Category Archives: United Kingdom

Silk Roads

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My geography failed me completely here. I doubt I could pin Japan on a map, let alone Korea or Uzbekistan. I realised how completely flummoxed I was at having no Eurocentric compass to orient myself at the start of the exhibition as it began with China and dynasties I had never heard of. I encountered lots of new information, which is still sinking in; it may be a while before the dust settles to reveal coherent thoughts.

Λοιπόν. This exhibition at the British Museum focused on trade routes between Asia, Europe and Africa between 500 and 1000 along which silks, spices, luxury and everyday goods, and ideas passed. It began with a bronze figure of the Buddha – made in Pakistan in the late 500s and excavated in Sweden amongst buildings dating from the 800s.

First: the developing links between China (Chang’an), Korea (Unified Silla) and Japan; in the Nara period (700s), rulers in Japan adopted elements of the Tang dynasty and adapted the Chinese writing system for their own language. Buddhism spread eastwards from India at this time to become the dominant religion. Silk was used as currency in China, and it was one of the luxury items in demand along the trade routes.

I found out about Dunhuang, a garrison town, where in 1900 a sealed “library cave” was discovered, containing manuscripts, textiles, paintings and other objects. Empires and peoples I had never heard of were represented by wonderful objects: the Sogdians, for example, and a mural from Samarkand showing a Sogdian ruler and his entourage, or one of an elephant from the Bukhara region.

The Belitung shipwreck was fascinating and mind-boggling. In 1998 a shipwreck was discovered off Belitung Island in Indonesia; a vessel from the early 800s en route from China to perhaps the Arabian peninsula, containing over 60,000 items – mostly Chinese ceramics. (The photographs of crockery on the sea bed reminded me of the Titanic last month.) I could happily find a home for the pretty blue and white dish – which makes clear how the very human pleasure of acquiring attractive objects as well as the essential stuff like salt drove so much global trade.

Ideas, religions, technological knowledge and languages travelled along the routes. There was a concertina of a Buddhist sutra in both Chinese and Sanskrit and a fragment of New Persian text written in Hebrew script; I had to think hard about those. Religions that travelled along the route: not just the dominant Buddhism of this time but also Hinduism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism, meeting up with local deities and religious practices, and, later, Islam through conquest.

Such a sense of human activity over so many centuries! Some of it illustrated our worst tendencies: the never-ending desire for more and more luxurious goods and the trading of people as well as commodities.

By the time the silk routes reached the shores of Europe, my sense of wonder diminished: it was all rather familiar. On reflection, I realised how thoroughly and unusually immersed I had been in an exhibition that barely touched on Europe or parts of the world colonised by Europeans. It doesn’t often happen, and it did make me very aware of my ignorance and lack of a compass as I venture into new territory.

After lunch I returned to more familiar territory: a small exhibition of prints and drawings that Max Beckmann had given to Marie-Louise von Motesiczky.

Charles Dickens Museum

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My mistake: I went to the museum hoping to see the copy of David Copperfield that accompanied Scott and his men on the Terra Nova expedition, but that’s not until February.

No matter: I was able to photograph some of the coal hole covers I’d noticed before in Doughty Street.

The museum was quite interesting. Dickens and his wife lived there from 1837-39; they arrived with one child and left with three. It’s an early-Victorian middle-class house with a few items of furniture that came from Dickens’s final home in Gads Hill. I confess that what really grabbed me was a portrait of Catherine Dickens with an overmantel in her lap. In a display case below her was an overmantel that she embroidered some years later – which sent me back to Tirzah Garwood and her endless creations. The difference was that Garwood made her own designs and sold her work, but the image of two women across a century with hands forever at work remained with me.

Catherine Dickens (1815–1879) by Daniel Maclise, 1847, oil on canvas

Tirzah Garwood

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To Dulwich Picture Gallery for a delightful exhibition. Everything made me smile, despite the sadness of Garwood’s early death. Basic facts: her dates are 1908-51; she was married to Eric Ravilious, had three children and was widowed in 1942; she was treated for breast cancer in 1942, which later recurred and killed her shortly after her second marriage.

I liked everything: the early woodcuts, the marbled papers she made and sold to publishers and upmarket shops, the embroideries (reminiscent of Marian Stoll), the Camberwick Green shops and houses, and the later Max-Ernst-meets-Douanier-Rousseau oils. There were also some works by Ravilious – including a large watercolour of chalk land which, ironically, would have been my steal from the exhibition – which brought out Garwood’s focus on people and the traditional female spheres of home, children and neighbourhood. She made things for people – a quilt for a friend, items for sale, illustrations in letters – and, from her work, I came away with a very positive impression of the woman: generous, fun, kind, endlessly creative. In contrast, I have no particular sense of the personality of Ravilious (or Gerrit Dou or Rembrandt or any other of the male artists in the gallery). That says something about the curating of the exhibition – and rather more about making art when you are also tied to your roles of a wife, mother and housewife.

(Yes, I do realise that on the plus side the confines of her life meant that she didn’t have the freedom to become a war artist and to die on a mission over Iceland.)

Liverpool 2

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The Mersey wind cuts with a sharp knife: I tucked everything around me as I headed down to the river. The open views of the famous riverside buildings have been redacted by the big blots of modern buildings – but the latter do provide good reflections. Having watched Terence Davies’s “Of Time and the City” a couple of weeks ago, I remembered the overhead railway, and reflected that the waterfront has probably never presented a perfect view. (But the Cunard Building tried hard!)

To the Maritime Museum, where I found myself unexpectedly interested by the history of Liverpool’s docks. More expectedly, I was very taken by the glamour of interwar ocean liners. The Titanic exhibition I largely swerved because of school groups, but the photograph of a rack of plates, still on the sea bed and half-covered by sand, was surprisingly moving. A modern Vanitas.

Cherry Tree to Darwen

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I’d bought my ticket to Darwen and was on the railway platform before I realised that my Bakelite mobile hadn’t picked up the message about the group walk being called off because of train cancellations.

So I went for a walk anyway. I didn’t have a map but I did have my ipad, the OS app and perhaps enough charge to keep me on the right track. I decided the best route under the circumstances was to get off at Cherry Tree station and follow the Witton Weavers Way to Darwen station.

It looked fine on the app, but an enormous housing estate is under construction between Cherry Tree and the motorway, so I lost my path and followed another one that had been severely narrowed by the construction fence. Then a grim, muddy path sandwiched between the motorway and the kind of farm that is more like a dump.

And then all of a sudden I was enjoying myself. A stile into a little wood, a few streams and a little lane of old houses and all was right with the world. I walked up to Jubilee Tower on Darwen Hill, thinking about parallels between various jubilee towers and Bismarcktürme and wondering how much windier it could get. And then down into Darwen with thoughts of the heavy footprint of Victorian industry around this moorland – the chimneys, the factories, the reservoirs, the grand civic buildings, the ex-quarries turned into public parks, the terraces.

Reflecting on my day afterwards, I thought how appropriate it was that I’d followed the advice of that great Victorian sage, Mr Sleary, and made the “betht” of things.