A Fondness for Fronds - Book Review

"Kate Dore with frame of plant forms,"
Victoria & Albert Museum, PH.258-1982

Among the items in the V&A’s remarkable photography collection is a small portrait by Oscar Rejlander (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here) of the Pre-Raphaelite favorite Kate Dore (at left). The leafy frame that surrounds the sitter, made by pressing ferns between the photographer’s glass plate negative and light-sensitive paper, was added later by Julia Margaret Cameron (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), perhaps during a visit by Rejlander to Dimbola Lodge, Cameron’s Isle of Wight home, in 1863.

It’s a striking image that illustrates a fad then at the height of fashion, one recounted with great style in Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (Frances Lincoln Limited, 2012), Sarah Whittingham’s new book on the Victorian obsession with what one journalist writing in 1891 called the "tasseled, feathered, fringed, frilled, crimped, and curled" plant. It was an enthusiasm that manifested itself in the passionate cultivation, collection, and exchange of fern varieties, both native and exotic, and one that quickly developed a full panoply of related interest groups, specialist growers, and publications.

The term "pteridomania" is derived from pteridophyte (a vascular plant that reproduces by spores, from the Greek pteri, feather, and phyte, relating to plants), and mania (madness or frenzy). It was coined by the clergyman and naturalist Charles Kingsley in Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (1855), his call for better science education among the young. Addressing the parents of mid-Victorian girls, he wrote: "Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing 'Pteridomania' and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to be somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool."

Yet as Whittingham convincingly shows, the passion for ferns transcended gender and could be identified in men, women, and children of all ages and classes throughout the English-speaking world. She finds examples not only in Britain, but also in the far-flung corners of the Empire and in the United States. Her material is (more or less) neatly organized into three main areas of activity: collecting, cultivation, and public display. 

From Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (c) 2012 Frances Lincoln Ltd.
and Sarah Whittingham. National Library of Australia, Canberra.

The first part of the book is enlivened by contemporary descriptions of "fern hunts," rambles over the countryside conducted with "trowel, satchel, and stout stick" in search of specimens in the wild. Whittingham's discussion of the tools used during such forays is fascinating. Tucked into bags and pockets were fern spade and hatchet, frond pattern book (for identification) and magnifying glass. The "vasculum" -- a cylindrical tin case in which the collected plants were carried home -- was ubiquitous. This was a physically demanding outdoor pursuit with a thrilling edge, and, as Whittingham notes, it could be extremely dangerous: "The overwhelming desire to find a rare fern led the hunter or huntress to lean over fast-flowing rivers, descend precipitous ravines, wade through bogs, and scale rock faces and waterfalls." In 1864 the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton recounted a gruesome accident in the Lake District. "A fine athletic young man, in the very prime of his life and flower of his strength, lost his life at the [Stock Ghyll] Force while we were there. Looking for ferns, he overbalanced himself and fell -- dashed into eternity in a second among the rocks." 

From Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania
(c) 2012 Frances Lincoln Ltd. and Sarah Whittingham.

Once prised from rock or ground, a fern could be transplanted into the large glass display boxes known as Wardian cases, which became the sine qua non of the fashionable drawing room, or into the garden. In the second part of her book, Whittingham describes the varieties of these cases in some detail, along with other forms of home display and cultivation, including nurseries, "stumperies," grottos, and conservatories.

The third part of the book describes how fern motifs were applied across the fine and decorative arts, adorning everything from majolica plates and pitchers to cast-iron fire grates and garden benches. The most original section here is a profusely illustrated consideration of the Victorian ferneries that were built into botanic gardens, winter gardens, and aquaria. 

These long chapters are complemented by a pair of fine short essays, the first describing the links between ferns and fairies, the second providing an entertaining capsule biography of the painter Edward William Cooke (1811-80; DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), who experienced, according to Whittingham, what was probably “the most intense and long-lasting attack of fern fever in the nineteenth century.”

Rounding out this useful 256-page oversized volume are extensive notes; a list of surviving and restored ferneries in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; an exhaustive bibliography; and a thorough index.

The book is largely descriptive, an approach that will suit many readers. Others will be frustrated by its superficial analysis of the cultural and social contexts in which pteridomania flourished. The book’s colorful anecdotes sometimes feel strung together in pursuit of a point that never quite gets made. Quotes from contemporary books and periodicals might have been selected more judiciously in service to a sustained argument about the needs, desires, and aspirations that fern fever (and indeed other Victorian plant obsessions, such as those for orchids, roses, coleus, and palms) represented during this period. Advances in the nineteenth-century understanding of fern biology are cursorily treated. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating survey and one that is sure to inspire additional studies.

Read more...

Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (Harper Press, 2006).

Catherine Horwood, Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home (Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2007).

Mary Kocol, "The Garden in Early Art Photography," Gardens Illustrated (November 2010).

Peter D. A. Boyd, "Pteridomania: The Victorian Passion for Ferns," Antique Collecting 28 (1993), 9-12. 

Dishing the Victorian Dirt

Imagine living anywhere near this gray mountain of trash in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign. It's the "Great Dust-Heap at Kings Cross" as seen from Maiden Lane (now York Road), painted in 1837 by the watercolorist E. H. Dixon, surrounded by slum housing and adjacent to the Smallpox Hospital.

The crud all around us is the focus of a fascinating new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London. "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," brings together a variety of art, documents, cultural ephemera, photos, videos, and art installations to -- as curator Kate Forde puts it -- "uncover a rich history of disgust and delight in the grimy truths and dirty secrets of our past."

The exhibition uses six different historical times and places as starting points for exploring attitudes towards dirt and cleanliness: a home in seventeenth-century Delft, a street in Victorian London in the 1850s, a hospital in Glasgow in the 1860s, a museum in interwar Dresden, a community in present-day New Delhi, and the Fresh Kills landfill site in New York City. 

Highlights include paintings by Pieter de Hooch, Joseph Lister's medical instruments, and a wide range of contemporary art on related themes. You can peer through one of the first primitive microscopes used to discover bacteria (which had been collected from the mouth of a Dutch scientist), learn about the cesspools that turned the Thames into a "monster soup" in the early nineteenth century, and gaze on "Laid to Rest," a sculpture by Serena Korda featuring bricks that incorporate dust sent to her by modern Londoners.

The exhibition's display on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in London's Soho district, ground zero of a cholera epidemic in 1854 that killed more than 600 people, is particularly interesting. At the time, an infecting "miasma" was thought to cause the disease. It took the brilliant detective work of the physician (and royal anaesthetist) John Snow (DNB bio here; Wiki bio here) and the Rev. Henry Whitehead (Wiki bio here) to find the true culprit: fetid water that was being distributed through a public water pump. Snow's famous "ghost map," which traced the progress of the terrifying disease through the city, is included in the exhibition.

As for Kings Cross ... similar dustheaps featured in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (the "Golden Dustman" Noddy Boffin is one of the writer's most indelible creations) and were the subject of "Dust, or Ugliness Redeemed," an essay by the poet R. H. Horne that appeared in Household Words, the weekly journal Dickens edited from 1850 to 1859. Horne vividly describes the underclass of "Searchers and Sorters" who scaled the debris and painstakingly raked through the refuse, separating animal and vegetable matter from broken pottery, bones, rags, metal, glass, and other detritus. Everything was sold off and recycled: coarse cinders were sold to brickmakers, bones to soapmakers, threadbare linen rags to papermakers. [Shown here: The sifting process at a dust-yard in nineteenth-century London; Mayhew, 1862.]

The Kings Cross dustheap pictured at the top of this post was packed up and shipped to Russia in 1848 when city developers decided to convert the site into what is now the Kings Cross railway terminus. The Russians mixed ash from the pile with local clay to make bricks that were used to rebuild their war-ravaged country.

This exhibition is part of the Wellcome's "Dirt Season" that involves a collaboration with the BBC (a series called "Filthy Cities" with accompanying scratch-and-sniff cards), an environmental theatre piece at this summer's Glastonbury Festval, related events for children at the Eden Project in Cornwall, a "Dirt Banquet" held earlier this month at Joseph Bazalgette's Crossness Pumping Station, and a free iPhone/iPad word-puzzle app called "Filth Fair."

"Dirt" runs through 31 August at the Wellcome Collection, 215 Euston Road, London.

Read more...

"Wellcome Collection Takes a Filthy Look at an Age-Old Obsession," The Guardian, 23 March 2011.

Henry Mayhew, "Of the Dustmen of London." London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.
 
Brian Maidment, Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870. Manchester University Press, 2007.

H. P. Sucksmith, "The dust-heaps in Our Mutual Friend," Essays in Criticism 23.2 (1973), pp. 206–212.

Costas A. Velis, David C. Wilson, and Christopher R. Cheeseman, "19th century London dust-yards: A case study in closed-loop resource efficiency." Waste Management 29.4 (April 2009), pp. 1282-1290.

Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Riverhead Press, 2006.  There's a wonderful website for this book here. 

"From Mama V.R. to Helena"

A gold, enamel, and garnet bodice brooch from 1830 that belonged to Queen Victoria made fourteen times its pre-sale estimate at auction last week, selling for £11,400. 

The intricately worked brooch features two large cabochon garnets in a setting of green and red enamel.  

The brooch (shown at left) originally belonged to Victoria, Duchess of Kent (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), who on her death in 1861 left her jewelry to her daughter, Queen Victoria. 

Queen Victoria subsequently gave the brooch to her fifth child and third daughter, Helena, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), as a present on her 24th birthday in 1870. The reverse of the brooch has a simple yet very personal engraving: “Belonged to dear Grandmamma V. From Mama V.R. to Helena 25th May 1870." 

Although Princess Helena married the German prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein in 1866, the couple remained in Britain close to the Queen, who liked to have her daughters nearby. 

Helena was an extremely active member of the royal family, carrying out an extensive program of royal engagements. She was also a committed patron of charities, and was one of the founding members of the Red Cross. She was also the first president of the Royal School of Needlework and the first president of the Royal British Nurses' Association.

She is, perhaps, my favorite of Queen Victoria's children...the Jan Brady of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan. She fell in love with her father's German librarian, who was promptly sent back to the continent when "Mama V.R." discovered the liaison. There is an excellent biography of her by Seweryn Chomet, Helena, A Princess Reclaimed: The Life and Times of Queen Victoria's Third Daughter (New York: Begell House, 1999).

Restored: Ellen Terry's Beetle-Wing Dress

"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." This briefest of lines from Act I, scene 5, of Shakespeare's Macbeth inspired one of the most famous stage costumes ever constructed.

When the Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving [DNB bio here; Wiki bio here] decided to produce "the Scottish play" in 1888, with he playing the title role and Ellen Terry, his acting partner, playing his wife, Terry [DNB bio here; Wiki bio here] called on her close friend Alice Comyns Carr to design her dresses. Carr wanted one of them to "look as much like soft chain armour" as possible and "yet have something that would give the appearance of the scales of a serpent." Working with Lyceum dressmaker Mrs. Nettleship, Carr devised a garment "sewn all over with real green beetle wings, and a narrow border in Celtic designs, worked out in rubies and diamonds, hemmed all the edges. To this was added a cloak of shot velvet in heather tones, upon which great griffins were embroidered in flame-coloured tinsel. The wimple, or veil, was held in place by a circlet of rubines, and two long plaits [of hair] twisted with gold hung to her knees."

The result was magnificent, and John Singer Sargent painted Terry as Lady Macbeth in 1889 (shown at left, on display at Tate Britain). 

Now this costume, an irreplaceable link to the Victorian theatre and one of its most famous and fascinating stars, has been restored and put back on view at Smallhythe Place, Ellen Terry's former home in Kent.

[Read the National Trust's press release here,]

Via Kent News:  'One of the most iconic dresses of the Victorian era – shimmering with 1,000 real beetle wings – is returning home to Kent. The emerald and sea-green gown, which is covered in iridescent wings of the jewel beetle, was made famous by the celebrated actress Ellen Terry in her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in 1888.

'The 120-year-old dress was one of the most iconic costumes of the time, immortalised by the John Singer Sargent portrait at the Tate Gallery. Now, after 1,300 hours of painstaking conservation work costing £50,000, the gown is on display at Smallhythe Place, near Tenterden, where Ellen Terry lived between 1899 and 1928. House manager Paul Meredith said the beetle wings that had dropped off were collected and reattached along with others that had been donated by an antiques dealer.

'"The 100 or so wings that were broken were each carefully repaired by supporting them on small pieces of Japanese tissues adhered with a mixture of wheat starch paste," he said. "But the majority of the work has involved strengthening the fabric, understanding the many alterations that were made to the dress and ultimately returning it to something that is much closer to the costume worn by Ellen on stage in 1888."

[Read a description of the restoration and see additional photos here.]

'The actress, known as the Queen of the Theatre, was famed for her portrayal of Shakespearean heroines and played opposite Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London for more than 20 years.

'Her beetle dress stage costume was one of the most important items in the National Trust’s collection and was on the priority list to be conserved. Brighton-based conservator Zenzie Tinker and her team carried out the work.

'"We have restored the original shape of the elaborate sleeves and the long, trailing hemline that Ellen so admired," Tucker said. "If she were alive today, I’m sure she’d be delighted. She really valued her costumes because she kept and reused them time and again. I’d like to think she’d see our contribution as part of the ongoing history of the dress."

'The gown is now in a new display space at Smallhythe Place alongside other features from Ellen Terry’s dressing room which have never been viewed by the public before. The half-timbered house, built in the early sixteenth century when Smallhythe was a thriving shipbuilding yard, was Terry's home from 1899 to 1928 and contains her fascinating theatre collection. The cottage grounds include her rose garden, orchard, nuttery, and the working Barn Theatre.

'Mr Meredith said the setting was an intimate area, bursting with theatre history and stage costumes. "Now the beetle wing dress is back and we finally have a really good contemporary display space, we hope to show many more people just how special the house and collections are."'

Read more...

"The Actor and the Maker: Ellen Terry and Alice Comyns-Carr," V&A 

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, Tate Collection

"Ellen Terry's Beetlewing Gown Back in Limelight," The Guardian, 11 March 2011

Alicia Finkel, Romantic Stages: Set and Costume Design in Victorian England (McFarland, 1996) 

Picture Show

In addition to providing a useful list of nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers, this page from the 6 December 1890 issue of The Graphic is...well, just beautiful.

Papers in the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Denmark, Holland, and Russia are represented.

Click the image and then the magnifying glass icon for a much larger (and readable) version.

Undershaw Under Threat

I previously posted about the threat to Undershaw, the Surrey home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2007.

As I noted then, quoting The Guardian, it was at Undershaw that Doyle "wrote the 'Hound of the Baskervilles' and a patriot defence of Britain's Boer War; resurrected Sherlock Holmes, having previously thrown him off the Reichenbach Falls; campaigned for justice for the falsely accused solicitor George Edalji, and attempted to learn the banjo."

Anyone who has read Julian Barnes's magnificent novel Arthur & George will feel that they know every inch of this house (shown above in 1897). At the time, I expressed the hope that the worldwide network of societies devoted to Doyle and his immortal creation, Holmes, would be able to rally private support to rescue the house from developers.

The following update is cross-posted from The Folio Newsletter, December 2010.

"Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's home in Hindhead, Surrey, is the subject of a legal bid by campaigners aiming to prevent it from being converted into flats. The house, which overlooks the South Downs, was built by Conan Doyle in 1897 for his wife Louisa, who suffered from ill health. After her death a decade later, he sold it. The house is virtually untouched from the period and retains such features as the family coat of arms, which appears on the impressive stained glass windows. Undershaw also remains significant to fans of Conan Doyle as the place where he wrote many of his most famous works. With continued uncertainty about its future, however, it is in a state of neglect and has been boarded up because of recent acts of vandalism.

"The Undershaw Preservation Trust claims to have identified a buyer for the property who wants to restore it to its former glory as a single family home, but has so far failed to convince the local council to stop developers from pushing forward with plans to convert the property despite its status as a listed building. Julian Barnes, Stephen Fry, and Mark Gatiss are among those supporting the Trust in its legal action.

"The Trust sees Undershaw as the last physical link to Conan Doyle. 'This house is part of Conan Doyle's history and it is important to remember that if these plans go ahead, there will be no going back,' say Trust representatives. 'The work will be irreversible.'"

You can read more about the Undershaw Preservation Trust and how you can help its efforts at http://www.saveundershaw.com and http://undershawhelp.blogspot.com.

Portraying Poverty

More news from the art world...

Four paintings by Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1904) are to be sold at Bonhams' Nineteenth-Century Paintings sale on 29 September in London.

Mulready's works frequently highlighted the social issues of the Victorian era -- particularly the poverty experienced by homeless street children, whom he often depicted gazing despairingly out at the viewer. The artist returned again and again to this subject in an attempt to draw official and public attention to the condition of these children.

Mulready (Wiki bio here) was a member of the Cranbrook Colony, a small group of painters who lived and worked in the picturesque town of Cranbrook, Kent. They were influenced by Dutch and Flemish genre painting and shared a sustained interest in child subjects. (Other members of the group included Frederick Daniel Hardy, Thomas Webster, John Callcott Horsley, and George Bernard O’Neill.)

Although the quality of Mulready's works as paintings leaves much to be desired, they are important social documents. As art reviewer Keith Roberts has noted, "Children could be used to publicize the iniquities of the social justice system without seeming to attack the social structure; reform might well be achieved by appeals to the conscience through sentiment rather than by reasoned argument and criticism of an overtly political character." This was an approach that Charles Dickens knew well and deployed to devastating effect in his novels.

In Uncared For (1871, shown above), one of the works that will be sold by Bonhams (estimate: £10,000-15,000), a pale, barefooted waif stares miserably at the viewer and a young boy buries his head in his hands. Their desolation contrasts powerfully with the more privileged group in the background. Above their heads is a torn street poster ironically proclaiming "The Triumph of Christianity." The juxtaposition would have been considered more provoking and subversive by Victorian viewers had the subjects been adults.

In Fatigued Minstrels (1883), also to be sold by Bonhams (estimate: £4,000-6,000), a pair of exhaused young street musicians slump against a stone pillar as a well-dressed family and couple walk along the brightly lit street opposite. 

"This is a fascinating group of pictures, and it is particularly poignant to be selling them at a time when the plight of the urban poor is so much in the public eye," says Charles O'Brien, head of Bonhams' Nineteenth-Century Paintings Department.

Such paintings were soon eclipsed by documentary photography, which could induce an even more profound shock in viewers through their harrowing realism.

Read more...

Poverty and Families in the Victorian Era (part of the superb "Hidden Lives Revealed" website)

Childhood -- Children -- Street Arabs (part of Lee Jackson's "Victorian London" website)

Pamela Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Sutton, 1997)

"Eadweard Muybridge" at Tate Britain

The pioneering Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) is the focus of a new exhibition that opened earlier this week at Tate Britain. Bringing together more than 150 works, the exhibition demonstrates how Muybridge broke new ground in the emerging art form of photography. 

Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1830, Muybridge (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here) studied photography in England before starting his career in the United States. Perhaps best known for his studies of animal and human subjects in motion, he was also a highly successful landscape and survey photographer, documentary artist, war correspondent, and inventor. Muybridge’s revolutionary techniques produced timeless images that have profoundly influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers, and artists, including Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Douglas Gordon.

The exhibition, which was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is presented chronologically, with an emphasis on the rapid technological and cultural change that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. It features Muybridge's celebrated experimental series of motion-capture photographs, including The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) and Animal Locomotion, a series of 781 collotype prints in 11 volumes published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1887. The exhibition also considers how Muybridge constructed, manipulated, and presented these photographs. A special highlight is an original "zoopraxiscope," a device Muybridge invented that projected his images in a way that created the illusion of movement.

Muybridge’s motion studies and carefully managed studio photographs of celebrities contrast with his panoramic landscapes of America. He was fascinated by change and progress and his photographs recorded both the natural beauty of this vast continent and the rapid modernization of its towns and cities. The exhibition includes many of his images of the Yosemite Valley, along with views of Alaska and Guatemala, urban panoramas of San Francisco, and a photographic survey of the construction of the Central Pacific, Union Pacific, and Californian Pacific railroads.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Tate is launching a new iPhone photo app called "The Muybridgizer," which will allow users to freeze-frame the moving world around them just as Muybridge did and to apply grids and sepia tones that will simulate his motion-capture photos. The app is expected to be available in iTunes by the end of September.

"Eadweard Muybridge" runs through 16 January.

Shown at top: Eadweard Muybridge, Dancing (fancy.) (Movements. Female). Plate 188, Animal Locomotion (1887). Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, 87.7.188.

Shown above: Eadweard Muybridge, Athletes. Posturing. Plate 115, 1879, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881). Albumen silver print. Courtesy Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.


Read more...

The Eadweard Muybridge Bequest (Muybridge returned to Kingston in the 1890s and when he died in 1904, he bequeathed his equipment and prints to Kingston Museum; this website provides an excellent overview of his life with extensive documentation and images)

"Muybridge: The Man Who Made Pictures Move," National Public Radio, 13 April 2010

"Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye," Oxford Art Journal (October 2005) 28 (3): 407-428.

The Compleat Eadweard Muybridge: His Life, Work, and Legacy (a superb blog by Stephen Herbert with links to a wide range of resources)

“A New Land at Last to Be Seen”: William Morris and Iceland

Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day.

Ah! What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,
Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire,
But that there 'mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams
Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?

-- William Morris, “Iceland First Seen” (1891)

Tucked away in a small cabinet in a corner of William Morris’s Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, are several small objects that tell an unlikely tale of adventure.

The 32 items, all on loan from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, were collected by Morris on two trips to Iceland. Among the eclectic group are a sixteenth-century Bible; carved horn containers, drinking vessels, and utensils; and various items of clothing, including woven belts, a bodice, a girdle, a cap, slippers, and a corded sash.

The container shown above, made from goat horn and adorned with an intricate floral design reminiscent of some of Morris’s own patterns, was carved in honor of Morris if not at his express direction. His initials are engraved in its brass cap.

Morris visited Iceland for six weeks in 1871 and for two weeks in 1873. The first trip was a watershed event in his life. Morris biographer J.W. Mackail called it a journey that “had to be taken in adventurous explorer's fashion, with guides and a string of pack horses ... it was a prolonged picnic spiced by hard living and rough riding.” It is described well in materials that accompany the display at Red House, which draw on Fiona McCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for Our Time (1994) and Jan Marsh’s Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story, 1839-1938 (1986).

Morris’s Expedition to Iceland, 1871

“Morris went to Iceland as a place of pilgrimage. The importance that the journey had for him is suggested by the way in which Morris, the atheist, would refer to it afterwards as his ‘Holy Land.’ He went there to see for himself the landscape that had inspired the Sagas, the folktales of a race who had survived the barrenness and stark reality of Iceland by sitting out the winters conjuring tales of their steely tribal forebears.

“Morris had begun his literary journey in advance of his first expedition and had been devotedly translating the Sagas over the preceding two years, ensconced in his study at Queen Square with his Icelandic interpreter and collaborator, Eirikr Magnusson. Magnusson noticed early on how clearly Morris identified with the defiant spirit and unflinching sense of duty shown by the Sagas’ heroic warriors.

“Morris and Magnusson set off with the faithful Charley Faulkner, one of Morris’s inner circle, in July 1871. In many ways the expedition reprised those of his bachelor days; perhaps this was part of the motivation for the trip, as Morris particularly admired the Saga treatment of male friendship. The concept of returning albeit briefly to the carefree life he had enjoyed before Rossetti and pre-Raphaelite influence took hold must have been an attractive proposition. His new passion for the Sagas was itself in effect a discarding of those old allegiances: he regarded the bluntness of the Old Norse literature as ‘a good corrective to the maundering side of mediaevalism.’

“Morris’s pursuit of the Saga sites gave shape to the itinerary and slowly Iceland seemed to justify the writer’s calling: here were people saved by literature. At the same time, the artist in Morris was buoyed up by the Icelandic folk art he saw. The daughter of a doctor they lodged with briefly was introduced in full gala dress which included a spectacular silver belt, dated by Morris as not later than 1530. He observes that ‘the open-work of the belt was very beautiful, the traditional northern Byzantinesque work all mixed up with the crisp sixteenth century leafage.’

“Morris also came to greatly admire the traditional turf-walled Icelandic farmers’ houses. Indeed, he seized on them as a confirmation that beauty was a matter of the functional and decorous (‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’). In these so-called bonders’ houses Morris took note of how the loom was never cast out into an outhouse but regarded as the family furniture, so essential was weaving to the economy of rural self-sufficiency.

"Iceland had an effect on Morris that was purgative and cathartic. He wrote that ‘the glorious simplicity of the terrible and tragic, but beautiful land with its well-remembered stories of brave men, killed all querulous feeling in me, and have made all the dear faces of wife and children, and love, and friends dearer than ever to me.’ Certainly he began to allow himself to long for the familiar sweetnesses of domesticity. He returned from Iceland at the end of the summer with a treasure trove of mementos. As they had travelled around Iceland, he and Faulkner had scoured the steads they stayed in and negotiated prices for desirable objects. Faulkner had acquired some Icelandic silver spoons. Morris’s hoard comprised some of the objects shown here.

"Morris related his traveller’s tales and demonstrated his success in cooking on an ‘outdoor kitchen’ built of bricks. Thirty years later his daughter May discovered the ‘rather melancholy remains’ of such a campfire in one of the garden fields. Morris’s trip to the land of glaciers and geysers meant that ever after Iceland was to her both a real and a legendary place, overpoweringly beautiful and sad. For the rest of her life, she dreamt of voyaging there herself.”

In fact, the items that Morris collected were donated to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 1939 by Mary Frances Lobb, May’s companion. Lobb had been a “land-girl” during World War I (a member of the Women’s Land Army), putting skills she had learned during her West Country upbringing to use as a farm laborer. She moved in with May at Kelmscott Manor following May’s divorce from her husband and failed affair with George Bernard Shaw.

The collection can be seen at Red House, a National Trust property, until at least March 2012. For visiting information, click here.


Read more…

William Morris, “Iceland First Seen,” 1891

John Purkis, The Icelandic Jaunt: A Study of the Expeditions Made by William Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873 (William Morris Society, 1962).

“William Morris Climbing a Mountain in Iceland,” caricature by Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1871 

“William Morris and the Legendary,” BBC

Richard L. Harris, “William Morris, Eiríkur Magnusson, and Iceland: A Survey of Correspondence,” Victorian Poetry, vol. 13, no. 3/4, Fall-Winter 1975, pp. 119-130. Summary: The diversified interests of William Morris led him, in the late 1860s, into a serious study of Iceland and its literature. With his Icelandic friend, Eirikur Magnusson, who taught him the language and collaborated with him in translating a number of sagas, Morris visited Iceland in the summer of 1871. He returned there in 1873 and maintained an interest in, and contacts with, the country and its people until his death. Letters and documents found recently in Iceland suggest the extent, depth, and nature of the poet's relationships with Eirikur Magnusson, his fellow countrymen, and their culture. This material is helpful to a better understanding of Morris' desire to provide a true representation in English of the sagas as he saw them, his concern for Iceland during a period of famine in 1882, his views on the possibilities of economic reform there, and his lifelong friendship with Jón Jónsson, the saddlesmith from Hliðarendakot, who was his guide on the 1873 visit.

“William Morris in Iceland,” The Guardian, 27 March 2010 (describes how Morris’s travels inspired “Earthly Paradise,” a new work for chorus and opera by Ian McQueen named for an epic poem written by Morris).

Restoration of Tennyson's Farringford Continues

I last wrote about Farringford, Tennyson’s Isle of Wight retreat, one year ago, when the poet laureate’s library there was the site of a small but exquisite exhibition of manuscripts, printed works, paintings, photographs, and furniture celebrating the bicentenary of his birth. Since then, there have been important developments in the building’s restoration.

Tennyson lived at Farringford, near Freshwater, with his wife, Emily, and their sons, Hallam and Lionel, from 1853 to his death in 1892. (Lionel died in 1886; Emily and Hallam outlived Alfred.) Shown at left: Alfred and Emily Tennyson with their sons Lionel, left, and Hallam, right, in the garden at Farringford, May 1863; photograph by Oscar Gustave Rejlander.

Among the writers, artists, politicians, and philosophers who visited Tennyson there were Prince Albert, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Frederic Denison Maurice, William Allingham, Helen Allingham, Thoby Prinsep, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker, George Frederic Watts, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Margaret Cameron (whose own home, Dimbola Lodge, was nearby) and many, many others.

Major restoration work on Farringford began last October and is expected to continue for the next year to 18 months, according to Rebecca FitzGerald, who with Martin Beisly, international director of Victorian & Impressionist Pictures at Christie's, bought the property four years ago.

“Our intention is to return the house as much as practically possible to how it was when Tennyson lived here. The library was the first room to be fully restored. Farringford has been a hotel since the mid 1940s and was in a state of considerable disrepair when we took it on in January 2006.

"However, to our delight we have uncovered original flagstones, working shutters, and plastered-over staircases and bookshelves fitted in the original study on the top floor. We are carefully stripping back layers of wallpaper and paint and discovering the original paint colour beneath, and we have a fair idea of how the house was furnished and the furniture arranged.” (Shown below: Tennyson's library at Farringford in 1892, with dog, writing desk, and other furniture; drawing by W. Binscombe Gardner.) 

The house will be closed to all but a few private functions until completion, although 23 self-catering cottages on the property are available to rent with a minimum stay of two nights. Nine have full central heating. Five also have wood burning stoves and therefore can be rented throughout the year. The new Garden Restaurant serves both guests and visitors all year, using local and seasonal produce including vegetables from the kitchen garden. A wood-fired oven is a beautiful feature in the dining room.

"Guests staying in our self-catering accommodation have full use of the grounds within the estate and enjoy direct access to Tennyson Down, which Tennyson walked daily with his dogs, and which so inspired his best-loved poems,” says FitzGerald. To book a cottage, call 01983 752500 or 01983 752700 or e-mail contact@farringford.co.uk. More information is available online at www.farringford.co.uk.

Once opened the house will no longer be a hotel but an exclusive wedding venue that can also be reserved for private functions, conferences, and workshops, as well as weekend courses and retreats with an emphasis on the creative arts.

“The house will have four principal beautifully restored bedrooms where the bride, groom, and respective parents can stay, these being Alfred and Emily’s rooms and the two original guest rooms. We will take additional private bookings in the house for those looking for an exclusive, private country house experience, but principally for those with a keen interest in Tennyson. Our intention is to mount regular exhibitions, host concerts and poetry readings, and give regular tours.”


Tennyson at Farringford, a beautifully produced catalogue of the 2009 exhibition edited by the curator Veronica Franklin Gould with an introduction by Leonée Ormond, is also available. It can be ordered online here, by e-mail at contact@farringford.co.uk, or by calling 01983 752500 or 01983 752700.

The exterior of the house today:

And the library before restoration:

Read more...

Farringford: Home of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Lewis Carroll and Xie

This charming photograph is one of three albumen print portraits of Alexandra ("Xie") Rhoda Kitchin (Wiki bio here) by Lewis Carroll that were sold recently by Bonhams for £24,000.

Alexandra (1864-1925) was the daughter of Rev. George William Kitchin, who for 15 years held a theological position at the University of Oxford, where Carroll, a fellow of Christ Church, lectured on mathematics. Kitchin later became Dean of Winchester and Dean of Durham. Alexandra was named for her godmother Alexandra, Princess of Wales, wife of Prince Albert Edward (later King Edward VII). 

The three photos show Alexandra in Danish and Oriental costumes. They were given to her by Carroll’s brother, William, on the occasion of her marriage to Arthur Cardew in 1890, along with a copy of The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, in which two of the photographs are reproduced.

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Helmut Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll, Photographer (Dover Publications, 1969) 

Playing with Pictures

Constance Sackville-West (English, 1846–1929) or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane Baillie (English, 1853–1913), untitled page from the Sackville-West Album, 1867/73; collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 9 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (24.5 x 30 cm); courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

This wonderful collage combining photography and watercolor, part of an album created by relatives of Vita Sackville-West, is featured in the fascinating exhibition "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage," which originated at the Art Institute of Chicago last autumn, made a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this year, and is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through 5 September.

Anticipating the avant-garde collages of Braque and Picasso by about six decades and showing a sly, absurdist sense of humor, aristocratic women of the 1860s and 1870s cut figures from photographic cartes de visite and glued them onto watercolor backgrounds in ways that created new and surprising narratives, simultaneously validating and parodying the exclusive circles in which they moved. Photos of people known to the artists, and in many cases photos of the artists themselves, imbue several of the collages with personal meaning. Others seem to be constructed in the same way that a teenager today would assemble magazine clippings of her favorite celebrities.

"The compositions are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects," say the Art Institute of Chicago curators.

Is it possible that the creators of these collages anticipated literary modernism, as well? Their works remind me of many contemporary novels in which minutely observed characters are foregrounded against the barest suggestion of a physical setting, forcing the reader's attention onto the specific and idiosyncratic. Playthings of the artist, plucked from disparate sources, the characters in these collages find themselves arranged against one another in dramatic juxtaposition, prompting the viewer to imagine the story behind each one.

What story does the Sackville-West collage suggest to you? 


Read more...
 
Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (Art Institute of Chicago, 2009)
 
The Marvelous Album of Madame B: Being the Handiwork of a Victorian Lady of Considerable Talent (Scala Publishers, 2009)
 
New York Times, 4 February 2010, "The Pastime of Victorian Cutups" (exhibition review)
 
Toronto Star, 9 June 2010: "The Roots of Surrealism in Victorian Collage" (exhibition review)

How I Would Spend £18 Million

J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino (1839), to be sold by Sotheby's in London on July 7.

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Overview of the sale at artdaily.com

Sotheby's exquisite sale catalogue [PDF]

Update via The New York Times...

LONDON, July 8 — A world record was set for Turner on Wednesday night when a landscape, "Modern Rome. Campo Vaccino," was sold for £29.72 million, or $45 million. The large canvas, 90.2 by 122 centimeters (35 by 48 inches), was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles bidding through Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, the London dealers specializing in Old Masters and 19th century painting.

The panoramic view was done by the English painter from memory, without paying much attention to the many precise sketches that he had done in the course of his various trips to Rome. It is an impressionistic evocation of the city bathed in a golden sunset haze touched with salmon pink, and some liberties are taken with topography.

Very few Turners of this size and caliber remain in private hands — five or six at the most, according to David Moore-Gwyn, Sotheby’s distinguished expert in British painting. This one was acquired directly from the artist when it was included in the Royal Academy show of 1839. The buyer, Hugh A.J. Munro of Novar, was a close friend of the artist and the executor of his estate who oversaw the vast bequests made by his late friend to the National Gallery, which together with the Tate Gallery holds the largest collection of Turners in the world. “Modern Rome. Campo Vaccino” remained in Munro’s family until April 6, 1878, when his collection was dispersed at Christie’s London. It was then bought by Archibald, the fifth earl of Rosebery, and his wife Hannah (née Rothschild), for 4,450 guineas, a huge price at the time. The landscape remained in the hands of their descendants until a family trust consigned it this year to Sotheby’s.

The historical background of the picture, preserved unlined in its plaster gilt and glazed frame, played its part in the enormous interest aroused.

The price is in line with the previous record set when another large painting, a Venetian view of "Giudecca, la Donna della Salute and San Giorgio" appeared at Christie’s New York on April 6, 2006, where it fetched $35.85 million.

The likelihood of another Turner of remotely comparable importance coming up at auction in the near future is slim. While Wednesday’s picture cannot really compare with the greatest Turners in which the visible world is reduced to luminous impressions, now in the two London museums, a few professionals seemed disappointed that it had not gone for even more.

Awareness of a unique opportunity regarding the work of the greatest British painter of all times and of the urgency of acting there and then was evidently a factor in the wise decision of the Los Angeles museum’s board of trustees to go all out, despite the current mood favoring austerity and financial restraint.