Janey Morris last call in 2014

ROSSETTI’S OBSESSION at the William Morris Gallery has it last day next Sunday  4 January, so my thanks to everyone who helped remember her in 2014, those at the National Portrait Gallery, Kelmscott Manor, Bradford City Art Galleries, Lady Lever Gallery and WMG  as well as everyone who visited the exhibitions and posted or tweeted. I feel that Janey has now been accorded the visual and biographical attention she deserves.   Thinking on, however, one aspect of her life remains under-appraised: her textile work is unsigned, scattered and of course fragile, therefore hard to research. 

And her after-life  continues beyond the centenary of her death, in the paintings and drawings that remain on view and in circulation.  A very nice and characteristic drawing by DGR is on sale at Bonhams a short while hence.  It shows Janey reading, rather than dozing as in other drawings (which are often taken as reflections of her supposedly  languorous demeanour when they were in fact poses it was possible to hold for the hour or so the artist required) and demonstrates her life-long love of literature. It's likely that as a child she had no access to books, only to stories in cheap magazines and maybe religious tracts, so in adulthood she made up for this by voracious reading, alongside William Morris, who said he 'devoured' books.  Jane's favourite reading was poetry, though she also loved ghost stories - a true child her of her time in this respect.

And her image still appears in unexpected places - my latest sighting was of the V&A's Daydream on a tin of Hungarian marzipan at Budapest airport.

    

Tangled Yarns

If within reach of the William Morris Gallery in the next four weeks, don’t miss

 Alke Schmidt’s exhibition TANGLED YARNS, an inventive and stimulating display about elements of the cotton trade from 18^th to 21^st centuries, asking the questions that should be asked about the sources and economic bases of the textiles that we wear and use.  Questions that Morris himself confronted with his Marxist understanding of political economy. 

The display consists of large intricately worked hangings that at first beguile the eye and then disturb the brain, but simultaneously invite one to reconcile or live with or reject the global processes of exploitation.  And do so in a curiously delicate rather than polemical manner, so the visual pleasure of the original fabrics survives their mutilation by referents to the brutal histories that went and continue to go into their making. 

To quote the blurb:  The tension between the challenging subject matter and highly decorative appearance of the work is deliberately cultivated, to bring out the ambiguities and contradictions, the politics and morality of the textile trade. 

   

more here   and here

and  here
There's more too on the fashion industry than I perceived, which could be politically useful now that fashion is the dominant cultural manifestation of the day .  This is a project that deserves and will reward future showings at other venues, so I hope Schmidt has had many offers!     HAPPY CHRISTMAS 

William Morris's Legacy

Thoughtful responses to ANARCHY & BEAUTY from Sasha Ward, Izzy Parker, Zarah Hussein, Jo Davies and Ed Hall  here

Black Portraits at RAMM Exeter

As well as Victorian Gothic at the RAMM in Exeter, the museum is showing a portrait by Nahem Shoa of fellow-artist Desmond Haughton, hanging next to its existing 18^th century anonymous portrait of an African in a red coat and waistcoat, formerly thought to be Olaudah Equiano and now for some reason allegedly Ignatius Sancho but surely someone else as yet unidentified.   Here is Shoa standing with both paintings

On the accompanying wall panel Shoa writes: ‘Many of my black friends felt when they go to museums the only images of black people are slaves or servants. I wanted to readdress this issue because I think it’s important for cultural institutions to reflect in positive and powerful ways the diversity of our population today.’

Black Boy with Paston Treasure

Conservation work on the picture of the Paston family's tableful of expensive and exotic possessions in Norwich Castle Museum brings up the nicely painted image of a young African man from the 1670s or thereabouts (with a much less nice baboon sitting on his shoulder.)  The lad is most finely dressed in his green and pink satins, and appears just as much an exotic possession as the tropical seashells, silver and other objets that crowd the table - though it must be noted there is another figure among the stuff - a younger white girl holding roses and sheet music in allusion to the cultured status of Sir Robert Paston and his family.  Rather than an artistic accessory she is thought to represent Robert's daughter, so the young man may possibly also be a household member, though it seems unlikely, unless the archives can yield information on the Pastons' servants.  He was surely drawn from life, however, so behind the image there lies a real person, whose history and experience can only be guessed at.

More on the painting here

on a link to crowd-funding the re-gilding of the frame
hopefully here

Victorian Gothic at Exeter

A neat exhibition at the RAMM museum in Exeter, which is really about the Victorian Gothick, and in keeping with the museum itself, opened in 1861 and named in memory of the lamented Prince Consort who died in December of that year.  Here he is at the top of the entrance stairs, in what feels a rather cramped site in the city centre, brilliantly repainted in bright pink.

And, from the Royal Collection, Landseer’s oil of Albert & Victoria in costume as Edward III and Philippa of Hainault in 1842. They had a lot to answer for - I don't assume Pugin's ideas would have prevailed without such royal endorsement - though the architects – especially the ‘Great Goths’ – Scott, Butterfield, Bodley, Street, Pearson etc – made a more lasting impression with their buildings.  Churches of course were to be expected, given the Anglican fervour for a return to pre-Reformation faith without papal authority  - but  Parliament ??  as heir to ancient Greek democracy? or St Pancras station hotel??  Those[still] don't make a lot of sense except as Victorian ostentatious, elaborate, boastful expense.

The RAMM exhibition includes many unfamiliar pieces, such as an intricate metal 'throne' designed by Viollet-le-duc from Tyntesfield, which looks ridiculously uncomfortable; and some less fanciful, solidly powerful church furnishings carved by Harry Hems.  

Finally, The Summoning of of the Knights, one  of the great Holy Grail tapestries produce by Morris & Co to  Burne-Jones' designs, which remains astonishing in its impact.

This whole topic set me thinking about the appropriate font for a blog about Victorian Gothick.  

In the Microsoft font repertoire are a number declaring themselves ‘Gothic’

such as Malgun Gothic

and

Franklin Gothic Book  which frankly doesn’t look at all Gothic either

and

Century Gothic, ditto

and

Copperplate gothic light  WHICH ONLY DOES UPPER CASE

and 

MS Gothic

and

Showcard gothic  like copperplate only upper case

For all these the Gothic suffix seems mistaken and inexplicable.

There are a few quasi-Victorian typefaces, but I think the most appropriate

and most Puginesque

is Old English Text, even though or perhaps because it is so difficult to read, just as on Victorian memorial brasses.    However, for that reason i didn't choose it ...

     

Mr TURNER

 I imagine most art historians will enjoy Mike Leigh’s film for its glowing cinematographic re-creation of Turner’s world in the 1830s and 40s – albeit somewhat sanitised by the warm light of early nineteenth century watercolour land- and town-scapes, but visually familiar and beguiling.  As far as one can judge, it’s also a fair portrayal of JMWT in all his uncouth glory, mixed with high-falutin turns of phrase, cultural tastes and obsessional sketching.  

Much of the movie-going pleasure is in the meticulous detail, anachronisms of dress, conduct, language so often ruining historical dramas in the eyes of historians.   A small lost opportunity, given the incidental but highly relevant references to the slave trade, is the absence of any Black  citizens in the streets and maritime locations, at a time when many were working as sailors and servants.  7There will doubtless be other nit-picking corrections and complaints, but they are rather irrelevant given the high quality of the movie and its many delights – most especially the assembled RAs on Varnishing Day.  Who ever expected to see Shee, Stanfield, Prout etc portrayed on film? And the depiction of Haydon as neurotic cousin to Leigh Hunt is superb - I hope that actor gets an award.  I was surprised there was no mention of Haydon’s unhappy end, though, as surely that must have occasioned some expressive grunts from Turner.

However, pedantry compels one correction, lest the error embed in future accounts.  Ruskin wrote eloquently in praise of the sky and sea in Turner’s Slave Ship when it was shown in 1840 as Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on.  But he did not ask his father to buy it  - the subject was too ‘painful’.  John James misunderstood, misinterpreted the praise and purchased the painting as a surprise present, which was hung in John’s bedroom, not in the entrance hall.  Ruskin hated waking to the horrible scene but could not say so; instead, he sold it almost immediately his father died.

Silent Partners

A fascinating and informative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum on artists’ use of mannequins or lay figures, an essential piece of studio equipment for centuries.  Chiefly used for maintaining the shape and fall of garments when the sitter or model had finished their sessions, these articulated, life-size dolls have their own uncanny presence, like puppets, life-like but lifeless, in relaxed or alert poses, seen but unseeing.  They are technical, practical objects like easels, mirrors, plinths, yet masquerade as humans, with plump or muscular limbs, which can stand, sit, recline, or simulate the flight of angels.

The exhibition, curated by Jane Munro, explores the practical, the jokey, the surreal and the uncanny aspects of the studio mannequins from the 18^th to 21^st centuries.  One serious aspect is the length to which artists used to go to conceal their use of stuffed or jointed figures, and how nonetheless glimpses are visible on the resulting canvases. Indeed, one effect of the exhibition is to see lay-figures behind or within the figures in every and any dramatic or convivial subject.  

In the 19^th century artists and critics mocked pictures with stiff or elaborately posed figures as ‘mannequinised’, with the apparatus showing through in scenes that claimed to depict total naturalism.   Felix Nadar drew a satire on Corbet’s Demoiselles au bord de la Seine as recumbent dummies,  which still makes one laugh.  And though it does not make the connection, the exhibition also prompted me to wonder about the relation between Manet’s nude Olympia and her near-contemporary mechanical namesake in the Tales of Hoffman.

 

Even if they like to imagine it, few viewers now think that Millais’s models for the couple in The Black Brunswicker actually embraced in the studio – especially as Kate Dickens posed for the woman – but the stagey nature of their clinch betrays the mannequin’s presence.  Though I’d guess this was more essential for the sake of the shimmering satin skirt than to avoid any impropriety.   The Pre-Raphaelite claim of painting directly ‘from nature’ – a claim magnified by their fans – is in my view not really undermined by the technical use of lay figures, especially where careful figure studies preceded painting.  But it suggests an interesting reason why poor Lizzie Siddal should have lain in Ophelia's bath-tub for so long – this was one pose where a wooden or fabric mannequin would not substitute for the live model. 

The exhibition contains some original mannequins, one supplied by the Roberson firm from which many of the PRB circle obtained their materials, with one of the enormous volumes detailing Millais’s account.  The ledger for Marie Spartali shows that typically hire of a female lay figure cost one pound a month, and a child’s figure 15 shillings.  Plus, in Spartali’s case, Robersons’ charge for delivery and collection; one envisages a shopman in his brown overalls carrying the effigy through the streets.

From such functional matters Silent Partners progresses to explore artists’ playful and performative relations with mannequins, which shade into Surrealists’ use and abuse of stuffed and live women and the Chapman Brothers’ grotesque and obscene figure installations.  One

unsettling example is Oscar Kokoschka's creation of a life-size soft-fur fetish of his adored but lost Alma Mahler, carried around and finally beheaded in rage.  Other fringe manifestations like talking dolls, tailors’ dummies and fashion mannequins are included, but surprisingly no link is made with waxworks, whose lifelikeness is their claim to fame.  But in fact the purpose of lay figures is to assist the illusion of reality, not enact it.   

Spaces of Black Modernism

Following Drawing over the Colour Line, Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey have curated a room display at Tate Britain called Spaces of Black Modernism which extends Romain’s research into Black artists and models in London 1919-1939 and further augments knowledge of artists and artworks that have proved hard to find although hardly hidden.  

It’s exciting to see previously ‘unknown’ works that reveal social-artistic-musical spheres which included people of varied Black ancestries without being in any ghetto except that of the visual and performing arts, where the address is not inward-looking but to external audiences.  Which is Tate’s purpose too, so it’s good to see eclipsed artists featuring albeit on a modest scale compared to too-much Turner (given the several rooms already rightly occupied by his pictures) or the equally large latest spread by Turner prize nominees.

Spaces of Black Modernism raises further interesting questions about the role and experience of dark skin in Britain in the inter-war years; it also interrogates the patchy art history of that period, which may be coming back into fashion as it recedes further in time.  One sometimes feels that only art of the last five minutes or over a century ago attracts critical attention and, as Romain’s research shows, the less noisy and/or celebrity artists are not only forgotten but literally lost, until one-by-one paintings, sculptures, photographs are found again. 

It looks as if Black Modernism has further to go in recovering the past, and one looks forward to more manifestations, in different formats and venues, hopefully moving beyond London.  

Apologies for lack of captions here: I will aim to add these soon as both artists and sitters deserve to be named.

PS  Seek out the even smaller display of work by Marlow Moss, another casualty of history, in an adjacent Tate space.

Edward Carpenter

One of the many now-forgotten progressive figures who feature in Fiona MacCarthy's fascinating exploration of William Morris's legacy through politics and the creative professions from 1860-1960 now on at the National Portrait Gallery is Edward Carpenter, prophet of 'the simple life' lived on a comfortable if not lavish unearned income.  These are the Indian sandals he taught himself how to make, and wore in the belief that  human soles should be close to the earth.

More importantly, he lived in a same-sex relationship  decades before it was permissable, and solaced many young gay men whose lives were darkened by public and private homophobia.  
It's a shame Carpenter is not better known historically.  Even many contemporaries dismissed him as a crank.  Thus the artist Will Rothenstein:

'Carpenter had an affectionate nature and a real love for mankind, but his vision was too vague and he was over-attentive to faddists and theorists. He lacked the power of men like Ruskin and Morris; the most concrete thing he achieved was the sandal.' 

Roger Fry's early portrait in NPG is rather wonderful, presenting Carpenter as if he had just turned up at the studio and found it too chilly to take off his overcoat.  The half-glimpsed rear view in the mirror and the low pink buttoned chair seem to signal some kind of metaphors for Carpenter's personality - not altogether straight and narrow?   But he's wearing hard black city shoes: where were the sandals?

William Morris & Andy Warhol

I admit I was incredulous when first hearing of this forthcoming show.  Largely I suppose from Warhol’s reputation for celebrity solipsism, as if everything he touched was ipso facto worthy of attention, even adulation.  So unlike our dear WM, surely?

But at the WM Society last Saturday hearing Jeremy Deller preview his forthcoming show Love is Enough at Oxford MAO – see  here

persuaded me that the connections, parallels and comparisons between the two make for a thoughtful exploration of similarities and contrasts, in the same way as with English Magic Deller produced a creative-critical, if quirky, appraisal of WM’s life and works for today.  Flower-patterning in diverse colourways is just one of the unlikely meeting points; so are hand-crafted multiple reproductions,  and the promotion of collaborative enterprise over artistic individualism, within a contradictory context dominated by one figure.  Deller is moreover convinced that both WM and AW shared an anti-industrial, anti-capitalist political perspective, which is less persuasive but nonetheless provocative.   I am also intrigued by his choice of title, for as well as being well-nigh unreadable today, Love is Enough was one of WM’s failures in his repeated attempt to combine visual and verbal arts.  The words, decorations and typography just did not match up. and the endeavour was more or less abandoned. UPDATE BELOW  Moreover, the text dates from the years when for WM love was certainly not enough, indeed seriously lacking.  It may have been a substitute for the loss – temporary as it turned out – of Janey, but it was certainly extremely  melancholy.  So how will Jeremy present it?  i look forward to seeing. 

UPDATE 
indeed, as  Januszczak said in STimes: 'after seeing the exhibition I made the huge mistake of actually reading Love is Enough the pseudo-medieval morality play.  The exhibition is provocative and fun. The morality play is twaddle'  [You dont say!, though Janusczek is one of few to offer a simple account of the text.] 'it's an escape into the world of Lancelots and Guineveres so complete that if I were deciding on the categories I would file under Love Unhinged... a mad flight from the realities of late Victorian England.'    And  even worse as a literary endeavour.

Women's Guild of Arts

Women's History Seminar

Institute of Historical Research

University of London

Senate House

Malet Street

IHR at 17.15 (Room to be determined)

Friday, 31 October

Zoe Thomas (RHUL) ‘At Home’ with the Women’s Guild of Arts: Studio Spaces and Professional Artistic Identity in London 1880-1920

This paper considers the tactics middle-class women decorative artists used to construct professional artistic identity between 1880-1920. Using the Women’s Guild of Arts as its focus, the paper reflects on the importance members placed on having a studio. The paper reveals women artists increasingly attempted to acquire studios, be this separate to their home, or through the reforming of existing rooms. The studio permitted women a new site in which to partake in a range of artistic, social and egalitarian activity, perceived to at least ideologically be separate from the constraints of the domestic and the amateur. This research builds on the flourishing body of academic work locating the blurred nature of middle-class women’s professional and domestic lives in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

Rossetti's Obsession @ WMG

[this is Jill Iredale  ] 
 Opening of ROSSETTI’S OBSESSION at the William Morris Gallery on 3 October:  its third incarnation this year, centenary of Janey Morris’s death, and an exhibition which has evolved over the year so that each venue has seen a subtly different show, with absences and additions.

First thanks to Jill Iredale of Bradford Museums [above] who proposed and curated and came up with the title.

Constant elements throughout include the great pastel drawings from Bradford and the great Honeysuckle embroidery stitched by Jane and Jenny.   These two elements represent aspects of Janey Morris, showcased in exhibition:  the ‘real’ Jane – seen in photographs and sketches, letters and embroideries – and what can be called the ‘mythical’ Jane, in the roles of Pandora, Persephone, Astarte, Beatrice, seen in Rossetti’s drawings.  We don’t confuse an actress with the parts she plays but still we interpret Jane through his obsessional representations of an alluring but moody femme fatale.

Thanks also to Rupert Maas who offered to the WMG the fine red chalk vision of Jane both as herself and as Tennyson’s Mariana, which makes a great addition to the show.

Jane remarkably transformed herself from a poverty-stricken childhood into a woman of culture and creativity, an active member of the William Morris family firm.   It also says something for the unavailability of divorce in the Victorian age that the Morris marriage survived the troubles she caused it, becoming a loving and mutually supportive partnership.  Jane devoted her widowhood to preserving and promoting Morris’s legacy, so we should thank her too.  

Rossetti’s Obsession is not a blockbuster but a jewel of an exhibition.  Thanks and congratulations to all involved. 

A prompt and appreciative review in Apollo

here

William III's Blacks from the plantations of the Netherlands

What is known of the '200 Blacks' who came to Britain 'to attend the Horse' with the 200 gentlemen who formed the retinue of William of Orange when he landed at Brixham and proceeded via Exeter to London in 1688?

In a broadside published a week after William's triumphal entry into Exeter  there was an account a bit like a press report, which was republished mostly verbatim a year later by John Whittle in An Exact Diary of the Late Expedition of His Illustrious Highness, the Prince of Orange His Publick Entrance Into Exeter:

============
Since the foundation of Monarchy, Imperial Orations or the triumphs of the Cæsars, in the Manner, Grandeur and magnificence of their most sumptuous cavalcades, there was never any that exceeded this of the most Illustrious Hero the Prince of Orange his Entrance into Exeter, which was in manner and form following:

1. The Right Honourable the Earl of Macclesfield with 200 horse, the most part of which were English Gentlemen, Richly mounted on Flanders Steeds, manag’d and us’d to war in Headpieces, Back and Brest, Bright Armour.
2. 200 Blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America, Imbroyder’d Caps lined with white Fur and plumes of white Feathers to attend the Horse.
3. 200 Finlanders or Laplanders in Bear Skins taken from the Wild Beasts they had slain, the common Habbit of that cold Climat, with black Armour and Broad Flaming Swords.

===================

In the Royal Collection is  a contemporary painting of William's landing,

from which not a lot can be seen, certainly not any white feathered caps,  though here enlargement   http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/402861/william-iii-prince-of-orange-arriving-at-brixham#.VCryuGVvHcE.favorites

and an engraving after Kneller of William himself shows him with an African-descent attendant, holding a helmet to match the king's back and breast armour, though this should not be taken literally

engraving British Museum 

I'm hoping someone has done lots of research on Orange William  and the Netherlands' plantations in the Caribbean....

Neo-classical Nubian Athlete

Among the classical and neo-classical sculpture acquired by soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme and now installed in his memorial art gallery in Port Sunlight is a fine black marble figure with dreadlocks entitled 'Nubian Athlete'.  Apart from the fact that it is believed to be of Italian origin and carved in the 17th or 18th centuries, nothing much is known about the statue, but it's one of several Black figures in the Lever Art Gallery.  A bit more about it here    http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.aspx?id=131

 Liverpool  Museums

As you may imagine, one of my pleasures is seeking and finding such figures wherever they may be, because long ago I was surprised to realise that Black figures did feature in Victorian art = it's obvious now, of course, but then = and now I seldom leave a museum or stately home without discovering some.  

So for the record, at Port Sunlight, the Nubian athlete has two small ceramic companions, a muscular fellow Nubian in William Etty's ridiculous painting of Cleopatra on her barge, and at least one allegorical female symbolising peace and plenty in an antique tapestry.  But maybe there are others?  

Rampant Butterfly and Peacock

Thanks to the Whistler Society  [Homepage - The Whistler Society] I went to see the current exhibition at the Bluecoat in Liverpool-  part of the Biennial-  which is worth a visit both for its intelligent selection and understanding of the artist and for its wonderful construction by Olivia de Monceau of a full-size replica in oils, gold leaf, canvas, leather and wood of Harmony in Blue & Gold : the Peacock Room,  one wall in Frederick Leyland’s London mansion.

Leyland was a Liverpool shipowner, so the quarrel between artist and patron makes an apt focus for the presentation, which placed Whistler as a forerunner of the modern artist whose outrageous publicity-seeking is part and parcel of their reputation.  He was certainly one of the first to curate his own solo shows, paying especial attention to the yellow and grey decoration and design of the rooms as well as the hang, and accessories to match.  His emblem being a butterfly derived from ‘JMW’, with a scorpion-sting in its tail, for his exhibition in 1883 he wrote of himself as Butterfly Rampant and claimed to have ordered ‘ a lot of little butterflies made in yellow satin and velvet with their little sting in silver wire which will be worn as badges by the women. Amazers!’

The story of Whistler’s intervention in the Peacock Room is told here [ A Closer Look - James McNeill Whistler - Peacock Room ].  Whistler having boldly re-painted the  elaborate woodwork in colours he deemed necessary to set off the centrepiece, his own painting of Christine Spartali as La Princesse du Pays de Porcelaine, Leyland declined to pay the full amount demanded. 

In retaliation Whistler painted himself and Leyland as a pair of strutting peacocks, one with his own silver quiff, the other rampant  and resplendent with Leyland’s reptilian aspect, and scattered on the ground the coins of the dispute.  

It’s a stunning image, for which all Whistler’s arrogance can be forgiven, especially since Leyland by all accounts was an unpleasant fellow and ruthless businessman, despite his love of art and music.  The exhibition also includes a replica of Whistler’s depiction of Leyland as a peacock with vicious claws on the piano keys, in The Gold Scab : Eruption in Filthy Lucre.

Fine Art Museum San Francisco

The Bluecoat/Biennial is on until the end of October, after which it appears that de Monceau’s magnificent construction will be dismantled, which is a pity as it deserves to be widely seen, and preferably not in a concrete box like those which form the Bluecoat’s contemporary exhibition spaces.  I wonder if it might be re-built at Speke Hall, Leyland’s country house on the outskirts of Liverpool, now owned by the National Trust?  It’d certainly be an attraction.

PS Colm Toibin will be at the Bluecoat at lunchtime on 7 October, responding to the Whistler exhibition. Free tickets here :    http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/exhibitions/2443  

Laus Veneris

The Society of Antiquaries is holding a fund-raising auction to raise money for Kelmscott Manor on 25 September.    It contains 100 lots ranging from tea-trays to trout fishing by way of objects and visits, and advance absentee bids are invited (though not, I think, phone bids on the night).   A couple of noteworthy items include a copy of May Morris’s embroidery handbook Decorative Needlework, with the author-designed cover. LOT 62

And most exciting of all, a sample of calligraphy, attributed to Burne-Jones but very much in William Morris’s own manner, as an illuminated title Laus Veneris as if for a manuscript of Swinburne’s poem, and almost exactly as depicted on the music stand in Burne-Jones’s great painting. LOT 85

This appears to have come from Kelmscott originally, having been owned by the mother of artist Edward Scott-Snell  who was a tenant of the Manor during WW2 and acquired things at the sale in 1939.  It passed to her grandson Joscelyn Godwin, professor at Colgate University, Hamilton, US.   Being an exquisite and hitherto unpublished item so closely linked to the painting, it deserves wider circulation and research. 

All information about the auction and other lots here:

http://www.sal.org.uk/kelmscott-manor/auction-catalogue-(25-september-2014)/

UPDATE :  1 OCT 2014  the event raised nearly £40 000 for the Manor  - a good start to what's going to be an extremely expensive programme.