Gloomy Sunday in or near Knightsbridge

A walk through Green Park and Hyde Park to the V&A.

The Serpentine

Go easy on the eyeliner, fellahs

Rose Wiley at Serpentine Sackler gallery

(click photo to enlarge)

Canvases patched, spliced, layered

In 1928 the V&A was given a collection of 16th century stained glass, mainly from the workshop of Gerhard Remisch, from Steinfeld and Mariawald Abbey, which was closed in 1802. Says the V&A: "In the nineteenth century, after the 1798 French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars that followed, huge quantities of stained glass were removed from churches and monasteries in France and Germany. England became the primary market for this glass. John Christopher Hampp (1750-1825), a German cloth merchant who had settled in Norwich in 1782, and his partner William Stevenson were responsible for bringing to England much of the continental glass now to be found throughout the country. Much of this continental glass was used in churches to replace the glass destroyed during the sixteenth-century Reformation. Quantities of it were also set in the windows of private residences and chapels of the newly rich industrialists and by the mid-nineteenth century there was a well-established tradition of stained glass collecting in England. "

On the right, beyond the blue reflections, is St Simeon in the temple beholding the holy spirit - the dove was a sign that he would see Christ before he died -

 Looking more closely, and having just puzzled over Rose Wylie's paintings, I found these panels puzzling in a different way ... that man with the staff, for instance, what's he doing there ... and why does the statue of Moses(?) have horns ...

 Both panels are filled with a concatenation of fantastic architecture -

 ... and just look at the shapes of the glass, some of them very tiny ...

As I headed for the tube, the 12,000 light bulbs of Harrods tried valiantly to cut through the late-afternoon greyness -

Little windows

Storm Doris was blowing on the day the movers came to take Clea's furniture up to Glasgow for storage. The front door was left open and the wind swirled through the house, catching the open window in the loo and slamming it shut. We heard a bang and the tinkle of breaking, falling glass, and rushed to the front door lest it be the lovely stained glass panels. Fortunately not ... but the glass in the little window was original to the house, about 115 years old -

Tom came along to fix it, installing a plain frosted pane -

 I have happy memories of the repainting of the loo. We were looking for the right shade of beige (again) and Tony, in jest, picked up a tin of a colour called Henna. "Perfect," sez I, "you are genius, that's just exactly the right colour!" He did look a little shocked as we proceeded to the checkout, and I could feel emanations of doubt as we drove home with the paint.

When it came to the repainting, a lot of reassurance was needed. "It's much too dark" - no, it's a bright warm colour; "It's too bright for a small space" - no, it's cosy and warm, perfect, and look how well it goes with the maps of old London that hang on the walls; "It's all wrong, this will never do" - let's try it, give it a few days and have a chance to get used to it. Of course he did get used to it - it was his choice, after all.

Another memorable small window is the stained glass panel that replaced the original wire screening in the pantry. The mesh allowed cool air to enter, keeping food in the larder fresh - the house was built before 1906, a time of few tinned foods, of daily trips to do the shopping. (Nor did it have a conservatory added on in those days.)

What's there now is a stained glass panel, made by Stewart, the local stained glass craftsman. He lives a few houses away and has a workshop near the railway station. As part of what he hoped would be a larger project of videos about local craftspeople, Tony made a video of Stewart making a little stained glass window, and he gave the little window to Tony.

The video - edited to 5 minutes from 15, no mean feat! - can be seen at https://vimeo.com/101200525

Drawing Tuesday - glass gallery, V&A

Sketchbooks at the ready -

Modern glass by Danny Perkins, by Najlaa

I had decided to draw the contents of a case - this is 18th century engraved glass, mostly Dutch 

Mags found some blue glass and then did it again with graphite 

Jamet B was in the furniture department, grappling with curved perspective 

Janet K found a versatile writing table, displayed to show its possibilities

Modern Swedish glass, by Sue 

Michelle's contrastingly harmonious page spread

The sunlight came and went, and the shadows were wonderful -

Sunday strollings

A familiar route for a Sunday jaunt - off the bus at Notting Hill Gate, and a walk across the park to the Round Pond

 (that's Kensington Palace in the background)

Then to the Serpentine Gallery, which currently is showing the "esoteric cosmology" of Hilma ap Klint, "Painting the unseen" -

Continue the walk down Exhibition Road to the V&A, with coffee and/or lunch in the Friends' Room; on the way out there's usually something that catches the eye in the glass gallery, this time these lamp-worked dancers, designed by Fritz Lampl for Bimini, 1928-38 -

Do they remind you of Josephine Baker? A figurine of her, also by Fritz Lampl, is nearby

also a case full of work by Marinot and his contemporaries (c.1930), the glass characteristically with little bubbles, wheel cut and deeply engraved -

Out in the courtyard, one of the bank holiday "Japan Festival" family activities - drumming -

 If you look closely you can see the samurai helmets that kids were making out of card inside the museum. And it wasn't just kids wearing those helmets.

Happy Hallowe'en!

This man is blowing a glass pumpkin -

See the entire process - it takes about 6 minutes - here.

Result!

Meanwhile, in Annecy, as we dragged our suitcases to the train station, we walked past a bar that overnight had sprouted some Hallowe'en decorations -

Drawing Tuesday - Glass gallery, V&A

First stop, a Venetian-style goblet with twisted and tooled stem with incorporated white and red threads, applied and tooled decoration. Netherlands, 17th century -

After that warm-up, another of the same, the applied and tooled decoration being opaque white glass this time -

What next caught my eye was this rather 1920s-looking object - "wine glass, possibly Catalonia, probably 18th century" - showing the influence, again, of Venetian glass making

 

The feet ... hmm ...

We weren't the only ones drawing in the gallery - along came a group of college age, or possibly sixth-formers -

Back to facon de venise for me, with a filigree glass (canework) goblet probably made in southern Germany 1550-1625. Many Venetian glassmakers left Murano, lured by the promise of greater freedoms and emerging markets elsewhere. (A similar goblet featured in a 2013 exhibition at the Courtauld.)

I love the "bobbles" at the bottom - how interesting to hold this glass, seemingly smooth from a distance, the twisted insertions (vetro a retorti) catching the eye, both in the cup and then gathered for the "knob" and spreading again in the foot. Once the twisted canes had been joined, it would have been blown into a mould to form the bobbles.

The label mentioned "diamond engraved" and an inscription 1600-1650 - sure enough, peering closely through the glass you can see that two lines of writing had been fitted into each of three clear sections.

What were the others drawing?

Chihuly (less daunting than the chandelier!)

... as seen by Janet B

Contemporary glass, with a wonderful shadow

... as seen by Sue  (Tali Dalton's "Under my wing")

Glass from Scandinavia

Janet K's rendition of Markku Salo's "Journey to Troy"

Next week (21 July) we'll be in the Reading Room of the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road. Here's an idea of what to expect -