One of the problems with collecting things is the volume of stuff you end up with that are interesting. This book is one of those. I don’t think it’s an interesting volume but what I liked was the Mudies Library sticker pasted inside the book and designed to hang over the outside.
With some very crude photoshop I have re-designed how the original label would have worked and it’s really the simplicity of only using one label to brand the book for the library.
Charles Edward Mudie was a publisher and in 1842 founded a lending library, which he called Mudie’s Select Library. Subscribers paid one guinea per year for an unlimited number of books, but could only borrow one volume at a time. With branches all over London as you can free from six options in the label above.
In 1876 Heffers books were founded by William Heffer in Cambridge and soon they became a publisher too. With many shops in Cambridge, today we eulogise their gallery at 18 Sidney Street, Cambridge.
A major brand in Cambridge in the late 1990s they had six shops in the city, each catering to different areas of the business. The Trinity Street shop was the largest for both general books and text books. Rose Crescent – Classical Music, King Street – Art Supplies, Grafton Centre & St Andrews Street – General books.
The Sidney Street shop at that time was for new best sellers on the ground floor and stationary with an art gallery on the top floor. As seen in the photograph above, it was a traditional setting on two levels, with roof lights.
In 1949 Bryan Robertson became curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and for a year he hired the Newnham student and cookery writer Jane Grigson to help run the gallery. Although he was only there for three years, he helped bring in fashionable artists and ceramics and helped change the gallery from selling reproduction prints of the university colleges and Victorian watercolours.
One of his first exhibitions was of New Paintings by Francis Rose, Cecil Collins and Merlyn Evans held at Heffer’s Gallery in Cambridge in 1950. The next year Josef Herman exhibited in a solo show.
Merlyn Evans – Tragic Group, 1949
As curators changed over the years the gallery would have a routine of exhibitions of historical works, maps and archaeological prints, and then modern art. From the advert below from 1955 Heffer’s are promoting the latest new ceramics by Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach. By this time they had their own picture framing department, so it’s not uncommon in East Anglia to find the Heffer’s label on the back of pictures that were framed there.
The fate of the gallery came when Heffer’s sold the business to Blackwells in Oxford who closed many of the shops in the city in order to focus on the Trinity Street shop.
On the steps of Heffers Gallery: Cecil and Elizabeth Collins, Bryan Robertson, Lucy M Boston?, Elisabeth Vellacott and Merlyn Evans.
It was at the invitation of William Morris that Frederick H. Evans came to photograph Kelmscott Manor in 1896. The photographer was 43 and was also running a bookshop in London. Two years after these photos were taken he sold his bookshop to become a full time artist. Today he is remembered for his large photographic prints of the Cathedrals of Britain.
There are only two sets of these photographs, both in American museums. Even’s photographic style was of platinotype images, images of a subtle dusty tone and almost like a photogravure, printed on platinum with sepia tones.
Kelmscott Manor was the country home of the writer, designer and socialist William Morris from 1871 until his death in 1896. The house was originally constructed in 1570 with some additions in the 17th century. It is open to the public to visit and owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London.
For the first three years, the Morris’s shared lease of the house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti until 1874. Rossetti and Jane Morris used the house to continue their long affair while William was travelling in Iceland, their romance starting originally a few years before. The manor can be seen in the corner of this painting of Jane Morris by Rossetti below made during that summer.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Water Willow, 1871.
The following year Rossetti’s poems were published to poor reviews and he spent his time at Kelmscott drunk on whiskey or high on chloral. In 1873 he had returned to painting and his work had recovered but the following year Morris couldn’t keep the scandal quiet his wife and his business partner were having an affair, so he cut him out of the Morris company and was asked to leave the house in July, 1874.
The Morris’s stayed on renting the house until 1914, when Jane bought the house to give her daughters Jane and May some security.
May Morris died in 1938 and bequeathed the house to Oxford University, on the basis the contents were preserved and the public were granted access. The University were unwilling to preserve the house as ‘a museum piece’ and passed the house and land to the Society of Antiquaries in 1962.
Painted by John Sell Cotman and his son, Miles Edmund Cotman, this is a hypothetical scene of protest and anger.
John Sell and Miles Edmund Cotman – The Wreck of the Houghton Hall Pictures c1779
Robert Walpole had been made a prime minister under George I. He was from a wealthy family and had invested in the South Sea Company when stocks were cheap and sold them at a profit before the company’s collapse of an inflated share price. They traded in slaves, mahogany and rum. He used the money to build Houghton Hall. Over the years he collected good furniture and paintings, filling his home with the spoils of wealth. He died leaving massive debts and his estate to his son, who sold some of the works to keep afloat, however he only survived his father by six years and the estate and debts passed to his son George.
Described as “the most ruined young man in England” George Walpole was frivolous with what money was left to him, gamling most of it away. In a scheme to make money he decided to sell his grandfather’s collection of furniture and art. In a deal negotiated by James Christie, founder of the auction house, the collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great.
Their sale was seen as a public scandal as they collection included works such as: Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Teniers, Rubens, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Murillo.
John Sell and Miles Edmund Cotman – The Wreck of the Houghton Hall Pictures c1779
Following the outrage of the works sale, the painting was made by John Sell Cotman and his son, showing the bodies of dead sailors and works including the large Rubens washed up on the shore in ruins with other plunder from the estate. Though no misfortune ever happened in real life and the boats made it to Russia complete, there was an anger felt by the upper classes in Britain of the loss of such a collection that showed a different style of “lost treasure”. The boat had set sail from Kings Lynn harbour for Russia and as the Cotman’s were Norfolk artists this might be why they felt a betrayal of their fellow countryman, George Walpole.
When Welwyn Garden City was first imagined, it was to provide not only housing, but a social system that would sustain a utopian country town. Writing in his manifesto Garden Cities Of To-Morrow (1898), Ebenezer Howard has planned out how this was to be achieved in Victorian Britain. With his ‘Three Magnets’ diagram, he breaks down society into town and country, listing the pros and cons for both and combining them in the bottom part of the illustration as an early Venn diagram. “The town is the symbol of society — of mutual help and friendly cooperation, of fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, of wide relations between man and man — of broad, expanding sympathies — of science, art, culture, religion. And the country! The country is the symbol of God’s love and care for man.”
His hope was to avoid the errors of the past in the mill towns of Britain, where factories popped up quicker than the homes for the workers could be considered, with slum housing erected to cope with demand. If towns were to be built afresh, they should avoid cheap ribbon building. Homes should have gardens, roads should be lined with trees; the town should have a large park, areas for offices, shops and factories for people to work in. Reflecting on Victorian British cities Howard wrote: “The well-lit streets are a great attraction, especially in winter, but the sunlight is being more and more shut out, while the air is so vitiated that the fine public buildings, like the sparrows, rapidly become covered with soot, and the very statues are in despair. Palatial edifices and fearful slums are the strange, complementary features of modern cities“.
After seeing his plan for a city implemented, Ebenezer Howard died and then the second wave of building was designed by two men: Louis Emanuel Jean Guy de Savoie-Carignan de Soissons (1890-1962) who had studied at the Royal Institute of British Architects before setting up his architectural practice De Soissons & Kenyon, alongside Arthur William Kenyon (1885-1969). Part of their plan was a large factory near the railway, and it was for Shredded Wheat.
Now in ruins, the can be seen from the trains that run through Welwyn Garden City. The silos have been preserved and shall be used in the redevelopment of the site.
The Shredded Wheat factory known locally as ‘The Wheat’, opened in 1926 and ceased production in January 2008. Originally designed by De Soissons and Kenyon. The site is to be redevelopment with flats and shops with the original factory made the centre of focus as a Grade II listed landmark building.
The history of East Dereham Church in Norfolk isn’t so unremarkable as other churches, but it has become the resting place of a poet and a saint. The bell tower to the right of the picture above was used to house French prisoners during the Napoleonic War.
St Withburga was originally buried there, but when her bones were removed to become a relic for Ely Cathedral, it is said that water filled the grave and so a well was built. Relics brought pilgrims, and pilgrims brought money. Above the well is a plaque that reads:
The ruins of a tomb which contained the remains of Withburga, youngest daughter of Anna, King of East Angles, who died AD 654. The Abbot and monks of Ely stole this precious relic and translocated to Ely Cathedral, where it was interred near her three royal sisters, AD 974.
The poet buried in the grounds is the anti-slavery campaigner William Cowper (1731-1800). The only other mystery is what is the lady doing in the image below. Running out of John Pipers way no doubt.
What does it mean for British Culture when Kettle’s Yard start to charge for the viewing of the house? A large amount of the population don’t go to art galleries. They think it will be boring or the spaces too austere. For many members of the public it is hard to see art in situ of a home, and Jim Ede’s home has been a place where many people started to become curious of art. But now Kettle’s Yard are charging for the public to view the house. £10.50 (£12 with a donation). It might not be a lot to some of you, but it will ban many people who are facing enough economic hardship.
They say the Gallery hasn’t recovered since Covid 19, however, the problem of Kettle’s Yard is the distance between the house and the gallery. The gallery has been hosting, what I would say were uninteresting and pretentious exhibitions that have failed to capture the public’s attention. The current show of Lucie Rie that is touring around UK venues is rare because it is extremely popular, but the curators of the gallery can’t see that the public and art fans want exhibitions like this – shows that reflect the collection of the House and the values of Jim Ede. What has happened is the house and the exhibition centre have been moving drastically in opposite directions, it feels more like Kettle’s Yard is being used as a trampoline to get the current curators jobs at more radical and lucrative galleries for their careers.
Left: The House as Ede likes it. Right: The same room with added Jennifer Lee during her exhibition there – what is the point of it?
For a while now the Kettle’s Yard team have been messing with the house, subtle things like putting works of art in parts of the property that have been in their exhibitions in order to validate the works. These are not works Ede collected, but by doing this it feels they are trying to make it look like they are given Ede’s stamp of approval.
But this isn’t what Ede wanted. When he left Kettle’s Yard to Cambridge University, Ede was horrified to find the curator Jeremy Lewison had started to move works around in the house, to the point Ede left written instructions of how the house was to be treated after he had left.
Left: Jim Ede’s Miro. Right: Barbara Hepworth’s Two Figures, Yellow and Brown.
Ede maintained an ‘open house’ each afternoon from 2pm to 4pm, giving any visitors, particularly students, a personal tour of his collection. He enjoyed peoples reactions to his works of art and he didn’t charge them. I would imagine he would be disgusted by the idea of making people pay for the privilege of looking at his home. He didn’t see it as a space that would be monetised like a static National Trust house, he thought of it as a home, with art in.
Kettle’s Yard is now to be another place lost to people who were curious of art but were delighted and inspired by the setting of a beautiful home.
While the house is open free to people under 25 years, the link of the property being owned by Cambridge University can only suggest this is really to give the majority of their students free access to the house, more than it is to help young minds. But the questions stand: should it be free? Do you think people will miss out on the space because of the charge? Do you think this will have wider repercussions for the state of Arts in Britain?
The legacy of the curator is that one of the most accessible art institutions in the country is now another money making venture. Slow hand clap.
If you think Anna Winters was the original pioneer of Vogue, you’d be quite wrong. Audrey Withers was editor of Vogue from 1940-60, and she worked with many photographers to make the magazine stand out. One of the most remarkable photoshoots was this series by Cecil Beaton set in blitz bombed London.
Today I think, if you took these photos there would be an outcry of insensitivity, however, the contemporary opinion of these photographs were that London, like fashion, is indestructible.
The first woman to be issued a patent in an American court, was Margaret Eloise Knight (1838-1914) for a machine for folding and gluing flat-bottomed paper bags.
As a little girl, ‘Mattie’ (as her parents and friends nicknamed her), preferred to play with woodworking tools instead of dolls, stating that “the only things she wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet drill, and pieces of wood. She then made kites and sleds out of wood.
After the early death of her father, Knight was forced to leave school aged 12 and work in the cotton loom mills in her town. After an accident at one of the mills where a shuttle flew off the loom stabbing a worker, she suggested a safety measure that was adopted with no credit to her.
Ill health ended her work in the mills but in order to survive she worked any job she could set her mind to. In 1867, she moved to Springfield, Massachusetts and was hired by the Columbia Paper Bag Company. She noticed that the envelope-shaped machine-made paper bags they produced were weak and narrow – unsuitable for groceries and hardware goods.
The British had been using paper bags since the 1840s and also had machines that made wider bags, however what Margaret Knight was to do was to make a machine that cut, folded, and glued paper to form the flat-bottomed brown paper bags familiar to shoppers today.
The trials to make the machine took three years and in order to obtain a patent a model of the machine was made in iron. During the manufacture, the design was stolen by Charles Annan, who had seen the prototype in the workshop of the company producing it and applied for a patent first. When Knight attempted to patent her work, she discovered Annan’s patent and filed a patent interference lawsuit in the autumn of 1870. She won the claim based on her journals, drawings and witnesses and was granted the patent for her machine. She was not the first woman to be awarded a patent but she was the first to win one in court.
With the patent she teamed up with a businessman and formed the Eastern Paper Bag Company. She received royalties from her invention that were capped at $25,000, around one million dollars today. Knight went on to be awarded another 26 patents and on her death an obituary was headlined as a “woman Edison”.
This is an interview with Michael Rothenstein. I think things like this are important to put online because there is too much artistic speculation today in replacement for research and facts.
Michael Rothenstein’s prints of cockerels make an immediate impression on you the moment you enter the 1981 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – beckoning the eye, their vivid contours eloquent of the printmaker’s art.
A graphic artist and printmaker, Rothenstein worked for many years in Great Bardfield, where in 1954, he founded the famous graphic workshop. Later he moved to his present studio a large barn at Stisted, near Braintree. Here, away from that hub of activity (the workshop at Great Bardfield attracted thousands of visitors every year) he feels he can work more privately. “Each technique has its own magic, and different artists come upon a technique which for them is magic at different times in their lives”, says Rothenstein, who did not himself discover printmaking until he was over forty. Once he had embarked on the process it took him over completely. “It was like a rebirth”, he says. Because printmaking had relatively passed him by when he was at art college, Rothenstein was able to convey the excitement of his own discovery in the books he began to write on printmaking. in the 1960s.
His graphics were immediately widely reproduced. Today from Stisted, working with Shelley Rose (a talented young printer who is his part-time assistant) his work is shown all over the world, rare for a graphic artist. Already this year there’s been a large retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia as well as exhibitions in West Germany, at the Tate and the V&A and his works on paper will be shown all summer in the prestigious Ljubljana Biennale.
Over the years Rothenstein has developed a finesse and precision hitherto unattained for such a revolutionary process. For many of his relief prints he uses huge tree-trunks which he obtains from Sible Hedingham. He also uses quite cheap crate wood waste from a factory in Braintree, as well as corroded iron and lino.
A lithe-bodied, charming man, his sustained vigour, evident during twelve gruelling weeks on the Royal Academy Senior Hanging Committee, left younger colleagues marvelling. “I put it down to a reformed diet”, he says. For the recipe-book by Royal Academicians, which the Royal Academy is to publish later this year, Rothenstein own contribution is an invigorating breakfast which includes muesli, homemade yogurt, lecithin, wheat-germ and blackcurrant juice, ideas inspired by the American “nutrition against disease” movement. His cover-illustration of this book, the cockerel, points again to how this virile theme runs constantly through his work. Rothenstein exhibition “Works on Paper” at the Minories, Colchester, took place in May. That same month his barn was the centre for an art exhibition by children from seven Essex schools, part of the Braintree Arts Festival – for Rothenstein is also: president of the Braintree Arts Association.
Next year he plans to exhibit in the gallery of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury. Here a print workshop has been set up in the garden for artists who work in print, but have no presses of their own. There is a permanent portfolio of their work on show in the gallery itself.
Rothenstein feels strongly that there should be a centre in North Essex where the many distinguished graphic artists who work there could have their work permanently available to the public. “There is nothing like this at present in the area and they deserve it!” he says.
