Threat to Royal Exchange murals

Frederic Leighton

These are not well known, if only because so few people visit the Royal Exchange today, but they are a notable sequence, which belong to the Victorian history of public art that includes the major Westminster sequence and Madox Brown's efforts in Manchester Town Hall.

The London series relates episodes from the City's history (naturally)  with some excursions beyond the walls, including the opening panel (top) of Phoenicians trading in Cornwall by Frederic Leighton, and another featuring Magna Carta at Runnymede.

Two by Stanhope Forbes - citizenry taking to the Thames during the Great Fire, and the gutting of the previous Exchange in 1838 - are worth being seen, both for their shared fiery scenes and for their visually effective compositions for tall works to be viewed from the floor.  

Stanhope Forbes 

Stanhope Forbes 

Frank Brangwyn

So it is  shame that there are proposals to render them largely invisible in order to fill the space with commercial outlets - cafes and shops.    Even if Frank Brangwyn's panel, Modern Commerce, foregrounds that theme, which is indeed a large element in the City's history and identity.

I'm not sure of the murals' own history except that they must have been projected in the 1890s and continued through to the 1920s, as the later panels feature the Great War.  The list of artists is a roll-call of eminent  and now mostly forgotten late Victorians.

Henrietta Rae

Including just two women: Henrietta Rae and Lucy Kemp Welch, the former depicting Dick Whittington as benevolent Lord Mayor, and the latter an industrious group of Women Workers 1914-1918, with a battleship fleet on the horizon.


More on Kemp Welch's work http://spitalfieldslife.com/






The proposals are for a mezzanine floor halfway up the paintings, obscuring their central sections and frankly making nonsense of the images.  A mock-up of the predicted effect below.

Here is where to register an objection.  Here is the VicSoc's fully itemised objection, which covers more than just the paintings.   And here is the full sequence of images, courtesy SpitalfieldsLife

Mentor to William Morris

As is well known, William Morris began training with architect George Edmund Street in Oxford in 1855, where he met Philip Webb.  Morris’s time in Street’s office  was short – in less than a year he changed  direction in favour of painting and then in 1858 he published his first book of poetry.   But during his time with Street, Morris imbibed the  Gothick Revival passion that  Street held to be superior to all others, and the correct model for his own time, not only for churches but also public buildings, as he would demonstrate with London’s Law Courts in the 1870s.    

Among other writings on architectural principles, in 1855 Street had published a book of architectural and travel notes chronicling a tour of northern Italy, which Morris no doubt read and absorbed.  Following Pugin and Ruskin, Street was already a believer in Northern Gothic or ‘pointed’ principles.  ‘As in the pointed arch we have not only the most beautiful, but at the same time the most convenient feature in construction which has ever been, or which, I firmly believe, ever can be invented, we should not be true artists if we neglected to use it,’ he wrote.  The work of Italian Renaissance architects showed ‘the same falseness of construction, and heaviness, coarseness, and bad grotesqueness of ornamentation … together with the same contempt of simplicity, repose and delicacy which we are so accustomed to connect with them.’

As a result, even when medieval, many buildings described in Street’s book failed to meet ‘true’ Gothic standards, almost as if they were exam candidates. Some passed the test, others were found wanting. This was not chauvinism, for the great cathedrals of northern France and Germany were deemed as excellent as Lincoln, Canterbury and the like,  but it was distinctly partisan, and above all romantic, as is clear in Street’s closing paragraphs:

'The principle which artists now have mainly to contend for is that of TRUTH; forgotten, trodden under foot, despised, if not hated for ages, this must be their watchword.’  Whether architects, sculptors or painters, ‘let them remember how all-important a return to first principles and truth in the delineation of nature and natural forms is, if they are ever to create a school of art by which they may be remembered in another age.

    Finally, I wish that all artists would remember the one great fact which separates by so wide  a gap the architects, sculptors and painters of the best days of the Middle Ages from us now – their earnestness and their thorough self-sacrifice in the pursuit of art, and in the exaltation of their faith.  They were men who had a faith, and hearts earnestly bent on the propagation of that faith; and were it not for this, their work would never have had the life, vigour, and freshness which even now they so remarkably retain.  Why should we not be equally remembered three centuries hence? Have we less to contend for, less faith to exhibit, or less self-sacrifice to offer than they, because we live in later days?  Or is it true that the temper of men is so much changed, and that the vocation of art has changed with it?  I believe not.'

  

This chimed with Morris’s youthful idealism, even if he had already  cast off a good deal of Street’s religious faith.  And it certainly coloured his own response to medieval buildings when he came to defend them against restoration in the 1870s. 

In like manner, Street’s critical assessment of Italian architecture surely fed into Morris’s prejudice, no doubt later augmented in reaction to Janey’s predilection for the land and the language during her infatuation with Rossetti.  When obliged to escort his family home from Italy, Morris developed a severe attack of gout, which prevented him from sightseeing, and no doubt soured his mood also.

As a coda to his Italian survey, Street wrote positively of the use of brickwork and polychrome, two features seldom seen or admired in Britain.  'It has been by far too much the fashion of late years to look upon brick as a very inferior material, fit only to be covered with compo, and never fit to be used in church building, or indeed in any buildings of any architectural pretension’, he declared.  In the Netherlands, south--west France, Northern Germany, large tracts  of Spain and throughout northern Italy, however, brick was ‘everywhere and most fearlessly used.’ 

And as a result of his observations, Street hoped that ‘the ignorant prejudice which made many good people regard stone as a sort of sacred material, and red brick as one fit only for the commonest and meanest purposes, is fast wearing out, and that what now mainly remains to be done is to shew how it may most effectively be used, not only in external, but also in internal works.’

This sounds like the challenge taken up by Webb, designing Red House for Morris, all in fearless red brick, including internal arches, window surrounds and fireplaces.

Street remained a friend to Morris and Webb, and one would love to know if he ever passed an opinion on his proteges’ building in Bexley.

   

Foundlings and Finds

Cornelia Parker curated an exhibition for the Foundling Museum in Coram Fields by inviting [and presumably paying, thanks to the Arts Council and other donors] sixty fellow artists to contribute a work of modest size loosely on the theme of ‘found’, and distributing the objects and videos through the rooms of the Museum, which are decorated and furnished to evoke the eighteenth century Foundling Hospital on the site, which was supported by several contemporary artists including William Hogarth.

Alison Wilding Cellar Frog 

Most artists are magpies, it seems, amassing studios full of found objects that may or may not relate to art works. So some of the contributors have unearthed such finds, like a collection of dirty playing cards picked up in streets over many years, or bottle tops from more recent gutters.  Others have submitted old pieces.  Others have made or displayed new/old objects, bought from flea markets.  Some have created wholly new works.  Alison Wilding shows the petrified corpse of a flattened frog found in her cellar, 

Anthony Gormley, Iron Baby

The result is an eclectic mix held together only by the theme and the fact that most are small  – which must have been quite hard for some contributors, accustomed to working on an outsize scale.  Many are necessarily solipsistic: ‘my’ objet trouvé from the beach, this reminds me of my grandmother, I made this a long time ago, etc.  For once, Anthony Gormley has not offered an ‘everyman’ version of his own body, but a touching cast of one of his own babies, aged six weeks, apparently asleep on the cold floor of an empty side room, as if somehow forgotten.

Elsewhere there is an uncomfortable, unspoken equivalence between the long-ago children who were ‘given’ to Captain Coram’s charity by mothers who could not support them, and discarded pieces of flotsam haphazardly found in the street or seashore.   Despite the title, the Hospital infants were not ‘found’ like Mike Nelson’s battered roadsign or Ron Arad’s string of unredeemed pawn tickets.  In some respects, there is too much rubbish on view.

Foundling tokens

Nonetheless, there are resonances even in these bits of detritus.  The roadsign is to a now-abandoned village, the pawn tickets are for never-claimed items, most frequently wedding rings. And the majority share a loss of identity that mirrors the anonymity of the foundlings who, once admitted, were re-baptised with new names, to recover their own only if their mothers came to reclaim them.  To this end each infant was identified by a maternal token, many surviving in the Museum’s collection, poignant mementoes of children who never knew their parentage.

The most eloquent art works reflect this anonymity and erasure, like Parker’s own contribution, an unfinished painting attributed to Alfred Munnings, of two well-off girls who lack features, maybe because the parents refused to pay the requested fee?  Or had not the means to support such an expensive portrait, in a symbolic echo of the foundlings' mothers.   This is also an 'orphan' work in art historical terms - a painting that has lost all identity, as there is no proof it is by Munnings, and like their faces the sitters' names will never be known,

Attributed to Sir Alfred Munnings

Christina Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne

At the end of July, a team of Swinburnian scholars organised a two-day conference at St John’s College Cambridge to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Algernon Swinburne’s notoriously pagan and pan-sexual Poems & Ballads, which shocked and thrilled  Victorian readers in equal measure, thanks to blasphemy and indecency.

It prompted me to offer a paper, remembering my research into Christina Rossetti’s life and work, when I realised that Poems & Ballads was published in the same season as her second volume The Prince’s Progress, whose reception was quite overshadowed if not wholly eclipsed by Swinburne’s collection.

The text of that paper is now  here 

I had  forgottten how the personal and poetic relationship between the two poets is a lot more interesting than might be supposed.  As the conference showed, those who study Swinburne generally ignore Rossetti, no doubt consigning her work to the Tennysonian/devotional camp.  But as contributors to the emergence of Aestheticism in literature and art, they repay attention.

The conference was full of new scholarship and insights into Swinburne's work and influence - as the
programme indicates     There is also a case display at Cambridge University Library outlined here, though it would be good if the display items were listed, as only those with access to CUL can actually see the display for themselves. It's notable for an open copy of the Saturday Review in which John Morley violently and lengthily attacked Poems & Ballads for its 'mixed vileness and childishness' - ironic when Morley later changed into one of Swinburne's greatest admirers.