Art from across the globe

As our Art literature collection continues to expand, Stephen Town adds a splash of diversity to the selection.

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This week's donations contain an eclectic mix
of art and illustration

I spent last weekend going through my late mother’s book collections. She would never have called it a library, but it was very substantial and varied, reflecting her interests, profession, causes and beliefs. It incorporated my late father’s collection and those of both their forbears, spanning nearly a century of commitment to Yorkshire education, a family tradition which of course I also continue until my retirement.

I have selected four items from her collection to add to my donations, all relating to the history of art. Most of her books will go to broader charitable causes, as she would have wished, and her almost complete set of twentieth century crime writing may well be available for purchase in a charity shop near you very soon.

Beach & Koch: King of the World: the Padshahnama

My mother loved India and continued to visit well past the time the rest of the family considered it safe and sensible. This large and beautifully illustrated book was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the Mughal manuscript from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. The exhibition, organised by the Sackler Gallery, travelled across India, the UK and USA in 1997-98 and was part of the 5oth Anniversary celebrations of the independence of India and Pakistan. The book was the first time these illustrations had been published.

Neil MacGregor: Seeing salvation: images of Christ in Art

The Art section in our Library also has the National Gallery work arising from the millennial exhibition on which this book is based. But this work was produced by the BBC and accompanied a TV series shown in 2000, concentrating on the history of the artistic depiction of Christ. Parts of the holidays of my childhood were spent in galleries and churches across Europe, as a cultural alternative to walking and climbing. My mother had a strong faith, but as MacGregor suggests, these images can still speak powerfully to non-believers.

Pinkney: William Morris in Oxford

Like Morris, my mother was an Oxford student. Also like Morris, she was a strong believer in social justice, although in her later years this was expressed more through liberalism than socialism. This book focuses on Morris’ later life in Oxford, covering what the author describes as his campaigning years, as he took up architectural and social causes to transform the University and City.

Higgins & Robinson: William de Morgan

De Morgan was an arts and crafts potter, and a lifelong friend of William Morris. We already have a selection of works on De Morgan in the Library at LG 8.3, and this slim but copiously illustrated book will further enhance our collection. The pages contain some previously unillustrated designs for tiles, stained glass and pots, showing off his ‘fabulous animals, rich florals and flowing Persian curves’.

A Natural History of English Gardening

As we pass the half-way point in his Nightshelf series, Stephen Town starts to reflect on how he might spend his time after retirement.

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Laird, M., A Natural History of English Gardening, 1650 - 1800, in the University library at LA 2 LAI.

Garden pests come in all shapes
and sizes. Image reproduced from
our Special Collections

The most common assumption about retirement, and one strongly held by my wife, is that I will have more time for gardening when I retire. In truth, I may actually spend more time reading about gardening, and this book would be a good place to start. It is not exactly easy nightshelf material, as it is a large and sumptuously illustrated title, produced by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; coincidentally this is where our former History of Art colleague Mark Hallett is now Director of Studies.

This is, however, no coffee table book. Although, anyone interested might gain great pleasure just by looking at the illustrations. It is, as the Guardian reviewer suggested, a work of both scholarship and beauty. Mark Laird is a knowledgeable scholar and an accomplished writer, and he and the book have associations with our University, York and Yorkshire which are documented carefully in his acknowledgments.

Photo: Stephen Town. Redressing the balance between
nature and geometry in my own springtime garden.

The title was consciously chosen as a ‘natural history’ to reflect the multidisciplinary breadth of the subject of gardens, and is particularly interesting on the subject of weather in the period documented, which all we gardeners know can ‘subvert the best-laid schemes’. This book brings together successfully all those disparate elements which influenced the art, science and practice of gardening in the eighteenth century, in a set of chapter essays which could each be read alone. The book seeks to redress a perceived bias arising from Walpole in the perceptions of modern English garden taste for ‘nature’ and against geometry and formalism, as I also try to do in my own garden. The book also recovers the significant contributions of both women and amateurs to the development of gardens in this period.

Gardening is, in the end, a joy, and this book fully reflects that.


Further reading:

Books from the Garden History Society Special Collection can be found in King's Manor Library and the University's Special Collections located in the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

Civil servants and faithful hounds

Tom Grady gets a bit lost in the Library catalogue. 

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I was doing some research recently, trying to find pictures of greyhounds in the Library’s Art Gallery Gift Collection. It turns out they’re difficult animals to track down (in more ways than one). We have a few books devoted to ‘sporting and animal prints’ but most of the ones I found depicted only stilted hunting scenes, improbably high-stepping horses, and barrel-shaped pigs.

A fairly typical 19th century depiction of a pig. "Gloucester Old Spot by John Miles 1834" by John Miles.
 Photograph of original. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

And then I came across this book and - as is often the case - I got a bit sidetracked: The German drawings in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle by Edmund Schilling [London ; New York : Phaidon, 1971].

It has an innocuous-enough sounding sub-title: “Supplements to the catalogues of Italian and French drawings, with a history of the Royal Collection of Drawings, by Anthony Blunt” but the name caught my eye.

Anthony Blunt. The wartime Russian spy.

The scandal of a Soviet spy-ring at the heart of the 1940’s British establishment tends to be the main thing everyone remembers about Blunt (and Burgess and Philby). Clearly I’m as guilty as anyone of that but, among many other achievements Blunt was responsible for the Queen’s collection of pictures, and was the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art for 27 years. He also published respected works on Nicolas Poussin, William Blake and Picasso. We have a few of his books in the Library.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which you can access with your campus login):

In almost every sense he was a superb [Courtauld] director. He had a natural authority, an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, and a winning way with students and younger colleagues. Teaching more by example than by precept, he inspired those around him to give of their best. Under him the Courtauld became the principal centre for training art historians in Britain, with a worldwide reputation for excellence.
from www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30829

One of those younger colleagues was Brian Sewell, who went on to become the London Evening Standard’s art critic for decades. You may not know that as well as being a famously-acerbic critic of poor taste in art (“The public doesn't know good from bad” Guardian, 31 Aug 2009) Sewell is a passionate dog owner. He not only wrote a biography of all the dogs he’s owned and rescued (about 17 in total), but he has also commissioned and built an ostentatious tomb where he plans to be buried alongside the carefully-preserved bones of them all.

In a roundabout way, Brian Sewell’s canine mausoleum brings me back to where I began. Why did a book with a foreword by a former Russian spy catch my eye when I was actually looking for an illustration of a greyhound? Well, because this is on the front cover:

Detail from the cover of The German drawings in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle
by Edmund Schilling [London ; New York : Phaidon, 1971]

It's a funny-looking one and it's a bit hairier than most, but it's a greyhound nonetheless.

Further reading

If you’re interested in learning more about Anthony Blunt you can find Anthony Blunt : his lives by Carter, Miranda [London : Macmillan, 2001] in the Library; or for a fictionalised account of the days leading up to his fall from grace there’s Alan Bennett’s tremendous play “A Question of Attribution” which can be found in the Library along with its companion-piece “An Englishman Abroad”. They both appear in Single spies : a double bill or Plays: two and are both on the shelves at MA 192.9 BEN.

You could also try the book that precipitated Blunt’s fall from grace: Climate of Treason : Five Who Spied For Russia by Boyle, Andrew [Hutchinson & Co. Ltd ; London, 1979].

And if you’d like to know more about greyhounds, there are some fantastic groups around the country who rescue them from poor treatment at the hands of the racing industry. Here are two:

• www.greyhoundgap.org.uk
• www.houndsfirst.co.uk

There's an organised walk by the river in York on 21 June if you'd like to see some up close and maybe get a chance to walk a greyhound yourself. It's part of The Great British Greyhound Walk - an annual national event: www.greatbritishgreyhoundwalk.org.uk

Celebrating the York City Art Gallery donation.... with more art!

Stephen Town continues his Night Shelf donations with a bumper collection of titles from the history of art.

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Last week we welcomed York City Art Gallery staff and the Friends of the Gallery to a reception celebrating the donation of the Art Gallery’s book collection to the University Library. This has already been reflected in previous blog posts, but it has provided me with the opportunity to continue my own donations through a gift of five art history works from my own collection.

Photo: University of York reception to celebrate the donation
of the York City Art Gallery book collection to the Library (picture credit Paul Shields).

I hope that the books I am donating this week will supplement, in a small way, the acquisition of this substantial and rich Art Gallery stock. I accept that this is not really night shelf material, but Christmas calls for something special and personal, and for a combined gift to cover the weeks until I return in January.

One of the perceived difficulties for a relatively young University is to amass collections of the depth and breadth of more longstanding foundations. This is particularly true in the history of art field, in which, as Professor Prettejohn pointed out in the reception, physical books have a particular importance and weight, especially those with illustrations. The Art Gallery gift is therefore of great significance and value to the University’s academic work, as well as providing a new link to the wider York community. So I'd like to reiterate my thanks to the York City Art Gallery and all involved in the donation.

As a serious librarian, with at least some basic skills remaining, I did think to test the unique worth of my gifts against our own collections, including the York City donated collections, and also the national COPAC catalogue of seventy research university and specialist institutions. Fortunately all turn out to be unique additions to York.

Old Master Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection - exhibition catalogue

More than twenty-five years ago I was invited to a reception at the Royal Academy to view a collection of Old Masters from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. The invitation came through a potential library computer system supplier; this firm being part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group of companies. Similar opportunities rarely arise these days as modern day procurement rules quite rightly frown on such generosities. (As it turns out, we didn't buy that library system in the end!)

Old Master Paintings - exhibition catalogue

The collection was created by successive Barons Thyssen, and at that time in 1988 was probably the second largest private collection in the world after the Queen’s. Now exhibited in its own gallery near the Prado in Madrid, the collection is particularly strong in landscapes and portraits, and includes Holbein’s striking depiction of Henry VIII. The Library also has a similar exhibition catalogue of modern masters from the same collection but this is a personal reminder of a wonderful evening, and a period when buying a library system was an exciting adventure requiring visits to exotic locations.

Masterpieces of the world’s great museums

Masterpieces of the World's
Great Museums, 1988
ISBN: 0600559149

The Prado Museum is one of those featured in this coffee table style book, among others including the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book contains good quality images of many of the western world’s most celebrated artworks, as well as plans of the museums as they displayed their collections in the late eighties (at the time of publication). Displaying these dispersed collections together not only provides a comprehensive introduction for those not already acquainted with the museums, but also gives those who have been fortunate enough to visit, an opportunity for contextualisation and re-evaluation.

Spanish painting – András Székely

Continuing the Spanish theme, this item is a real rarity, as there appear to be only four other locations of this work in the UK. The colour plates have been painstakingly added after the text printing. Coverage is from Mozarabic miniatures through to Miro and the Picasso works featured are from the Barcelona Museo; the most emotionally affecting collection I have personally experienced.

Myth and ceremony in Islamic painting

- exhibition catalogue

Myth and ceremony in Islamic
painting - exhibition catalogue

This apparently insignificant item covers an exhibition which I remember viewing, although I have no recollection of where and when. The national research libraries catalogue is as confused as I am; no-one wants to commit to a firm date or location for the exhibition, and there is no other copy of this catalogue in research libraries in the north of England. An almost throw-away attribution links it to J.M. Rogers, now Honorary Curator of the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art and first holder of the Khalili Chair of Islamic Art at SOAS. Although the catalogue contains no images from the exhibition, it does give an interesting account of the history and development of Islamic art and its influencers.

La Dame à la Licorne

Paris is full of museums and art galleries, and one might be forgiven for tiring before reaching the Musee du Moyen Age at Cluny, the treasury of medieval art in Paris. The sumptuous and mysterious six tapestry panels of the Lady and the Unicorn are its bewitching and unforgettable centrepiece.

Photo: The Lady and the Unicorn by Terretta
Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

One of the most famous tapestries in the world, this book guides the reader through each element before offering a more in depth study of the piece's significance. Interpretations of its meaning are debatable, but enjoyment of the five senses, together with a rejection of those passions generated by ill-control of sensory pleasure, as conveyed in the six panels, might be a salutary message for Christmas celebrations.