Ford Madox Brown at Haltwhistle

My photograph of the Brazen Serpent Window at Haltwhistle has appeared in the book of the current Brown exhibition at Manchester . I am sure that a reassessment of Ford Madox Brown's curious art is long overdue. I don't really think he improved with age and there is a certain world-weariness about the later art which seems slightly depressing.The  decorative side is seems to come into greater prominence. The Manchester Murals are striking in this respect.

Bosanquet window

We went to Rock the other day.I had not been there since I was young. It was a delight to see the church again . It is a fairly decent,small Norman building with many artistic and intellectual associations.(David Jones, Ben Nicholson etc from the time when Helen Sutherland lived here). The intellectual links come from the Bosanquet family who were archaeologists, administrators and active in charitable work.The church has an excellent late window by Leonard Evetts from 1991.This window commemorates four members of the Bosanquet family.Robert Bosanquet and his wife Ellen, his son Charles and his wife Barbara.The older Bosanquets are remembered in the left hand panel where you can see a Minoan double axe, a Greek temple and a circular Greek motif-RCB excavated in Crete.In the right hand panel reference is made to CIB's activities as first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle by display of the university's coat of arms.CIB's birth in Athens is hinted at by the appearance of the owl from the rebverse of an Athenian tetradrachm.I have not worked out the significance of the eagle yet It may relate to Barbara Bosanquet who was American. In that case the images at the top of the left hand panel would relate to her mother -in-law.(PS Will get a better picture when I visit next).Here is a detail of Athena's owl-it gives abetter impression of the window.

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland: Window by Burne-Jones

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland, a photo by James Holland on Flickr.

I have just read Fiona MacCarthy's book on Burne-Jones. What I like about Burne-Jones is his work s a designer (sort of)and his humorous drawings. But there isn't that much on the stained glass-we hear that he made some but nothing significant about the manufacture-can you imagine B-J grozing away? I cannot. As a painter he is alien to me -it is more like heraldry than art.We do have one of his better works in Newcastle but all those people with their pointy chins are boring. The female portraits with their huge eyes are quite repellent. This is a kind of historicist, hot-house painting which I cannot admire.
The book is a typical MacCarthy production and is perfectly readable.The index is decently done. She uses the word mouvementé like a new toy-too often.She is maybe a bit credulous about the use of ox-gall and might have been clearer about the position of Legros in the Victorian art world. Steer is named with Sickert as being a painter of urban squalor-a very odd duo they would be. Sickert yes, Steer, no (page 298).The place name Assonan should most likely read Assouan the French name for the place in Egypt which we call Aswan.

The BM has recently published a selection of Burne-Jones' funny drawings (and also a book on Eric Gill). Both seem to be nicely produced and the price is reasonable. You can read about the Burne-Jones here.
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Immagination
Fona MacCarthy,Faber&Faber 2011.

Charles Keene a Victorian artist with "Punch"

One of my favourite artist biographies is George Layard's  Life and Letters of Charles Keene of Punch.
It came out in 1892-the year after the artist's death. This portrays the artist as an obsessive collector: of old music,  antiquities and so on. Keene played the bagpipes and the smaller, sweeter, Northumbrian pipes. His correspondence with the remarkable Joseph Crawhall II of Newcastle is most enjoyable. Crawhall was an interesting artist in his own right and loaned  his ideas book to Keene, thus helping furnish him with ideas for cartoons. Keene incidentally was a fervent Tory but was always uneasy about doing political cartoons. His illustrations deal with social and artistic situations.

As an artist Keene was appreciated by artists such as Pissarro and Menzel. High praise indeed, especially when coming from Menzel who was one of the most brilliant and prolific draughtsmen of the C19.

 In Keene we value his, literally, keen observation of gesture and pose and of the fall of light on clothing.

A father remonstrates with his son and comes of worst.

He drew on any scraps of paper which came to hand and sometimes with improvised, home-made implements. Here are two of his gently satirical drawings from Tate Britain.The first shows what is probably a variation on the perennial theme of the landscape painter who has to deal with naive or irritating observers. Daumier did many drawings on this theme and Keene like Daumier did not make up his own captions.

In the second drawing we have what could be described  as "the superior servant theme". The scene is a railway station or ferry terminal and the gent leaning on the post perhaps the coachman- is so impressed with his own importance that he doesn't want to get involved with dealing with the luggage-the lower servants can do that.He most certainly doesn't want to soil his uniform. His mistress on the left seems slightly agitated or concerned but he isn't bothered.

Imagine Keene's  studio full of props and costumes and also including mirrors used to study a pose or expression-for he used himself as a model. There would usually be a fug of pipe tobacco, smoked and resmoked. (He also collected old-clay pipes). By now, if you did not already know, you may have guessed that he remained a bachelor throughout his life. His after-work amusements included membership of choirs and glee-clubs. Keene loved to sing.  

decorated easter eggs.

I recently found a box of Easter Eggs which I had decorated long ago in my salad days. Some were painted and with others I  used a mixture of resist and scratching into the surface. But the egg I was most pleased to find was the  dyed egg made in the traditional Northumbrian manner. It is illustrated here and I will tell you how it was made.

The technique is very simple. Layers of vegetable material are wrapped in a small parcel of cloth which is tied up, loosely with thread, string or wool and then boiled for 40 to 60 minutes. During this time the colour from the plant material should transfer to the egg. It may be that any small flowers which are held nearest the egg will act only as a resist or stencil effect. In any case the beauty is in the accidental design and this is what I like about the technique. Do not try this if you do not like the creative accident.

In the past the cloth wrapper might have been made from material which was dyed with non-fast colours and this would have added to the decorative possibilities. If you have similar material  then go ahead and use it.

One of the problems with this technique is that it is quite hard nowadays to find a light coloured egg which will show the effect to advantage. It  seems that all eggs are now designed to be brown as customers believe that this suggests health/quality. In fact I  probably wouldn't  use the onion skin  medium unless I could find a white or very pale shelled  egg. You can see here the red/orange colour you get with onion skins which doesn't show up clearly against the brown of the egg shell

I learned this method of dyeing eggs from my Granny. Eggs were sometimes rubbed very lightly with butter to enhance the colour effect.

What sort of plant material can you use?  The traditional  choice is onion skins as an envelope within which there can be seasonal flowers. In Northumberland this could be the yellow whinn. Some have said that spinach will give a green effect- but it did not work for me. You can also use old tea leaves or coffee grounds to colour the water. I used leather dye in the egg shown below. It was a recent experiment.

Coloring eggs at Easter is common throughout Europe. In some cases the folk designs are bold patterns but their symmetry is not for me.

When I made the old eggs I blew some of them-the painted ones- as some boys used to do when collecting eggs. The eggs which were boiled can survive with careful handling and will not smell unless they are broken . After a few years you will have a shell with a dried up egg rattling around inside it. Break the egg then and it will smell  odd.   

Humble Humbrol

George Shaw paints the suburbs of his youth, the Council Estates  where so many of us have grown up. He uses Humbrol enamel paints which  evoke nostalgic thoughts in the artist-and in this writer. This medium allows Shaw to achieve an ultra-bland surface to his paintings (on panels). What he says about nostalgia is fair enough. But when he contrasts enamel paints with oil paints which he sees as being more appropriate for religious or High Art then we are on the level of whimsy. Oil paint is nothing more than a traditional medium which can and has been used to paint grand or  humble  objects. It is as basic as Humbrol enamel or egg tempera .

Another peculiarity is his concern with  titles. He found himself a good one in the  title for the show which apparently comes from Hardy. It is "the Sly and Unseen day". In fact it is  condensation of Hardy's phrase , " a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year"*.The artist  told The Observer that he had chosen "bumptious" titles for his deadpan, photographically dependent paintings in order to prod the viewer into thought.  Well, the most obvious thought is why does he distract the viewer with these pretentious titles? What you see is definitely what you get  and the results lack life. It seems that the titles are trying to force something which isn't there in the unrelenting banality of the images. A room of drawings was due to open but was not available at the time of my visit.

The George Shaw exhibition is on at the Baltic Kunsthalle in Gateshead.

*Chapter XV: referring to Tess's musing on the unknown day when she will die.