The Fortnightly Flag #05

The Fortnightly Flag

29 August 2017

WRITING AND ART

I went to visit the Bank of England Museum's 'The City in Literature' exhibition which celebrates the Bank's literary connections. A number of prominent writers have worked in banking but apart from Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), who worked for the Bank all his working life, none of them seem to have liked banking very much although it brought several of them some financial stability.

P.G. Wodehouse, who joined HSBC in Lombard Street in 1900 "was often late and once disgraced himself by defacing a new ledger". The Bank charitably adds that he was keen on the staff sports club and his 1910 novel 'Psmith in the City" was based on his experiences.

Many writers and artists have been inspired by tales of fraud and financial crisis since this tends to affect everyone. There are cartoons on display by James Gillray who in 1797 first depicted the Bank as 'The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street'.  There are also cartoons by John Tenniel published in Punch in 1890 referring to reckless speculation by the merchant bank Baring Brothers. The collapse of the banking system was only averted by a rescue of £17 million orchestrated by William Liddendale, Governor in 1889-1892, which sounds vaguely familiar. Also the fact that misdemeanours committed by the Chief Cashier, Frank May, were deemed 'unactionable' although they led to the establishment of the Audit Department in 1894.

I found the exhibition fascinating and admission is free.

My own contribution to the City in Literature is a stage play 'The Liquidator' (cast of 6, 1 set) about a couple of nefarious bankers on the run from the eponymous heroine who is trying to track down their assets.

From there I went along Lothbury to the Guildhall Art Gallery, also free of charge, where the City of London displays around 250 of its collection of around 3000 paintings. My thanks to the City of London guide who was excellent. The Guildhall gallery has many fine paintings but is best known for its good collection of Pre-Raphaelites.




In the basement the Guildhall Art Gallery has the remains of London's Roman Amphitheatre which was discovered when the old building was being redeveloped.  Rebuilding was held up nine years while the site was excavated.  There is not a lot to see apart from some walls and ancient drains but the display is imaginative.  There is a black line around the square in front of the Guildhall showing the extent of the amphitheatre.  It is huge.



The Fortnightly Flag #04

 

The Fortnightly Flag

 

15th August 2017

 

WRITING AND ART  ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY  STAGE AND SCREEN

 

WRITING AND ART

 

The Hive, Kew Gardens

 

Another must-see art event in London this summer is The Hive at Kew Gardens, an art installation intended to give an impression of what it's like to be inside a beehive, part of Kew Gardens' on-going campaign to regenerate our dwindling population of honeybees (kew.org/bees).  For my part I have planted more lavender in the garden.  Bees love lavender.

 

 

 

 

 

The Hive is a metal mesh structure 17 metres tall.  A feat of British engineering, it was commissioned by the UK Government and created by artist Wolfgang Buttress, Simmonds Studio and BDP.  Formerly it was the centrepiece of the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo.


The Hive is in Kew Gardens until November.

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Sadly by the time I got there the surrounding meadow garden had gone to seed but the Great Broad Walk, Britain's largest double border which stretches for 320 metres and is packed with 30,000 late summer perennials was gorgeous.

 

 

Art at Kew

 

There are two art galleries at Kew, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art housed in a modern building linked to the 19th century Marianne North Gallery.  Botanical Art is a specialist genre, usually in pencil and watercolour to record fine detail.  Its purpose is to produce scientifically accurate drawings of botanical specimens. In the hands of talented artists some of these are very beautiful.  The Shirley Sherwood Gallery has a fine collection.  It leads to the Marianne North Gallery.

 

Marianne North

 

Marianne North, born 1830 to a wealthy and well-connected family, was an exceptionally gifted artist.  Her gallery, which she commissioned and arranged herself to show her works in context, contains 848 paintings together with the panel decorations which she painted herself.  Her paintings are exquisitely beautiful.  She travelled across the globe recording the flora and fauna and collecting plants which she sent back to Kew as she was acquainted with the first Director, Joseph Hooker.  Marianne's studies are not strictly botanical being in oils but, crucially, she painted the plants in context and additionally supplied a landscape showing the environment in which they grew.

 

Her landscapes are particularly fine.  They are smaller than those of her male counterparts - size evidently mattered to Victorian male painters - because she was constantly on the move and needed to keep her equipment portable - but the extraordinary range of her paintings from a North American autumn to South American mountains, from India and Indonesia to Australia, New Zealand and Japan surely puts her up there with the best.  No-one else that I can think of painted such a wide range of different landscapes.

 

The Gallery, for reasons of conservation,, has been plunged into semi-darkness, which makes it hard to see the paintings in all their vibrant colour but Kew offers for sale a very good biography "Marianne North: A very intrepid painter" by Michelle Payne shop.kew.org/kewbooksonline which gives a straight-forward and informative account of her life and work with many illustrations of her wonderful artwork.

 

ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY

 

Greek DNA Analysis reveals surprises

 

I studied Greek history and literature in my first year at university so have a long-standing interest in the subject.  In a recent issue of Nature journal researchers published the results of their analysis of genetic data from skeletons dating from the Bronze Age.  The team, led by Dr Iosif Lazardis from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, focussed on the Minoan Civilisation of Crete (2600 - 1000 BC) and the Mycaenean culture of mainland Greece (1600 - 1100 BC)

 

Most of the people appear to be local deriving 62% - 86% of their ancestry from the people who introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (Turkey) in Neolithic times but the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons revealed ancestry from populations originating in either the Caucasus mountains or Iran.

 

Between 9% and 17% of their genetic make-up came from this source.  In addition, the team report the Mycenaeans, but not the Minoans, show evidence of genetic input from people who lived further north on the flat grasslands that stretch from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.  Between 4% and 16% of their ancestry came from this northern source.

 

We were taught - based mainly on linguistic evidence - that the Mycaenean Greeks were descended from the Dorians who came from the north.  This appears to be scientifically accurate and the new evidence gives us some idea who these Dorians were. 

 

Surprisingly the researchers found no evidence of suggested migrations to Greece or Crete from ancient Egypt or from the areas of the eastern Mediterranean occupied by the Phoenicians, who were famously a sea-faring nation.  This is especially surprising in the case of Crete which also had a maritime culture but only ten skeletons were examined from the island and it may be that a larger sample would provide a wider perspective.

 

STAGE AND SCREEN

 

Tom Hiddleston to play Hamlet at RADA

 

The Thor and Night Manager star will lead the cast in a fund-raising production of Hamlet for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) which will run from 1 - 23 September at RADA's Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre in London.  The production will be directed by Kenneth Branagh, RADA's president, who also directed Tom Hiddleston in his breakthrough movie Thor in which he plays the mischievous Norse God Loki.  All proceeds will go towards RADA's Attenborough campaign to raise £20m to upgrade one of their main London sites and provide accommodation for their students.

 

Gina McKee at Shakespeare's Globe

 

Gina McKee will play the title role in a production of Boudica, a  new play telling the story of Britain's famous warrior queen written by Tristan Bernays and direted by Eleanor Rhode which opens on Friday 8th September at The Globe Theatre on the South Bank.  blog.shakespearesglobe.com