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.