York Museums Trust Blog

Collections Snapshot

Thanks to Jenny Alexander, Assistant Curator of Fine Art for this Collections Snapshot from the York Art Gallery collection.

Portrait of Catherine Davenant, wife of Thomas Lamplugh, 1664 by an unknown artist. Oil on canvas. Presented by Mr R.M.MacColla in 1959.

Thomas Lamplugh was a Yorkshire-born clergyman who became Archbishop of York in 1688.  This charming portrait of his wife was probably painted to mark his appointment as Archdeacon of London in 1664.

Until the 18th century, women’s hats were modelled on men’s designs. Her costume is orthodox restoration period and puritan in style, reflecting the austerity of Cromwell’s commonwealth. She wears a high-crowned black hat made of beaver fur worn over a limp hood. The style is very similar to that worn by the Dutch at the time, when most people in England were starting to sport more flamboyant fashions. The painting is currently featured in the Hats exhibition at York Art Gallery (until 23rd January 2011).

Collections Snapshot: Isaac Button Pottery

Isaac Button was Yorkshire’s last traditional country potter, making functional domestic pots from the red clay he dug himself. The site of his Soil Hill Pottery near Halifax produced pots since the 17th century until 1965, when he retired. At the height of his career, he could transform a ton of clay a day into pots. He still found time for enjoying himself though and is infamously quoted saying he “never left a pub the same day he entered it”.

Isaac is also the star of one of the most famous pottery films ever made. “Isaac Button: Country Potter” is 40 mesmerizing minutes of silent black and white film, produced by the amateur film maker John Anderson in the few years before Isaac retired. John died last year, leaving the film to the Yorkshire Film Archive. His widow has passed on to York Museums Trust a wonderful collection of photographs taken by him whilst he made the film. She has also given us two mixing bowls by Isaac, made of the rich red Yorkshire clay and decorated with the jewel-like yellow slip and galena glaze. The bowls are featured in the “Honest Pots” exhibition which is currently on display at York Art Gallery until October 2nd 2011, alongside some of the photos of Isaac and the famous film.

Here’s an update on the refurbishment work in York Art Gallery’s Burton Gallery, from gallery manager Lorna Sergeant:

The Burton Gallery is really coming along now. We are currently well underway with the refurbishment. All the major repairs in the roof have been completed. The rotten truss has been treated and strengthened, 13 glass panels on the apex roof have been replaced.

The barrel glazed ceiling has been cleaned and a UV film has been installed over these panes to reduce UV light levels entering the now bright and sunny exhibition room. A walkway has been installed in the void of this ceiling for safe and easy access for contractors.

The barrel glazed ceiling before cleaning work...

...and after.

 We are currently underway with the relining of the walls with a special wall liner called FERMACEL which is a fantastic product that gives the walls a really flat finish but also allows us to hang works/paintings up to 200kg. The floor has had its first sand to reveal beautiful mahogany wood which will be sanded further and then coated in a matt finish.

Electricians have just completed the first fix of works which will enable us to have more access points to power, improved ventilation, a new lighting track and CCTV.

New wall lining is put up in the Burton Gallery

During the course of the refurbishment, the rip-out of the baize-covered walls has revealed that the gallery was originally tongue and groove all the way around and was painted cream and green strips in the 1950s under the instruction of then-curator Hans Hess. We have also found secreted in the wall an old cigarette packet dating back to the 1920s.

By December, the Burton Gallery will be an elegant and bright gallery which I am sure will become a favourite with all when it reopens in January with our new People and Places displays.

The tongue and groove panelling found around the walls

Cigarette packet from the 1920s

Having never been interviewed before I was naturally rather nervous when Channel 4 approached me to be a ‘talking head’ on their forthcoming series The Genius of British Art.

However, I was really keen to promote our big upcoming exhibition of William Etty’s art (opening June 2011 at York Art Gallery) and tentatively agreed.  I was to be interviewed for Howard Jacobson’s episode, provocatively entitled Flesh, which explored Victorian attitudes towards the nude in art, of which York-born William Etty was to be key part of Jacobson’s argument (Flesh is being broadcast this Sunday, 17 October, at 7pm).

Jacobson had come to love and admire Etty’s art during his youth in Manchester. He regularly visited the city’s art gallery and claimed that he was amazed as a young man that such erotic depictions of the nude were on display. Later in life he was to use Etty’s painting, Candaules King of Lydia, Shewing his Wife by Stealth to Gyges (Tate), as inspiration for his book The Act of Love (2009).  

Iphigenia by William Etty

William Etty (1787-1849), despite his fame in the period, is currently rather unknown – his voluptuous and sensuous depictions of the nude having slipped into art historical obscurity.  Through my work on Etty, planning a big exhibition of his art (the first major exhibition for over 50 years), I have found that many people feel rather ambivalent about his paintings – either loving or hating his depictions of the nude.

We have played on this aspect of Etty’s art in the planning of the forthcoming exhibition, which we have entitled William Etty: Art and Controversy. The aim of the exhibition is to explore in detail both the critical reactions his art raised in the early nineteenth century and continues to receive from audiences today.

The television crew arrived at the Gallery back in November 2009. We had pre-selected a number of works by Etty for filming – as York Art Gallery has one of the biggest collections of works by Etty it was easy to pick an interesting and diverse array of paintings to showcase.

Howard Jacobson was very sympathetic to the sense of controversy Etty’s nude engendered and was keen, in the questions he asked me, to find out why this should be.  The interview lasted for over an hour. We chatted about Etty’s artistic training, the controversy surrounding his depictions of the nude and his enduring legacy (or lack of it).

Male Nude, arms upstretched, by William Etty

It became very clear, from the line of questions, that Jacobson suspected that audiences today still find Etty’s art to be rather provocative, something he felt was confirmed by the fact that York Art Gallery currently doesn’t have any of Etty’s nude paintings on display.

He repeatedly pressed me as to why this should be. I explained that in the recent past the Gallery had a whole room dedicated to Etty’s art and that as part of the natural cycle of a Gallery paintings get rotated. I also stressed that the forthcoming exhibition would bring together a substantial number of works by Etty, over 100, most of which depicted the nude. However, it evidently fitted his argument to consider the current absence of Etty’s to be a sign of modern society’s aversion to the nude in art.

I’m looking forward to Sunday night’s programme – even though I think I’ll be watching my interview from behind a cushion!! – but hopefully it will raise the profile of Etty and give our forthcoming exhibition a good plug. Would I do it again? Probably…. but I’ll wait and see the result on Sunday before offering that answer in the affirmative!

Click here for more on William Etty on our website or here  to visit Channel 4′s page on Flesh from the The Genius of British Art

Going out into the countryside to dig your own clay has got to be one of the most labour-intensive ways of sourcing artists’ materials.

But it’s all part of a day’s work for potter Doug Fitch, whose story brings up to date a tradition dating back for centuries.

Doug lives in Devon and a film about his life making pots is one of the highlights of Honest Pots, the latest exhibition in York Art Gallery’s Gallery of Pots.

Doug Fitch at work

He got involved with the project through a partnership I had already built up with potter Alex McErlain, from Manchester Metropolitan University. Alex was helping to curate our exhibition and offered to share with us his research project following Doug’s work.

Doug has also lent us some of his latest creations to go on display, and even made 30 special pots for our visitors to pick up and examine, all with different finishes and decorations. He was thrilled to bits with the result when he came to see the finished exhibition on Friday.

One of our main aims was to show how traditions and techniques in creating pottery had developed over the years.

A second film, of country potter Isaac Button, from Halifax in Yorkshire, shows him at work in the 1960s producing batches of pots.

One of the stills from the film on the wall shows Isaac carrying a plank of “pancheons” – these were large dishes used for all sorts of household jobs – from carrying laundry to mixing food.

Isaac Button with his pancheons

This emphasis on functional pots gave me the opportunity to show ceramics from our stores that I never thought would be out on display – like a set of three pancheons which had been in collector WA Ismay’s family for generations.

I could also include pots with play with the idea of functionality –  two of my favourites are Double Jug, by Alison Britton, and Turquoise Jug, by Colin Pearson.

And I also put together pots from different eras which use such similar glazes or techniques. Our Owl from 1700 – its head is a cup and its body, a jug –  is positioned next to Dovecote by Paul Young from 2008 – made more than 300 years later.

Helen Walsh putting Owl into place; Dovecote is pictured far left.

For more information on Honest Pots, visit our website and for Doug Fitch’s account of his visit to see the show, visit his blog.

Seven months after our stunning exhibition Japanese Sashiko Textiles closed here at York Art Gallery, it has just opened at the final venue on its tour at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery.

I made the long train journey down to Devon last week to help with the installation. Opening each crate and lifting out the incredible garments – from work coats to Japanese slippers called tabi – it was like being reacquainted with old friends. I’ve done condition checks of these clothes 5 times now and every loose stitch, patch and mouse-eaten hole is familiar to me. It’s a thrill to see the faces of those people who are seeing these objects in the flesh for the first time after looking at digital images for months.

I’m sure people in the south west will be as bowled over by the exhibition as everyone was in Yorkshire and Glasgow. Organising this exhibition has been filled with highs and lows and I will have very mixed feelings when the loans finally return to Japan in October.

The exhibition at Plymouth runs until 25^th September and you can download the free publication at www.sashiko.org.uk

This is probably one of the most celebrated types of bowls produced by Lucie Rie – the dribbly iron glazed rim is a famous design feature of her work.  It’s a large bowl (over 28cm in diameter) and has warped slightly due to its size.  Rie threw her pots with very thin walls and then made them even thinner by cutting back the pot with a razor.

The bowl, along with 42 other pieces, was given to us by the collector Henry Rothschild (1913 – 2009).  Rothschild was a hugely influential figure in the British crafts scene and founded the Primavera gallery in London in 1945.

Rothschild had a particular affection for bowls and described this bowl as his favourite, his “Desert Island Disc pot”.

Lucie Rie (1902 – 1995)

Bowl 1949 is on Display in the new Gallery of Pots at York Art Gallery.

by Felicity Aylieff (b.1954)

This monumental pot is a new acquisition; it is 2m tall and weighs in at 250kgs!

It was made by Aylieff when she was resident artist in Jingdezhen, China, working at Mr Yu’s Big Ware Factory. Jingdezhen is known as the porcelain city and they make all sorts of things in porcelain, from tableware to lampposts.

The pot was made by two potters working together on a wheel, throwing it in sections that were then joined together. It was originally about 3 meters tall when made, but has shrunk during drying and firing. Aylieff decorated the pot with floral patterns in blue and white to capture the essence of traditional Chinese pottery.

info by Helen

(the pot was purchased by York Museums Trust with the support of the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and The Art Fund, 2008).

Fiction in museums?  Surely not.  But they can be a source of inspiration – and we have a few recent examples to prove it. 

Last year Tracey Chevalier curated an exhibition at York Art Gallery and used it to stimulate all sorts of literary activity in a wide range of folk, including some of YMT’s own staff. 

In November Kate Atkinson wrote in The Guardian, talking about the Castle Museum:

“The museum was a place of miracles and wonders for me, where the rooms and streets of the past were brought to life in a way that was (and still is) thrilling. My imagination was undoubtedly nurtured by those visits; in fact I am sure that they helped to build the foundations of my becoming a writer.” (full story)

And the wider community of bloggers and online writers are following suit – here, for example, is a story for kids that uses the museum as a backdrop.  So if you want to get over your writer’s block perhaps you should get along to your local museum.