Double-take

The Peacock Room with blue and white Chinese porcelain of the Kangxi period. © 2010 – 2013 Smithsonian Institution and Wayne State University Libraries

Fellow blogger Courtney Barnes recently mentioned a website called The Story of the Beautiful, which chronicles the remarkable and revealing history of the Peacock Room in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, part of the Smithsonian Institution.

As The Story of the Beautiful describes, the Peacock Room was originally constructed by architect Thomas Jeckyll for the London house of shipowner Charles Leyland in the mid 1870s, as a cabinet to display blue and white Chinese porcelain. Then the artist James McNeill Whistler spectacularly redecorated the room, transforming it into a three-dimensional work of art.

The Peacock Room with various Asian ceramics. © 2010 – 2013 Smithsonian Institution and Wayne State University Libraries

After Leyland’s death the room was purchased by American industrialist and collector Charles Lang Freer in 1904 and shipped to his house in Detroit. Freer had a different taste in ceramics, preferring subtle glaze effects and collecting wares from across the whole of Asia.

After being moved from Detroit to the public art gallery Freer had initiated and funded in Washington, the Peacock Room was initially displayed with blue and white porcelain, as it had been in London. Now, following the cleaning and conservation of the painted decoration, Freer’s choice of ceramics has been reinstated.

Apart from having a model website, this project also demonstrates brilliantly how objects are changed by their physical context. It simultaneously proves how the context is changed when the objects within it are changed. And on top of that it illustrates how a historic interior can have more than one valid appearance – quite an achievement for a single room, but then this is not just any old room.

Living history

HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Palace of Huis ten Bosch, 2010. © RVD, photo: Vincent Mentzel

Earlier this week HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands made the announcement that on 30 April 2013 she will abdicate in favour of her son, the Prince of Orange. By then she will have been on the throne for 33 years, and at 75 she will have been the oldest reigning Dutch monarch.

As constitutional monarch Queen Beatrix represents an element of continuity, an embodiment of ‘living history’. Various members of the House of Orange have had a connection with the Dutch nation from its foundation in the 1570s and 1580s, first as stadtholders and later as monarchs. Now Queen Beatrix’s reign, too, will become ‘history’.

HM Queen Beatrix signing legislation at her desk at the Palace of Huis ten Bosch, 2011. © Rijksoverheid

The recent portraits shown here hint at that continuity in various, almost old-masterly ways. The photograph at the top was taken in the Witte Eetzaal (White Dining Room) of the Palace of Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. This room is in one of the wings added to the building by Daniel Marot for Prince William IV of Orange between 1734 and 1737. The image of the Queen at her desk shows her under a portrait of the Dutch pater patriae, Prince William I of Orange.

God is in the details

Detail of the hangings on the mid-19th-century bed in the Red Bedroom at Felbrigg Hall. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

Modernist guru Mies van der Rohe is supposed to have said that ‘God is in the details.’ But that dictum doesn’t only apply to modernist design, of course.

Items on the writing table in the Red Bedroom. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

When looking at images of Felbrigg Hall recently I found these amazing shots by David Kirkham, which zoom in on details of objects and surfaces in the house.

A corner of the Regency sofa in the Drawing Room. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

From an objective, rational viewpoint, these ‘things’ – and the collective thing that is Felbrigg – are the direct and indirect evidence of history, of the coming and going of different  generations who left successive layers of objects and decorations.

Rosewood teapoy, c.1820, in the Drawing Room. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

But quite apart from the causal relationships between objects and events, the different textures, shapes and colours in the house also seem to communicate with us on a more subliminal level.

Detail of Rococo giltwood pier table, c. 1752, in the Cabinet at Felbrigg. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

The myriad material factors in a house like Felbrigg, and the juxtapositions between those factors, are simultaneously deliberate – in reflecting the choices of specific people at specific points in time - and random – in that they represent not one moment of taste but many, and that some evidence has inevitably been lost or erased over time.

Gilded overmantel mirror and French ormolu and marble clock in the Cabinet. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

The result is perhaps similar to what Marcel Duchamp called the ’art coefficient’, the effect that art has on the viewer: an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

View of part of the Dining Room. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

In the context of a historic house we would probably call that ineffable coefficient the ‘spirit of place’.

Celestial and terrestrial globes in the Library. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

And to that immensely complex body of material evidence we then need to add the subjectivity of the visitors, each of whom is unique and brings yet another set of factors into the equation.

A corner of the Library, with its 18th-century Gothick style bookcases. ©National Trust Images/David Kirkham

So, paraphrasing Mies, we might say that the spirit of place is in the details: in our unique, subjective reactions to the innumerable sensory impressions as we move around a historic house.

The lost world of Fu Bingchang

Min Chin with a camera, Northern Hot Springs, February 1940, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

Photographs taken in China before about 1950 are relatively rare. During the Cultural Revolution many Chinese destroyed their collections of photographs, as any evidence of a ‘bourgeois’ past could get you into serious trouble.

Fu Bingchang and Sun Ke, 1920s, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

Some collections of photographs of China have been preserved elsewhere, but until recently most of those were fairly difficult to access. Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol has been instrumental in making a number of those collections available through the Visualising China website, where more than 8,000 images can now be explored.

Woman sitting in a cane chair, 1910s-1920s, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

These pictures include views of cities which have since completely changed, portraits of individual Chinese both eminent and humble, and records of everyday life. Some of the collections came from British people who were working in China as part of mercantile, imperial or missionary enterprises. Others are photographs taken and collected by Chinese that somehow ended up outside China.

Fu Bingchang with two women, 1930s – early 1940s, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

One of these collections comes from Fu Bingchang (1895-1965), who held various posts in the Nationalist government and was also a keen amateur photographer. His snaps provide a very personal glimpse of elite life in China between the 1920s and 1940s.

Fu Bingchang and Wang Chonghui standing in front of a motor car on a country road, c. 1940, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

The images show a society poised between tradition and modernity. As well as cameras, motor cars and bathing suits, they include traditional architecture, gardens and furniture. Exemplifying this period of huge change in Chinese society, women are often portrayed wearing the cheongsam (or qipao) dress, based on male Manchu dress but adopted by women from the 1920s onwards as a modern, progressive fashion and accessorised with scarves and handbags (as was recently explained to me by WESSIELING). Fu Binchang himself is sometimes portrayed in traditional dress and sometimes in up-to-the-minute plusfours and co-respondent shoes.

Jiang Fangling with round window, c. 1940, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

An image of a Fang Jiangling next to a round window to me exemplifies this fascinating hybridity: the window is of a type that had been used for centuries in Chinese garden walls to provide enticing and nicely framed glimpses of greenery and vistas beyond. At the same time, Fang Jiangling’s pose next to it is somehow very moderne, as she grasps the edge of the window like an Art Deco sylph playing with a ball or a Bauhaus mannequin manipulating a cog in a machine.

Fu Bingchang in the dormitory of the Legislative Yuan, Sichuan, 1940, from the Fu collection featured by Visualising China

This image database is yet another example of the opening up and linking of online collections that I have mentioned in previous posts. Thanks to Visualising China Fu Binchang’s world can now be reappraised and studied in greater detail.

A slideshow of images from Visualising China with audio commentary is available on the BBC website, and a programme on BBC Radio 4 about the project can be accessed through the BBC iPlayer.

We are all found objects now

Collection of geological specimens and other objects at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

The debate about the significance of Pinterest (initiated in a post by Enfilade which I responded to in this post) has been continuing with a post on the blog Unmaking Things, run by students on the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum History of Design MA course.

Two pairs of shoes at Mr Straw’s House, Worksop, Nottinghamshire. ©National Trust Images/Geoffrey Frosh

In this new post entitled ‘Digital Adornment’ Marilyn Zapf notes that Pinterest seems to echo the research of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in mapping taste and class in 1960s France. But rather than asking people to complete questionnaires about their preferences, as Bourdieu did, the present-day researcher can find in Pinterest a huge ready-made data set relating to taste (or ‘taste’).

Textile scraps probably used to plug draught gaps in the late eighteenth century, found at a farm on the Kingston Lacy estate, Dorset. ©National Trust Images/Cristian Barnett

Marilyn’s post has made me reflect on how Pinterest paradoxically increases the distance between an individual and an object, while appearing to bring them closer.

On the one hand, the choice of images available through the internet is huge and is exponentially increasing. The choice for the individual to excercise his or her taste, with the help of Pinterest’s user-friendly software, apears to be almost limitless. Objects zoom in on us from all angles.

Victorian scrap screen at Arlington Court, Devon. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

On the other hand, Marilyn notes that “Pinterest provides a way to consume without purchasing, to collect without owning.” As access increases, ownership – both physically and in the sense of commitment or knowledge –  appears to diminish, and our grasp of the object appears to be more elusive than ever.

1950s bra packaging discovered at Corfe Castle, Kingston Lacy estate, Dorset. ©National Trust Images/Cristian Barnett

Also, the very power of the Pinterest concept, in allowing everyone to create their own ‘art’ gallery (simultaneously private, in that it reflects the individual’s personal taste, and public, in that everyone can see it) has the effect of radically, even brutally democratising the value of images. Great works of art and everyday objects, the beautiful and the tasteless are all reduced or elevated to the level of ‘found objects’.

Military dress uniform found in the private apartments at Knole, Kent. ©National Trust Images/Myles New

This, in turn, reminds me of how Marcel Duchamp transformed mundane objects into art purely through his choice of them, most famously through the urinal that he displayed as a sculpture entitled ‘Fountain’.

Duchamp also explored the opposite strategy, by for instance transforming the Mona Lisa into something akin to a joke cartoon character. Now, in Pinterest’s democratic visual playground, life appears to be mimicking art.

Objects found under the floorboards at Nunnington Hall, North Yorkshire. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

Marilyn also perceptively writes that by using Pinterest ”the consumer (in the guise of a collector) is made visible. [...] The networking site puts the consumer on display alongside consumption itself.”

For better or for worse, Pinterest objectifies our choices, and, through them, objectifies us. As we all become producer-consumers (or prosumers), we all turn into someone else’s found objects.

Long to reign over us

Photographic print of the Queen treated to look like an oil painting, 1953, at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. Inv. no. 290938. ©National Trust Collections

As the Diamond Jubilee weekend approaches, I thought I would take a look at some of the objects in the collections of the National Trust that relate to the 1953 Coronation.

Silk crêpe handkerchief, c. 1953, at Killerton, Devon. Inv. no. 1363609. ©National Trust Collections

They provide a narrowly focused but vivid snapshot of early 1950s cultural and social trends in Britain.

Blue jasperware Wedgwood teapot designed by Arnold Machin, at Sizergh Castle, Cumbria. Inv. no. 997887.2. ©National Trust Collections

Some of the items show modernist design elements, although in a muted, decorous way. Others are unashamedly traditionalist.

Wedgwood commemorative mug, c. 1953, at Greenway, Devon (Agatha Christie’s holiday home). Inv. no. 122026. ©National Trust Collections

They span the entire spectrum from cheap throwaway items to beautifully designed objects made from durable materials.

Chair of a type used by those attending the 1953 Coronation in Westminster Abbey, which could subsequently be purchased by the attendees (echoing the earlier practice of giving surplus royal furniture to courtiers as perks of office), at Chirk Castle, Wrexham. Inv. no. 1170796.1. ©National Trust Collections

But they all seem to include heraldic elements, befitting the highly symbolic, even hieratic nature of the occasion. Style Court has just done a nice post about Arnold Machin’s iconic silhouettes of the Queen.

Book of matches, Bryant & May, 1953, at Sissinghurst Castle. Inv. no. 802872. ©National Trust Collections

And the early television set reminds us that in 1953 Britain had only fairly recently entered the broadcast media age – there was debate around whether the coronation should be broadcast on television at all, and when it was decided to do so many people bought TV sets especially for the occasion. Perhaps we are in a similar transitional moment now, as interactive media supplement or take over from broadcast platforms.

1950s Bush television, at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, Merseyside (Paul McCartney’s childhood home). Inv. no. 2030421. ©National Trust Collections

More Coronation memorabilia can be found on the National Trust Collections website – with thanks to Philip Claris for highlighting a selection of them.

This also reminds me of the upcoming conference at the Courtauld Institute, London, entitled Art and Its Afterlives, looking at how the meaning of works of art and other objects changes and reverberates long after their original creation.

Are you Pinterested?

Craig Hanson, who writes the Enfilade blog, recently posted on the Pinterest phenomenon, the online image pinboard service that is growing fast at the moment. Craig notes how images from museum websites are increasingly being ‘pinned’ and how this is helping to increase the public awareness of museum and heritage collections.

An often-pinned image: view into the Green Closet at Ham House. ©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

I had noticed something similar with images from this blog appearing on Pinterest. I find it fascinating to see which images (and, theferore, objects and places) are particularly popular – some get pinned and repinned numerous times.

There seems to be real mutual benefit in this: it helps museums and heritage institutions to understand what their audiences are interested in, and it helps individuals to find inspiring images and learn more about those objects and places.

Another current Pinterest favourite: Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House. ©National Trust Images/Eric Crichton

Some museums have responded by creating their own Pinterest boards, for instance the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the British Museum. The National Trust also has an official Pinterest presence, put together by our web team and including some ‘prosumer’ content. It illustrates our multi-focused identity as a membership organisation, a nature conservation body as well as a museum authority.

One of the National Trust’s Pinterest boards, featuring images taken of Trust places by members and visitors.

My colleague Alex Hunt, who monitors external trends that might affect the National Trust, sent me a link to this post by We Are Social which analyses the profile of the American users of Pinterest: the majority of them is female and has design/art-related occupations and interests. 

National Trust images that combine colour, texture and historical atmoshpere tend to be favourites on Pinterest, such as this view from the Top Terrace at Powis Castle. ©National Trust Images/Andrew Butler

According to We Are Social’s research, UK Pinterest users tend to have a slightly different profile (and there are far fewer of them), but both groups seem to have a high proportion of what marketing people call ‘influencers’, those whose activities and tastes are followed and imitated by others. A while ago I did some posts about influence and influencers, open-source art history and liquid networks.

Snapshot from Courtney Barnes’s tumblr page.

Fellow blogger Courtney Barnes, a classic cultural influencer, has recently started a visual diary on tumblr (which is similar in some ways to Pinterest), to record the discoveries that cannot immediately be accomodated on her main blog Style Court. It is a miniature (but growing) encyclopaedia of one person’s taste, an evolving mood board and a treasure trove of visual juxtapositions.

Another popular image from Treasure Hunt: Ellen Terry’s beetle dress for her role as Lady Macbeth, at Smallhythe. ©Zenzie Tinker

It is impossible to predict how the use of Pinterest will develop (I should perhaps revisit this in a year’s time), but at the moment it provides a wonderfully magnified view of the inner workings of cultural exchange, inspiration and networking.

Place and non-place

Dovecote at Chastleton House, Oxfordshire. ©Emile de Bruijn

I have just returned from a fascinating conference at the University of Northampton about ‘consuming the country house’, which I mentioned earlier. ‘Consumption’ turned out to be a really useful theme to frame discussions about the social, economic, political and artistic aspects of country houses.

Detail in the garden at Great Chalfield Manor, Wiltshire. ©Emile de Bruijn

One of the speakers, Ruth Gill, who works for Historic Royal Palaces, mentioned a book by anthropologist Marc Augé entitled Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). Augé analyses transient places like airports, stations and supermarkets in which myriad human transactions are processed but which do not encourage feelings of connection or belonging.

Door of the gazebo at Great Chalfield. ©Emile de Bruijn

Ruth warned against the dangers of historic houses becoming too much like non-places. Sometimes the measures taken to preserve the historic fabric of a place can have the unintended consequence of making the visitor feel that he or she does not belong there.

Vista at Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire. ©Emile de Bruijn

We probably all know the feeling of being in a place that is objectively beautiful but feels somehow alien. Equally we can all remember those moments when a small detail in a painting, the smell of a tapestry or of polished wood, the proportion of a piece of furniture or a doorframe, an intellectual insight or a surprise vista in a landscape suddenly connected us to a place.

Detail in the garden at Hidcote. ©Emile de Bruijn

I agree with Ruth that enabling those moments of connection – between ourselves and the world, between the past and the present – is essentially what heritage is all about.

A taxonomy of guidebooks

85 of the National Trust’s best-selling guidebooks can now be purchased online through our website.

I use the guidebooks a lot in my work, to quickly check facts about certain houses, gardens, rooms and objects. Over time I have collected different editions of the same guidbook, and it is interesting to see how they have changed over the years.

The earliest National Trust guidebooks were small, sober affairs, as befitted the austere 1940s and 1950s, and for quite a long time the guidebooks kept that restrained look.

I can remember buying one at Clandon Park in the mid-1980s which was fairly substantial in size, but still had the self-consciously ‘tasteful’ green cover. Inside some of the pages contained text only – extraordinary by today’s standards – and the relatively sparse illustrations were mainly in black and white.

Even so, to me as a teenager just becoming aware of ‘heritage’ it was rather thrilling to have all this diverse information about a house, its garden, the people who lived there and the things they collected – a biography of a place, effectively - in one booklet.

In some cases I have managed to find the pre-NT guidebooks as well, published when the house in question was still privately owned, and which show different and understandably more personal approaches to presenting a family’s heritage. And in places where the ‘donor family’ has a lot of input, such as Waddesdon Manor, the guidebooks still have a distinctive identity.

Today the guidebooks are much more visually stimulating both outside and in, as they have to compete for attention with the plethora of other products on offer in the various National Trust shops. And in some places there is now more than one type of guidebook, to cater for the different needs and tastes of different visitor groups.

It is probably not too far-fetched to say that the guidebooks mirror the development of the National Trust as a whole, and reflect trends in our appreciation of the past more generally. Perhaps – and I say this only half in jest – the time has come for a proper sociological and art-historical study of the subject?

Update: It had slipped my mind that our guidebooks editor, Oliver Garnett, has published a fascinating article on country house guidebooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on pp. 7-9 of the October 2010 issue of ABC Bulletin. Hopefully he will soon produce another article on the history of National Trust guidebooks.

Past imperfect

The Hall at Hanbury Hall before 1900. ©National Trust

The agronomist Louise Fresco recently posted  about the implications of adding traditional cuisine to UNESCO’s world heritage listings (she writes in Dutch, so apologies to English-only readers). She rightly warns against the assumption that traditional recipes are fixed, and that there is one particular dish that can be designated as the ‘official’ one. Cuisine, like any other form of heritage, is always subject to change, and that change doesn’t necessarily make it less authentic.

The Hall more recently. ©NTPL/Dennis Gilbert

That post reminds me of historic interiors, which are also often read as definitive and fixed. Of course this impression is partly caused by the sincere efforts of the owners or curators, who have done their best to make all the elements fit together into a convincing whole, just as a chef tries to harmonise all the flavours on the plate.

The Hall at Hanbury Hall is a salutary example of how radically the look of an interior can change over a hundred year period. The top image shows the fabric of the Hall unchanged since the house was rebuilt in 1701, but resplendent with Victorian clutter. The bottom image shows an attempt to recreate an eighteenth-century look by the National Trust. Both images can justifiably be called either ‘true’ or ‘untrue’. Taken together they also tell us something about our constantly changing perception of the past.