Natural History Museum

The animal and plant decoration on the museum’s exterior

I have posted before about my love for the Waterhouse Building, home of London’s Natural History Museum (The Sculpture of Nature). This time I thought that I would share a few photographs showing the outside of this beautiful and eccentric building, specifically, a few of the many, many animal and plant sculptures and reliefs that decorate its rich exterior.

A Cathedral to Science – entrance to the museum

The ambition of Alfred Waterhouse’s design is breathtaking in its complexity, with literally hundreds of sculptures and gargoyles adorning a façade that is already a busy excursion into the Gothic fairytale-land of the German Romanesque. Such richness of detail could easily have disintegrated into a jumbled mess, yet through careful control of scale and proportion, together with the cohesive force of the strong lines running through the design, Waterhouse never loses the overall coherence of the building.

Iconic landmark – The towers of the museum seen from South Kensington underground station

Primitive reptiles and a dire-wolf? beneath one of the many windows

This magnificent feline is high up, against one of the building’s central towers

A whole menagerie of beasts and gargoyles look down on visitors

This lion, like all the other beasts, was modelled from Waterhouse’s own drawings

The building also has more subtle decoration, such as this fox and birds over the entrance

Smaller creatures are represented on tiles such as these

Apart from the animal in the roundel, note the birds in the rooftop ironwork

The famous pterodactyl

I fell in love with this building on the day I first saw it and in the decades since I have only grown to appreciate it more. If you have a chance to visit London then please make a trip to the Natural History Museum one of your priorities.

(As always, thanks are due to husband Alex for helping to put my thoughts into words.)

Fierce Creatures

We have just spent a few days in London visiting our daughter Isla and one highlight of our trip was a visit to the British Museum to see the Ice Age Art exhibition. In many ways this show was a shock because the artefacts are all so small. I knew a number of the pieces from reproductions and was taken aback to discover that these apparently monumental objects are in fact only a few centimetres tall. Monumental figures of women are one recurring theme through the show, the other being animal figures, with many being very powerfully conceived.

Sadly, photography was not permitted in the exhibition (though I did see some surreptitious clicking using mobile phones going on), so here are a few other nice animal objects to be found in the BM.

Bull’s head decorating a lyre from Ur (Sumerian)

Another object from Ur – the famous ram in a thicket

Persian griffin drinking horn

Bronze age silver bull

Lion?

Leaping ibex (originally a vase handle)

The one on the left is clearly a goose; not sure about the one with the nice false eyelashes!

Rather dragon-like dogs on a bronze flagon

Powerful bronze bull’s head

Leaping dog on a Roman pot

Japanese netsuke deer

Cold Weather Clearout

A snowy day in North Cornwall

You may have noticed I have not been active on this blog for a while. A cold, miserable January has never been my favourite time of year, or my most productive. This year I decided to put all my efforts into carry out my New Year’s resolution – to de-clutter my life.

If you live in the same house for over 20 years you accumulate a lot of things; if you are by instinct a hoarder (in a family of hoarders and collectors!), things can become ridiculous. Now that our children have grown up and left home our house should be far too large, yet every space seems to be packed full of stuff.

I took a hard look in my wardrobes and found clothing that stretched back twenty-odd years. Some things had not been worn in all that time but I always planned to find a way to remake or reuse them. This type of recycling is something I was brought up with but I have now come to realise that I will never find a use for everything in a couple of lifetimes.

Our children may have left but I still seem to have rooms full of their belongings, with great piles of children’s books, toys, games and knick-knacks that I have found it hard to sort through and dispose of.

Books are a real problem too; every member of the family collects books and this Christmas brought a few more; yet we have far too many to give them all shelf space and that means making hard decisions about which ones are no longer wanted.

The last and perhaps the biggest problem is all the fabric, dyes, paints and many other materials I have amassed to support my creative work. It is the source of my work and I never quite know what I will want to use next but I again I have more than enough for several creative lifetimes.

These hedge trees show where the wind comes from!

So how am I doing? Well it is still a work in progress but I now have sorted many sacks of rubbish and even bigger quantities for the recycling collection; the local charity shops have already received some new stock and are set to get more, while I have a growing list of items that are headed for eBay. I am not sure I will ever really change my habits and learn to shun possessions but at least I should have some space free for a while.

I must now try very hard to remember the Taoist message that we enter the world with nothing and that possessions are just baggage that ties us down.

Our hamlet in the snow

More Museum Favourites

Here are a few more of my favourite objects in the wonderful British Museum.

There is no story here, just images that excite me, selected more or less at random. – Or if there is a kind of general story, it is just about what various creative people have done using stone, metal, wood or clay.

The great treasure-house that is the British Museum

Weighty majesty – from Greece

Flowing movement in stone – also from Greece

Chinese jade ritual blade – just a polished bit of stone?

Fish-shaped ritual headdress, with beautiful shadows – Africa galleries

Shiny piece of abstract metalwork – (European) bronze age gold brooch

More bronze-age metal – corroded Chinese bronze vessel

Metal blade in the form of a bird – Africa galleries

Practical metalworking – Chinese finger-nail protectors

Exquisite modelling on a Chinese phoenix-headed ewer – White porcelain (9th to 11th centuries)

Shang dynasty (1600 BC to 1046 BC) – bronze ritual vessel

As always, photographs are a poor substitute for seeing the real thing – Visit a museum again soon!

Threads of Silk and Gold

Last weekend we travelled to Oxford to see a groundbreaking new textiles exhibition at The Ashmolean Museum. “Threads of Silk and Gold – Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan”, presents textile pieces using traditional Japanese skills but made primarily for a Western audience. (Sadly, there was no photography allowed in the exhibition but I did sneak a couple of snaps to give a flavour of the show.)

Cover of the beautiful catalogue

Japanese art and crafts were hugely popular in the West between the 1870’s and the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Textiles were part of this export trade but have been little studied until now.

Although there are token exhibits of weaving and Yuzen dyeing, this is an exhibition of Japanese embroidery. Ranging from superb exhibition pieces and large artworks to examples of what are frankly “tourist kitsch”, the craftsmanship is uniformly superb and shows a level of hand labour that is now unimaginable.

Detail of Cranes and Wisteria – Size 201cm x 279cm (Ashmolean collection)

This screen of cormorant fishing is the star of the show

Many of the largest pieces (up to nearly 4 metres high) were exhibition works for various World Fairs, or were produced for the richest foreign tourists to take home from their visits.

Detail of the Cormorant Fishing showing the free stitching technique

Detail showing the fire basket. This is painting with stitches!

I have long loved Japanese embroidery but always felt that there was a stiffness and very “rules-driven” approach to its execution. With the notable exception of the Cormorant screen, this is still visible here but where the designs are so grand and original the end-result totally escapes any limitation from the fact that every feather on every bird is executed using precisely the same stitch technique. Indeed, the whole exhibition is an object lesson in the possibilities and limitations of craft techniques;  the truly original works exceed the limitations of technique while even the best craft skills cannot rescue the dreadful pot-boilers.

Detail of the peacock shown on the catalogue cover. (Photo of catalogue illustration)

Outside the exhibition was an education exhibit on Japanese embroidery techniques (where photography was allowed) and on the day we visited there were also embroiderers staging demonstrations.

Many exhibits feature 3D embroidery. This is a modern imitation

Demonstration piece showing basic stitches

Techniques for couching gold thread

Modern, embroidered handling-piece

Silk-weaving is now the only affordable substitute for large fully-embroidered pieces

“Threads of Silk and Gold” runs at the Ashmolean until 27^th January 2013. For more information see the Ashmolean website

More Eden

Here are a few more photographs we took on our visit to The Eden Project last week. This time we present some of the more unusual / abstract / eccentric images we came home with. Hope that they inspire you!

The Sculpture of Nature

Terracotta relief sculpture in The Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum in London houses one of the world’s great collections on the living world but it is also one the nation’s truly amazing buildings. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse (1830 – 1905), the Museum is like a Romanesque Cathedral to Science with a touch of Victorian railway station thrown in. Waterhouse’s design is not only striking in terms of style but also for its innovative use of materials, with the entire building being clad in fired terracotta tiles in an interesting buff and blue colour scheme. The extravagant, nature-inspired decoration was also produced in terracotta with huge numbers of sculptures and sculptural reliefs both inside and out.

Romanesque Cathedral crossed with a railway station – A Temple of Science

I studied art at a time when Modernism was still very much the dominant force in architecture. I seem to remember that a building like the Natural History Museum was not so much attacked in discussions of good architecture (except by implication), it more just totally ignored; but I loved the building the first time I saw it and love it even more today.

Waterhouse’s Museum is as far from Modernism as you can get

These images are just a small selection of the reliefs and other decorations to be found in just the main hall of the building; the same decorative scheme is carried on throughout the building and can be the basis of an interesting museum trip all on their own.

Birds at the bottom of the grand staircase

Each piece of decoration was drawn by Waterhouse himself, then checked for scientific accuracy by Richard Owen, the museum’s director, then sent to a sculptor for modelling in clay before being cast and fired.

A canine – probably a domestic dog

The great sculpture of Charles Darwin by Sir Joseph Boehm now commands the grand staircase.

The greatest figure in biology looking over the main hall

A ram’s head decorating the base of a main pillar

A feline with her young

Another bird

Darwin

For further information see Natural History Museum – History and Architecture
 and the RIBA Natural History Museum pages
or make a trip to see the museum yourself.

Pretty Boxes

When Alex and I went to London last week we decided that we were going to try and see some different kinds of museum work, apart from the textiles, Asian art, etc., that we usually look at. So Alex went to try and find a room in the V&A that he had not really appreciated before, where he would really study the objects and take a few photographs.

Lots of shiny diamonds but we both would have allowed more of the beautiful blue enamel work to show

Alex chose a room of displaying small gold or silver boxes in one of the Rosalind and Arthur Gilbert Galleries. These gem-studded boxes are clearly very precious and all showed evidence of the highest quality workmanship.

Miniature decoration with a musical theme

One of the most stunning aspects of that part of the V&A is the stunning view over the Madejski courtyard in the centre of the museum.

Morning sunlight filtering into the Madejski courtyard

When you love museums and visit them regularly, you tend to accumulate a list of favourites that you check out each time as old friends. With large National museums there are also lots of rooms that you wander through without really paying so much attention; maybe because you do not see a connection between your particular interests and the type of artefacts on display. This is particularly true of places like the V&A, where the range of material is huge and much of it consists of very specialised collections.

This is my favourite. Not sure if the centre is Japanese metalwork or a copy

The work I produce is mostly small and intricate so I would have expected to feel a natural appreciation for this type of very detailed work, yet I confess that I find some of it a little over-fussy. I cannot help feeling that setting off all that very fine detail against some empty spaces would allow the designs to “breathe” a bit better.

Really serious “bling” but I think that some less textured areas would set off the stones better

Nice moss agate but I am less sure about the metalwork on the lid

Really tiny mosaic work!

Next time you visit a favourite museum, make sure to have a close look at some very different objects!

Tang Horses

The pottery horses of the Tang dynasty are among the most iconic objects in all Chinese art. Fired to fairly low earthenware temperatures and decorated using simple lead glazes, often in three colours (san-cai); these beautiful objects were essential grave goods for anyone with pretensions to status and produced in very large numbers.

Tang dynasty horse in the British Museum

Head of the British Museum horse above

Examples vary greatly in quality and size and smaller, cruder examples can still be bought for modest sums by collectors today. The large examples from high status tombs are, of course, much less common and stand among the highest examples of the sculptor’s art anywhere. Two examples in the British Museum in London are astounding for the way the  “essence of horse” has been abstracted from the maker’s knowledge of real animals, especially in the modelling of the heads.

Another Tang horse in the British Museum

Even in the best examples, the bodies of these horses are generally very simply modelled with all the careful observation and formal invention devoted to the heads; so much so that the heads can sometimes  seem a mismatch for the bodies they are attached to.

Tang horse in the Shanghai Museum

Head of the Shanghai Museum horse

Modelling horses in clay was already an ancient tradition by the Tang dynasty (618 – 906AD). It is interesting to compare them to the horses found with the Terracotta Warriors dating from 800 to 1000 years earlier.

Horses of the Terracotta Army (circa 206 BCE)

I am not in any sense a horse lover but I never fail to appreciate just how sensitive the artist’s reaction to these animals was.

A fine example in the V&A Museum in London

A powerful beast from the Imperial Collection in Beijing

Sadly, the Tang horse has become a bit of a cliché, with endless modern copies, often of poor quality. Perhaps that is why Chinese today do not value them as highly as they do more modern Ming and Qing artefacts; or perhaps it is because refined surface decoration counts much more than form for Chinese connoisseurs. This is a subject that Alex and I plan to expand on in a later post.

A modern “replica” of a Tang horse in an interior design store

Embroidered Dragons

I love Chinese dragons! Unlike the fearsome dragons in the West, which must be battled and slain, the Chinese versions are, if not friendly, at least not threatening.  Here a few representations of Chinese dragons in embroidery.

Imperial court robe (V&A museum)

Most of the dragons here are imperial dragons, symbols of the Emperor himself. During the final Chinese dynasty, the Qing period from 1644 to 1911, the dragon could be found on almost every piece of Imperial clothing and regalia. This may have been due to the foreign Manchu rulers feeling that they had to constantly assert their legitimacy by using this very Chinese symbol of rule.

Dragons on an Imperial Parasol (Forbidden City, Beijing)

Many of these textile pieces are Imperial clothing and accoutrements from the V&A museum and the Forbidden City in Beijing. While these dragons vary in colour there is a sameness running through them as if the makers were very careful that the forms and expressions of their creatures matched the required type.

Imperial court robe (V&A museum)

Other dragons that are not from the Imperial household are much more varied, often with wonderful, mad expressions as they manically chase their flaming pearls.

Dragons chasing a flaming pearl (Taoist priest’s robe, V&A museum)

Dragons on a tubular banner (Forbidden City, Beijing)

Dragon chasing a flaming pearl (Taoist priest’s robe, V&A museum)

Dragon chasing a flaming pearl (Taoist priest’s robe, V&A museum)

Dragon on a court robe (V&A museum)

Dragon (Taoist priest’s robe, V&A museum)

Dragons on an Imperial Parasol (Forbidden City, Beijing)

A strange little dragon on a wall-hanging (V&A museum)

Dragons chasing a flaming pearl (Taoist priest’s robe, V&A museum)

Dragon on an Imperial wall-hanging (V&A museum)

Imperial court robe (V&A museum)

Imperial court robe (V&A museum)

Imperial court robe (V&A museum)