Unconnected communities

 

Shingle Street, a tiny hamlet in Suffolk, is the end of the road, the last few houses before a deserted beach.

What is the romance of a road that leads nowhere? Part of the pleasure is just to visit the last destination on the signpost.  

You have almost certainly never heard of Shingle Street: it is the end of the line, in deeply rural Suffolk. The nearest town or village of any size is is Woodbridge, 25 minutes by car away. Hence the magic: from a busy dual carriageway from Cambridge, into rural Suffolk, then to single-track roads, until the final destination. The contrast between busy and deserted. The lack of noise; there was nothing to hear, except for seagulls and oystercatchers. Then you notice the sound of agricultural machines (about which more later).

Shingle Street is simply one street – and it’s hardly much of a street. At one end, a row of coastguard cottages; at the other, a converted Martello Tower, looking as ugly and forbidding as it must have been when built. In between, a handful of individual houses, each of them a separate design, although design is hardly a way to describe a distinctly ramshackle collection. No shops, but certainly plenty of shingle: the beach, which extends for miles in either direction, is all pebbles, with fascinating plants, including verbascum and sea kale growing directly out of the shingle. There were stern warnings as you approached the beach not to disturb the plants (which, to be honest, didn’t look very disturbed), but to follow the designated paths to the waterline (there weren’t any paths). As for the plants, they clearly ignored that notice, and it was indeed as if they existed in a different universe to that of the standard beachgoer: they were getting on with their job, ignoring where visitors walked, and growing in a random fashion. As for visitors, just a handful: one or two people fishing, a couple with their dog, a group who had clearly come from some distance and even brought chairs to sit on the beach. Nobody swimming, as far as I could see: not that kind of day, not that kind of beach. Out at sea, vast container ships were visible on the horizon – waiting for high tide so they could berth at Felixstowe, a few miles further south. 

The “street” wasn’t really a street at all. There was a rough track for cars at the back of the houses, but at the front, the tiny gardens opened straight on to the beach. Two or three of the gardens had people sitting in the open, talking. There was, briefly, a moment of interaction as a woman and a child, with towels wrapped around them, ran from the sea back to a house, clearly ignoring the signpost stating not to disturb the plants. Then quiet again. There was a rusted winch for dragging a boat up the beach, but the current inhabitants of Shingle Street no longer had any relationship with the sea. 

We walked from Shingle Street to Alderton, the nearest village, a couple of miles away, across a very sandy landscape, with more Martello towers and World War II pillboxes, one of them with a tree growing out of the entrance. Although the soil looked very unsuitable for growing anything, the surprise on the walk was the intensiveness of the agriculture. Vast, oversized tractors and cropping machines were harvesting potatoes as we passed. The village of Alderton was almost shaken to its foundations by a convoy of agricultural vehicles thundering through. As they passed us, pinned to the hedge to avoid them, one of the drivers waved half-heartedly, as if our presence was incidental to the main business of harvesting those potatoes. There were a few hedgerows, some trees, some birds, but the overriding impression from the nature on the walk was that it barely survived the onslaught of modern agriculture: in the contest between nature and large-scale agriculture, nature was the loser. Any wild plants you saw were incidental survivors from what was really an industrial landscape: vast fields with hedges and borders removed, farmed by one or two machines. One field of sweetcorn had plants growing dramatically, already reading five or six feet, so clearly very healthy; but there was absolutely nothing growing beside them in the middle of the field. It was a pure monoculture, that could only exist by highly specific fertiliser and herbicide to encourage the sweetcorn, and at the same time obliterate everything else. 

Alderton itself was a small, unassuming village, with a rather sad local shop and a church with just a very plain hall nave, half rebuilt by the Victorians, a porch that was so decayed you could hardly make out what the carvings on it had been, and the church’s most distinctive feature, a tower that was half-collapsed. This was one of those unmemorable churches that you only remember for what is not there. The stump of the tower remained, but fenced-off, and trees had grown around it, so one end of the church had become a wild space, the opposite of the what the church authorities would have wanted: fenced off, with notices saying “the tower is dangerous: keep out”, as if the danger came from the wildness, not the loose stones. Inside the church, the wildness was emphasised by the way the tower entrance was cordoned off in a haphazard, unplanned way, with some railings, as if the tower collapse had been yesterday, and nobody had worked out how to deal with the door that now led to a heap of rubble. Despite all that, the impression was that the church had once been the centre of something, and that something no longer existed. 

As usual in English villages, there were a few new cul-de-sacs of recent housing development, with new houses in no particular style looking as though they could have been built anywhere. Who lives there? Do they use the shop? Do they have any organic links with the village of Alderton? They looked entirely oblivious of the old village, the handful of listed buildings, the church and the old rectory.  

At the end of the day we went into Woodbridge. Compared to Shingle Street, Woodbridge is a major town, but in reality, it still does not have the feel of being part of the modern world. It has a small quay, boats with people living on them, some individual (rather than chain) shops, and station on a line that goes from nowhere to nowhere. As we queued up for our fish and chips, we saw diners in the adjacent pizza restaurant looking monumentally bored. Couples in their sixties, each of them looking at their phone, not talking. The only thing to wait for seemed to be for the meal to arrive, after which there would be no need for further conversation. They didn’t seem to be engaged with anything much outside themselves. 

Of course we all dream about how things once were: the myth of a golden age, when the countryside was a small-scale working and farming community, that was never really like that. I was very moved by Eamonn Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath, that used parish records to suggest a community around a pre-reformation parish church, a community that changed forever with new religious practices, but I acknowledge that it is a romantic, one-sided presentation by an author with an agenda.

Nonetheless, here was a day with a powerful sense of fragmented communities. The residents of Shingle Street, sitting in their gardens looking at the sea; the farm workers; the inhabitants of the new developments at Alderton; the church, the sea kale and verbascum. Are all lives so fragmented?

The rise and fall of cities and their art

 

Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c1610, commissioned by Nicolas Rockox, mayor of Antwerp, for his own house

I am intrigued to learn more about cities. That very vague idea is not very helpful – a glance at bookshops for books with “city” in the title rapidly runs into hundreds. It needs to be a more precise interest. How about this? 

Some cities give the impression that they were always big: London and Paris are examples. Their history can be found, but isn’t very visible among the constant renewal and rebuilding of the centre. In contrast, former cities display much more of their history even to the casual observer. By “former”, I mean a specific group, which enables me to refine my interest in cities to something much more specific: cities that experience a dramatic change in fortune, whether growing or retracting, and ideally both. Think about it: cities that were once great, but no longer: Venice, Bruges, Dundee. In England, Norwich, Kings Lynn. Further down the scale, think of Boston, Lincolnshire, with its enormous spire as evidence of a time of wealth, and now looking down on some quite significant poverty.

So, a reading programme about why cities decline. It seems to me a good combination of reading with visiting, since the evidence on the ground will be very apparent – nobody had the money to demolish all the remains of former wealth. One problem, however, is that there always seem to be more books written about “golden ages” (which could include Amsterdam, Antwerp, Venice) but much less about the decline. I find the long slow cultural decline of Florence under the Medici a fascinating subject, even if it shows an inverse relationship between wealth and artistic quality. Or, more precisely, while the Medici remained rich, there was no longer a wide art-buying public.

Does Antwerp fit this scenario? After a couple of visits my superficial impression was the very significant presence of 17th-century buildings and culture. The Rubens House, and his vast output, is entirely 17th century. The Plantin printing and publishing operation had a monopoly of publishing liturgical texts for the Catholic Church. The Rubens House was begun 1610. The Snijders & Rockox House dates from 1603 onwards. Yet we are told the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 reduced the city to a shadow of its former self, losing 40% of its population.

Perhaps it is my contrary thinking, but it looked to me that Antwerp (and surrounds) did not appear to be suffering too much in comparison with its northern neighbour, The (northern) Netherlands. It’s not, in other words, a simple claim that Protestantism is linked with artistic quality. 

But artistic quality may have a link with economic success. At least, in the eyes of Maarten Prak, who writes (in Five Books on the Dutch Golden Age):

There is a big debate about the economic origins of the Dutch Golden Age. The debate is about whether it was the result of Antwerp merchants moving to Amsterdam, and taking Antwerp’s ‘golden age’ with them in their bags, or whether things had been happening already in the Dutch economy before 1600 that helped launch the Dutch Golden Age.

But what interests me is what of course should be obvious, that great art happens when there is economic success. Perhaps it’s just a matter of statistics: painters in the Italian Renaissance painted a lot of pictures because they were being paid well, and widely, to do so. Similarly, in the Dutch Golden Age, there was a vast market for domestic paintings (and paintings paid for by private clients for display in churches). Among those thousands of pictures, a handful will be exceptional. That happened in 15th-century Flanders, in 16th-century Antwerp, and in 17th-century Netherlands. Maarten Prak again:

A group of painters emerged, including van der Weyden and van Eyck, the best of whom were producing for courtier audiences, but still operated in urban environments, and also had an urban clientele … You see that happening in Ghent and Bruges in the 15th century, in Antwerp in the 16th century, and then in Amsterdam, and other towns in Holland, in the 17th century.

But you also see it in 17th-century Antwerp, with Rubens, Jordaens, and others. Why should this be?

Flower paintings at Kettle's Yard (July 2026)

 

Doron Langberg, Hibiscus I, 2022

Painting flowers is one of the most obvious subjects for painting, so you wonder why there are not more flower painting exhibitions. Perhaps the organisers – and the public – have been put off by the practice followed by many galleries, including the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam, to group all the flower paintings together in a single room. This practice might make sense if the gallery had a wide ranger of flower paintings, but both galleries choose to display all their 17th-century Dutch flower paintings together. My heard sinks when I see so many similar works together, all with a black background.

Today, the situation is very different. There are many kinds of flower-inspired paintings, and what could be simpler to curate than an exhibition of them? Except that the Kettles Yard team seems to have extended their brief to include works primarily about people (Kay Donachie), or not including any flowers at all (Howard Hodgkin). Limiting ourselves to those works that are of flowers, what struck me was the difference between the skill of the 50 or so artists included (the show only contains one work only from each artist, so the judgements below apply only to these works).

I would imagine a trawl of amateur art exhibitions would reveal thousands of flower painters: flowers are easy to obtain, they typically last a few days (with some exceptions), and are typically colourful, so it should be easy to get a result. Most importantly, they raise little problem of perspective being largely in a single plane.

For me, the magic of flower paintings is that they represent a kind of pure painting. They aren’t about anything other than the flower being depicted. So when the catalogue tells me that a painting honour's the painter's father, I don't get it.  

Nonetheless, a few paintings stood out very clearly in this show. 

David Jones: a lovely demonstration of watercolour without, as far as I could see, any preparatory drawing, with light flowing, as it were, through the leaves and petals. 

Cass Namoda: a dramatic close-up of part of a single flower, with not enough space within the picture to display the whole. 

Doron Langberg: very rough daubs of bright pink, against green, give a powerful suggestion of hibiscus. The image is representational, but only just. 

William Nicholson: always one to provide a witty commentary on the ostensible subject, Nicholson includes a dramatic shadow that almost obscures the foliage below the peonies. 

Cedric Morris: the viewer appears to be in the middle of an almost exploding bunch of flowers, filling the rectangular canvas with bright, living colours. This man can paint the essence of flowers better than anyone else in the show! His paintings of people are never as good. 

Judith Tucker: A very dramatic view of sea asters against a dark background. The leaves especially are a vivid orange, yet the background is dark, so the effect is somewhat surreal. Undeniable is the power of the piece. Looking up sea asters in Wikipedia suggested their flowers are not that different to any other aster, and not very dramatic: the focus here is on the leaves.

What did I dismiss? Any artist who included human figures, since, in my opinion, the human figure directs the viewer how to interpret the image. Thus, Caroline Walker, whose naturalistic depictions of home life complete with child are not, I think, flower paintings. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is included for a fritillary sketch, but it looked too small-scale in the context of an exhibition gallery.

In summary: great show, but it would have been better to have included a few examples from earlier centuries, especially the 17th century. 

The Bill Gates of the 15th century?

 

The picturesque remains of Chichele College

The town of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, perhaps a little larger today than a village, with a population around 8,000, is not so different to many other small towns in the Midlands: an old church, a market square, a few old buildings, some small-scale industry (shoemaking). But in the centre is the intriguing Chichele College, the ruined remains of a religious institute set up in the 15th century for canons. Today, the property is owned by English Heritage, and is open to the public, courtesy, it would appear, of volunteer curators. I was intrigued by the idea of a “chantry college”, and how it came to exist.

On the site there were a few information boards, but these seemed more interested in the building over the more succeeding centuries following the dissolution of the monasteries (according to Wikipedia, Henry VIII seized the college in 1542). There was no guide, and Pevsner, as usual, focuses on the buildings, rather than about its purpose. What was a chantry college? Wikipedia has an entry for the founder and benefactor Henry Chichele (pronounced “Chichly”) which, although a poor entry, gives some idea about his career: a rapid rise to the top of the English Church, partly as a result of his wealthy connections, notably, his brother. In the town of Higham Ferrers, Chichele also built a grammar school and a “Bede House” (an alms house), both in the grounds of the parish church.

What was a Chantry College?

That, to me, is a mystery. I was aware of Chantry chapels, founded to say masses for wealthy donors, but Chichele College appears to have had at least partially an educational function. Its responsibilities included teaching grammar and song. It appears to have been abolished because it was not part of a university or school.

What was the motivation behind Chichele’s philanthropy?

Clearly, Chichele was wealthy. In addition to Chichele College, founded 1422, he also founded two colleges in Oxford, one for Cistercians in 1437 and one, All Souls, founded 1438, which still exists, as well as Chichele College, and the impression comes to mind of a 15th-century equivalent of Bill Gates or Howard Hughes – whatever was spent on philanthropy only amounted to a small proportion of their total wealth. But is that assumption correct? Chichele’s money came from multiple benefices – at one point, he had at least eight, and was instructed to give them all up except one. Owning more than one benefice was, of course, one of the complaints by reformers against the established Church. English law prevented a bishop having multiple benifices, but nonetheless, Chichele appealed to the Pope, and was granted an exemption in 1407 on being made bishop of St David’s in Wales, enabling him to keep them.

 

Was Chichele corrupt?

According to the Wikipedia entry for Chichele obtained clerical benefices (that is, the position of rector as well as the income from the parish) via his wealthy brother (at least initially). It also mentions how, as archbishop of Canterbury, he investigated and condemned heretics who complained about the corruption of bishops and archbishops. Complaints about corruption in the senior clergy were clearly already widespread in the 15th century, even before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517.

So my questions are: how corrupt was Chichele (compared with other clergy in the Church of England in Chichele’s time)? Was the founding of the College at Higham Ferrers motivated by genuine altruism or simply face-saving? The Wikipedia entry for Chichele, although over 3,000 words long, gets too involved in trying to arguing with scholars to give a good summary (“The struggle between them [Chichele and Pope Martin V] has been represented as one of a patriotic archbishop resisting the encroachments of the papacy on the Church of England. In point of fact it was almost wholly personal, and was rather an incident in the rivalry between the Duke of Gloucester and his half-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, than one involving any principle.”, but no citation for this claim). The Wikipedia entry uses the term “diplomatist”, an outdated term today replaced by “diplomat”, and which suggests that much of the Wikipedia entry was lifted from an earlier source, probably the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edition (acknowledged in the references).

It will require some detective work to try to establish, if the sources are sufficient, the real background to Chichele’s philanthropy.  

The house with no kitchen or fireplace

 

The facade of Paycocke's House: built 1509, but all the oriel windows, and much of the highly detailed carving, date from early in the 20th century

Paycocke’s House in Coggeshall, Essex, is one of the best-known Tudor houses in England. It was owned by a wool merchant, Thomas Paycocke, who made his fortune from selling undyed wool. So I was fascinated to see this demonstration of a wealthy Tudor merchant’s lifestyle. But on arrival, my response was a number of questions. 

Like many old houses, this one had been altered. I’ve nothing against adapting old houses to suit current needs, but the biggest alterations took place around 1900, when Noel Buxton made a lot of changes, including adding fireplaces to the main rooms, and moving the main staircase, and more or less rebuilding the front of the house, adding oriel windows, for example. All of these changes were made to give the appearance of putting the house back to its original state. To the present-day visitor, it’s difficult to imagine the house in its original layout, and at a first glance, the front looks all of a piece. But, of course, the reality is, as with so many English parish churches, that what you are looking at is as much a Victorian restorer’s idea of what medieval (or Tudor) looked like, rather than the original. None of those oriel windows existed in 19th-century photographs. Inside, there are beautifully carved bressummer beams, usually found over a fireplace – but none of them is in the original position. All the fireplaces are new.

Those fireplaces intrigued me. Thomas Paycocke used this house as his main showroom, where he met clients, many of them from continental Europe. Indeed, in the main room, visitors can see the table is set for a meal. Yet we learn that Paycocke’s house had neither a kitchen, nor any fireplaces! Records of tenants in the early 20th century report how cold the house was, and it must have been similar for Paycocke in his day. How did he not have a fire, or any kitchen? How can you live in a house with neither? According to the National Trust website, Thomas didn’t live there, but had another house in the town. Nonetheless, he let his son, John, live there. There was originally a third storey, but it’s difficult to imagine fires at that level and not on the ground floor.

Medieval halls had a central fire with a hole in the roof, but I don’t imagine any newly built Tudor dwelling trying to replicate that heating system. So what did Thomas Paycocke do for heat, and what did he do to provide food for his clients? He certainly had the money – he left the equivalent of over £500,000 in bequests in his will.

Sadly, Paycocke’s House raises more questions than answers, and it doesn’t seem to offer a very good example of what everyday Tudor living was really like. Although the later inhabitants are certainly of interest, the reason we visit the house – to get a glimpse of how people actually lived – is not, sadly, something the current house can provide.

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, by Robert A. Johnson (1974)

 

Parsifal and Kundry, from the 1889 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Parsifal

With a title like that, perhaps it was asking for trouble for me to try reading this bookHe was. But I was struck by the idea of using a medieval epic to present views of masculinity. The author, Robert Johsnon, “a Jungian analyst in private practice in San Diego”, proposes to use the Grail myth, interpreted via Jungian psychology, to explain how men behave. Specifically, he uses the Chretien de Troyes version of Parsifal. I couldn’t resist reading about Parsifal, so I sat down to read this short book (just 84 pages, just 25,000 words). I should have realised it was an unlikely achievement. In that short space, Mr Johnson proposed to use Jungian psychology to explain the male psyche via the Grail story, and to do it in a contemporary Christian context (the book originated as a series of lectures at an episcopal church in San Diego in 1969).

I can’t deny, I am fascinated by the medieval tales such as Parsifal. They tell such a simple yet unintelligible story, so that they cry out for an explanation, and

There is no denying, the prose has a kind of comfort about it. As readers, we enjoy being carried along with the author’s argument, when it appears so sensible. One trick is that the author occasionally interjects a common-sense aside, for example, on page 24 he wonders where Parsifal got his sword from “I am very curious. I would very much like to know where Parsifal’s first sword came from.” That seems a very straightforward question, just what we would ask.

Yet this book sold in such astonishing numbers – over 100,000 copies sold, states the cover. How do you sell so many copies? Well, don’t let the reader have any doubt. The Bible, medieval chivalric epics, the nature of the psyche, have multiple interpretations, but despite the multiplicity of subjects tackled in this short book, the author remains sublimely confident that his interpretation is right. His text mixes therapy, Jung, the Christian Bible, and medieval epics, and, do you know, they all have the same message! It’s remarkable. In fact, in reading the book, I was gobsmacked. Have attitudes changed so much in the last 50 years? But let’s go through the book and identify just where my jaw dropped.

Here are some examples of the author’s tone of certainty:

•  “All men are Fisher Kings” (p10)
•  “Read a typical modern novel and you will find that it revolves around the subject of the lostness and the loneliness of the alienated man … We are all wounded and it shows” (p12)
•  “It is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him. A man must consent to this.” [p15]

One imagines Mr Johnson the practising psychiatrist is always right: “In my consulting room a man will sometimes bark at me when I prescribe something strange or difficult for him. ‘What do you think I am? A fool? And I say, ‘Well, it would help.’ For it is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him.” [p15]

And, surprise, Jung is also always right. According to Johnson, every boy goes through a “Fisher King” moment, when he blunders into something that is too big for him. Except, in Jung’s case, his Fisher King moment was not his fault at all – his teacher didn’t believe that Jung could have written the assignment he submitted in class. “There’s one paper here that is by far the best, but it is obviously a forgery.” That’s not a Fisher King moment, that is a piece of hagiography.  This anecdote could have come from the Bible: Jung as Christ.

Everywhere, there is the astounding confidence of the author. He tells us he uses the Chretien version of Parsifal, not the version by Wolfram von Eschenbach, because it “is simpler, more direct, and nearer to the unconscious”. What enables him to make such a judgement?

Another curious technique of the author is to assign unusual meanings to common words. He makes a distinction between “emotion”, “feeling”, and “mood” (which he uses as a synonym for depression). For the author, “enthusiasm”, means “filled with God”. This reassignment of natural language demands a kind of compliance from the reader: if I say it means X, it does so.

But the Parsifal story, you say! It cries out for interpretation. The Fisher King (Amfortas in Wagner’s opera) has been wounded, but his wounds will never heal. He seems to have been wounded sexually – somewhere in the thigh.  His wound will only be healed by the intervention of a fool.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s interpretation of the story is highly questionable. For example, Parsifal covets the Red Knight’s armour and horse, and so he kills the Red Knight. Is this wrong? Certainly not, according to Johnson. “The Red Knight represents that strong, virile, masculine stuff a boy needs so desperately … That is the fierce competitiveness of adolescence and masculinity in general. Almost every boy has to win from somebody else.” [p25]. This is enough to send half or more of the male population into a nosedive because they were not victorious in their last fight.

Even stranger, Johnson mingles the Christian fixation on chastity, with the knightly ideal: “the only proper pursuit for a  knight [is] he must never seduce or be seduced by a woman.” [p28] I seem to remember that the chivalric epics accepted and acknowledge sexual passion – but not in this interpretation. In Johnson’s book, “it is terribly important to make this distinction between the outer, flesh-and-blood woman and a man’s inner feminine quality, and to keep inner laws differentiated from outer laws” [p31]. Whatever that means.

The book is a farrago of “masculine” and “feminine” behaviour. The author repeatedly talks about the need for men to discover their feminine side. To be honest, I’m more interested in identifying my overtly male side and noticing in 2026 how many males seem incapable of relating to other males except by a handful of acceptable male encounters (football, the gym, the  pub).

In the introduction, no fewer than four women are credited with turning the author’s talk into a text for publication. Clearly, the author himself, who presumably wrote some notes for his lecture, couldn’t do the work. He was hard at work writing the sequel to this book, called (inevitably) "She". Or perhaps he was just too busy acknowledging his masculine side to do the feminine work of typing and transcribing.  

A visit to Bath

 

A view from the Holburne Museum: a nicer view outside than in?

Everyone looks forward to a visit to Bath! We all know that for a few years, notably when Jane Austen was writing, Bath was the English centre of pleasure and entertainment. Yet, somehow, that moment of grandeur last for less than a century. John Wood, the architect, created his plan for the development of Bath in 1725, and apparently, already by the 1790s building had slowed; Bath was being replaced by Brighton and Cheltenham as a destination for the rich.

But a visit at the weekend showed that Bath today is again a highly popular place for pleasure. I lost count of the number of weddings and hen parties being celebrated in the streets. We walked in Sydney Gardens, which, apparently, are the only remaining pleasure gardens in Bath, and there were plenty of people around, but the looked more like residents than visitors; the visitors were in the centre, seeing the attractions.

My visit was of course limited. I mostly saw museums (the American Museum, the Holburne Museum, and the Victoria Art Gallery), and had dinner at the former Empire Hotel, now rebranded as The Architect. But there was no doubt that the centre was very lively. Cambridge, where I live, is a city full of tourists, but few of them visit the city for entertainment in the evening. In contrast, Bath seems to come alive as the sun goes down.

What was also noticeable was the absence of traffic in the largely pedestrianized centre. But perhaps Bath was not entirely cosmopolitan: at 10 o’clock in the evening, our formal restaurant was almost empty.

Is Bath a centre of taste?

If there was taste on display, it was from many years ago, and with very different attitudes. The Victoria Art Gallery, despite its fascinating collection, looked as though it hadn’t had any funding for the last 50 years. Paintings were stacked three-high in the one big room. There were some children’s activities laid out, but I didn’t see any children doing them. The ‘shop’ was dedicated to selling tickets to a paid exhibition on the ground floor (the permanent collection is free access, although this isn’t made very clear).

 

The American Museum

The premise of the American Museum, founded by (American) Dallas Pratt and (Briton) John Judkyn, was, to coincide with their vision of American history, based around the Founding Fathers and white settlers. Pratt and Judkyn were antique collectors and dealers, so they had every reason to enjoy celebrating American-made furniture and objects.

But, of course, that comfortable, long-established vision of US history, taught to generations of schoolchildren, has been completely side-stepped by the belated recognition of colonialism and slavery, the admission that Native Americans, and African Americans, were almost entirely written out of the history presented in the Museum. This raises a fundamental problem: history books are rewritten with each generation, but the Museum’s collections are almost entirely what how the white settlers lived and what they collected. Now, the collections don’t tell the story the curators would like to tell, and worse, what is on display is offensive simply by what it leaves out. Overall, this is a disaster for the museum organizers: a tone of almost self-congratulation has switched to a place for apology. Unsurprisingly, the permanent collection is full of apologetic captions (which are easier to change than the objects themselves) mentioning, for example the Native Americans who once occupied the lands shown in the Puritan and Shaker rooms, for example. Temporary exhibitions, of course, are much easier to change, and the exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts is a stunning contrast to the permanent collection. These quilts were made in Alabama by descendants of slaves. Not only that, the quilts are quite simply stunning.

 

The Holburne Museum

The permanent collection at the Holburne Museum has never been very exciting. Perhaps it’s my taste, but large-scale portraits, even by Gainsborough, to enable the rich visitors to Bath to congratulate themselves are not very exciting – even when dressed up as a Bacchante:

 

Perhaps part of the problem is that the spectacular house that houses the collection was not designed as an art gallery, and, despite all the changes made to accommodate visitors, the space still works very poorly. The ballroom was converted to a gallery by Reginald Blomfield, but the main room has too many windows to make it suitable for pictures. You can’t see the pictures, and the view out of the window is too good; I chose the view. Unfortunately, the 2011 extension, by Eric Parry Architects, an ostentatious building, simply adds more small rooms that aren’t connected to each other. Now there are two separate staircases and two separate sets of small rooms on the second floor.

Sadly, the permanent collection isn’t much to write home about, even after the addition of the Schroder collection of Renaissance objects. Holburne and Schroder both collected in many different art forms, with the result risking being an incoherent muddle. The museum administrators acknowledge this when they created a display of lots of the Holburne collection in one “room”. 

There is no attempt to tell you what each of the pieces is; it’s just an impression of lots of stuff. If it were my grandmother’s house, that I had to deal with after she had died, I’d get rid of everything and start again. Worse, it turns out that Holburne was heavily involved in slavery.

You pay £16.50 to enter the museum, with no concessions for pensioners. For that, you are treated to the collections of two very rich families. You also get a glitzy website and lots of marketing (invitations to become a member on most screens). In the basement, a £2.5m development has the Schroder family collection of Renaissance objects – the vast majority of which are shiny. The main idea behind this collection is, apart from a handful of exquisite portraits, to display the Schroder family’s wealth. Admittedly, the Renaissance loved rare stones and expensive objects, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow the Renaissance slavishly and simply admire this family’s wealth.

There was an interesting exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century prints, which in highlighted the  lack of excitement from the permanent collection.

 

Is Bath worth a visit?

Galleries and museums are stuck what the collection they have. Probably a better experience of how it felt to be in Bath during its heyday could be obtained by visiting different locations, such as the Royal Crescent, and Roman baths, and the Assembly Rooms. Nonetheless, I think more could be done with each of the three venues I visited.