dunstanburgh, lovely dunstanburgh.

This last few days I have been twice to Craster in the evening and walked along to Dunstanburgh to enjoy the bright yellow whin and the long shadows cast by the declining sun. Saw quite a bit of wildlife in the boggy area near the castle . There were two swans and various other geese and ducks, lots of tadpoles too. No legs yet that I could see. Caught a glimpse of a very big bird  making off; possibly a heron. The bracken has just come through and has the curled look of a bishop's crozier.

the sculptor's business

Queen Victoria by Alfred Gilbert, 1903, Newcastle

I have recently been rereading biographies of C19 sculptors-Alfred Gilbert and Auguste Rodin.

Their contrasting circumstances and characters and the ways in which they made their careers shed much light on the idea of the public sculpture.
As characters they could hardly have been more different. I would say that Gilbert was a self-dramatising extrovert and that Rodin tended more to introversion. Their families suffered considerably either way. Both  men were extremely hard working and both were laws unto themselves when it came to working on commisssions.

Rodin had the advantage of working in a culture where the state was highly interventionist and considered it important to provide studios where sculptors could work on government commissions.The  French sculptor could rely on a culture richly endowed with craftsmen. The pointers, mouleurs and bronze casters were all readily available He did not need to rent anywhere special to work on the Gates of Hell. Gilbert had to find his own workplace and his extravagant construction of a home and studio must have been one of the major factors which led to his insolvency and residence abroad.

To some extent Rodin and Gilbert shared a tendency to throw themselves into their work. Gilbert had a tendency to either wish to carry on working after an object was accepted and paid for-or to draw out a commission so long that he upset his patrons became quite irritated with him. The best example is the tomb of the Duke of Clarence which dragged on for years and must have seriously alienated the Royal Family.

 Rodin could drag things out too. This is illustrated through his attitude to the Balzac monument which was commissioned by a literary society. Rodin became obsessed with the project and consulted every possible visual and documentary source-even to the extent of travelling to Balzac's native region to look for similar physical types. All this turned out expensive for Rodin when his patrons became more and more anxious and eventually the commisssion was cancelled . And in the end the extraordinary image was too much for the literary society. They got someone else to do the work.

Gilbert was quite likely to spend  his fee and procrastinate when reminded that work was due. Rodin had a tendency to quote vague or inadequate fees in his enthusiasm for a project. His financial extravagance in older years was the purchase of antiquities -or what he thought were antiquities for exorbitant prices.


Alfred Gilbert, by Richard Dorment, 1985
Rodin:the shape of Genius,by Ruth Butler, 1993.
Rodin:by Frederic Grunfeldt, 1987.
Just how Butler manages to omit Rodin's encounter with the Cambodian dancers bemuses me still....

the permanent way

A little while ago there was a big sale of railway posters at Morphet's auction rooms. They were gorgeous and very expensive images. Most of them advertised the charms of this or that resort and did so with considerable skill. But one image struck me forcibly as it relates to an aspect of railways with which my family had some connection.

The poster design  at right, by Stanhope Forbes shows platelayers adjusting the track and this was the work done by my grandfather James Shell .The poster was also a surprise to me because it didn't seem to fit with what I knew of Stanhope Forbes an artist who was painting sentimental pictures in Brittany before Gauguin ever set foot there.

The photograph above shows a group of platelayers working near Linton in Northumberland and it was probably taken in the 1940s. My grandfather is standing second from right.