as the Newlyn School. In the 1930s she and her husband settled in the Malvern Hills, where she remained for the rest of her life.

Thus the exhibition includes sketches she did of Mousehole in Cornwall, alongside sketches of a ploughed field, trees beside a river, Richmond Park, Bodmin Moor, two land girls in a field, seeding potatoes, and so on.

Mousehole Harbour, Cornwall, with Figures in Foreground by Laura Knight (mid-1920s or early 1930s) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

It was only later, when I googled her many finished paintings of Mousehole and other Cornish scenes that I realised where these sketches were heading, and what I was missing. I wish the exhibition had included at least one finished painting of this kind of scene alongside the sketches, to help you understand the process better, and the purpose of the sketches.

Nudes

We’ve already met the two dramatic nude women in Dawn. There are a small number of other nude sketches and studies on display, which I thought were a bit so-so. Like the countryside sketches, they strongly suggest that the ‘magic’ of Knight’s paintings was precisely in the painting, in her skill at creating an airy, light and luminous finish with oil paints.

Standing Nude with Her Arms Behind her Head by Laura Knight (mid-1950s) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

Theatre, ballet and circus

This broad subject area contains the largest number of sketches and drawings. Knight sketched ballet dancers, and circus performers, there are drawings of boxing matches held among soldiers training during World War One, and ice skaters and trapeze artists and many other performers. The wall labels tell us that she even spent some months travelling with famous circuses of the Edwardian era, drawing and sketching every day.

Trapeze Artists by Laura Knight (1925) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

They’re all competent. Some of them piqued my interest. But none of them seemed to me as vivid as the drawings of, say Edward Ardizzone, who had a comparable sketching style, using multitudes of loosely drawn lines to build up form and composition.

The Lion Tamer by Edward Ardizzone (1948)

Maybe I’m mixing up fine art (Knight) with book illustration (Ardizzone) and maybe I’m giving away my failings of taste in saying so, but I much prefer the Ardizzone. It’s more vivid, more evocative, more physically pleasing (more tactile), more fun.

Also, as with the nudes and landscapes, a quick search online reveals that Knight converted her sketches into scores and scores of paintings of the circus, and I immediately found the paintings much more pleasurable than the sketches – a little cheesy and old-fashioned, like vintage Christmas cards, but much more finished and complete than the sketches.

Grievance

The introductory panel and all the wall labels exude what you could call the standard feminist spirit of grievance and offence. There’s a long list of offences to absorb.

The curators point out that Knight, despite her success with the public, was only granted membership of the Royal Academy in 1936! That she was the first woman to achieve this accolade (why so late Royal Academy)! But that, even then, she wasn’t invited to Academicians’ Annual Dinner until 1967!

We are told that, as a woman art student before the Great War, she was forbidden to paint or sketch from real naked models but had to work from sculptures and statues! It was only in the 1930s, in Newlyn, that she was able local people to pose nude for her! And so a work like Dawn can be seen as an act of defiance against a male-dominated art world!

I’m sure all of this, and much more along the same lines, is true and scandalous and we should all be outraged by it. But, seen from another perspective, all this righteous indignation amounts to a skilful evasion of the rather obvious question, which is whether Knight’s art is any good – or is of anything of other than antiquarian interest, dusted off and used as a pretext for the righteous anger of modern curators?

This tricky question is not addressed anywhere in the (very informative) wall labels, but, when you think about it, is amply answered by:

  1. The Academy’s choice of location for this little ‘exhibition’ – tucked away in a dark and dingy side-room.
  2. The fact that it is more of a ‘display’ of half a dozen notebooks, three paintings and a poster, than a full-blooded exhibition. An after-thought.

If Laura Knight is so eminent and so worthy of consideration, why didn’t the Academy give her a larger exhibition in a more prominent space?

Ironically, the curators who complain that Knight was overlooked and patronised in her own time, have done quite a good job of repeating the gesture – of displaying only a small and not very persuasive part of her output, in a hidden-away side room which nobody in a hurry to see the blockbuster shows on Anthony Gormley or Helena Schjerfbeck or Félix Vallotton is in too much danger of stumbling across.

Suggestion

In all seriousness, why not give Laura Knight a much bigger exhibition? If you look at the paintings embedded in the Wikipedia article or all across Google, it’s clear that she painted absolutely brilliantly, but in a straightforward naturalistic style which was completely outdated and provincial by the 1930s, let alone the 40s or 50s – in a style which carried on its Edwardian naturalism into the atomic age as if the rest of modern art had never existed.

But despite that – or more likely, because of it – Knight was very popular and successful with the public. Her paintings of Edwardian children playing on the beach or soulful ladies standing on clifftops sold by the dozen and – from a Google search of them – look immensely pleasing and reassuring in a lovely, airy, chocolate-box kind of way. And her wartime paintings perfectly capture the earnest heroism of the conflict, and of the social realism, the committedness, of the wartime artists.

To me this all suggests a whole area of investigation, an enquiry into why British artistic taste remained so isolated and uncosmopolitan for so long, which would reference:

  • the way the director of Tate in the 1930s could proudly say that Tate would only buy work by the young whippersnapper Henry Moore ‘over his dead body’
  • or Sir Alfred Munnings, the horse-painting president of the Royal Academy, addressing the academy’s 1949 annual banquet, delivered a drunken rant against all modern art, and invoked the support of Winston Churchill (sitting next to him) who he claimed, had once asked him: ‘Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his … something, something?’ ‘And I said ‘Yes, sir! Yes I would!’

A big exhibition of Knight’s work would:

  1. put to the test the curators’ claims about her importance and relevance
  2. be very popular among the sizeable audience, who still like their art extremely traditional (think of the sales of prints and other merchandise!)
  3. allow the curators to explore and analyse the long-lasting appeal and influence of the anti-continental, anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde tradition in 20th century English art of which, for all her skill and ability, Laura Knight appears to have been a leading example

This – the philistinism of English art, the determined rejection of all 20th century, contemporary and modern trends in art and literature in preference for the tried and tested and traditional – is something you rarely hear discussed or explained, maybe because it’s too big a subject, or too vague a subject, or too shameful a subject. But it’s something I’d love someone better educated and more knowledgeable in art history to explain to me. And I’d really enjoy seeing more of Laura Knight’s lovely airy innocent paintings in the flesh. Why not combine the two?

For once mount an exhibition which is not about a pioneer or explorer or breaker of new ground, but about a highly capable painter of extremely traditional and patriotic and reassuring paintings, and explain how and why the taste which informed her and her audience remained so institutionally and economically and culturally powerful in Britain for so long.

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by Simon on September 17, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 17, 2019

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The Beardsley Generation @ the Heath Robinson Museum

This small but entrancing exhibition explores the impact that a radical new photographic means of reproduction (process engraving) had on the art of illustration at the end of the 19th century.

Through 50 or so drawings and 20 or so illustrated books and magazines, the exhibition brings together a treasure trove of images from what many consider the golden age of illustration which lasted from around 1890 to the early 1900s.

The Pilgrim stretched both of his hands up towards Heaven by Charles Robinson (1900)

The Pilgrim stretched both of his hands up towards Heaven by Charles Robinson (1900)

Informative

As always the exhibition is in just the one room at the Heath Robinson Museum and looks small, but there are now fewer than 20 wall panels, some quite lengthy and packed with technical, historical and biographical information, so that reading all of them almost feels like reading a small book.

A brief history of Victorian illustration techniques

In the early Victorian era, book illustrations were mostly produced from steel engravings. Artists such as George Cruikshank (some of whose prints I was looking at earlier this week, in the Guildhall Art Gallery) and Hablot Browne were expert at etching on steel. However the process was expensive, requiring the illustrations to be printed on different paper separate from the text and then bound in with the rest of the book.

By the 1850s publishers preferred to use wood engravings, with the result that master wood-engravers developed large workshops which employed many engravers. The artist presented his picture on paper or on a whitened woodblock and would hand it over to the skilled engraver. The engraver then converted the picture into a woodcut, carving away the areas that were to appear white on the final print, leaving the raised lines which would take the ink, be applied to paper, and produce the print.

Thus the engraver played a major role in interpreting the artist’s work, sketch or intention, often superimposing his own character and style on the image.

Still, it did mean you could make illustrations without having to be a skilled etcher and among the first artists to take advantage of the new medium were the pre-Raphaelites, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.

They were followed by a second school of artists, sometimes called the ‘Idyllic School’, which included G.J. Pinwell and Arthur Boyd Houghton, who infused their essentially realistic works with intensity and emotion.

Job's Comforters by Arthur Boyd Houghton (c.1865)

Job’s Comforters by Arthur Boyd Houghton (c.1865)

There followed in the 1870s and ’80s what the curators call ‘a period of dull realism’ which is not dwelt on. It was at the end of the 1880s that the technical innovation which the exhibition is concerned with came in, and transformed the look of British illustrations.

Process engraving

In the late 1880s process engraving replaced wood engraving. An artist’s drawing was transferred to a sheet of zinc so that areas to be printed in black were given an acid-resistant coating and white areas left exposed. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the white areas were eaten away. The plate was then attached to a block of wood which could be inserted into the block holding the type, so that illustration and text were generated together by the same printing process.

This new process required that the artist’s image be in pure blacks and whites without the kind of fine lines which had flourished in etching on steel or in wood engraving. Moreover, the artist could be confident that the line he drew would be exactly what would be presented to the reader, without the involvement of a wood engraver to enhance or (possibly) detract from it.

At a stroke, the older generation of artists who had relied on master wood-engravers to work up their rough sketches for publication was swept away and replaced by a new young generation of penmen who relished the clarity of line and space encouraged by the new technique.

The most dramatic proponent of the new look, who exploded onto the art scene like a small atom bomb, was Aubrey Beardsley (b.1872)

How La Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram from the Morte d'Arthur by Aubrey Beardsley (1892)

How La Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram from the Morte d’Arthur by Aubrey Beardsley (1892)

Beardsley was an illustrator of genius who had created an entirely new and personal visual world by the incredibly young age of 20. There are four prints and two drawings by him here, plus three book covers and books laid open to show his illustrations in situ. What a genius.

Having explained this major new development in print technology, the exhibition also explains several other influences which were swirling round at the time and contributed to the development of the ‘new look’. These included:

  • Japanese art
  • European Symbolism
  • Venetian and Renaissance art
  • with a dash of Dürer thrown in

Japanese

After the Harris Treaty of 1858 reopened trade links between the West and Japan, one of the many consequences was a flood onto the Western art market of Japanese woodblock prints.

Known in Japan as ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world’, the Japanese style was notable for not using perspective to add depth, or light and shade to create a sense of volume and space in the images. Instead the Japanese used ‘dramatic boundary lines’, i.e. clear, distinct, black lines – to create images – and then used colour, again not to create depth, but decoratively, filling in the shapes created by the lines with plain washes.

Japanese art had a profound influence on Western artists at a time when they were looking for ways to revive what had become tired traditions and to combat the rising challenge of photography.

Setting a Japanese print (in this case Nakamura Shikan II as Benkai by Utagawa Kunisada) next to the works by Beardsley allows you to immediately see the liberating impact that the Japanese habit of stylising the image has had for the European – allowing him to abandon almost all conventions of perspective and depth.

Actor Nakamura Utaemon Iii As Mitsugi’s Aunt Omine by Utagawa Kunisada (1814)

Beardsley’s best images float in an indeterminate space, bounded by extremely precise and clear lines which give his best images a wonderful clarity and dynamism. But Beardsley wasn’t alone. A greater or lesser element of simplification and stylisation characterises most of the artists working in the ‘new look’.

The last fancy of the contemporary buck for Pall Mall magazine by Edmund J. Sullivan (1900)

The last fancy of the contemporary buck for Pall Mall magazine by Edmund J. Sullivan (1900)

Symbolism

Symbolism was an art movement which swept northern Europe in the 1880s and, although its techniques remained largely realistic, in some case hyper-realistic, it applied these approaches to subject matter which was infused with obscure and semi-religious feelings.

Symbolism took images of death, yearning, loss and mystery, and showed them, no longer in the bright light of nineteenth century rationalism and optimism, but brooded over by a more modern sensibility and psychology. A drawing of Salomé by Gustave Moreau is used to exemplify the Symbolist effect.

Its influence can be seen in an illustration like this one by Charles Ricketts, which takes the well-worn subject of Oedipus and the Sphinx but drenches it in arcane symbolism – inexplicable figures and flowers adding to the sensual, erotic yet mysterious atmosphere.

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1891) by Charles Ricketts

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1891) by Charles Ricketts

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

The exhibition lists and explores other influences including the impact of a classic printed book from Venice titled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili or The Strife of Love in a Dream, published by Albertus Manutius in 1499, and regarded as a masterpiece of typography and design by collectors.

A Garden Scene from 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' attributed to Francesco Colonna (c.1499)

A Garden Scene from ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ attributed to Francesco Colonna (c.1499)

Copies of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili became available in England in 1888 and influenced Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Charles Ricketts, Aubrey Beardsley and Robert Anning Bell.

List of artists in the exhibitions

The exhibition includes works by all of those illustrators and more. I counted:

  • Aubrey Beardsley – 4 prints, 2 drawings and three book and magazine covers or pages
  • Alice B. Woodward – 2 drawings
  • Louis Fairfax Muckley – 1
  • Herbert Granville Fell – 2 drawings and a watercolour
  • Alfred Garth Jones – 2
  • Thomas Sturge Moore – 1
  • Laurence Housman – 5
  • Charles de Sousy Ricketts – 2
  • Paul Vincent Woodroffe – 1
  • H.A. Eves – 1
  • Harold Edward Hughes Nelson – 1
  • Byam Shaw – 1
  • Edgar Wilson – 1
  • Cyril Goldie – 1
  • Henry Ospovat – 1
  • Robert Anning Bell – 2
  • Philip Connard – 1
  • Jessie Marion King – 3
  • James Joshua Guthrie – 2
  • Edmund Joseph Sullivan – 2
  • Charles Robinson – 3
  • William Heath Robinson – 3
  • Arthur Boyd Houghton – 1
  • Walter Crane – 1

Books on display

  • Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley
  • Midsummer Night’s Dream ill. by Robert Anning Bell
  • The Kelmscott Chaucer ill. by Burne-Jones
  • Poems of Edgar Allen Poe ill. by William Heath Robinson
  • Poems of John Keats ill. by Robert Anning Bell
  • Poems of John Milton ill. by Garth Jones
  • The Faerie Queene ill. by Walter Crane
  • plus illustrated versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the Book of Job, the Yellow Book, and more

All the works were worth looking at closely, studying and mulling in order to enjoy the play of line and form. Many of the prints are wonderfully drawn and warmly evocative. Every one is accompanied by a wall label, and the twelve or so most important artists merit bigger wall labels which give you their full biography along with influences and major works to set them in context.

These biographical notes help you to make connections between different artists linked by having a common publisher, or working on a common publication or magazine, or who knew each other and encouraged, helped or shared ideas. The exhibition really does give you a sense of an entire generation excitedly inventing a whole new style of art.

Nostalgia

I think at least in part I respond so warmly to so many of the images is because, as a boy growing up in the 1960s, lots of the old books in my local library and the children’s books which my parents bought for me, contained just this kind of late-Victorian / Edwardian illustrations.

Looking at almost any of them creates a warm bath of half-forgotten memories of curling up in a corner and totally immersing myself in thrilling stories of Greek heroes and mermaids and pirates and pilgrims.

Tailpiece by Edgar Wilson (date unknown)

Tailpiece by Edgar Wilson (date unknown)

This is another wonderful, heart-warming and highly informative exhibition from the Heath Robinson Museum.

Related links

More Heath Robinson Museum reviews

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by Simon on March 22, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/22/the-beardsley-generation-heath-robinson-museum/

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