Discovering World War One records for the first time in 2011.

Every historian in the universe wants to discover a treasure trove of written texts, photographs or objects that has never been seen before. Most historians never manage it.

The small French village of Vignacourt is north of Paris, near Amiens. Dur­ing WW1, this village was behind the front lines, a short march from the frontlines against the German army. It soon became a casualty clearing station/recreation area for passing war traffic. Allied troops moved up to, and then back from the battlefields on the Somme, via Vignacourt.

In 1916 farmer Louis Thuillier had returned to Vignacourt after two years of military service in the French army when Australian soldiers began arriving in the town. The Australian forces were pouring into the Western Front from the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in Gal­lip­oli. Thuillier and his wife Antoinette were an enterprising and car­ing couple who saw an opportunity to make some income for themselves; they offered passing soldiers photographs of themselves. They depicted British and British Empire soldiers and French civilians, particularly Australians. 

Two diggers, enjoying some recreational riding, before returning to the front line.

Taken by Louis and Antoinette Thuil­lier

Photo credit: The Lost Diggers, Channel 7

Capt­­ured on 4,000 glass-plate negatives, printed into postcards and posted home, the photo­graphs made by the Thuilliers enabled Austral­ian soldiers to maintain a link with their families at home. The Louis and Antoinette Thuil­lier collection covered many of the signif­icant aspects of Australian in­volvement on the Western Front, from military life to the bonds formed between the soldiers and civilians.

The photographers' notes suggest that many of the photos were taken of Aust­ralian soldiers, from the 1st and 5th Division, in late 1916. Thus the boys had recently survived the carnage of battles at Pozieres and Fromelles. At Pozieres alone, in just four days, 5,285 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.

If people DID know about the photographic collection during the 1914-18 war, they forgot about it after the armistice. Only one person mentioned the photos in the decades since 1919; a French amateur historian, Laurent Mirouze, had seen part of the collection over twenty years ago. Apparently his attempts to see the plates preserved and protected two decades ago were ignored by the British and Australian authorities in France.

Anyhow this amazing war record was recently found by a Sunday Night team in France. After following up rumours of a secret stash, the team found 3,000+ fragile photographic glass plate negatives in the attic of a dilapidated Vignacourt farmhouse that had once belonged to the Thuillers.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra was fortunate enough to be given 74 of the original glass-plate negatives; these in turn were made into hand-printed photographs in Canberra. The resulting exhibition is called Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt. They are candid, informal portraits of allied soldiers enjoying time in the village, young men who had recently survived the carnage of battles on the Somme and Flanders. The soldiers were often billeted with local families and some of the pictures show local children and French teenage girls posing with the diggers. I am assuming the photos were informal and a bit larrikin because Australian soldiers at rest don't feel comfortable in formally posed military positions.

The curator noted “Nearly two-thirds of the young men who came through Vignacourt would have gone on to be killed or wounded. The losses were appalling. In all likelihood these images are the last photographs taken of many of these young men before they died. They are a character study of men under stress and in relaxation but men who are experiencing the war and coming back to areas where they can let off steam a little bit. They know they’ve got to back up the line”.

Diggers with their host family

Photo credit: Sunday Night

British censorship on the western front meant that few such informal photographs exist outside the official record. As I had noted in an earlier post, Australia did not have its own official war photographers until 1917. The Thuillier collection fills a hole in the historical record.

The Channel 7 show, The Lost Diggers, secured some of the plates from a Thuil­lier relative. When she heard of the great interest in the history of the plates, she donated them to Australia. Gratitude to the Australians in this part of France is apparently still very strong.

The remainder of the Thuillier collection is still in those chests in France, covered with dust and in serious danger of deterioration. I could not have written about The Lost Diggers, without Channel 7’s Sunday Night programme.

The Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt exhibition will end at the Australian War Memorial Canberra on the 31st July 2013. 

My favourite film ever - Babette's Feast.

I was reading a discussion about the best film that a reviewer had seen and fully expected him to select Gone with the Wind (USA 1939) Citizen Kane (USA 1941), Casablanca (USA 1942), The Third Man (UK 1949), Lawrence of Arabia (UK 1962) or The Lord of the Rings trilogy (New Zealand/UK 2001–2003).

I would have voted for Babette’s Feast (Denmark 1987) and was delighted to see it was one of the three winners. I was also surprised, mainly because a] Denmark seems somewhat remote for most cinema fans and b] the film displays no violence, no teenage angst, no nakedness and no chase scene.

Written and directed by Gabriel Axel, this drama was based on the story by Isak Dinesen /Karen Blixen and starred Stéphane Audran. It was the first Danish film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The story was simple. In 19th century rural Denmark, two aged spinsters lived in a village with their father, who was the minister of a rather pious Protestant church. Out of the blue a French woman refugee arrived at their secluded front door, fleeing counter-revolutionary bloodshed in Paris. The two sisters allowed Babette to stay and she repaid their kind­ness by working for them as their house keeper. Her only link to her former life was a lottery ticket that someone in Paris renewed for her every year.

Babette's Feast.

Dark austere clothes, grey austere hair, dark 19th century room.
But examine the concentration and the opportunity for pleasure.

One day Babette won the top lottery prize of 10,000 francs. Apparently she had been a professional chef in her earlier life, and when the sisters decided to put on a dinner to mark the 100th anniversary of their late father’s birth, Babette asked to do the cooking. She was clearly prepared to spend all of her winnings locally, instead of using it to return to Paris and to her previous life. I am sure that the good sisters secretly feared what a Frenchwoman and Catholic might do in their kitchen, nonetheless they invited the entire village to the dinner. Babette then prepared the finest French feast ever eaten in all of Denmark’s history.

With such a slim story line, character and photography became the most important elements of the film. I really loved the second half of the film that focused on the preparation, serving and consumption of Babette's rich feast. The richness of the food was in sharp contrast to the austere house and the even more austere vil­lagers. Would the pious, elderly church congregants comment harshly on the earthly pleasures of their meal and thus ruin the evening? 

Babette's work in the kitchen was a labour of love.
The cooking and eating scenes had modern foodies drooling in the cinema.

Slowly slowly Babette's very special personality, and her ability as a chef, helped them let go of their innate distrust, allowing some pleasure to seep into their souls. Her soul, and her food, actively seduced the villagers into letting go of their inhibitions!! One blogger summarised it beautifully. Babette’s act of self-sacrifice caused old wrongs to be forgotten, ancient loves to be rekindled and a mystical redemption of the human spirit to settle over the table.

Remembering the Boer War in South Africa

The Australian War Memorial tells of how, soon after its acquisition by Britain during the Napoleonic wars, the tip of Africa had been shared between British colonies and independent republics of Boers i.e Dutch–Afrikaner settler farmers. In order to escape British rule, many Boers had moved north and east from the Cape to settle on new lands which later became the ind­ep­endent Boer rep­ublics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The relationship between the British and the Boers was often tense, with Britain extending its control by annexing Natal in 1845, though Lon­don did recognise the two republics in treaties signed in the 1850s.

The two Boer republics, Orange Free State and the Transvaal

The discovery of gold and diamonds in the Boer republics in the 1880s further intensified the rivalry, particularly as British citizens flooded into the Boer territories in search of wealth. The rights of British subjects in Boer territory, British imperial ambition and the Boer desire for to stay outside the British Empire caused more friction. In 1899 the Boers were provoked into preventing what they saw as an impending British conquest.

The conflict in South Africa is generally divided into three phase:
1] late 1899, when the British infantry were defeated or besieged by highly mobile Boer mounted troops.
2] from Dec 1899 -> Sep 1900, which involved a British counter-offensive, resulting in the capture of most of South Africa’s major towns and cities.
3] from Sep 1900 -> May 1902, when the war was mainly a guer­rilla conflict between British mounted troops and Boer irregulars.

2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles. 

Third from left: Trooper Harry Breaker Morant, 

South Africa, c1900.

Photo credit: Australian War Memorial

Hastily raised contingents were sent from around the British empire. As a loyal part of the British Empire, the Australian colonies offered troops for the war in South Africa, and from 1901 on, so did the new Aus­tralian Common­wealth. Some Australians also joined British or South African colonial units in South Africa: some were already in South Africa when the war broke out while others made their own way to the Cape. Australians served mostly in mounted units, presumably because they were already experienced bushmen.

The outbreak of war had long been expected in both Britain and Aus­tralia. Believing that conflict was imminent, each of the Australian colonies ultim­ately sent 4-6 contingents. The first groups arrived in South Africa in late 1899.

Many soldiers of the Empire died, not just in battle but of disease, while others succumbed to exhaustion and starvation on the long treks across the veld. In the early stages of the war, Australian soldier losses were particularly high because of disease.

Empty battle fields in KwaZulu-Natal with nothing but graves.

After a series of defeats in 1900 the Boer armies became fragmented, forming groups of highly mobile commandos which harassed British troop movements and lines of supply. Faced with this type of warfare, the British commanders became increasingly reliant on mounted troops from Britain and the colonies.

After Federation (1/1/1901), and close to the end of the war, the Australian Commonwealth Horse contingents were raised by the new central government. These contingents fought in both the British counter-offensive of 1900, which resulted in the capture of the Boer capitals, and in the long guerrilla actions which lasted until the war ended. Colonial troops were valued for their ability to shoot and ride.

After September 1900, by which time the war had become mainly a guerrilla conflict, Australian troops were deployed in sweeping the countryside and enforcing the British policy of cutting the Boer guerrillas off from the support of their farms and families. This meant the destruction of Boer farms, the confiscation of horses, cattle and wagons, and the rounding up of the civilian women and children. These civilian captives were taken to concent­ration camps where, weakened by malnutrition, thousands died of disease.

The Australians at home initially supported the war, but became disenchanted as the conflict dragged on, especially as the effects on Boer civilians became known. Nonetheless troops continued to arrive until the war ended in May 1902.

Siege Museum, Ladysmith

Some 16,000 Australians fought in the Boer War, of whom 282 died in action or from wounds sustained in battle, while 286 died from disease and another 38 died from other events. Six Australians received the Victoria Cross in South Africa. Yet there are very few memorials to the Boer War in Australia  apart from an equine Boer War statue, once in Edward St Brisbane and later moved to Anzac Square. I wonder if there are any memorials in other parts of the British Empire that sent soldiers to this war.

BBC History Magazine Jan 2013 suggested that people interested in remembering the Boer War should go to KwaZulu-Natal. It is possible to experience the eerie and poignant stillness of battle sites from the Zulu, Transvaal and Boer Wars of 1879-1902. And the Siege Museum in Ladysmith has relics, uniforms, maps and panels, that are helpful. Visitors to KwaZulu-Natal can stay at either the spectacular Isandlwana Lodge, set in the rocks above the battlefield, or the opulent Battlefields Country Lodge at Dundee.

Additionally there are several battlefield sites around the Bloemfontein area, so start at the Anglo-Boer War Museum, Monument Rd. It is believed that this museum is the only one in the world dedicated to the Boer War and gives the visitor insight into the war through its art collection, dioramas and exhibits. It also helps the visitor understand the background against which the war took place and what the life in the concentration and prisoner-of-war camps was like.

 

Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein

Casa Verdi in Milan

Giuseppe Verdi born 1813 in Le Roncole near Parma, son of tav­ern-keepers. Then the family moved to Busseto where young Giuseppe had a normal school education, along side his musical studies. He married Margherita Barez­zi in 1836, daughter of his great patron Antonio Barezzi, and soon bec­ame mun­icipal music master of Busseto. It seems utterly appropriate that the lovely salon in Casa Ba­rezzi was where Busseto Società Filarmonica held its mus­ical gat­h­erings.

When family tragedies struck, Verdi threw himself into work. His first two operas opened at La Scala to favourable reports. They certainly est­ab­­l­ished Verdi as a serious composer. His third opera Nabucco triumphed at La Scala in 1842 with Giusep­pina Strepponi in the starring role. By dressing up the story of his hero’s yearning for his lost homeland in Biblical terms, Verdi bypassed the problem of Austrian censor­ship, either by wit or luck.

Verdi had finally bec­ome famous, and was now commanding a higher fee than his contemporaries. His fame spread; his choruses were sung in the streets by ordinary citizens and become the hymns of Italian patriots and freedom-fighters in 1843, thus forging the composer's reputation as an ideological hero of the Italian people. Only the censors in Vienna disliked and distrusted his work.

With money flowing in, Verdi bought his beloved Sant'Agata property near Busseto and continued working. His creativity knew no limits and the 1850s became his most productive decade. Rigoletto 1851, the first of what is now called the Big Three RigTrovTrav, was a triumph when it opened in Venice. Il Trovatore was a great success in Rome in 1853 and La Traviata eventually triumphed in Venice.

Casa Verdi in Milan, opened to residents in 1902
Sculpture of Verdi in the front garden 

The Risorgimento/re-rise was heating up. This was the C19th nat­ion­al­ist mo­ve­ment that sought a] Italy's indep­end­ence from a range of oc­c­upy­ing pow­ers and b] unification into one nation. By March 1848, Italian pa­triots fought for 5 days in Milan, trying to drive the Austr­ian occupying forces out, and failed. None­the­less, grow­ing Italian nationalism was a constant and crit­ic­ally im­por­tant backdrop to Verdi’s life.

In 1860, with Victor Em­man­uel's assistance, Giu­seppe Gar­ibaldi led his vol­unteer red shirts in an amazing victory in Sic­ily & Naples. Victor Emm­an­uel was pro­cl­aimed first king of a newly un­ited (albeit incomplete) Italy in March 1861. Count Camillo Cav­our and Gousei Mazz­ini were the other heroes across Italy.

Verdi’s heroism was more emblematic than instrumental. Yet Verdi had truly become identified with the Risorgim­en­to. His arias serv­ed as virtual national anthems during era when It­al­ian nationalism was a dangerous concept. He even became a politician!

In his old age, Verdi’s political views were becoming less epic and more local. He paid for and established a new hospit­al for local farm workers and their fam­il­ies in Vill­a­nova, near Sant'Agata. He also bought a site in Milan for his pet project, a retirement home for older musicians  Casa di Riposo.

During 1898 Verdi stayed in Mil­an’s Grand Hotel much of the time, supervising the building his project. Verdi was an old man (87) by Jan 1901 when he suffered a major stroke. When he died, Ver­di left all Italy in mourning. A month later his and his wife's coffins were transferred from a temporary burial spot at Milan cemetery to the crypt in Casa di Riposo. At the state ceremony the funeral cort­ege was acc­ompanied by family, friends, Italian Royal family, Italian politicians, foreign diplomats and com­p­osers, including Puc­c­ini.

Casa Verdi concert hall
Verdi’s own piano 

Led by Arturo Toscan­ini, professional singers sang the Va, Pensiero ch­orus from Nabucco, thus repeating the triumph Verdi had enjoyed way back in 1842. In the streets 300,000 ordinary citizens lined the black-draped funeral route and joined in. Everyone was singing for Verdi of course, but also for the cause of Ital­ian sovereignty.

Verdi had requested in his will that all the future royalties from his operas would go to the Verdi Foundation and thence to Casa Verdi. Thus Casa di Riposo per Musicisti became a rest home for retired opera singers and musicians in Milan. Designed by the poet-librettist Arrigo Boito and by his architect brother Camillo, it would be interesting to know why they chose to build in Neo-gothic style, since a sense of Italian nationalism might have produced a very different style. Ample, beautiful 19th-century environment, amid large windows, abundant space and furniture mark it as a house full of memories. Perhaps Verdi had originally thought of instrumentalists and singers specifically from the great opera house La Scala being his guests; in any case, all Italian musicians were soon welcomed.

Casa Verdi is now home to 55 musical students and recent graduates who are studying and working in Milan. Concerts are offered several times a week in the house, and residents are also given free tickets to La Scala. Verdi's own piano stands proudly in the concert hall decorated with wood panelling and painted trompe l'oeil draperies.

Casa Verdi communal dining room 

Does this story sound familiar to people who saw the film The Quartet? If Verdi had met the musicians played by Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins in Beecham House, he would surely have approved.

Spanish paradors - staying in luxury and historical accuracy.

In 1910 the Marquis de la Vega Inclán (1858-1942), close friend of King Alfonso XIII, was selected by the Spanish government to foster cultural tourism. In particular he was asked to create a hotel chain aimed at improving Spain’s international reput­ation as a unique tourist destination. A parador was to be a kind of luxury hotel, but the loc­ation had to be special - that is, it to be located in a signific­ant historic building like a monastery, convent, fortress or castle. And the original architecture had to be maintained with as much integrity as possible.

Per­sonally launched by King Alfonso XIII, the first parador opened in Ávila with thirty beds in 1928.

Since paradors were opened in sites as far north as Galicia and as far south as Andalusia, the landscape and views were very different in each location. The first Ávila parador was in the Gredos Mountains, surrounded by impressive scenery. Others would be on cliff tops looking out to sea or in medieval streetscapes in the centre of a town.

With the first hotel up and running, the Royal Tourism Commission was formed, specifically to find sites of great historical or natural interest where new paradors could be developed.

Things were going very well, and in the early 1930s four new National Parador Hotels were opened. But with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), tourists from other countries stopped travelling to Spain and internal travel was restricted to necessary business only. Also many of the hotels were converted into hosp­itals for wounded soldiers or suffered severe damage from battle.

 Santiago’s parador, courtyard

After the war ended, damaged parador hotels were rebuilt and projects for new paradors were proposed, but World War Two interfered. It wasn’t until 1945 that a fabulous parador was opened in the San Fran­cisco Convent in Granada, inside Alhambra Palace. Built over a small Muslim palace in the 16th century, the convent readily converted into a very special parador. Visitors can see where the Catholic monarchs had been interred, at least until the Royal Chapel Pantheon was built.

Alhambra's parador was a huge success, and a new and equally pop­ular site was found in the Gibralfaro fortress of Malaga. In the 1960s, everyone wanted to travel inside Spain (including me). Old historical sites were renovated and new paradors opened for business in places like Córdoba (1960), Guadalupe (1965), Ávila (1966) and Toledo (1968), then Salamanca somewhat later.

At present there are 93 parador hotels operating across the nation. So the National Parador Hotel  chain has created four special routes for tourists to discover Spanish history and to live in historic buildings while they explore. These routes have been arranged in several different categories: 

Cultural routes: castles, monasteries, Mozarabic, through the heart of Al-Ándalus/Moorish Iberia.

Natural routes: through the Costa de la Luz and the Picos de Europa/Peaks of Europe.

Wine routes: Alava wine, Rioja and Navarra wine, Ribera del Duero wine and other wine routes.

Pilgrimage routes: St James Way to the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana and on. 

Guadalajara’a parador, dining area 

Did the financial crisis in Spain have an impact on the paradors? Inevitably yes. The New York Times said the chain suffered a loss of 28 million euros in 2011 alone. The government wanted to close 7 paradors permanently and to close at least 25 paradors during the off-season. The Spanish population was outraged. Fortunately at least the top paradors still seem to be doing well. Guadalajara’s parador is in a former castle perched on a hill that was once fortified by the Moors (712 AD) and was for centuries the residence of bishops and cardinals. It is near Madrid.

Canadian soldier-heroes, 1917-8: Alfred Munnings

Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) was born in Mendham Suffolk in 1878, son of a miller. When he finished his apprenticeship, young Alfred painted rural scenes, gypsies and horses which sold well and were hung from time to time in the Royal Academy.

The First World War meant that families had no money for luxuries.. and art objects were no longer being bought. Munnings attempted to enlist in a Hampshire regiment, but he was knocked back every time on health grounds. Finally in 1917, he was given a civilian job in a horse depot near Reading, checking tens of thousands of Canadian horses for disease and treating them. Only then could the horses be sent to serve in artillery, cavalry, or supply units in France.

Munnings, Canadian Troops at a Musical Evening in France,  

27 x 33 cm, 1918 

Taylor Gallery London. 

I am very grateful to the Canadian War Museum for their references. They believed that Canadian history owed much to Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaver­brook, a New Brunswick newspaper baron who'd moved to Britain. As a friend of Sir Sam Hughes, Canada's Minister of Militia, Lord Beaverbrook had been given charge of overseas military records. Intent on publicising Canada's wartime achievements, he produced a detailed account of Canadian operations, launched a programme of military photography that included the sale of prints, pioneered front-line cine-photog­raphy, and published a daily newspaper for soldiers, The Canadian Daily Record. Whatever one thought of his politics, Beaverbrook’s salute to Canadian families was heroic.

The crucial role Canadians played in the Second Battle of Ypres (April 1915) was a top priority for Beaverbrook. In 1916 he commissioned a British artist, Richard Jack, to recreate it in paint. Then, with 100 artists being despatched under the auspices of his Canadian War Memorials Fund, Beaverbrook covered the Belgian, British and Canadian armies operations all over Europe. The project eventually brought Canada some 800 military paintings and sculptures.

It was this Canadian War Memorials Fund art programme that Alfred Munnings joined in 1918, specifically to paint the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and Canadian Forestry Corps.

Perfect! For an artist who loved horses and loved painting them, Munnings was in his element. Throughout the history of warfare, horses had played important roles - as pack animals, transporting infantry, hauling artillery and in cavalry operations. And European armies of course included specialised cavalry units.

Munnings, Canadians Felling a Tree in the Vosges, 

51 x 61 cm, c1918 

Canadian War Museum 

And not just horses. France and Britain needed timber for the war effort but logging skills were more readily available in Canada. So in early 1916 the British government asked that a forestry battalion be raised in Canada for service in Europe. The Dominion acted quickly; 1,600 men were recruited and money was spent on both logging and milling equipment. The 224th Canadian Forestry Battalion was sent.

Three more forestry battalions were raised, and soon the foresters numbered some 22,000. Attached personnel (Canadian Army Service Corps, Canadian Army Medical Corps, Chinese labourers, prisoners of war) brought the total strength to 31,000. Many Canadians who would otherwise have been ineligible for military duty were able to serve in the forestry units. Munnings was delighted, in April 1918, to be assigned to paint the Canadians at work. He first went through the Normandy logging camps and from there he travelled to eastern France.

Munnings, Gen Jack Seely, Commander of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, 

1918 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

When Munnings was recalled to London in mid 1918, he completed some works and transferred 44 paintings to the Canadian War Memorials Fund. The artist considered his experiences with Canadian units to have been among the most rewarding events of his life.

Canadian War Museum, Ottawa

The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa is Canada’s national museum of military history. The concept of a military history museum originated in 1880 but the current building that we see in the photo didn't  open until 2005.

Manet, portraits and the good life in Paris

Artist Edouard Manet (1832-83) has been well analysed in the last decade. In 2003, Madrid’s Prado focused on the artist's relationship to his art predecessors and in 2011, Paris’ Musee d'Orsay located him among his contemporaries. Now an exhibition called Manet: Portraying Life is focusing on the portraits he painted. This exhibit­ion was organised by the Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House London, in collaborat­ion with the Toledo Museum of Art Ohio. The show wowed them in Toledo!

Although he lived only until 51, the Impressionists' leader in Paris created many paintings in general, and portraits in particular. Manet painted his family, friends and many of the famous personalities in French art and literature. 50+ of these works have been collected from all around the world, so now I have to ask why do we know so much about his images of modern city life but not much about his portraits. 

Manet, Portrait of Zola, 1868
147 x 114 cm

Musee d'Orsay

Two critiques of the exhibition have been useful. Richard Dorment of the Telegraph  noted that Manet placed portraits of real people against settings fab­ric­ated in his studio. Thus the line between what should have been seen as a true portrait and what was best understood as a genre painting was not always clear. This shifting ground between portrait­ure and genre went right to the heart of Manet’s modernity. In some pictures Manet used portraits in the way theatre directors used act­ors. He added all the ingred­ients of a boulevard farce about money, sex and modern life, seen through the eyes of the quintessential flâneur.

But Richard, even Manet's quest for modernity was ambivalent! On one hand he was a risk-taker in his art and often found himself excluded from the official Salon by art experts in the early years. On the other hand, his very large painting Le Dejeurner sur l'herbe 1863 looked as if it came straight from Renaissance Italy a la The Pastoral Concert c1510 by Giorgione or Titian. Could an artist be backward looking and modernist at the same time?

Adrian Searl of the Guardian believed almost all of Manet’s oeuvre was portraiture, whatever genre he was painting. This was most obvious in Music in the Tuileries Gardens 1862, which is displayed in a room on its own. Visitors can easily see all the tiny portraits embedded in this small outdoor scene, a snap shot of leisure and pleasure in Paris.

The London exhibition opened with a room devoted to the artist and his family. In one, his wife played the piano; in another there was an impressionist portrait of his wife with a cat on her lap. Berthe Morisot, the artist who married Manet’s brother, was painted with a Bouquet of Violets in 1872. Searl’s point was that Manet painted from life, so everyone who appeared was a kind of portrait.

Manet really was the organising father of impressionism! He and his wife welcomed the artistic and literary personalities into their home for a salon every week. And friends often dropped into Manet in his studio or joined him at a table in his favourite cafes. But he was rarely a true impressionist in his art, as Monet and Pissarro were.

Manet, Portrait of Antonin Proust, 1880
130 x 96 cm
Toledo Museum of Art,

The catalogue is important because many people won’t be able to get to London before the exhibition abruptly closes next week (14th April)!!! As a lasting piece of literature, the catalogue explores Manet's portraiture and reviews his growth over his career. 

Of all the works described and explained in the catalogue, I particularly loved two. Firstly the portrait of Émile Zola - partially because Manet developed a modern approach to this genre, but also because Zola was a very fine thinker and writer. Secondly the portrait of Antonin Proust, a childhood friend of Manet who went on to become a journalist, politician and, importantly, the Minister for Culture. This gorgeous portrait reminds me of the 1867 portrait painted by Henri Fantin-Latour of Manet himself. The top hat, gloves and cane represented a debonair man about town.

The first in a new series of cinematic art exhibitions from museums around the world, called Exhibition Screen, is about to start. The Royal Academy’s exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, will be captured for cinema screens worldwide and shown in Palace Cinemas in Australia on the 27th and 28th April 2013. Manet lovers in other countries should check Exhibition Screen for their own dates.

Lowry's ordinary home and amazing gallery

Laurence Lowry (1887–1976) was born in Stretford Lancs. In 1905 the teenager was a student at the Manchester Municipal College of Art, where he studied under the French Impressionist artist Adolphe Valette. Valette also put Lowry in touch with current artistic developments in Paris.

By 1915 Lowry was studying at the Salford School of Art. It was here he mastered industrial landscapes and began to establish his unique style. Lowry eventually became famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial north­ of England of the early C20th. His distinc­tive paintings were best known for dullish cityscapes, and match-stick humans and animals. One of his favourite districts to paint was Salford, an area he knew very well. 

Lowry, 
Coming Out of School, 1927,
35 x 54 cm,
Tate

Often times his images were crowded with people, but they were rushing and isolated individuals, not people having a wonderful time. In 1939 John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Lowry's first solo exhibition in London, saying: 'I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern industrial England”.

In 1948 Lowry had enough money to buy a modest home in Mottram, Greater Manchester called The Elms. It was not the most attractive house in the world, but as he had always remained single, there was never any need to move to a nicer place. The dining room was his studio and most of the wall space was covered with paintings and drawings completed during his time there. Now that the home has been given Listed Status, the new owners plan to restore the staircase which winds up the centre of the house and has lots of intricate detailing. An original cast iron stove, original doors, window shutters and floorboards will be renovated and the fireplace will move back from the lounge back to its original location in Lowry’s bedroom.

The Elms, Mottram 
in Greater Manchester 

In the 1950s, the artist liked to spent his holidays at the Seaburn Hotel up in Sunderland, focusing on scenes of local ports and coal mines. And he holidayed often in Berwick Upon Tweed. He must have really loved the northern industrial scenes.. since he painted them often. In fact while Lowry composed many of his northern views as imaginative reconstructions of different places, some were named after specific streets. Art dealer Richard Green noted that Coronation Street 1957 is the same street in Salford after which the famous, eponymous TV soap opera was named three years later. Was this life copying art or art copying life?

Lowry often befriended and bought works from young artists he admired, including James Ish­erwood whose works hung on the Mottram studio wall. He supp­orted other young careers by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. But the paintings he bought for his own pleasure were not contemporary. When the money started to roll in for his own works, Lowry purchased a number of works by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882). How strange that an artist who painted stylised, lonely people in tough northern cityscapes should be particularly inspired by a sensual Victorian Pre-Raphaelite.

Lowry

The Fever Van 1935

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Lowry died in 1976 aged 88, just a few months before an important and successful exhibition of his work was held at London's Royal Academy. The artist was buried in Manchester, leaving a very large estate, valued at £300,000 plus many works of art. Since then, a col­lection of Lowry's work has been put on permanent public display in a newly built art theatre and gallery complex, The Lowry, on Pier 8 Salford Quays Manchester. The complex contains 2,000 square metres of gallery space displaying 400 of Lowry's paintings plus other artists' work. It was all collected by Salford Museum and Art Gallery from the 1930s on, but the works didn't move into the new Manchester complex until it opened in 2000.

Amongst the other gall­eries that have since organised retrospectives of his works, Tate Britain Millbank is showing Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life from June-October 2013. The Tate exhibition has 38 of his best loved works, starting from his 1934 works.

The Lowry theatre and gallery complex 
in Salford Quays, Manchester

Lowry, in his own time and since, has divided the critics into two camps. Supporters believed his paintings were authentic images of modern life, the only works to truly address the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the shabby northern half of England. The detractors believed his works were untutored, repetitive, ugly, naive and lazy.

In discussing the painting The Rival Candidate (1942, Art Gallery of Western Australia), Kitty Hauser adds some facts from Lowry's life that may have explained his unique style. Firstly the only person whose approval he craved was his highly controlling, bed-bound mother who had loathed giving birth to her only child. To repay his mother, Laurence had nursed her day and night from the time she had become a widow in 1932 until she died in 1939. Secondly Lowry worked as a rent collector for 42 years,  a lonely position which may have accounted for the detached way he painted his busy scenes. If he had time for painting, it was only at night or on weekends.

Michael Howard wrote Lowry: a Visionary Artist, showing how the painter's apparent naivety was a deliberate mask to a complex character.  Carol Ann Lowry, the painter's unrelated adoptive god daughter, was one of the several young girls Lowry befriended, and who helped to fuel his artistic fantasies. Lowry's extensive library held a series of his obsessively reworked erotic paintings; this was not what Howard had expected from the northern heritage industry's favourite icon.

Fabergé treasures in the USA

I have recently read the book Fabergé: Fantasies & Treasures, written by Geza von Habsburg and published by Universe in 1996.

Carl Fabergé (1846-1920) was born into a family in St Petersburg that created jewellery. The young man, trained in Russia and Germany, was in the right place and the right time. He had luck of course, but he also had great creative skills and beautiful crafts­manship - all three elements bringing him to the attention of the Russian Imperial Court.

He helped out in the Jewellery Gallery of the Hermitage and in time (in the mid-1880s) was named goldsmith and jeweller to the Russian court. His works were first displayed at the 1882 Pan-Slavic exhibition held in Moscow under the patronage of Czar Alexander III.

Napoleon Egg, 1912 

Battle of Borodino, Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. 
Workmaster: Henrik Emanuel Wigström. Miniaturist: Vassily Ivanovich Zuiev
Tsar Nicholas II’s gift to his mother, Empress Maria Fyodorovna. 
On long term long to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Yet it was only when Alexander asked Fabergé to create a special Easter egg for the czarina that this iconic object was first invented. Fortunately for the Romanovs these eggs became an Easter tradit­ion throughout Alexander's reign, his son Nicholas II’s reign and on until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Of the 50 Fabergé eggs ever made, the von Habsburg book concentrated on those in the Pratt collection in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Clearly Carl Fabergé and his brother could not manage all the work themselves. They therefore decided to establish independent workshops, headed up by a Fabergé workmaster i.e a master craftsman who would produce works of art specifically and exclusively for the House of Fabergé. Nothing would be accepted by the Fabergés until and unless it had been approved by Carl.

So if there were many workmasters, why were their so few eggs ever completed? Apparently it took two years just to prepare for every single egg. Yet so famous were they that of the many thousands of jewels and art objects made by Fabergé, most peoples’ minds go straight to the relatively few Easter eggs.

My favourite was the Napoleonic Egg of 1912 which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the victory of the Russian armies over the dread­ed French emperor. Made of gold, enamel, diamonds, platinum, ivory, velvet and silk, this tiny egg was only 11.2 cms high. Yet it opened into 6 signed miniatures, each richly framed, which were later found in an album of drawings from the workshop of Henrik Wigström. Wigström had been one of the famous Fabergé workmasters who created stunning art objects during the 1903-1918 era.

Fabergé and his workshop made the most beautiful objects out of gold, enamel and hardstone; his picture frames, cigarette cases, clocks and silver animal decanters were created for the ruling families of Europe or any other patron wealthy enough to spend limitless sums of money. So it is appropriate that the book also presents gold, enamel, and hardstone pieces by the artist-jeweller. If I had to select which objects in the book were the most splendid, I would certainly select the guilloche enamels. von Habsburg did not reveal Faberge’s most zealously guarded secret i.e the process used to make his enamels.

Fabergé left Russia in 1918 and died in Switzerland in 1920. In 1924 sons Alexander and Eugéne re-opened Fabergé in Paris, where they continued to make the art objects that their father had been so successful with. To distinguish their pieces from those made in Russia before the Revolution, they used the trademark FABERGÉ PARIS.

Enamel guilloche picture frame, 
9 cms high, c1890 

workmaster's mark of Viktor Aarne St Petersburg, 
Photo credit Christie’s London 2010 
Realised £16,000 (USA $26,000) at auction

Louisiana heiress and philanthropist Matilda Geddings Gray (1885–1971) collected her first object by Fabergé in 1933, before just about anyone else in the USA. Over the following years, Matilda Geddings Gray amassed one of the best Fabergé collections in private hands, including the Imperial Napoleonic Easter Egg..

This book was written as a companion to the catalogue of the travelling “Fabergé In America” exhib­ition. The surprising element for me was that the author was almost as inter­est­ing as Carl Fabergé. Archduke Géza of Austria (b1940), is the son of Archduke Joseph Francis of Austria (1895–1957) and the grandson of King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony. Géza also happens to be a very experienced writer about Fabergé and was the curator of some important inter­nat­ional Fabergé exhibitions. In 1966 he joined the staff of Christie’s auction house in Switzerland. In 1980 he became Chairman of European Operations for the company. Later he became the Chairman, in New York and Geneva, for Habsburg Fine Art International Auctioneers. 

His work specialised in silver and gold, objects of vertu and Russian art. Habsburg served as the curator and organiser for Fabergé, Jeweller to the Tsars (1986-87), an exhibition held at Kunsthalle in Munich. Then while on the board of the Fabergé Arts Foundation, von Habsburg was chief curator of Fabergé, Imperial Court Jeweller (1993-94), which was shown in St Petersburg, Paris and London. He also served as guest curator of Fabergé in America (1996-97), which toured five cities in the USA.

For more stunning Fabergé objects and details about the donors and recipients, see the Fabergé Revealed Exhibition of Mar 2012. It shows the Bismark Box, an imposing Imperial presentation box that carried the donor’s portrait; it was inscribed by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Alexander III of Russia to His Serene Highness Prince von Bismarck Chancellor of the German Empire 1884. The German imperial chancellor was Europe’s most powerful and influential statesmen, and must have deserved the 90 carats of diamonds.