World's Most Visited Art Galleries

According to the The Art Newspaper 's annual international survey published in April 2009, The Louvre in Paris took the top spot as the world's most attended mus­eum, as you might expect. Centre Pompidou in Paris was second, then the Tate Modern in London, British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria was the most visited art gallery in Australia. With 1.48 million visitors in 2007-08, it also ranked among the publication’s top 25 most popular art museums in the world. Since Melbourne (3.85 million) doesn’t have the population of Cairo-Tokyo-New York-London-Paris-Mexico City, nor the history of Vienna-Berlin-Paris-Rome-Jerusalem-London, this is an impressive feat.

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National Gallery of Victoria, front entrance

When it came to individual exhibitions, Nara National Museum (850 ks west of Tokyo) won the 13th annual survey with a display of items from Shoso-in, the imperial treasure house of the Todai-ji Temple. It had an average daily attendance of 12,700 people. The Tokyo National Museum ranked second with a display of national treas­ures from the Yakushi-ji Temple. In third place was the Grand Palais Nave in Paris, a large exhibition hall which reopened in 2005 after long renovations. The Nave saw an average of 10,350 people per day for a display of digital art including film, videos and instal­lations. Madrid's Reina Sofia (which exhibition?) came next and a large-scale exhibition of Van Gogh's works made the Albertina in Vienna the next most popular gallery programme.

How close were Claude Lorraine and JMW Turner?

The National Gallery in London has an exhibition called Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude which will continue until 5th June 2012. According to the gallery, it is the most in-depth examination of Turner's experience of Claude's art. The exhibition includes oils, watercolours and sketchbooks, and introduces visitors to the story of the Turner Bequest and its importance in the history of the National Gallery.

Claude, Seaport With the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648. Nat Gall

J.M.W Turner (1775-1851) himself understood well the connection between the two artists; on his death, Turner bequeathed the National Gallery two paintings, on condition that the works were hung between two pictures by Claude Lorraine (1600-82)! The final room of the current exhibition has collected and displayed archive material dedicated to the relationship between Turner's bequest and the Gallery.

Turner, Dido Building Carthage, 1815. National Gallery

So my question to the Gallery is: how real was the connection between the 17th century Frenchman who lived in Italy … and the 19th century Englishman who loved Claude’s work, even before he made his first visits to France, Switzerland and Italy?

The longer Claude lived in Italy, the more his paintings became classical, monumental and sensitive to the effects of light. One of his important mid-life paintings was Seaport With the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, painted in 1648. Many of Claude's paintings were concerned with travel, but here he created an imaginary seaport to depict the unusual story of Sheba’s and Solomon’s separation. The classical architecture was stunning, dwarfing the human beings and even dwarfing the ships.

I believe that during the Italian decades, Claude was always Claude. So the comparison between the two artists stands or falls on which Turners were selected. Country Life 21/3/2012 aptly chose the National Gallery’s own Dido Building Carthage 1815, identifying it as one Turner’s most direct salutes to Claude. The seascape was also concerned with an imaginary seaport, with ancient architecture and human beings, but this time the sky was hazier and the water darker than in Claude’s vision.

Turner, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate c1840. Tate

Perhaps comparing Turner to Claude became less tenable after Turner’s first visit to central Italy in 1819 and his second visit a few years later (in 1828). Then a middle aged man, Turner soon discovered that Claude’s idealised classicism was not real, and perhaps it never had been. For all the beauty of Claude’s landscape, 19th century Italy was very different. Modernity itself was very different!

Turner’s later painting Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate c1840 (Tate London) was a very different kettle of fish, owing nothing to Claude. Instead of classical ruins, depicted in minute detail and lit by a pale blue sky, Turner’s drama came from an extremely rough sea. The sky above looked ominous and in the distant coast, the viewer could almost detect the outlines of the town’s harbour wall and lighthouse. Turner no longer bothered with minutely depicted architecture, classical or otherwise. The wild sea and sky were now his subjects.

Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, 1840, Boston MFA

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying was also painted in 1840 and once again focused on wild and romantic seas and skies. However the details were intentionally very difficult to detect and the viewer had to rely on Turner's title, when first analysing the contents. The ship in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water, left alive human bodies thrown overboard. Brutal yes, but with more of an emphasis on wild nature than on human brutality.

Agnon House Museum, Jerusalem. Nobel Prize winner!

What was a relatively uneducated young man from the Ukraine, Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, doing winning a Nobel Prize for literature? Shmuel who?

Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes(1887-1970), a rabbi’s son, learned Hebrew texts from his father and European literature from his mother. In 1908 the family emigrated to Israel, but as soon as he could leave his parents’ Jaffa home, he pursued his studies in Germany in 1912. Germany was where Shmuel Yosef laid eyes on Esther Marx, argued with her father about whether a writer could make a reliable and supportive husband, married her anyhow and had two children. And Germany was where the would-be author had his first book published.

Agnon House Museum, Jerusalem

Shmuel Yosef was writing constantly in Germany and, without gainful employment, might have starved in his writer’s garret. Fortunately he met the successful publisher Salman Schocken (1877-1959) in Berlin during the war, a man who solved the entire publishing dilemma. Only one early manuscript was not published; a completed novel was destroyed in a fire in Shmuel and Esther's home in 1924.

Devastated by the loss of his own writings and by the destruction to his library, Agnon decided to return to Jerusalem alone, intending to bring his family along at some stage in the future. Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes was a difficult name to carry around, so when he returned to live in Israel in 1924, he changed it to the much simpler and more literary Shai Agnon. I bet Mrs Esther Czaczkes was surprised to hear her beloved husband answering to a totally new name.

Agnon's library was hit for a second time when his Jerusalem house was destroyed during the appalling Arab riots of 1929. For a writer to lose his library, twice, would be like a painter to lose his eyes or a surgeon to lose his fingers. So Agnon had no choice but to build a new house.

Agnon's upstairs study and library

I love Israel’s modernist Bauhaus architecture, built largely in Tel Aviv from 1930-WW2. But I didn’t expect the harsh, white, undecorated shape of Bauhaus architecture in Jerusalem. Thankfully Agnon never had to move from his 1931 Talpiot house for the rest of his life. He had moved enough in his life.

I don’t suppose Agnon was an easy husband or a supportive father to his wife and children. Linda Gradstein described a man who lived a modest, religious life and insisted his family did too. The author tolerated just four folding chairs for visitors, no hot water for showers, no meat and no access to the one big library room upstairs to anyone other than the great man himself.

Even when Schocken was Aryanised by the Germans in 1939, Agnon got lucky. The publishing house moved to Israel under the same name and continued the role it had played in Germany. We can identify the following books as Agnon’s novels, all published of course by Schocken: The Bridal Canopy, 1932; A Simple Story, 1935; A Guest for the Night, 1939; Only Yesterday, 1946; Shira, 1971 and In Mr. Lublin's Store, 1974. He also wrote books of short stories, collected letters, novellas and non-fiction.

Throughout his career, Agnon was recognised by his literary peers. He was twice awarded the Bialik Prize for literature (1934, 1950). And he won the prestigious Israel Prize for literature, twice (1954, 1958). However the peak of Agnon's literary life was winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. In fact he shared it with the wonderful German Jewish writer Nelly Sachs (1891-1970).

Shai Agnon, after winning the Nobel Prize

The City of Jerusalem bought the house in 1970, the same year that Agnon died, and eventually turned the building into a museum. In the last few years, renovations were made to restore the building to how it appeared during Agnon's lifetime. Reopened in Jan 2009, the upstairs library and study, including Agnon's large book collection, is the most interesting part of the house-museum.

Visitors and students can now inspect archival photographs, documents, recordings made by the writer, letters, manuscripts and copies of special editions of his works. Older citizens like myself can review the published material while enjoying coffee and cake on the typical Bauhaus roof terrace. Bliss.

Despite Agnon’s themes being clearly Jewish, there was also something universally appealing about them. His works have been translated into just about every language under the sun, including for societies who would never have seen a Galician-Ukranian-Israeli-German in their midst.

Israeli fashions and Israeli politics: 1934-85

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between the political values held by the people in a nation, and the clothes that a nation manufactures and wears. But if anyone needs to be convinced that the connection is real, consider the 1960s in the British countries that I knew well.

No self-respecting, progressive young woman in 1965 would buy her clothes in any shop other than the Handicrafts of Asia chain. The cotton clothes she bought from those shops made a clear political statement that the young woman was concerned about the following:
 1. natural (and not synthetic) materials;
 2. the rights of women workers in Third World countries;
 3. owning cheap, long lasting dresses;
 4. ignoring the dictates of fashion houses in Paris and Milan; and
 5. defying her mother’s tastes.

My Gap Year programme, 1966, Jerusalem. Dancing dresses 

In Israel, even more so than in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Consider the changes that took place in Israeli society from the 1930s (a time of mass migration from Nazi Europe) to the 1980s (when capitalism ran rampant). Just 50 years! The country’s worldview used to draw its inspiration from draining the malarial swamps via shared labour (even if most citizens had always lived in cities), and providing for the welfare and education of every citizen, regardless of his income level.

The Ata Textile Factory, that was founded in Kfar Ata near Haifa in 1934, was fascinating. It was established by the Moller family, Czech Jewish industrialists, at a time when the nation’s most important social organisations were the trade unions (Histadrut) and the Labour government. By 1946, Ata had over 900 workers living in Kiryat Ata, all enjoying the community rights that made life pleasant eg housing, childcare and subsidised groceries.

In addition to the socio-economic story, the history of Ata also relates the story of the factory and its textiles i.e the physical appearance of Israeli society. Israel’s workers and soldiers wore Ata clothing, as did members of youth movements. When every prime minister in the world would have worn a suit and tie, David Ben Gurion proudly chose khaki shirt and slacks that suggested he was a man of the people, a worker of the land. Sandals were de rigeur.

One of the primary values behind ATA clothing was national solidarity. The factory's fashionable products in its early years included a drill fabric called Army and a cotton satin called Officer. There were only four colours available - khaki, white, black and blue.
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David Ben Gurion, prime minister from 1949-1963 (except for 2 years).

How do I remember this so clearly? I lived in Israel in the middle 1960s.

In the 1960s, Ata realised the company needed to modernise its image so they established a female apparel division called Splendid Model. They started creating fashionable dresses in bright colours, not hippy but certainly reflecting the 1960s zeitgeist. But the times were changing faster than Ata was. The State of Israel was moving towards a capitalist model, raising the threat of privatisation, cutting the economy off from governmental management and making large cuts in welfare budgets. It was a tragedy for workers, but a great boon to industrialists. Soon urban and bourgeois Israelis preferred more stylish clothing from abroad, and they wouldn’t touch the old Ata lines with a barge pole.

The history of the Ata Company has been displayed at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, revealing the economic, political and social changes that took place in Israeli society during the most important decades in the state’s short history. The exhibition is called Factory, Fashion and Dream. It displays these national memories in a broad historical context, moving FROM pioneering spirit, workers’ rights, concern for the community and a commitment to basic, somewhat utilitarian clothes. It moves TO a rolling back of workers’ rights, modernity, private greed and lack of interest in the history of the state.

Ata: Factory, Fashion and Dream exhibition, Tel Aviv Museum

It was no wonder that the Ata factory closed down in 1985. Yet even then, the 3,000 Ata workers thought the government would save them from unemployment and poverty. It did not. The government stood aside, allowing a core part of Israeli society to close and workers to be cut adrift. For decades ATA had symbolised prosperous Israeli industry, proletarian pride and a struggle for the work place. Its closure meant that the sense of idealism, always a core part of Israeli identity, ended as well.

Modern women in Belle Epoque Paris

Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is on view at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane from March- 24th June 2012. The famous French artists of the late C19th and early C20th who celebrated the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque included Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin and the occasional woman artist like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. For a complete list of artists whose works were included in this exhibition, see QAG.

It is not coincidental that so few women artists are represented in the Modern Woman exhibition. Since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women until 1897, all the female art students in Paris had to find an alternative, less prestigious school that would accept them. Or, if their families had plenty of money, some women students were able to study privately with an established male artist. Fortunately Académie Julian, founded by Rodolphe Julian in 1868, accepted women; but even there the male students and female students were trained separately.

Worse still was the constant chaperoning that women artists had to endure. Berthe Morisot mother’s totally banned her from going to unsuitable places (eg dances, winebars, cabarets, the beach) and chaperoned her when she went to suitable places. Artist Marie Bashkirtseff was forbidden from participating in Paris’ cultural night life, never being exposed to the wonderful events that male artists used as themes for their own art works.

Folies Bergère poster by Leonetto Cappiello, 1900. Musee d’Orsay

What holds the various artists and styles together? Firstly, as the gallery points out, modern artists increasingly moved away from idealised representations of the female figure. In particular the artists abandoned the idea of the female as a goddess, virgin or idealised allegorical figure.

Secondly the artists stopped focusing largely on aristocratic or wealthy women, and started looking at ordinary women from every part of society. The artists seemed interested in women’s family lives, in working roles and enjoying leisure time activities. Ordinary women in city streets, coffee shops and cabarets!

For art to be truly modern, it had to reflect its own era. So the gallery’s third aim was to show French society going through a radical change in political, social and artistic life. For those who had a reliable income, life was musical, optimistic and colourful. Women didn't have the vote yet, but their lives were becoming more valued and meaningful. Science and medicine were improving rapidly.

Of course in 1900 they didn't know that industrial-strength massacres were just around the corner (in 1914).

Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman at her Toilette, 1896. Musee d’Orsay

It is no surprise that the drawings for the Brisbane exhibition came from Musée d'Orsay, housed in the former Orsay Railway Station in Paris. The works were selected from the 10,000 drawings of d'Orsay's graphic arts collection, a collection visited by millions of people each year. If any one city was going to sum up all that was special about late C19th culture… it was Paris.

I agree with Angela Goddard, curator of Australian Art in Brisbane. The image of woman, in all its ambiguity and diversity, became the face of modernity. And in the unrehearsed immediacy of these drawings, we can glimpse a sense of the fleeting sensations that characterised La Belle Époque.

A number of reviews have noted that this exhibition concentrates on drawings rather than the larger works in oils by Renoir and his colleagues. Thus, they suggest, we are provided with a more intimate portrait of the people and times, and especially the changing roles of women. Is this true? Are drawings more intimate by definition?

What I did not like was the apparently intimate title Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers. These women were definitely not the daughters of the artists, a fact that becomes clear from some rather sexy images of women getting undressed, lying in bed and washing in the bath. The models in the art works may have been someone's daughters and lovers, but to the viewer they were ordinary, modern women, going about their daily life in bustling Paris. And surely that was the entire aim of the exhibition.

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Tissot, Sunday at the Luxembourg Gardens. Private collection

In one of those super feats of timing, Fashion Is My Muse is currently displaying the art works of James Tissot. Tissot left London for Paris in 1882 and reintroduced himself to his countrymen with an ambitious and provocative series of 15 pictures entitled La Femme à Paris. La Femme á Paris showcased the modern Parisian woman during the very period of rapid change that the Brisbane exhibition was interested in, the late C19th. Tissot’s series illustrated women from a range of income levels and occupations, rendered in precise detail using high key colours. Hopefully these Tissots are in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

William Nicholson and Canada's WW1 generals

I saw the catalogue William Nicholson, British Painter and Printmaker 1872-1949, but only took notice of this artist because he went on to become Ben Nicholson’s father.

No starving artist was William Nicholson. He was born into a prosperous Nottinghamshire family who made their money from the ironworks that specialised in agricultural machinery. When William was in primary school, his father was elected a Tory MP and a year later the son was sent to a classy boarding school.

Luckily for William, the nightmare of being in a boarding school was relieved by the intervention of the drawing master who encouraged and coached the lad. Eventually the young man went to Paris to study life drawing at the Académie Julian, only recently the home of founder members of the Nabis, passionate about Gauguin’s art. For William, the Louvre was another French joy where he developed an interest in C17th Spanish painting, making copies of a Velásquez’s works.

My interest in William Nicholson was piqued in relation to WW1. Although not necessarily a painter of modern life, a number of works relating to the war suggested he understood the mechanisation of slaughter very well. Thus the very large painting called Canadian Headquarters Staff, with its group of officers semi-posed against a backdrop-photograph of the bombed-out Cloth Hall at Ypres, became very important.

Firstly it was commissioned in 1917 as part of a commemoration of Canadian sacrifice and heroic effort in the Great War. The painting, on loan in 2004-5 to the Royal Academy from the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, had never been exhibited before outside Canada.

Secondly it was huge (2.4 x 3.1 ms), cleverly designed and not at all absorbed with nationalist glamour and theatrical drama. If the commissioners of the painting had hoped to see glorious Canadian soldiers on rearing horseback a la Napoleon, they would have been sorely disappointed.

Nicholson, Canadian Headquarters Staff, 1918. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa.

I would love to see the original brief – what did the commissioners of this painting want Nicholson to depict? What did they hope the painting would say to its Canadian audiences? The painting, originally commissioned by Lord Beaverbrook but quickly forgotten, was rediscovered in the vaults of the Canadian War Museum. Nicholson captured the officers in the moments before they sat for an official portrait. Unconventional for the officers' ordinary stance, it has been argued that Nicholson may have viewed his subjects with cynicism. Well, YES! But we don’t even know if the painting was properly finished or not by 1918.

The six senior officers, 5 generals and a major, could have been about to roll up their papers and go off for a spot of tea. So what set the scene firmly in the nightmare of WW1? Their uniforms of course, smart, polished and clearly Canadian. And behind their heads was a full length backdrop on the wall. The Cloth Hall of Ypres behind them was a still from the dreadful newsreel of destruction and misery that had shocked the world. In sepia.

William Feaver wrote “what Nicholson was at pains to suggest could only be that the generals’ responsibilities were, so to speak, their backdrop. Cause and effect loomed over them. Their troops had proved themselves at the Second Battle of Ypres, in April 1915; they had been the first to suffer onslaught by poison gas; Ypres had become a ruin. And here, in his studio, with his civilian hat and coat laid on the chair at the left, Nicholson created a war tableau devoid of both poignancy and bellicosity”.

The Telegraph said he painted in a bravura style that we associate with late Victorian and Edwardian artists such as John Singer Sargent. So historically, William belonged at the tail end of the C19th's dialogue between painting and photography, not at the beginning of the C20th's analysis of the nature of visual, spiritual and psychological experience.

Yet … yet…. William was still working on the picture when, a month before the war ended, he learned that his own son Tony had been killed in battle. Nothing can ever prepare parents for the death of their child, even in war time. So perhaps Feaver was correct; the generals paraded not authority but wariness. The generals KNEW what ordinary mothers and fathers could only FEAR.

Nicholson was knighted in 1936. All in all, we assume he would have happily given his knighthood back, if only it would have brought his son Tony back to life.

World's favourite art galleries

In light of the The Art Newspaper 's annual international survey published each year on the most attended museums, I thought I would ask other art-related bloggers which their favourite art gallery was.

Bruce at Victorian History has already indicated his preferences. "My own personal favourites are Musée d'Orsay with its wonderful displays of both the impressionists and the post-impressionists, and the Musée Marmottan with its Monets, including some absolutely delightful caricatures".

Kristin at ArtEco was totally rapt in the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris. Gustave Moreau was a symbolist painter that turned his home into a museum in 1903, so that the paintings are still hanging where he left them.

Hermes at Victorian Paintings noted that his favourites were Bristol City Galleries; Fitzwilliam, Cambridge; Tate Gallery, London; and Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.

One of my favourites is The Wallace Collection at Hertford House in Manchester Square, London. This may seem surprising since I am not a huge fan of 18th century French paintings and decorative arts. But the idea of using the architecture of a home to amass and display that very home's own collections is irresistible. I almost expect the Marquess of Hertford to wander down the hall to do a spot of dusting.

The Wallace Collection

So what is your favourite gallery? All I need is a Comment with the name of the gallery, the city where it is located and a few lines on why you like spending time there.

My unscientific guess was that people associated with art, as lecturers/curators/collectors/artists or bloggers, would not necessarily select the world's biggest and most famous galleries - the Louvre in Paris; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Tate Modern in London, British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Let me refer you to one quick survey. The Guardian newspaper asked The expert panel: which is your favourite art gallery? in May 2008 and their results were as follows: The Serpentine, Kensington Gardens London; Museum of Modern Art in New York; Guggenheim Bilbao; the Neue Galerie New York; Kerlin Gallery in Dublin; the Ingleby in Edinburgh; Paul Stolper, an independent gallery in east London; the Prado in Madrid. This list provided quite an interesting mixture of the world-famous and the more local.

St Ives School - who says artists must suffer for their art?

St Ives was always a pretty fishing area of Britain, and the Porthmeor studios were opened for business as early as 1815 (probably originally built for something fish-related). This suggests that by the later C19th, keen artists were building their studios on top of the fishermen's cellars.

Nonetheless the town wasn’t a realistic destination for most travellers until the extension of the Great Western Railway in 1877.

St Ives and its beach

As a result, much of the town was built during the later C19th when the permanent population increased marginally and the number of visitors increased substantially. Note the British-American artist James Whistler and his pupil, English impressionist painter Walter Sickert. Note also Australian ex-pat artist Emanuel Phillips Fox who settled at St Ives in 1890 and met the artist Ethel Carrick there in 1901. They soon married each other.

Map locating St Ives, far SW tip of England

Railway poster, advertising Cornwall (what date?)

Even then, it took some time before art critics recognised the area as a centre for creativity. The first event that established the town on the national scene was when an art pottery studio was established in St Ives in 1920 by Bernard Leach. Then in 1928, painters Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Christopher Wood (1901–30) visited St Ives and loved what they saw. So I am suggesting that the 1920s was the first important decade in the development of the Cornish fishing port as an artists' colony.

Christopher Wood met and became quite close to Ben Nicholson in 1926 and soon moved to Cornwall to paint and to exhibit together. Wood said he painted coastal scenes because he loved the sea, he loved primitive landscapes and because his family had always messed around in boats. What a tragedy that he died, at his own hand, aged 29.

Formed in 1927, the St Ives Society of Artists flourished during the 1930s and 1940s, attracting manyof the artists who had painted in Cornwall either permanently or as a visitor. Members included some of my favourite C20th artists: Stanhope Forbes, Frank Brangwyn, Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings and Stanley Spencer. Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940, aged 28, and "went native".

Porthmeor Studios, overlooking St Ives' beach

 
Ben Nicholson married the sculptress Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) in 1938 and with the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, they decided to settle in St Ives for the long term. They were soon joined by the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo (1890–1977). Gabo had moved from Russia to Munich and Paris (amongst other cities) for many years and didn’t settle in Britain until 1936. Locals looked on in amazement as the artists made sleepy old West Cornwall trendy.

Trewyn Studio, purchased by Nicholson and Hepworth in 1949, was no bigger than many other stone-built houses in the town. The war had ended and a new, younger generation of artists emerged, led by the star couple. This second generation of artists also made the Cornish coast their home and continued using the term The St Ives School. The 1950s were tough years for most Brits but St Ives’ modern artists were doing well.

Hepworth Museum, interior space

After their divorce, Barbara Hepworth continued to live in the St Ives house and died there in 1975, aged 72. Trewyn Studio, now The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, was opened the very next year (1976) by her family, following the plan she outlined in her will. The Museum has been run by the Tate, almost since it opened to the public. It displays a representative group of her sculptures, permanently available to the public, both inside the house and outside in the garden she loved.

So St Ives is a stunning beautiful place for an art museum; plus it is totally appropriate for a Hepworth museum ...since she lived and worked in the town.

Hepworth Museum, garden sculptures

The Tate St Ives is a totally separate art gallery and is worth a visit for its architecture and spectacular location on Porthmeor Beach alone. Exhibitions vary throughout the year and may be accompanied by lecture series. The population of St Ives is probably under 12,000 people, so I am assuming that the lectures and exhibitions are held partially to attract outsiders.

The Tate St Ives, facing the beach

Bernard Leach continued potting in St Ives until 1972 with his students and apprentices, and died in 1979. The pottery remained open under the direction of Bernard's wife and then after her death in 1999, it was bought by a local businessman. The Pottery Cottage, next to the Leach pottery, is now open as a museum, focusing on the output of talented potters throughout the 1920-2000 era.

Studio pottery from Bernard Leach, Pottery Cottage St Ives

 

Christopher Wood, St Ives Cornwall, 1928. British Art Fair

House Museum of Anna Ticho (1894-1980)

I have always liked the idea of an artist’s work being shown in the family home that the artist once lived in. Consider, for example, Rembrandt’s home in Amsterdam, Durer’s home in Nuremberg or Ruben’s home in Antwerp. The idea of a house-museum seems more authentic than a multi-artist, multi-era gallery built decades after the artist’s death. I say “seems” more authentic because who is to say that this family home was the only house, or even the most important house that the artist lived in, during his adult career?

Ticho House, Jerusalem

Anna Ticho was born in Moravia in 1894. It was then then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today is in the Czech Republic. She moved with her family to Vienna when she was still in primary school and later enrolled in art school in Vienna. Anna married opthal­mologist Dr Albert Abraham Ticho just before war broke out, and moved to Damascus with her husband who served in the Austrian Army.

When Dr Ticho was discharged after war ended, they emigrated to Israel. Pride of place was given in her new home to drawings she had brought with her from Vienna’s young and talented artists: Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka. The Tichos bought this house in 1924, one of the first Ottoman houses in Jerusalem built outside the old city walls. It was not huge, but it was perfectly suited to the climate and landscape of the city. They converted the lower storey into an eye clinic which was busy until Dr Ticho died.

Ticho House garden restaurant

Anna Ticho was busy running her husband’s medical practice and running the home, so there didn’t seem to be as much time for art as she would have liked. Her drawings of figures and Jerusalem landscape were done from nature, using the familiar hills, rocks and olive trees around the city as source material. Perhaps the barren Jerusalem landscape encouraged Ticho to turn to sketching and water colours, not oil painting. The stony Judean Hills, treeless and human-free, lent themselves to rather austere sketches.

Only later, said Irit Salmon, did Ticho treat subjects such as dissolution and abandonment, depicting trees, houses, and aging people. She drew the maze of rooftops of the houses of the Old City stretching to the horizon above their opaque windows, creating a delicate interplay between stones and windows interwoven with domed roofs. She moved to earthy tones.

The Jerusalem house had to be comfortable and elegant. The Tichos were always active in Jerusalem’s social and cultural life, including involving themselves in the foundation of Bezalel Art School. After her husband’s death, Anna continued to live and work in the same house until her own death in 1980.

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Galleries
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Anna bequeathed the house, its library and its collections to the city, for use as a public art gallery of her own work. And it’s not just Ticho’s own work on display. The museum wanted ex­hib­­itions that would fit in and be inspired by Anna Ticho and Ticho House. So they chose a range of media, including painting, photo­gr­aphy and video to explore issues of living spaces and women in art. I enjoyed "A Room of Her Own", an exhibition of women in portraiture from the 19th century on.

Ticho, Jerusalem Hills .......... Vuillard, Misia on Chaise Longe

New art galleries: Alicante in Spain, and three in France

Spain

Alicante is the capital of the Spanish Province of Alicante, in the south of the country near Valencia. The population of this Mediterranean port is about 340,000.

Like Holon in Israel, I suspect Alicante is a small city trying to market itself as a cultural centre. Two interesting sites have existed in the town for a long time. Firstly the Archaeological Museum, located in a renovated old Alicante hospital of San Juan de Dios. Exhibits include valuable finds from the Paleolithic era found in different sites in and around Alicante. Secondly Gravina Fine Arts Museum houses the art collection of the Alicante County Council, from the Middle Ages until 1900. The museum is located in a C17th building that was specifically converted for Gravina.

Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain.
See the modern extension to the right of the original 17th century building.

Now another important museum has opened. Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art is in the Old Quarter of town. It houses a major collection of C20th art, based largely on the works donated by Eusebio Sempere; his entire private collection of modern art! Here I am at a slight disadvantage since I was in Alicante for only a short time, don’t know much about Eusebio Sempere and I am much stronger academically on art painted before 1930.

From what I can find, Eusebio Sempere (1923-85) was born in Alicante and did his training in the visual arts locally, at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos de Valencia. In 1948 he moved to Paris with a scholarship to continue his studies. There he established contact with avant-garde artist like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Matisse and Klee. His favourite technique became the silkscreen, often using abstract and geometric elements. In 1960 he moved to Madrid. In 1964, Sempere had an exhibition in the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

Casa de La Asegurada (1685) is the oldest and most baroque civil building in Alicante. The building has had a long and varied history - it has previously been a granary and a business school, but since 1977 has been home to a contemporary art gallery which houses one of the most important C20th art collections existing in Spain today. Donated by local artist and sculptor, Eusebio Sempere, the art objects includes paintings, sculptures, mixed technique and lithographs by Spanish artists like Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. The collection also includes non-Spanish artists like Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky.

The museum was closed for major extension works and re-opened in 2011. Although the gallery walls are stark, this museum is worth visiting as it is located within Alicante's old architecture, opening onto the Plaza Santa María. And the museum is located next to the Santa Maria Basilica, a C14th gothic church built above an Islamic mosque. Most importantly the museum competes with Madrid, offering access to famous contemporary art works. And best of all, entry is free.

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Now to France.

Musee Bonnard, in Le Cannet, France 

Opened in June 2011, Musee Bonnard will be a treat for art history fans of Pierre Bonnard  (1867–1947). For the last 25 years of his life, Bonnard lived in the Cote d'Azur village of Le Cannet near Cannes, the perfect place for an artist who celebrated Mediterranean light. His sunlit rooms and gardens, filled with his wife Marthe and sundry relatives and friends, shined with intense colour. The opening exhibition starred 40 of his paintings, including Late Impressionist-Nabi landscapes and still-life paintings with textured surfaces.

Musee Lalique opened in July 2011. Immediately following the First World War, René Lalique (1860-1945) chose to build his factory in Wingen-sur-Moder, a village in northern Alsace. Today this is the only place where Lalique crystal is still produced, so it is sensible that a museum dedicated to his artwork, from small jewellery to large architectural looking objects, be located in Wingen.

Lalique art objects, Wingen-sur-Moder, France

Two-and-a-half hours southeast of Paris, in the part of Champagne that borders Burgundy, is a lovely little village where Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and his family spent 30 years of their happiest summers. Since February 2011, art pilgrims and visitors to Essoyes have been able learn about the life of the family in Renoir's studio, Du Côté des Renoir, and enjoy the landscape from vantage points where the artist painted. Visitors can also pay homage at his grave site in the local cemetery.

Du Côté des Renoir, Essoyes, France



Napoleon, The Briars and the Melbourne connection: The Balcombe family

Earlier this year I published a post about Napoleon's house in exile, on St Helena Island and noted that sections of the Napoleon’s island House Museum were crumbling and in urgent need of repair. An appeal has been launched by the Foundation Napoleon to rescue the house, its grounds and its woods, hopefully attracting tourists and historians back to St Helena.

What I didn’t know and didn’t mention in that post was that there was a connection between Napoleon Bonaparte, St Helena Island and Melbourne. His intended prison home, Longwood, was not finished by the time he arrived on the island in December 1815. So Bonaparte had to stay with the merchant and Purveyor for the East India Company William Balcombe (1779-1929). The prisoner lived in a garden pavilion on the family estate, The Briars, and according to all reports, Napoleon became particular friends with the family's youngest teenage daughter Betsy.

Betsy’s friendship with the “enemy” did not endear the Balcombes to the governor of St Helena. But it seems more likely that William was suspected of being an intermediary in clandestine correspondence with Paris. In either case, William Balcombe decided to return to Britain in 1818 with all his family. Napoleon, as it happened, died soon after.

An excellent blog called Reflections on A Journey to St Helena was very useful. It discussed why the Balcombe family lived in very straitened circumstances back in England and why the governor of St Helena might have eventually removed his objections to Balcombe's juicy new preferment, a government post as Colonial Treasurer in New South Wales in 1823.

The Briars 1842, Balcombe homestead near Melbourne

The Balcombe family eventually settled in Australia in 1824. William died after only a few years while still Treasurer (in 1829), leaving his widow with a handsome land grant but no pension. She returned to London to plead her case and the Colonial Office gave her money to return to Sydney, together with promises of government posts for her sons.

William’s son Alexander Balcombe (1811-77) took up lots of land at Mt Martha just outside Melbourne in 1840. He and his wife were creating a large family, so they quickly built a rough-hewn slab house, and called it The Briars. The 1842 Briars homestead, one of the oldest pastoral properties on the peninsula outside Melbourne, recalled The Briars home on St Helena Island.

The family prospered and Mrs Balcombe moved to East Melbourne sometime in the 1850s, first into a prefabricated house that used British materials and an Indian design. Then the Balcombes built a new and large house in East Melbourne c1857 which they called East Court. Alexander Balcombe must have been dividing his time between town and country. He settled down to pastoral pursuits and the life of a country squire, was appointed a magistrate in 1855 and was first chairman of the Mount Eliza Road Board from 1860 on.

Napoleon's own furniture, in The Briars museum near Melbourne

In another remarkable connection, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes (1890-1975), Australia’s most famous society and charity leader, was the granddaughter of Alexander Balcombe. She was the president of every charitable and cultural organisation in Melbourne. And she married well. Her husband Norman Brookes won Wimbledon in both the singles and doubles, and was later appointed commissioner for the Australian branch of the British Red Cross in Cairo. After the war ended, Norman resumed his previous employment at Australian Paper Mills Co. Ltd, becoming chairman in 1921. He too led a blessed life.

But it was Dame Mabel’s connection with Napoleon that most interests me here. In her older age, she wrote St Helena Story and had the book published in 1960. She wrote of her family's substantial collections of furniture, objets d'art, books and relics of Napoleon. She even purchased the freehold of the pavilion that Napoleon had occupied on her great-grandfather's estate on St Helena, and presented it to a grateful French nation in 1960.

Dame Mabel Brookes’ city home, East Court, had some of the furniture used by Napoleon on St Helena, a teak table used by both Wellington and Napoleon, a writing desk bearing Napoleon's kick marks on the lower panels and the Frenchman’s death mask. The Briars homestead near Melbourne is now a museum where visitors can see the Dame Mabel Brookes Napoleonic Collection. It includes furniture that Bonaparte shared upon his stay with the Balcombes, plus some of his hair, papers, letters, a legion d'honneur medal and artworks.

The St Helena Story 1960, a book written by William Balcombe's great grand daughter

I was interested to see a reference to Betsy Balcome Abell's book To Befriend an Emperor: Betsy Balcombe's Memoirs of Napoleon on St Helena, Welwyn Garden City, Ravenhall, 2005. Betsy, the little girl who had been so kind to Prisoner Napoleon, was the great aunt of our other author, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes.

The link between Napoleon Bonaparte, The Briars on St Helena Island, William Betsy and Alexander Balcombe, The Briars in Melbourne and Dame Mabel Brookes' Napoleonic Collection is irresistible. The Briars homestead-museum is open daily.

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The connection between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Australian politician Michael Kroger is less persuasive, but the timing (for my blog post) is sublime.  My Napoleon Obsession noted that Kroger collected a vast array of Napoleonic objets d'art in his Melbourne home, taking decades to amass imperial eagles, candelabras, clocks, vases, paintings, furniture and military paraphernalia. In October 2011, all these precious Napoleonic objects went up for auction in Paris. And left Melbourne for good.

Buyers of Napoleonic artefacts at the Paris auction did not seem to have been deterred by the Euro’s recent difficulties. A clock in Levanto marble, with rich gilt and bronze decoration, sold for €22,000. A watercolour pennant design for Napoleon's 2nd Artillery sold for €39,000. A post-abdication portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, made €39,000.

Portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, painted 1845 or after

Other collectors of Napoleonic artefacts existed, of course, including collectors I had written up in this blog. The Napoleon Room in Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, for example, was large enough to accommodate the sprawling 22-piece acanthus-tailed griffin suite of furniture designed for the Emperor's uncle, Cardinal Fesch. All the furniture and artefacts in the Napoleon Room were bought by Lord Lever specifically because of their associations with the French Emperor, although many of these associations have subsequently been brought into question. 

Leo and Gertrude Stein, salonieres or collectors?

When Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was 3 years old, the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English from childhood. Her father then moved the family back to the USA in 1879 but died suddenly in 1891, so the oldest brother Michael had to sustain the whole family.

Another brother, Leo Stein, moved back to Europe, painting and immersing himself in art in Florence. In 1903 Gertrude also moved back to Europe. She eventually ended up in Paris, with Leo, at a painting studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank. Their large independent income, which Michael and his wife Sarah sent each month, made a bohemian life-style in Paris easy to sustain.

How did the Leo and Gertrude Stein become so knowledgeable about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy an early work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson took both Steins under his wing in Florence.

I have lectured many times on the Steins as cultural salonieres, but the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is now suggesting that the family was more important as art collectors. I may change my mind, but I doubt it.

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, San Francisco Museum of Art

In 1905 Leo and Gertrude saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse at a crucial point in his art development. It was at a time when he and other avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press. Soon the Steins were visiting the Matisses socially.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s, who had turned a pharmacy into an informal art gallery. Soon after, the first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background, a rose-period nude of a girl. Then the Steins bought some works of Renoir, two Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and some Cézanne water colours.

The friendship with the Matisses cooled only when Gertrude developed a much greater interest in Picasso. But all was well since it was actually Michael and Sarah Stein who continued to collect Matisses in particular.

Etta and Claribel Cone were two wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimore women. Etta inherited her wealth at 27, giving her a handsome yearly income to spend. The Steins and Cones all travelled to Florence in1905 where Bernard Berenson introduced the Cones to art by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Friesz. The Steins took Etta to meet Picasso at his studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and persuaded Etta to buy Picasso drawings whenever that artist was short of funds.

Back left: Leo and Gertrude Stein, back right = Sarah and Michael Stein, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c1905.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905/6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his apartment over the Seine, and both sisters bought as many paintings and drawings as they could afford. Gertrude also sold the Cones a number of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a group portrait by Marie Laurencin that showed several of the regulars of the Stein salon, including Picasso.

Baltimore ultimately benefitted from the Cones' collecting.

27 Rue de Fleurus became the first real and permanent home for the Steins, and one that Gertrude remained in for 40 years. This is where the Steins provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris. They inspired, supported and, most importantly for the modernists, they bought art. Their home became known as a salon, with paintings covering all the wall space in their home. Works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne and others overflowed into every room of the household. Artists, writers and critics became frequent callers, for the Saturday night art parties.

Michael and Sarah Stein also held open house on Saturday nights, near the younger Steins, and the participants could move easily fromone home to the other. These evenings enabled the young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable collections of paintings by good artists. Their salons functioned as galleries.

Picasso, Nude on a Red Background, 1906, Musée de l'Orangerie Paris

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By this time Stieglitz was well acquainted with the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, and began to actively negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their massive art collection in his gallery. Other young modernist painters eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurençin, Robert Delaunay, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, frequented their salon.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was prepared to associate her reputation with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris frequently visited in the 1910s, finding Stein accepting of the more radical art styles that other people tended to reject out of hand.

For the newly arrived young Jewish artists from Eastern Europe, starving in their Paris garrets, the Steins’ salons filled with food and drink were also much appreciated. The Steins and Cones might have all been secularist Jews, but they went out of their way to help young Jewish artists arriving weekly from Eastern Europe, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani.

The fact that all the Steins, the Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas all spoke Yiddish or German as their mother tongue must have helped the young Eastern Europeans integrate, during their first difficult years in Paris. And, let me repeat, the endless supply of food and wine!

Alice B Toklas decided to sail from the USA to Europe and while in Paris, she was invited to a Saturday night party at #27. Toklas was soon besotted. She soon became a regular visitor and began going to the galleries and theatre with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into the rue de Fleurus household and became Gertrude's right hand woman, secretary, reader and critic.

But several years after Alice arrived, there was a family rupture. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a fan of Cubism. Gertrude and Alice visited Pablo Picasso at his studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Les Demoiselles was the work that marked the beginning of the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912, Gertrude and Alice took all the Picassos, Leo the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes. Leo moved to Italy, permanently!

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas in their art salon, rue de Fleurus.

The Steins had established the first “museum” of modern art. But the salon wound down with war breaking out in 1914, when Gertrude and Alice moved to Spain. However Gertrude still befriended people like writer Ernest Hemingway and designer Jean Cocteau. And Gertrude was still in close contact with Claribel Cone who happened to be in Munich when WWI broke out.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel rented a large apartment in the same building as Etta’s and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. The excellent Cone collection of art eventually entered the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Claribel Cone died in 1929, Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

The recent San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important and difficult-to-assemble paintings that haven’t been together since pre-WW1 Paris. The Stein collection had been divided and subdivided constantly among relative, friends, dealers and collectors. Gertrude and Leo traded back pictures to acquire new ones, a practice that made it difficult to track down their possessions. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein salon and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I am convinced the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, but in the long term less successful as collectors of art.

I hope people fascinated with the Paris salon saw The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA, May - September 2011. Second best would be getting hold of the catalogue.

Bristol, Brunel and British Empire history

Bristol Temple Meads railway station was the oldest and largest railway station in Bristol. The neo-Gothic building opened in 1840 as the western terminus of the Great Western Railway from Paddington station in London. The whole railway including Temple Meads was the first one designed by the most loved British engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Soon the station was also used by the Bristol and Exeter Railway, the Bristol and Gloucester Railway, the Bristol Harbour Railway and the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway.

Bristol Temple Meads railway station, built by Brunel in 1840 

The terminus included the passenger shed and the adjoining engine and carriage shed. It was 67 m long with timber and iron roof spans of 22 m. Even so, it had to accommodate an increasing number of trains, so the station was expanded firstly in the 1870s and again in the 1930s.

Sadly Brunel's terminus is no longer part of the operational station, closing in 1965. The architectural and historical significance of the station has been Grade 1 protected. Fortunately The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum opened in the old railway station in 2002, following expensive and extensive renovation (£8 million).

Its role was to explore the history of the British Empire and the effect of British colonial rule on the rest of the world. It aimed at presenting an even-handed version of imperial history, rather than automatically condemning or automatically glorifying the empire. This was probably an impossible goal, but it was always good to see left wing and right wing historians equally offended.

Exhibition space

Some 20 galleries packed with interactive exhibits told the story of the biggest empire the world has ever known. The museum had a good publications department, producing books on colonial life, and a register of titles of the regiments of the Honourable East India Company and East Indian Armies. And there was a collection of artefacts of the Commonwealth Institute; extensive archives for photographs, works on paper and historical films, and a costume collection.

The museum was also the home of an epic tapestry. The New World Tapestry was the largest stitched embroidery in the world, larger than the Bayeux Tapestry. It depicted English colonisation projects in Newfoundland, North America, the Guyanas and Bermuda between 1583-1642, when the English Civil War began. The 24 panels of the tapestry extended for 81.3 m in length and were 1.2 m high. It took from 1980 to 2000 to be completed.

Displays

The exhibition started with John Cabot’s first expedition in 1497 and continued until modern times. My favourite section was, naturally enough for an Australian, The Rise of Victoria's Empire (1800-1900). These galleries focused on the story of the Victorian empire, asking how Britain expanded and controlled its empire, how did Britain's empire work during the 19th century, who benefited from it, who left Britain to live or work abroad, and what did it feel like to live under British rule? Regarding Australia, for example, there were individual accounts of convicts transported to Australian penal settlements. And there was an attempt at measuring the impact of colonisation on Australia’s original inhabitants.

On the day I visited the Bristol Museum, our group included colleagues from Canada, New Zealand and South Africa who enjoyed the quality of the historical material, but we did not have any historians from the sub-continent, Singapore, Hong Kong or the West Indies. I wonder if the two groups would have reacted differently.

The passenger shed, mentioned above as being right next to the railway station, was not wasted. It was one of the largest performance venues in the South West.

Sadly for historically minded visitors, the museum announced it would be closing up and moving to London in 2008. What a shame. Bristol was a great site for the museum, given its key role as a major port in centuries past. Bristol was a transit point for international trade, including the transatlantic slave trade which was abolished in 1807.  And the old Brunel railway station provided a perfect exhibition space.

Bristol railways, old passenger shed

But the move did not take place as planned and it has since been announced that the planned move to London will not be completed until 2012. What has happened to all the displays, loaned objects and visitors? Can’t another site be used, until the final installation in London has been completed?

In the meantime, The M Shed is a different Bristol museum that opened in July 2011.  Bristol museums seem to be a movable feast. The new project is located in a dockside transit shed that was previously occupied by the Bristol Industrial Museum. It is chockablock full of Bristol artefacts and images, showing Bristol's role in the slave trade and exhibits on transport, the arts and local citizens. And outside the shed, moored in the docks, is a collection of historic vessels. The conversion will eventually cost a cool £27 million.

 The M Shed, Bristol. Opened July 2011

The National Maritime Museum of Cornwall in Falmouth has collections that consist of objects, boats, art, books and archives, all promoting the history of Cornwall, its maritime heritage and small boats. Much of the collection came from the former Cornwall Maritime Museum in Falmouth. The Small Boat Collection, which was orginally developed by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, is also housed in Cornwall where it has been extended by the addition of other British and international boats. Finally The National Maritime Museum Cornwall is the home to the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

I wouldn’t have added the Cornwall Maritime Museum into a discussion of Bristol, Brunel and and British Empire history, except for one link. The Falmouth museum put on lectures about Brunel the great engineer and the construction of his important ships and their legacy.