York Museums Trust Blog

Forrest Gump was so obviously wrong…life is nothing like a box of chocolates…life is, quite clearly, a series of opportunities to eat biscuits.  Biscuits tend to carry with them a penalty, such as attendance at a meeting or a promise (if I eat this biscuit I promise to do at least an hours work before I have another) and some turn out to be a little stale, or what you thought were chocolate chips are actually currants.  Then there’s the fact that they often come accompanied by a hot beverage, thus adding a whole layer of metaphorical complexity that boxes of chocolate simply do not have.  See? So much more like life…

We have a horse in the gallery. Stubb’s life-size painting of Whistlejacket arrived last Thursday and to general sighs of relief, fitted through the door (with only millimetres to spare.)

He was wrapped in pinky paper – like the Jumblies feet – and arrived in an enormous, articulated lorry. It transpires that the lorry itself is not quite big enough to accommodate him, so he travels in a sort of horse-box attached to the back!

This is a porcelain three-tier table centrepiece by Rockingham and stands about 2 feet tall. It was made at Brameld & Co. between 1830-1868 and was decorated by Alfred Baguely in the same design as a dessert service made for William IV in 1830.

It is an incredibly complex decorative piece of 10 parts, combining modelling, matt and burnished gilding, painted scenes on the base (Hawes water from Thwaite force and Lowther Castle and Park) and tiny painted Civil War scenes on the bowl at the top. It is a beautiful though somewhat gaudy piece on its own, but imagine it covered in flowers, fruit and desserts on a Rococo period table….

From the Arthur Hurst Bequest to the Yorkshire Museum in 1940. Currently in store 

 Information by - Helen

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One of the main spaces at the gallery has been under wraps for the last few months.

Following a problem with falling plaster the South Gallery has been completely refurbished.  A suspended ceiling has been removed to reveal an attractive Victorian roof space.

This is a sneak preview: click here

She seems constantly surprised by how the people of York are attracted to her fame (we do have celebrities in Yorkshire, but the home-grown famous are tainted by too few degrees of separation – heavens, everyone in Leeds knows someone who went to school with a Kaiser Chief and if you experience afternoon tea in Betty’s without glimpsing Alan Bennet, I’d demand a refund.) She’s exotic and glamorous (being American) and defiantly surprising, as she’s here by choice, not the happenstance of birth.  So the people come, as moths to a flame (not that Tracy would ever burn anyone, not even on an off day.)  Last Tuesday they came in hoards, like their Viking ancestors. As we set out her desk with her handwritten ‘the writer is in’ sign, in a corner of the gallery, and she sat with her pen poised, I felt I had led a lamb to the slaughter.  Would she survive?  The crowd were bemused and buzzed like angry bees “When is she going to speak?” “Well,” I suggested, “I’m sure she’ll speak if you speak to her..”  and they buzzed some more.  She did survive…and the Viking bees seemed pleased to have met her.

Icons are considered to be the Gospel in paint and Russians sometimes speak of an icon having been “written” because the same pisat’, писать word means to write and paint.

Icons are prepared today in the same meticulous fashion which has passed down through the centuries. They are painted in egg tempera on wood.

Our icon can be dated to the mid 1650s thanks to the back slats which prevent the panel warping as it dries out over time.

Info by Caroline

This view of Kikham Abbey gateway by John Sell Cotman was painted in between the 17th and 20th July 1805 whilst he was staying at Brandsby Hall, near York.

Cotman is considered to be one of the finest watercolourists of the nineteenth century, and this work dates from a period of his greatest creativity.

The picture was presented to York Art Gallery by the National Art Collections Fund in 1955, as part of the Cook bequest.

Look out for an exhibition John Sell Cotman and his Contemporaries in the Little Gallery starting in February at York Art Gallery.

Alastair Smith

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 When all the leaves are troublesome gold – a line from a poem written by my son when he was a scarily precocious 3 year old.  It always springs to mind (or should that be ‘autumns’ to mind?) at this time of year.

It’s nice to kick back and blog for a bit now the days are drawing in – there is definately a chill in the air. Here at the Art Gallery we have been passing around a cold of the worst kind, such that we may have to start painting crosses on the office doors. Thankfully I was able to escape from the heady atmosphere of Vicks Vapourub last week when I attended the engage conference in Bradford.  It was particularly welcome as it included a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on a day bright with sunshine.  The Andy Goldworthy installations are a must see.  You have not seen a wood pile until you have seen one of Mr. Goldsworthy’s. 

As a student I wrote a thesis on the romanticisim of nature in industrial societies and how this is reflected in the Green Man myth.  I wrote to several artists, asking for their feelings towards the Green Man – including Andy Goldsworthy – he was very generous in his reply, too busy to write to me, he recorded his answer on an audio tape, which he requested I return to him, as on the B-side were noises made by his baby son. His wife had recorded it for him whilst he was on a residency in Japan.  It is something of a regret that I didn’t have the where-with-all to make a copy of the tape before sending it back – baby noises and all. I still have the transcript (of Andy’s comments – not his son’s) though, painstakingly tapped out on my Remington portable – now I really am showing my age!

Last week I went caving.  It was not a stroll in the park.  A stroll in the park would’ve been nice.  Even in the rain.  It didn’t rain in the cave.  It didn’t have to.  I still got wet right up to my oxters (the spell check doesn’t like ‘oxters’. I don’t suppose computers have any.) 

My son, Finn, went caving with school last year and loved it, so my husband arranged for a friend of ours to take Finn and his sister, Esme, caving with her.  She invited other friends’ kids along too, and the upshot was that she needed an extra adult.  Richard, my husband, suffers from horrendous claustrophobia even in spacious, floodlit show caves with stalagmites named ‘the witches hat’ and ‘the grumpy elf’.  So I had to go.  It was as bad as I expected, such that, standing in the middle of a car park afterwards, in the rain, peeling off sodden clothes beneath a damp towel was, by comparison, a delightful experience.  When I got home, physically trembling from a combination of shock, exhaustion and hypothermia, Richard beamed and said, “That makes up for all those visits to the Abbey Museum I’ve had to endure.”

How can that be?  How can caving compare with the occasional trip to our local museum?  I was dumbstruck. Anyhow, I now have to consider that if there is even a shred of truth in his comparison, I have to accept that not everyone enjoys repeat visits to museums and galleries in the way I do.  Are we expecting too much of the people of York when we ask them to visit the Gallery again and again?     

Could we threaten to send them caving instead?