British Brothers' League 1901-5, London

Britain’s monarch could expel foreigners to protect the security of the realm in the late C19th, but free movement of labour was gener­al­ly unquestioned. Migration wasn’t an urgent issue until Conserv­ative politicians agitated in the 1880s-90s, and the media got on board. 

Migrants in a crowded Poplar market, 1904

The Guardian

The feared immigrants were mainly East Europ­ean Jews. In the Pale of Set­tlement, they were allowed to live on a permanent basis. From 1880s on, with the terrible anti-Semitic pogroms, many fled. 150,000 settled in the UK, including my Russian grandmother. Then there were other Russ­ians and Poles, Ital­ians and Ger­mans who moved to the East End, and were seen to lower living standards in the UK.

Emerging trade unions were worried that low-skilled migrants acc­epting long hours and low pay would undermine real English workers’ struggles. During the 1890s, the Trades Union Congress/TUC passed 3 resolutions calling for immigration controls.

Jewish trade unionists wrote the remarkable Voice from the Aliens to counter a nasty resolution at the 1895 cong­ress. They unionised themselves and made strenuous efforts to co­op­erate with existing labour bodies. Influential non-Jewish activ­ists in William Morris’ Soc­ial­ist League support­ed them, as did tailors’ leader George Mac­donald etc. But the dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett, described Jewish immigrants as the "scum of the contin­ent who made slums even more foetid and congested".

Maj Evans Gordon MP and Parliamentary colleagues

to address restricting further immigration of destitute foreigners

BBL Poster, 1902

The migrants organised their own public meetings to challenge BBL propag­anda through an ad-hoc Aliens Defence League, temporarily housed in Brick Lane. They proposed practical solutions: unionising migrant workers so they could fight alongside indigenous workers for better conditions for all, and creating fair rent courts to deal with landlords.

The Daily Mail continued its campaign against the arrival of Jews from Russia: "In Feb 1900, a British liner called the Cheshire moored at Southampton, carrying refugees from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. They had breakfasted on board, but they rushed as though starving at the food. These were the penniless refugees and when the relief committee passed by they hid their gold, and fawned and whined, and in broken English asked for money for their train fare."

In 1901, hatred continued. Bishop Cosmo Lang of Stepney in East London accused immigrants of swamping areas once populated by Eng­lishmen. Major Will­iam Evans-Gordon, Conservative MP for Stepney in 1900 elected on a strong anti-immigration platform, ag­reed. Along with neigh­bour­ing Conservative MP Samuel Forde-Ridley and Capt William Stan­ley Shaw of the Middlesex Regiment, Evans-Gordon forged a pop­ul­ist anti-immigrant movement called the British Brot­h­ers’ League/BBL. It was launched in the East End in May 1901.

Init­ially the BBL was most int­erested in protectionism, although it soon emphasised more rabid anti-foreigner rhetoric. Henry Norman Wolverhampton MP publicly deplored the UK being made into the "dump­ing ground for the scum of Europe". He joined the campaign and advised other nations to "dis­in­fect their own sewage".

The Eastern Post and City Chronicle happily reported BBL activities and demanded that the government end the foreign flood which had submerged East London. Within months the league claimed 45,000 members, although a member was anyone who signed the BBL's petition. The League promoted its cause with large meetings, with guards whose role was to eject disruptive opponents.

The BBL’s East End strongholds in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Limehouse solidified around the immigrant ghetto of Aldgate and White­chapel. BBL members, mostly local factory workers or unempl­oyed, were convinced by BBL propaganda that their precarious work sit­uation (low pay, overcrowded housing, poor sanitation) was caused by immigrants. But Captain Shaw also boasted of his elite recr­uits: Oxford grad­uates, city merchants and 40 Tory MPs.

The league’s opening rally in 1901 drew opponents. BBL supporters wrote to the press about socialist foreig­ners upsetting the meeting. Local newspapers noted that 260 big brawny stewards roughly ej­ected foreigners. So when the BBL held another large rally at the People’s Pal­ace Mile End in Jan 1902, the 4,000 supporters were again protected by guards. [A technique later used by the British Fascists]

BBL supporters filled a petit­ion pressing MPs to halt immig­ration. When the government launch­ed a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903, Evans-Gordon chaired it and set the agenda. The Royal Commission inves­tigated the BBL’s own charges - that immigrants:
ar­rived destitute and dirty;
practised insanitary habits;
spread in­fectious diseases;
were a burden on the rates;
disposs­es­sed nat­ive dwellers;
caused native tradesmen to lose trade;
worked for rates below local workers;
included crim­in­als, prostitutes and anarch­is­ts; and
formed a non-assimilating commun­ity.

Britain is the Promised Land and immigrants are undesirable

The 1905 Aliens Act satirised

The Royal Commission struggled to back up its charges in its 1903 report. After all, the immigrants themselves lived in overcrowded conditions and mostly worked 12+ hours a day. Their dedication to educ­ation and self-improvement denied claims that the migrants low­ered living standards. 

Still the Tory government passed Br­itain’s first modern immigration law, 1905 Aliens Act. Alth­ough the word Jew did not appear in this Act, the legislation was large­ly seen as a success for the BBL, which could then close down.

This Act put an end to the Vict­or­ian Golden Age of migration which had benefited from cheaper trans­port costs and growing labour dem­ands. The Alien Act’s most important provision was that Leave to Land would be refused to those migrants who could not support them­selves. To screen the migrants properly, the Act allowed them to disembark only in app­roved ports where an Immig­ration and a Health Officer could in­spect them.

By the time the Act passed, the Tories had fallen to Lib­erals in a landslide. The discretionary powers were transfer­red to the new Home Secret­ary, Herbert Gladstone, who used them to instruct all members of the Immigration Board. From 1906 the press was allowed to attend board meetings and in 1910 im­m­igrants were permitted legal assist­ance. The refusal rate under the new Act was low alth­ough some groups, eg gypsies, were disprop­ort­ionally af­fect­ed. The act remained for eight years before being subsumed into the more stringent 1914 Alien Restriction Act.

Tailoring workshop, East End c1910

The Guardian

Nothing is new; the League left behind a legacy of support for far-right groups. Enoch Powell warned of rivers of blood, Oswald Mosley wanted forced repatriation of Caribbean immig­rants who flooded in, Margaret Thatcher spoke of Britain’s towns being swamp­ed and Nigel Farage said parts of Britain were like a horrid foreign land.

New Hampshire's Hood Museum of Art

Eve Kahn wrote that Dartmouth College in Hanover N.H  gathered much of its experimental architecture along the edges of its cam­p­us, which was otherwise dominated by Georgian and colon­ial quadrang­les in brick and white clapboard. At the SE corner, a few imagin­ative buildings dedicated to the arts are hud­dled together. The best so far is the Hood Museum of Art, which was originally de­sig­n­ed in the 1980s by the influential post-modernist Charles Moore. Its gabled brick pavilions are crowned in a domed finial with a necklace of raised copper triang­les. Moore laid out a meandering path from the campus’ main green, meant to pique curios­ity. He flanked a gateway with layers of square columns, which all­owed glimpses of courtyards and galleries beyond. But the signage was poor, and the gateway’s brick, con­crete and copper surfaces aged poorly in winter.

Hood Museum of Art, 

Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire

Hood director, John Stomberg, says that for many students and visitors, Moore’s scheme was too obtuse. Stomberg supervised a $50 million renov­ation and expansion by the Manhattan firm Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects (of Barnes Collection in Philadelphia fame) that added badly needed classrooms, gal­leries and an atrium. The ever-growing permanent collect­ion (c65,000 pieces) spans from Assyrian palace reliefs to C19th Native American battle­field sket­ches, Papua New Guinea head­dresses, and a 2018 painting by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu.

Each year, thousands of schoolchildren visit the gal­leries. There’s no entry fee, and few rival institutions nearby. Dartmouth und­er­grad­uates have to take some art classes, and have to visit a museum.

We pass the New Guinea wooden drums, masks and shields in poly­chrome swirling patterns, and through a forest of cross-hatched poles car­v­ed by Aboriginal Australians. A teacher and her class choose an elab­orately coiffed Af­rican mask to sketch. A 2016 teepee-shaped sculpture was made by Choctaw-Cherokee Jeffrey Gibson, topped with a birdlike cer­am­ic head and draped in bells.

Side galleries have more predictable works: Calder’s mobile, Rot­hko’s abstraction, Picasso’s Guitar on a Table (1912). In Perug­ino’s C16th tableau Virgin and Child with Saints, men gaze up at Mary and her infant on a pedestal; the paint­ing is studied in various Renaissance classes. Under-appreciated masters from the 19th and early C20ths were also displayed.

There are calm waterfront scenes by the African-American painters Robert Seldon Duncan­son and Henry Ossawa Tanner, and luminous por­traits of women by Cecilia Beaux and Lilly Martin Spencer. A grey-green stoneware jar was made in South Carolina c1830 by enslaved potter David Drake. Snakes sprout from the forehead and ribs of Harriet Hosmer’s 1850s marble bust of Medusa, near Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s C19th painting of an ancient Roman sculpture gallery.

Dartmouth School opened in 1769. soon starting collections eg fragments of mastodon tusks excavated in Kentucky and a ruffle-edged silver bowl made in Boston. Over the centuries, museum displays were installed at var­ious buildings, incl at neigh­bouring Wilson Hall, a 1880s turreted Romanesque former library. The Hood’s construction in the 1980s was financed by rich al­umnus Harvey Hood.

The Hood site is sloped and narrow, tucked between Wilson Hall and a 1960s theatre building, Hopkins Centre for the Arts, designed by modernist Wallace Harrison. The Hop has concrete archways and cantilevers. Moore described his contribution to the campus as unobtrusive, in reaction to modernists’ macho construct­ions.

The Hood attracted many gifts e.g New Guinea woodcarvings from L.A collector-dealer Harry Frank­lin and Native Amer­ic­an drawings from art historian Mark Lansburgh. But there was lim­it­ed room to show them. Classroom space was cramp­ed as faculty incor­p­orated art into the curricula and there was little flexible in­door space for events.

Stomberg arrived in 2016 from Mount Holy­oke College Art Museum, when construction plans and fundraising were underway. Charles Moore’s defenders were protesting against TWBTA’s partial eras­ure of the original building and gateway. TWBTA has pointed out that the firm has the greatest respect for Moore’s oeuvre – Tsien had been one of his architecture students in the 1970s.

Much of the 1980s brick skin has been preserved, along with the signature domed finial. The galleries and staircases still have Moore’s expanses of raw concrete and quirky ziggurat forms sculpted on the column capitals and light fixtures. A variety of dark and pale oak floorboards adds a sense of patina to the redone galler­ies. Sunlight streams in through skylights, staircase windows and the bay, which keeps visitors oriented as they roam through disp­lays that explore continents and millennia.

Reactions to the renovations have been fav­ourable, albeit with some traces of nostalgia. The lofty atrium, lined in the same brick, is already serving as a major campus attraction for stud­ents. Live saxophone music wafts upstairs. Stomberg says he is hop­ing to schedule some dance performances in the window, which has a sweeping view of the Georgian and Colonial campus.

Thank you Apollo for the history and the photos.

African Art
architecturalrecord.com

Modern American Art
Artforum

Assyrian Reliefs and ancient Greek pottery

artscope

An art critic, who visited the Hood since it re-opened in Jan 2019 after nearly three years and $50  million renovations, wrote this response: Clearly the old gallery was too dark, too small and poorly equipped for students and outside visitors. The gallery literature says the space of the old Hood was greatly expanded, and there are now 16 galleries instead of 10. Even more importantly the galleries are now beautifully light-fitted. And the Hood is much better connected to the university campus.

But the contents on display and the flow of visitors are less satisfactory. The new director clearly wanted to map and display the entire world of art his­tory, within one gallery! When I go to a gallery it is to see what they special­ise in eg Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, or Rus­sian decorative arts during the Czarist reigns. I can broaden my horizons in art history, but I don’t want to be involuntarily moved from one era to other eras within a single room, from cont­in­ent to continent without a cup of coffee in between. I agree with Murray Whyte: “In one of the mus­eum’s few unavoid­able paths, you have to pass through a coll­ect­ion of contemporary Native American art to reach the Hood’s trad­it­ional American collection”. It was confusing.

Consumptive chic for women???

Consumptive Chic: History of Beauty, Fashion & Disease 2017 by Dr Carolyn Day examined the connection between fashion and Tuber­culosis/TB. The book was beautifully written and illustrated, but I was angry on women’s behalf while reading. In an era ignorant about TB, the tuber­cular body came to be defined cul­t­urally. During the late 18th-early C19ths this became romant­ic­is­ed i.e people actively redefined notions of the otherwise horrib­le sympt­oms as ideals of beauty.

Dropsy and Consumption flirting outside a mausoleum.
Credit: Wellcome Collection

Illustrated with fashion plates and medical images, this was a clear story of the rise of Consumptive Chic which described the strange link between women’s fashions and medical thinking re TB. Thus two belief systems developed in a connected fashion:

1. Women's in­herent feminine character/way of life rendered them naturally sus­cep­t­ible to contracting TB.

2.  Despite the changing fashions over decades, TB’s symptoms were believed to increase the attractive­ness of its victim over time. Once they contracted TB, patients were indeed more likely to die. But they would be increasingly beautiful as they approached death. The emaciated figure and fev­erish flush of TB victims were positively promoted as a highly desirable appearance. As were the long swan-like necks, large dil­ated eyes, luxurious eye lashes, white teeth, pale comp­lex­ions, blue veins and rosy cheeks.

Women focused on their eyes by painting eye liner and eye shadow onto their faces, even though these eye paints contained dangerous mer­cury (causing kidney damage), radium, lead or antimony oxide (a carcin­ogen). Women placed poisonous nightshade drops in their eyes, to enlargen their pupils. And they bathed in pois­onous arsenic, to make their skin desirably pale. The poison vermillion was worn on the lips as a lush red tint. How brutal, then, that medical writers knew that the fash­ionable way of life of many women actually harmed them.

What would inspire largely educat­ed classes to respond to illness through the channels of fashion? Why would people try to glamorise the symptoms of a deadly disease?? Day showed that consumption was seen to confer beauty on its victim. Yes it was a disease, but one that would become a positive event in women’s lives.

The Victorian corset was a heavy duty clothing apparatus, capable of constricting a woman's waist down to a tiny 17”;  this and an hourglass figure were all the rage in the C19th. Dresses were desig­n­ed to feature the bony wing-like shoulder blades of the consumpt­ive back, emphasising an emaciated frame. Additionally, diaphanous dresses and sandals exposed women to cold weather.

The coughing, emaciation, endless diarrhoea, fever and coughing of phlegm and blood became both a sign of beauty and also a fashion­ab­le disease. As obscene as it seems now, TB was depicted as an easy and beautiful way to fade into death. It was neither!!

Day noted the dis­ease’s connections to the Romantic poets and to scholars in the early C19th. Literary influence was important for educated women; most Romantic writers, artists and composers with TB created a myth that consumption drove male artistic genius. The link coincided with the ideolog­ies of Romanticism, a philosophical movement that opposed the En­lighten­ment through its emphasis on emotion and imag­ination. These men were the best, most intelligent & brightest members of society. Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most notorious of the Romantic poets, noted that his TB affliction caused ladies to look at him with heartbreak. The poet John Keats (1795-1821) embod­ied an example of the refined tubercular artistic genius, doom­ed to a very early death. He was a body too delicate to endure earthly life, but one whose intellect indelibly imprinted on culture.

And artistic women too. The link between TB and ideal femininity was played up by Alexandre Dumas fils whose novel La Dame aux Camélias (1848) presented redemption for immor­al­ity via the suffering of TB. The consumptive model Elizabeth Siddal, the drowned Ophelia in John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of 1851, became an icon for her generation.

There was less interest in the appearance of TB in the lower classes. Not because working women and prostitutes deserved a miserable and painful death, but because the lower classes showed how women real­ly suff­ered TB’s brutal realities. TB was explained away rather realistically in the working classes: miserable living cond­itions, pollution, poor hygiene, poverty, promis­cuity and drunkedness. TB was not romantic and beautiful for working women.

Tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion
Furman News, 1888

Could the different reactions to TB, the glamorisation of the ill­ness for upper class women Vs the bleak experience of TB in impov­erished Victorian communities, be there to maintain class order in Britain? Perhaps fashion-setters elevated TB as an elegant form of suffering for the upper classes, specifically to create a psychological dis­tance from the unsavoury realities of lower-class disease? No won­der TB victims from the British upper classes were lauded while poor vic­t­ims were stigmatised.

My blog-partner-doctor wanted to know why other diseases like cholera did not have the same cultural impact? Because, Day said, in­fectious diseases followed an epidemic pattern. First they inc­r­eased very quickly; then they slowly faded in intensity and incidence. The course of TB was less flashy than other contagious illnesses, but it still followed a ve ry slow epidemic cycle of infection.

New Medical Knowledge 

A much better understanding of TB came in 1882 when germ theory was described by Louis Pasteur. In that year Robert Koch announced he'd discovered and isolated the micro­­sc­opic bac­teria that cause the disease. Koch’s discovery helped convince public health experts that TB was contagious. And that the victim’s sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were caused by frequent low-grade fever

Preventing the spread of TB led to some of the first large-scale public health campaigns. Doctors began to define long, trailing skirts as causes of disease because they swept up germs from the street. Corsets were also believed to exacerbate TB by limiting move­ment of the lungs and blood circulation. And doctors began prescribing sunbathing as a treatment for TB. Eventually TB was viewed as a pernicious biological force requiring control. The weak and susceptible female gave way to a model of health and strength. 

NB Emily Mullin How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion

  

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, c1852, Tate 

The tubercular model Elizabeth Siddal became an icon for her generation.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-50 is at the National Gall London June 2025. This might be less of a popular success than previous shows featuring paintings by eg Vincent Van Gogh, but then the C14th was a while ago. The National Gallery had mixed popular and academic shows before.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–50,

book cover

The early C14th in central Italy was a golden moment for art and change. Artists Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were forging a new way of painting. They painted with a drama not seen before. Faces showed vibrant emotions. Bodies moved in space. Stories flowed across panels.

Name a key Renaissance Italian city-state and many people will say Florence. But C14th Siena was wealthy and had a stable government, with plenty of patrons, both religious and secular. And as a centre for trade and pilgrimage, Siena artists were exposed to new ideas and styles. Ideal for talented artists to grow and to foster fame in Florence.

This London exhibition makes the case for the 1300-1350 era being a critical moment in Siena’s art history. Firstly, Siena was an important banking centre in Western Europe, leading to prosperity and to art patrons. This was true for private devotional objects or for more public displays of faith and wealth. Secondly Siena was a cosmopolitan place to meet new ideas. Eg see how Sienese artists encountered Gothic works from France and adapted them into their own context. Thirdly there is a whole section on textiles which came from the east and found their way into art works. Siena’s status as a trade centre and a pilgrimage route stop from Canterbury to Rome enabled this cultural exchange.

In the decades pre-1350, Siena was the site of fine artistic innovation and activity. Drawing on the quality collections of  NY Met and National Gallery London, as well as loans from other major lenders, the exhibition includes 100+ works by remarkable Sienese artists. It features paintings, metal work, sculptures and textiles. And this shared exhibition with The Met focuses on the artists noted above.

Simone Martini, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342

National Museums Liverpool

Why did the glory era end in 1350? The Black Death/bubonic plague was ruining Europe, Asia and Africa’s people. And being a trade centre, on a pilgrimage route, became dangerous; Siena suffered as most cities and towns did. It had been easier for artists to work on commissions in times of peace & stability. Fortunately Siena’s artistic efforts did have a lasting influence, post plague.

A public display of intimate objects was created for private devotion. With 100+ exhibits made by artisans working in Siena, Naples, Avignon and beyond, see some of Europe’s earliest, most significant art works. The London and the Met’s shows are used to bring together the very best.

It is important to focus on the artists singly. By seeing many examples of their work, visitors can examine their style, themes and the commissions the artists received. Focusing on artists who knew each other personally and professionally also gives a sense of Siena’s artistic community. The exhibition’s individual biographies allow viewers to consider how each career met the city’s civic, religious and political institutions. Each depiction of the Virgin Mary, patron saint of Siena, was important.

The art space suits the biographical approach and the curators’ notes are great. The visitors can set the scene with a few Byzantine-style icons helping them understand why these Sienese paintings are innovative and thematic. Duccio was the earlier of the artists, so start with him and then, in the central space, see the other artists...and their legacy.

What was confusing was the change of individual artists and broader themes eg the artistic and historic background first, followed by Duccio. His masterpiece, the Maestà altarpiece for Siena Cathedral, occupies the hub of the hub and spokes. 2 of the spokes focus primarily on major works by Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti. But look at connections between this Lorenzetti and sculptor Tino di Camaino. Then at religious devotional objects and the depiction of textiles, and work by the Lorenzettis.

Alas the exhibition kept switching to broader themes before it finished with the biographical approach. Surely the layout is chronological, explaining why the artists come in order, with contemporary trends inserting themselves in between. 

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Annunciation 1344.
Tempera and gold leaf on panel, 122 x 116 cm
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena

One of the interesting legacies of this generation of Sienese painters is how their influence extended beyond Siena eg to the Papal Court in Avignon. Martini played a pivotal role there, taking Sienese painting to Avignon in 1330s and dying there in 1344. His works helped transmit the elegance, linear refinement and emotional nuance of Sienese painting.

The emphasis on grace, storytelling and beautifully controlled surfaces marked the International Gothic style. While the rest of the exhibition shows Sienese artists featuring French Gothic & Northern European styles, see Siena’s influence on France’s, Bohemia’s and early Dutch art.

The Sienese commitment to story-telling and decorative richness left a clear mark, separate from the Florentine emphasis on anatomy and emotion. So while Siena’s Golden Age was short, its visual language lived on in courts and church settings where visual rhetoric overcame naturalism.

Duccio’s Maestà panels haven’t been together for ages. A great example is Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych where the diptych and triptych joined together in a multiple altarpiece. This devotional work was done for Card. Napoleone Orsini. Close it like a book, open it to an Annunciation scene or totally unfold it to reveal Christ’s tragic end. This show reunites them after being in the Louvre, Belgium and Berlin.

Duccio 's Maesta altarpiece, 1308-11

Siena Cathedral 

After centuries of separation, the exhibition reunited panels that once formed part of Duccio’s monumental Maestà altarpiece. Panels from Martini’s glittering Orsini work finally came together. Gilded glass, ivory Madonnas, illuminated manuscripts, rugs and silks show the creative energy flowing between European artists.

Many thanks to saltertonartreview. And enjoy Joanna Cannon’s book Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–50, 2024