Voicing the Garden, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund through its All Our Stories grant stream, and by the Cambridge University Botanic Garden Association (CUBGA), seeks to collect, celebrate and share the stories of the people behind the plants – the people who have made, grown up in or simply enjoyed the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.  The resulting archive of over sixty interviews is a rich mix of inside tracks, personal meanings, conflicting viewpoints, loves, loathes, life changing experiences, characters and recollections.

These unofficial and, before now, untold histories gathered up by a team of fully-trained volunteers are the opposite of an authoritative guide book to the Garden, says, Juliet Day, Development Officer at the Garden, who has led the project. "Voicing has given us a place to remember the black market in duck eggs, the daughters of a former director jumping their ponies over the winter garden hedges, EM Forster coming to tea and not being remotely interested in the plants, setting fire to the lake – yes really - the ‘slow bicycle race’ at staff parties, the 1950s Glee Club, the schoolgirls who weeded the Garden during the war and then grew up to bring their own grandchildren, the parents who have grieved here."

At the heart of Voicing have been engagement collaborations designed to connect the generations.  Excerpts from the interviews have inspired local groups to make accompanying short films, co-ordinated by the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium.  Young adults from Squeaky Gate, a creative arts charity, have composed, performed and filmed a lyrical and invigorating music video, putting a totally different perspective on the balm and beauty the Garden has to offer.  Working with Cambridge-based Spellbound Animation, Kings Hedges Primary School took as their inspiration memories of the man who could tame robins to create a beautiful, hand-drawn animation breathing new life into the legend (viewable here).

Trish Sheil, Film Education Manager for the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium said "The Consortium very much supports the development of cine-cultural and cine - literacy skills and Voicing the Garden offered a wonderful opportunity for young people in Cambridgeshire, from primary age to undergraduates, to use their creative skills in live action and animation film. Led by professional filmmakers and animators, these young people have to brought to the big screen the rich memories of the people associated with the Garden, and created a refreshing and memorable visual legacy for everyone to share on the website."

The Voicing films premiered Thursday 12 December at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 5pm, showing alongside work from the archives.  Director of the Botanic Garden, Professor Beverley Glover, also took the opportunity to present Nikki Driscoll, student at the Anglia Ruskin School of Art, with a special prize for her animation, A Man and A Dog, which illustrates the day the poodle pushed alpine supervisor, Harold Langford, too far.

After the Arts Picturehouse premiere, all the film shorts were made available to view on the project website.  Virtual visitors will be able to listen to the Voicing interviews, view the shorts and visit the word workshop developed by local writers to support the many who are inspired by the Garden to write.  It will also host a treasure trove of archive material to rummage through – clippings from the Cambridge News, aerial photographs of the Garden in development, diaries, reports and publications. 

When phase two of the project website goes live in January, Voicing the Garden will also be inviting visitors to upload their own memories of coming to the Garden, who with and what they did, to the on-line Memory Book.  Visitors will be asked to pinpoint favourite parts of the Garden, and short stories, poems and artwork will be published in the on-line Anthology.  Voicing the Garden will continue to build and share the collective history of what the Botanic Garden means to the people who work, rest and play here.

Visit www.voicingthegarden.com for more information

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration, held in the beautiful surroundings of Two Temple Place, marks the first time Cambridge’s unique, world-class collections have been drawn together under one roof. Together, they are more diverse in range and scope than perhaps even the Tate and British Museum combined, covering the span of human endeavour and exploration, from the miniscule to the majestic.

The exhibition features, among many other objects: ancient fossils, contemporary art, modern Inuit sculpture, Darwin’s only surviving egg from the Beagle voyage, a rare dodo skeleton and a state-of-the art digital instrument that searches for sub-atomic particles in the frozen depths of Antarctica.  Several exhibits will be leaving Cambridge or going on public display for the first time.

For centuries, the university has been a powerhouse of learning; discovering, collecting and studying objects that have changed our understanding of the world, challenged long-held beliefs and fundamentally altered our view of the planet and the universe.

But it is the role of Cambridge as one of the world’s leading research universities, with six of its museums embedded within academic departments, that lends this exhibition its uniqueness. Five of the university museums are also nationally-recognised Designated Outstanding Collections, awarded by Arts Council England.

Professor Nicholas Thomas, co-curator of Discoveries and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said: “The exhibits on display lead double, if not multiple lives. They are not just museum pieces spanning millennia; but living objects used for teaching and research that have changed our understanding of the world – and will continue to do so in ways we cannot yet imagine. Our collections are explored daily, offering new insight and revelations about the world around us.

“This exhibition challenges us to think about the notion and meaning of ‘discovery’; not just epoch-making scientific or artistic discoveries, but everyday discoveries – and discoveries that are passed from generation to generation and renewed afresh each time.

“An exhibition of this scope and nature could only come from Cambridge. Our collections are exceptionally rich, but also unusual and even quirky. For over two hundred years our museums have accumulated every imaginable kind of artefact, art work, device and specimen. Discoveries takes us from Darwin to DNA; from Captain Scott to the exploration of space.”

The exhibition, which runs from 31 January to 27 April, 2014, also features discoveries gone awry in the form of 19th century ‘Muggletonian’ prints. The Muggletonians were a religious sect who rejected the Newtonian system of the universe; instead arguing that biblical statements took precedence over claims of scientific fact, intending to prove that the sun and moon revolved around the earth.

And the ‘Tinamou Egg’, collected by Darwin himself on the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), proves that not even the world’s greatest scientists always get things right. The egg, thought to have been lost until its rediscovery in 2009 by a museum volunteer, was cracked by Darwin as he attempted to store it in a box too small for its purpose. One of just 16 eggs collected by Darwin on the five-year voyage, it is the only one known to survive.

Elsewhere, Cambridge’s position at the forefront of scientific discovery, is highlighted in the Museum of Zoology’s exhibits at Discoveries including the actual butterflies used by Reginald Punnett in one of the colour plates of his book Mimicry in Butterflies. His work helped pave the way in modern genetics and his specimens are joined at Two Temple Place by Hugh Edwin Strickland’s Chart of Bird Classification, dating some 16 years before the publication of The Origin of Species. The chart had been stored rolled up for many years before its recent conservation and mounting and has never before been on public display.

The exhibition does not just focus on science, however, but also the intersection where science and art can meet. A Henry Moore piece, a Gaudia-Brzeska self-portrait and a modern Inuit sculpture and a spectacular print by Australian artist Brook Andrew will join watercolours by Edward Wilson, the Cambridge-educated scientist and artist who accompanied Captain Scott on his Discovery Antarctic Expedition (1901-04), to look at the nature of discovery in the art world.

Professor Thomas added: “This exhibition is not just about our ‘treasures’; we have deliberately selected works of art, artefacts, specimens, documents and images that allow us to reflect on diverse acts of discovery. They vary from sculptures or drawings representing artistic breakthroughs to paintings recording hazardous conditions at the Poles. We have telescopes that enabled the skies to be studied and new stars seen. What might be a scholarly resource to one person may for another be aesthetically arresting. It may be, simply, magical.”

Dr Liba Taub, Director of the Whipple Museum of Earth Sciences, said: “Human imagination itself may be the most powerful instrument of discovery, allowing us to question the ideas of others, no matter how illustrious and famous they may be. The understanding of a known principle, or the seeing of a phenomenon with one’s own eyes, offer a special sense of discovery as well.”

Discoveries at Two Temple Place runs from 31 January - 27 April, 2014. Press tours are available on 29/30 January. Exhibition opening times are Monday, Thursday, Saturday – 10am-4.30pm. Wednesday – 10am-9pm and Sunday 11am-4pm. Closed on Tuesdays.

The eight university museums sending exhibits to Two Temple Place are: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Kettle’s Yard, Museum of Zoology, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences and The Polar Museum

On 10 March, 1945, a single shell landed in Kleve, a town close to the Dutch border in northern Germany. Kleve was badly bombed by Allied Forces and much of its medieval centre had already been destroyed. According to reports the shell that fell into the street near Kleve railway station on a spring day almost 70 years ago killed just one person, an Englishman called Ronald Balfour. 

A slightly built, short-sighted historian, Balfour was a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and had received basic military training before taking up his post just a few months earlier. At the time of his death he was operating beyond allied lines in the chaos of disputed territory.

With the help of a small group of German civilians Balfour was transporting treasures, removed from Christ the King Church in a suburb of Kleve, to safety in nearby Goch.  When the shell hit, Balfour was on one side of the road and his companions were on the other with a handcart carrying the artefacts. Balfour’s companions were unharmed as were the church treasures. A few weeks later the local German forces surrendered and by the end of April war in Europe had come to an end.

The film, Monuments Men, released last month, has drawn public attention to the role of the MFAA in safeguarding at least some of the heritage of war-torn Europe. MFAA was American-led and had a multinational membership of around 350 men and women. The movie is based on a book (The Monuments Men by Robert M Edsel) and billed as telling a “true story”.  But according to the Balfour family, Donald Jeffries, the English ‘monuments’ man’ in the film (played by actor Hugh Bonneville), is quite unlike Ronald Balfour.

Balfour was 40 when he enlisted in MFAA and just 41 when he died. When he signed up to join the MFAA, Balfour must have seemed an unlikely candidate for military service: he was a specialist in medieval history; he was slim in build and wore thick pebble glasses. He was a Fellow of King’s College and his entire adulthood had been devoted to scholarship. What motivated him to risk his life was his passion for art and history.

In his will, Balfour bequeathed his personal library of 8,000 books to be shared between Cambridge University Library and King’s College Library. King’s College was also given several boxes of Balfour’s papers with his family donating further papers in 2005 and 2006. The most recent accession includes the last letter that Balfour wrote to his friend and superior officer Geoffrey Webb. Just a few days before his death, Balfour wrote about how much he enjoyed his work despite the hazards.

“It has been a grand week, certainly the best since I came over. One has the tragedy of real destruction, much of it quite unnecessary, but the compensating feeling of getting something done oneself. No civil authority to worry about and the need for quick decisions on one’s own responsibility... The degree of looting is terrible.. it will be a pretty business if all the repositories of foreign works of art are treated thus.”

Newspaper reports suggest that in a few months Balfour and his colleagues had been successful in saving some of the heritage of several towns in northern Germany. An article in the Rheinische Post in 1955 records: “With his own hands Balfour salvaged from amidst the rubble of destroyed buildings the archives of several towns, including those of Goch, Kleve, Cranenburg and Xanten.”

The archive of Balfour’s papers at King’s College also contains evidence of his determination to impress upon his army colleagues the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of the territories they would be going into as an invading force. In a speech he prepared but never delivered he wrote: “No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.”

It’s a message that resonates today. Patricia McGuire, King’s College Archivist, said: “The Balfour papers offer significant insight into the critical work of the MFAA in preserving tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of works of European art. Containing Balfour's own postcards and photos from visits he took before the war, personal letters, testimonial memoirs as well as professional reports, the collection provides a personal view that the official papers alone cannot.”

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673.

Inset images: Churchill tanks in wartime Kleve (Wikimedia Commons), MFAA poster, bells destined for smelting (both King's College Archive Centre)

Last month the government announced an initiative to commemorate the First World War with a programme of cultural events called 14-18 NOW.  Through Arts Council England, it will fund commissions by leading artists from Britain and around the world “to create works that reflect on the impact and legacy of the First World War”.

Art has long been at the mercy of politics. Research by art historian and broadcaster Dr James Fox reveals that a century ago the present government’s predecessor in the shape of Asquith’s wartime cabinet was convinced that art posed such a threat to the security of the nation that it made painting out of doors illegal around the country.

Fox, a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College and known to public audiences for his BBC documentaries, first came across the subject while researching his PhD about art and the First World War. He explained: “I kept finding strange passages in which artists confessed to being abused, interrogated and arrested while painting and sketching outdoors. Virtually nothing had been written about the reason for these bizarre experiences, so I set about trawling newspapers, government reports and police records in search of clues. What I discovered was astonishing.”

Fox’s findings were first published in the British Art Journal in 2009. A more extensive discussion of the same topic will form a chapter in his forthcoming book, Business unusual: British art and the First World War, 1914-1924.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people – who had only recently become obsessed with spy novels and films – grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation. “The public became suspicious of almost everyone who didn’t fit in. Of the many groups who suffered from these suspicions, some of the most adversely affected were artists,” said Fox.

The notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Fox said:  “In his book My Adventures as a Spy, Baden-Powell revealed how he and other British spies on the continent had posed as artists and disguised their plans of forts, harbours and industrial areas as innocent sketches of stained glass windows or ivy leaves.

This was one of the reasons why, with the declaration of war in August 1914, artists quickly fell foul of emergency legislation. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) imposed a regime of draconian censorship on artworks. It also made it illegal to make “any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with the intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing”.

The effects were significant. As one artist explained: “No sketching whatever is allowed within four, and in some cases, seven miles of the coast... Even though the subject of the sketch may be a group of trees, a cathedral or a paintable cottage, the rule applies strictly.”

As a result of the legislation, many artists were challenged or arrested: in Scotland the society painter and Royal Academician John Lavery was arrested for painting the Fleet at the Forth Bridge; in Dover the renowned landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer was accosted by “some blighter [who] comes up and wants to see my permit which is very upsetting in the middle of laying a wash”. Reporting from the west coast of Ireland, the post-impressionist Augustus John poked fun at the nation’s panic with the account that “around the harbour… if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman”. 

Those most severely hit by the restrictions imposed on painting included the artistic communities based in Cornwall, a county where fears about German invasion were strongest. Artists in the clusters at Newlyn, St Ives and Lamorna felt the restrictions keenly at a time when wartime austerity was already depressing art sales. In Newlyn, the figurative painter Laura Knight wrote that “even to write a perfectly straight line might be interpreted as a sinister act”. In Lamorna, Alfred Munnings (famous for his paintings of horses) remarked that he “dared not be sketching out of doors in the country at all”. 

Fox said: “As the war progressed, art itself began to be perceived in an increasingly negative light, downgraded from merely pointless or unnecessary activity to one that was improper and immoral, encouraging selfish and profligate behaviour when selfless sacrifice was what counted. Artists were bracketed together with other alien identities – Jews, pacifists, profiteers, foreigners, newly naturalised Britons.”

Bohemianism itself signalled a lack of patriotism. When a British artist-couple rented a cottage in the West Country, there were immediate suspicions that they were German agents. The villagers’ vendetta against them prompted the police to call one of the artists in for questioning. He was soon released. The local schoolmistress exclaimed: “If he is not a spy, why does he wear a hat like that?” In London the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with his modernist work and German name, found his studio ransacked.

Fox’s research reveals that in the first month of the war, some 9,000 cases of espionage were reported, yet during the four years of the conflict just 29 spies were convicted. “Hundreds of artists were arrested and questioned, an experience that must have been deeply distressing. But only one of them was found guilty. The Norwegian painter, Alfred Hagn, was sentenced to death after invisible ink was discovered in his hotel room in London, but was extradited after going on hunger strike,” said Fox.

The case that made the biggest impression on the public was that of Philip de László, a famous society portraitist who was Hungarian by birth. His naturalisation as a British subject in 1914, and his easy access to the powerful elite, put him under suspicion. The patriotic newspaper John Bull wrote: “The distinguished character of M. de László’s clientele would have afforded him fine opportunities for obtaining first-class information if he had really been desirous of getting it… Cabinet Ministers… are such busy people that they frequently go on working while the artist plies his brush… King George… walks about the room and dictates to his Secretaries while he is “sitting” for his portrait.”

De László was arrested and interned. He was condemned in the press for being one of “the most dangerous spies” of the war, and many called for him to be executed. “After several years imprisoned without charge, De László, rightly, was exonerated. But it had a huge effect on his career, and it took a long time for him to recover,” said Fox.

The treatment of artists during the First World War seems, with the benefit of hindsight, laughable. Indeed, the notion of middle aged artists being arrested by over-zealous officials while painting pretty watercolours out in the countryside was lampooned in the press at the time. But Fox reminds us that things are not so different today.

“In recent years the government’s attempts to combat terrorism has led to new legislation that authorised police officers to stop and search anyone who appears to be photographing or filming sensitive locations. The medium might have changed, but the principle is the same. We remain innately suspicious of images”, he said.

Research by Cambridge University art historian, Dr Meredith Hale, published in the June edition of the Burlington Magazine, reveals how this unique piece of interior design embodies the merging of cultures separated by thousands of miles. She considers how the artists who created the screen took their inspiration from a wide range of traditions and genres – including, most notably, the work of Dutch printmakers – showing just how fluid was the exchange of ideas and objects during a time when the world was rapidly opening up and its elites desiring of novelties and luxuries.

The screen, which early in its history was divided in half, depicts two of the most important European victories in the Great Turkish War (1683–1699). The section of the screen now in the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, shows the siege of Vienna on 12 September 1683, when the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Saxony, Bavaria, and Franconia relieved the city from a two-month siege by over 100,000 Turkish troops. The section of the screen now in the Brooklyn Museum, New York, tells the story of the siege of Belgrade on 6 September 1688, when Imperial Habsburg troops under the leadership of the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian II Emanuel, took Belgrade, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1521. 

On the side of the screen designed to face the women’s sitting room are elegant hunting scenes based on a range of European prints. The scenes on the Tepotzotlán half of the screen are based on prints after Gobelins tapestries by Louis XIV’s court artists, Adam Frans van der Meulen (1632–1690) and Charles Le Brun (1619–1690). The hunt on the Brooklyn half of the screen is based on the Medici court artist Johannes Stradanus’s designs for tapestries for Cosimo I’s villa at Poggio a Caiano. The rich floral border and garlands tied with red ribbons along the tops of the hunt scenes recall the kinds of decorative elements that would have appeared in the tapestries to which the prints were related. Both the main scenes and the decorative borders are embellished with gold paint and inlaid shell work which would have, particularly in candlelight, enlivened the busy multi-figured compositions. 

“The paintings have been attributed to Juan and Miguel González, artists associated with the viceregal court,” said Hale. “The González brothers are something of a mystery. Scholars of Spanish colonial art have debated whether they are of Spanish or Japanese origin. Both are possible, given the cosmopolitan nature of Mexico City at this time and the very real influences from both traditions.”

When it was first made, the screen comprised 12 painted panels and, at more than seven feet high, measured 18 feet from end to end. Early in its history, this fabulous objet d’art made its way to Europe, most likely with Sarmiento de Valladares upon his return to Spain in 1701, where it was divided into two six-panel screens. The Tepotzotlán half of the screen seems to have remained in Spain until 1970, when it was taken back to Mexico and became part of the collection of the Museo Nacional del Virreinato. The half of the screen now in New York was bought by the Blois family of Cockfield Hall, Suffolk, almost certainly during the first half of the 20th century. Following a sale of some of the contents of the house in 1996, this second part is now owned by the Brooklyn Museum. 

As a single objet d’art, the screen told the story of Spanish Habsburg power and, for those who viewed it, communicated a message of its inevitable continuity. Research by Hale, a specialist in Netherlandish art with a particular interest in the printmakers of the 17th century, has concentrated on the print sources for the battle scenes and the surprising ways in which newssheets produced in Amsterdam could be used in colonial Latin America. She reveals just how closely the painters drew on etchings made by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe during a period when printing was the primary means of producing propaganda and dispersing information.

“Prints that were designed to satisfy the European buyer’s desire for information on current events and celebration of military successes were transformed into grand decorative objects with impressive propagandistic power. What began as ‘news’ ended as an entirely new kind of object whose evocative and commemorative function was akin to that of history painting,” she said.  “De Hooghe, who is best known for Williamite propaganda, had one of the most important and prolific workshops in the 1680s in Amsterdam so while it’s surprising to see newssheets put to this particular use, his authorship of them would have made them collectible in a way that other newssheets may not have been.”

De Hooghe’s work was decidedly high-end. Prints by the same artist feature in another series of large scale painted panels that were also in the viceroy’s collection, The Battles of Alessandro Farnese. Hale’s study of this series will be published later this year.

European prints, particularly religious ones, had circulated in Latin America since the 16th century and had often been used in interesting and surprising ways, such as the pair of feather mosaics, Jesus at the Age of Twelve and The Weeping Virgin (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) made in Michoacán, Mexico, c 1600, and based on engravings of c 1590 by Philippe Thomassin after Giulio Clovio. These works already featured in the collection of Rudolf II in Prague by the early 17th century. The long-standing and lively export of European prints to Latin America was mirrored in the importation of such exotic ‘New World’ objects.

“With his commission of this painted screen, Valladares created an entirely new kind of luxury object. As shown by Rich Aste, curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Brooklyn Museum, this is the only known work to combine the two elite Mexican genres of biombos, or folding screens, and shell inlay paintings known as enconchados. Folding screens retained their exotic status throughout the 17th century—their eastern origins were often emphasised in inventories—and the unique combination of the folding screen format, local technique of shell-inlay painting, and scenes of famous recent Habsburg victories would have served as a reminder of New Spain’s strategic location at the centre of trade from the east and the west and of the viceroy’s loyalty to the Habsburg king,” said Hale.

“However, the significance of the Folding Screen with the Siege of Vienna and Belgrade and Hunting Scenes far exceeds its original context. The use of near-contemporary broadsheets produced by one of the most important Dutch printmakers of the late 17th century expands our view not only of the kinds of print sources that were used in Latin America, but also the distances that such political prints, which have often been considered to be ephemeral, travelled, the degree to which they were prized, and how, at least in one instance, such prints were used. Far from the straightforward acquisition of aspects of one culture by another, Folding Screen with the Siege of Vienna and Belgrade is a fundamentally ‘transcultural’ work of art, one that reflects the merging and converging of a range of cultures in the early modern period.”

Meredith Hale is the Speelman Fellow in Netherlandish Art at Wolfson College.

Inset images are details from: Folding screen with hunting scene, Museo Nacional de Virreinato (Hector Montano Morales); Folding Screen with the Siege of Vienna, Brooklyn Museum; etching of Siege of Vienna, Romeyn de Hooghe 1683 (Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam); Siege of Belgrade, Romeyn de Hooghe, 1688 Koninklijk Bibliotheek, The Hague.
 

In 1873 the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was given a number of Dutch landscape paintings by a benefactor called Richard Kerrich. Among these works of art was a beach scene painted by the artist Hendrick van Anthonissen early in the 17th century. Anthonissen depicts groups of people clustered on a sandy beach at the small town of Scheveningen. Other figures stand on the cliffs and, on the shore, several boats have been pulled up on the sand.

For at least 150 years this seemingly unremarkable work of art has harboured a secret.The cleaning of the painting has now revealed that a beached whale provided the focus of the original composition.  The whale explains the hitherto slightly baffling presence of groups of people on the beach, and atop the cliffs, on what appears to be a blustery winter’s day. With the Leviathan now back where the artist placed it, the scene makes perfect sense.

The hulking shape of the stranded whale was discovered by Shan Kuang, a postgraduate student at the world-renowned Hamilton Kerr Institute, a division of the Fitzwilliam Museum dedicated to the conservation and restoration of easel paintings. Kuang was assigned the painting as part of conservation carried out on Dutch works of art during the refurbishment of the Fitzwilliam’s gallery of Dutch Golden Age painting, which reopened on Tuesday. 

The first inkling that a key feature was missing from the Anthonissen artwork came when Kuang meticulously removed a top layer of varnish and overpaint to reveal a small figure, apparently standing on the sea horizon.  “As conservators, we take off the resin varnish that was applied to protect and saturate the paint. The varnish yellows and darkens with time,” said Kuang.

“As I worked across the surface a man appeared – and then next to him a shape that looked like a sail. By this time I could also make out an area of the sea which had been painted more crudely than the rest of the ocean. It was a thick layer of repaint covering a large section of original artwork. At the end of the treatment, the whale had returned as a key component of the composition, just as the artist had intended.”

The man who seemed to be standing on the horizon is, in fact, balanced on the whale’s back where Kuang suggests that he might even be measuring its length.The chosen focus of the painting resonates with a surge of public interest in whales: contemporary records show many instances of whale beaching on the coastline of the Netherlands in the first half of the 17th century. While the Anthonissen painting seeks to represent the whale in a realistic manner, some prints from the period portray whales as rampaging monsters of the deep and omens of disaster.

Conservators face difficult decisions when confronted with overpainting. “It’s important that we are true to the artist’s intentions. After establishing that Anthonissen had not made this alteration himself, the decision was made – in conjunction with curators at the Fitzwilliam – to uncover the original paint hiding beneath the repaint,” said Kuang.

“Removing repaint has its uncertainties: you don’t always know how easily the paint can be removed or the condition of the original painting beneath the overpaint. Fortunately, the whale only had a few damages and was overall in good condition. I was able to remove the overpainting by scraping with a scalpel and using carefully chosen solvents. I had to proceed very gently and often work under the microscope to ensure no damage was done to the painting. It was very satisfying to see the whale slowly appearing.”

No-one knows why the whale was painted out of the picture – or when. “Today we treat works of art as entities but in the previous centuries, painting were often elements of interior design that were adapted to fit certain spaces – or adjusted to suit changing tastes. It’s possible that the whale was removed because the presence of a dead animal was considered offensive – or perhaps without the whale the picture was more marketable,” said Kuang.

“According to the documentation, no-one had any idea that the painting featured a whale when it was gifted to the Fitzwilliam. An analysis of the paint suggests the alteration is very old, but not contemporary to when the picture was painted circa 1641. The whale was likely overpainted in the 18th or 19th century, before it was given to the Fitzwilliam in 1873.”

Conservators require a thorough grounding in chemistry as well as fine art. On top of that, they need excellent hand-eye coordination and a commitment to detail. Kuang, who took a first degree in chemistry at Yale University in the USA, is in her second year of a three-year course that will lead to a Postgraduate Diploma in Conservation of Easel Paintings. “As students at the Hamilton Kerr we are extremely privileged to be able to work, under close supervision from tutors, on the conservation of important works of art. To have made a discovery like this – and bring an element of the composition back to life – is just wonderful,” she said.

View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen is on permanent display in the Fitzwilliam Museum. For information and opening times http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ 

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673 or communications@admin.cam.ac.uk  01223 332300
 

‘A Case Against Destruction, A Case for Celebration’ looks at how the people of Bloomsbury drew, wrote and celebrated their way out of plans to demolish a seven-acre site that was home to more than 600 people – and reflects on how a community’s resolve 40 years ago might influence planning policy and protest today.

Using original 1970s illustrations by artist Albany Wiseman, as well as contemporary photographs of the streets saved from the wrecking ball, the exhibition reveals how the area has changed – and remained the same – in the intervening decades.

Exhibition curator Janet Hall, an MPhil student of Architecture and Urban Design at Cambridge, said: “This area of Bloomsbury came so close to being completely destroyed; it was only the combined efforts of a community of local people, artists, friends, neighbours and councillors that saved it from almost certain destruction.

“Feasibility studies had been carried out, and full plans were drawn up. Had the Bloomsbury plans gone ahead, historic buildings including residences belonging to the Peabody Trust – one of the earliest housing associations in the capital – would have been lost for good.”

Despite fierce local opposition from councillors, including future Health Secretary Frank Dobson, Bloomsbury was the preferred choice of Edward Heath’s Conservative government and Whitehall mandarins who wanted to site the new British Library opposite the British Museum - in the face of strong evidence that such proximity was wholly unnecessary for the vast majority of future British Library users and researchers.

Eventually, after a long and vocal campaign against the demolition of Bloomsbury’s historic buildings, the Heath government bowed to local pressure and chose to site the new British Library building on derelict land and railway sidings – at its current home in St Pancras.

Today, the word protest is often associated with various forms of violence or disorder, but during the 1970s the community in Bloomsbury understood it in a different light. In response to the plans made for the demolition, the Bloomsbury Association was formed. The association’s first chair George Wagner wrote multitudes of letters to various newspapers, the British Museum, national libraries, councillors and members of government on behalf of the association. Local residents organised concerts, created a local mascot ‘BuBu’, hung out their Bloomsbury Bloomers, and began the annual summer Bloomsbury Fair which happens to this day.

These were acts of fun, creativity and friendship. Although people were disappointed about what was happening to their home, they took positive actions throughout their protest and even in their victory continued hoping and planning the future of this area through the Bloomsbury Association planning sub-committee.

Hall believes there is an increasing importance in understanding this type of community engagement in terms of planning and suggests looking at the past in this way illuminates the risks that face London and other areas of the country today. The proposition of siting the British Library in this area brought about many in-depth studies both for and against the plans, and it is these records, this detail of information, that lets researchers see what was protected, how it was protected and what this enabled.

“There are too few occasions within urbanism that a community’s actions have led to a better architectural/urban solution,” said Hall. “The situation in Bloomsbury is particularly unusual because the solution found was not the alteration of a proposed project but its total relocation and total conservation of an area. The public influenced to a lesser extent the architectural scale, but more significantly affected decision making on a wider-urban scale from their local level – an ambition laid out by the 2011 Localism Act.”

The exhibition ‘A Case Against Destruction, A Case for Celebration’ can be seen at 1 Pied Bull Yard, WC1A 2JR between 1-6pm on weekdays until July 27. Admission free.

Its ‘WHITE HEAT’ symposium will see key figures from the decade join speakers from the fields of art and cultural history, the history and philosophy of science, activism and popular culture to revisit one of the most intense periods of intellectual and cultural ferment.

The event takes place in the very Department of Engineering lecture theatre where Gustav Metzger gave his iconic 1965 lecture/demonstration ‘The Chemical Revolution in Art’. 

In the lecture, Metzger discussed his ideas about movement, time and transformation in art and demonstrated for the first time Liquid Crystals.  Following the symposium there will be an evening opening of current exhibition Gustav Metzger: LIFT OFF! at Kettle’s Yard, including his landmark piece Liquid Crystal Environment.

Writer, curator and researcher Bronac Ferran, who will chair one of Saturday’s panel discussions, said: “His two lectures in Cambridge in 1960 and 1965 were highly significant events that are seen as landmarks in cultural history and inspired a whole generation of students living and working at that time. With his return to the city through the current exhibition, we celebrate the ongoing influence of Gustav's work and ideas that were formative in influencing many leading figures who will come together on the 26th to acknowledge this legacy.

“Gustav's involvement with science policy and founding membership of the Committee of 100 proved very prescient of today's preoccupation with interdisciplinarity and art-science agendas. It is in this context that WHITE HEAT has been organised; to hear from leading figures who were driving the revolutions and counterrevolutions half a century ago and to see what role Cambridge played as an intellectual and cultural incubator of social and political transformations.”

Highlights of the programme include an introduction to Gustav Metzger’s Chemical Revolution by curator Elizabeth Fisher with video contributions from Gustav Metzger. Other key figures of the 1960s art world presenting on this turbulent decade, include curator Jasia Reichardt, who will discuss her curatorial work during the 1960s on seminal exhibitions such as the first show of British Pop Art in London; Between Poetry and Painting.

Contemporary artist Neal White will discuss the continued legacy of 1960s research-based artistic practice, while talks on the publications Studio International and Leonardo Journal will further explore the interdisciplinary links between art and science in the 1960s. 

The day will also include a panel discussion on The British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS), a ‘radical science’ movement launched in 1969. Supporters of BSSRS included Francis Crick and Bertrand Russell and the movement aimed to open up the politics of science to both scientific and public scrutiny through pub-based seminars and the Science for People magazine.

Born in 1926, Metzgar’s career has spanned more than sixty years of art and political activism. Metzger began his artistic career at the Cambridge School of Art in 1945, and returned to deliver two seminal lecture/demonstrations at the University of Cambridge in 1960 and 1965. LIFT OFF! focuses on Metzger’s auto-creative work bringing together installations, archive, film and sculptures.

For further details about the conference and exhibition, visit: http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/

Mesmerisingly beautiful and just under life size at 33.6cm tall, the Virgin of Sorrows’ gently furrowed brows, natural flesh tones, glass eyes and teardrops and eyelashes made from human hair, still elicit a powerful response from the viewer 350 years after it was made. It was most likely created for the private chapel, study or bedchamber of a devout patron, and would almost certainly have been protected under a glass dome and originally paired with a similarly-sized bust of the Ecce Homo (Christ as the Man of Sorrows).

The Virgin of Sorrows is on show in the Museum’s Spanish & Flemish Gallery, alongside other masterpieces by contemporary Baroque sculptors and painters.  The Fitzwilliam Museum has already raised a substantial amount towards the work (including £30,000 from the Art Fund and £10,000 from The Henry Moore Foundation) but needs to secure a further £85,000 by the end of September 2014 in order to acquire the remarkable bust. 

The Spanish Golden Age, early 16th to late 17th century, was a period of incredible artistic and economic output for Spain, seeing the nation rise to one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.  From the conquest of the New World, to the writing of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, this period changed the course of world politics and culture.  The Fitzwilliam Museum has a small collection of Spanish art, including two works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, but the more emotive Catholic works, exemplified by painted wood sculpture are extremely rare in British collections. Taste and religion played their part in this: indeed, most of de Mena’s sculptures remain in the churches, monasteries and convents for which they were made.

The Spanish sculptor Pedro de Mena (1628-1688) was taught the art of wood carving by his father, Alonso de Mena (1587-1646), a well-regarded sculptor of traditional religious images in Granada. Following his father’s death, the eighteen-year-old Pedro took over the workshop and was joined by established artist Alonso Cano (1601-1667), who taught him how to realistically paint sculpture. Cano also encouraged Mena to enhance the naturalism of his sculptures by including additional elements, such as eyes and tears made from glass, and eyelashes from human hair.  As such, Mena’s statues and busts have a remarkable lifelike quality, which can be unnerving to the 21st century viewer. Mena left Granada in 1658 and spent the rest of his career in Málaga, becoming increasingly well regarded with prestigious patrons from church and state. Mena was known for his intense faith and was elected by the Inquisition in both Granada and Málaga as a censor of images.

Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum said:  “The thing about this bust is that it is not one of those lugubrious virgins with rolling eyes that one associates with Spanish religious art. Here instead is a strikingly simple, and arrestingly intense, portrait of a beautiful young woman - an Andalusian peasant girl perhaps? - depicted in that moment of hopeless anguish for the humiliation and loss of her only Son. Pedro de Mena's Mater Dolorosa would be a wonderful addition to our collection.”

You can give online by visiting www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk, or please contact Sue Rhodes, Development Officer, sr295@cam.ac.uk , 01223 332939.

Other Spanish Golden Age initiatives within the University of Cambridge include an ongoing funding campaign to establish a postgraduate scholarship post in the period at Clare College.  The campaign is in the memory of Dr Anthony Close who was a member of the University’s department of Spanish & Portuguese, and one of the world's leading experts on Cervantes, and his masterpiece, Don Quixote.

Early in the 19th century a young man called Richard Hopkins Leach (1794-1851) walked from Cambridge to Cornwall – a journey of more than 300 miles – to look for work. He kept a diary of his adventures, recording them in pictures as well as words. His journal gives a vivid picture of the pleasures and hardships of travel on foot through the rural landscape also documented by better-known travellers such as William Cobbett whose Rural Rides became a classic. 

Richard Leach’s travel journal for the years 1814 to 1817, with its descriptions, maps and sketches of places he visited en route, is one of many items on show to the public for the first time at the Museum of Cambridge as part of the 2014 Open Cambridge programme. These objects tell the remarkable stories of a family whose history was for almost 300 years intertwined with that of some of Cambridge’s most iconic buildings – from public houses to colleges. 

Carefully inscribed in the pages of a small notebook, Richard’s observations reveal a young man fascinated by all that he sees around him in a country emerging from the Napoleonic wars. On his travels, he records meeting newly released French prisoners and encounters the suspicions of dialect-speaking locals in the West Country, who take Richard and his companion for deserters. 

On Thursday 2 June 1814, while walking from Marlborough to Tidworth in Wiltshire Richard writes that he ‘was glad to enter the public house (the old Bull) our appetites being unusually keen with waiting so long for dinner we had an excellent relish for our bread & cheese & beer the landlord said it was long since he had seen a strange face & was sorry he could produce no better accommodation to the weary but he would sleep on long feathers himself if we would put up with his bed in deference to age we declined his offer….’

The reference to ‘long feathers’ is one of many compelling historical details. Short downy feathers produce the softest and snuggest bedding while long feathers with their sharp quills are less luxurious.

Richard returned to Cambridge where, half a century later, his second son Frederick was to found a small decorating firm that expanded to provide a wide range of skills and work in partnership with some of the country’s best known designers and architects. Among them were William Morris, father of the arts and crafts movement, and George Bodley, the Gothic revival architect.

A series of Open Cambridge events are the first steps to bringing the Leach family to public attention and, in the process, revealing their input to some of the Cambridge’s most striking interior design – in particular the medieval-inspired and highly decorative schemes of the arts and crafts movement.

At the Museum of Cambridge, an exhibition titled Cooks and Colours explores what’s known about the early generations of the family.  At All Saints’ Church, the story of Frederick Richard Leach is unfolded with an emphasis on his City Road premises which were recently demolished for redevelopment. The David Parr House charity recorded and salvaged what they could before the developers moved in. The exhibition at Michaelhouse showcases the photos of Hannah Boatfield who visited the various locations where F R Leach & Sons’ work can still be seen and recorded what she saw.

Cooks and Colours has been curated by Tamsin Wimhurst, a local historian and trustee of the David Parr House. “This is an exciting opportunity for the public to see a collection that is usually in private hands,” she said. “Among the family archive are oil paintings of 19th-century Cambridge by Richard Leach and a pair of silver buckles that belonged to Barnett Leach, Richard’s grandfather who was the master cook at Trinity College.  A waistcoat that was sent to the Leach family during the 1850s, but never sewn together, has been recreated.  Also, for the first time, a sign painted by Richard Leach for the John Gilpin, a pub that use to stand on Gold Street, has been taken off the wall of the museum and displayed so that both sides can be seen.”

The delightfully exuberant sign illustrates the story of John Gilpin, a poem very popular in the late 18th century. Wimhurst said: “A London linen draper sets off on a journey on horseback. His horse has its own ideas and refuses to stop at the village where the draper’s family are waiting. It gallops off and Gilpin loses his hat, wig and coat, and the wine bottles around his waist are broken. The horse then turns round and gallops back. One side of the sign shows Gilpin’s outward journey and the other his return.”

In 1849 Richard Leach painted a striking portrait of his family. It shows (from left to right) his wife Isabella Leach, daughter Isabella McLean Leach, son John McLean Leach (with cat), son Frederick Richard Leach, son Barnett Leach, and finally Richard himself (seated). Isabella holds Richard's travel journal. It's thought that the face of the artist was painted by his son Barnett (standing behind the table).

A string of famous architects contributed to the heritage of Cambridge – among them Christopher Wren, James Gibbs and George Gilbert Scott.  Much less well known are the generations of local craftsmen who helped to create both the town’s domestic buildings and the masterpieces of design that each year attract thousands of tourists to visit Cambridge and marvel at its stained glass windows, stone and wood carving, decorative design and painted interiors.

At least half a dozen generations of the Leach family are known to have contributed to the life of Cambridge, both town and gown. Their names rarely appear in the annals of history which inevitably focus on the powerful benefactors who indirectly paid their wages and the architects, interior designers and engineers who directed them.

It is the input of these largely overlooked artisans, whose route into professional life was through apprenticeship rather than academic study, that Wimhurst hopes to highlight. Documentary evidence of their business and practical skill is found in archives recording their work in account books and advertising cards while visual evidence of their creativity as artists survives in buildings throughout the city, including All Saints Church on Jesus Lane and St Clement’s Church on Bridge Street. 

Preliminary research into the Leach dynasty has traced their presence in Cambridge back to 1675 when Barnett Leach and his wife Margaret lived in the Archers Inn in St Andrew’s Street that was once located near to where the main post office is now.

Barnett and Margaret’s grandson, Barnett III, became the first college cook in the family and was appointed ‘Master Cook’ at Trinity College in 1770. “At this time college cooks were self-employed. They rented out their pots, pans and crockery to the colleges – and often ran other businesses alongside their daily work,” said Wimhurst. Barnet III’s son, yet another Barnett, followed his father as master cook at Trinity and also worked as a bacon dealer and ran the Pickerel Inn on Bridge Street, the oldest parts of which date to the 1500s.

It was Richard Hopkins Leach, second son of Barnet IV, who laid the foundations for future generations to become artisans – sign writers and stained glass makers, builders, stone carvers and cabinetmakers.  Returning from his travels, Richard was apprenticed to an engraver and became a skilled jobbing artist, earning his living from house painting, lettering, portraiture and college work. He is best known as a painter of inn signs, four of which can be seen at the Museum of Cambridge.

Richard’s son, Frederick Leach came to be regarded as Cambridge’s finest master artworkman – a term used in his tradesman’s card to describe his combination of skills. Wimhurst said: “He began his career as apprentice to a stonemason before working alongside his elder brother in his painting and decorating business. In 1862, aged 25 and with a £300 loan from family and friends, Frederick set up his own business in City Road.”

FR Leach expanded from house and shop painting into ecclesiastical and civic arts, crafts and decoration. In the 1871 census Frederick is described as ‘Church Ornament and Glass Painting master employing 12 men and 2 boys’ and in the 1881 census as ‘Painter: Designer and Art Worker employing 28 men, 2 women and 6 boys on painted decorations, stained glass and making furniture’.

The firm was at its most successful in the 1880s when it undertook some impressive commissions. Frederick worked with the designer William Morris on the staircase of St James’s Palace in London, a commission that encouraged him to open an office in Great Ormond Street. The firm’s trade cards and accounts book reveal that its reputation spread far and wide. In Cambridge, Frederick collaborated with the architect George Bodley, an exponent of English gothic revival.

Examples of the work of FR Leach’s team of craftsmen survive throughout Cambridge. At All Saints’ Church, the firm painted the walls, with most of the work done free of charge by Frederick himself. The nave and transept roof of Jesus College Chapel was his first commission for Bodley and Morris. At St Botolph’s Church, the firm decorated the chancel roof.  A commission for painting and stained glasswork at Queens’ Old Hall included 885 lead castings gilded for decoration.

David Parr House is seeking volunteers to help them research more about the fascinating history of the Leach family. Anyone interested should email davidparrhouse@gmail.com

Free, drop-in events relating to the Leach family take place on Friday 12, September and Saturday 13, September. For an online Open Cambridge programme go to www.cam.ac.uk/open-cambridge or phone 01223 766766 for a printed programme.

The exhibition Cooks and Colours has been made possible by support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Inset images: pages from Richard Hopkin Leach's journal (copyright Ric Leach), Queens' College Old Hall with decoration by FR Leach (copyright Hannah Boatfield), John Gilpin pub sign by Richard Hopkins Leach (copyright Museum of Cambridge), portrait of the Leach family by Richard Hopkins Leach (copyright Ric Leach), FR Leach trade card (copyright Ric Leach), FR Leach (copyright Ric Leach).

For the Open Cambridge programme, and all details of events linked to the Leach family story, go to http://www.opencambridge.cam.ac.uk/. Cooks and Colours opens on Saturday 6 September. The Museum of Cambridge charges an entrance fee but will be open free of charge for one day only on Saturday, 13 September, 10.30am to 5pm, for Open Cambridge.
 

In 2008 Jon Hunt bought a car, kept it for the following three years as an investment and then sold it in 2011 at a profit. So far, so ordinary. However, Jon is founder of Foxton’s Estate Agency, one of the largest in the UK, and the car he bought was a Ferrari GTO 250, one of just 39 that were produced between 1962 and 1964. The price he paid in 2008 was a whopping, and record-breaking, £15.7m. And the profit? A cool £4.5m.

This extraordinary deal is one of the best examples of a growing trend towards alternative investments. Since the financial crisis of 2008 left stock markets jittery and the real estate market depressed, alternative investments, especially beautiful objects with an emotional dimension such as works of art, wine, musical instruments, jewellery, watches and, of course, cars are growing rapidly.

According to the 2020 Foresight Report: Luxury Investments Since 2007, an increasing number of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) are expressing an interest in emotional investments. Indeed, investments by American HNWIs were valued at US$118bn (£71bn) in 2012; more than half of all Chinese millionaires opted for such investments.

Clearly, emotional assets have an obvious appeal beyond being simply a refuge from equities, bonds and gilts during difficult economic times – you can hang them on a wall and play, drink or drive them. They look beautiful, they’re glamorous and they have a distinct curiosity value.

But while the returns might be attractive, and the lack of correlation with conventional investments also appealing, anyone thinking about making their passion a serious investment traditionally had to consider two main issues, says Professor Elroy Dimson, co-director of the Centre for Endowment Asset Management (CEAM) at Cambridge Judge.

“While the long-run returns on these collectibles have been superior to the total return from assets such as gold, government bonds and Treasury bills,” he says, “their relative illiquidity, and difficulties over valuation, mean that they are far from straightforward investments. Whereas equities are traded every day, investors might hold onto these emotional assets for 40 years, the infrequency with which these assets are traded reflects the costs of trading them.”

Creative solutions are required, and pooled investment funds are increasingly becoming an important part of the market. Rather than buying a painting or a number of cases of wine, investors can now buy into joint funds, thereby spreading their risk and making disposal easier.

According to the 2012 Deloitte report Investing in Château Lafite, Picasso or Patek Philippe – The Rise of Collectible Assets, there were then “44 art funds and art investment trusts in operation in countries such as Luxembourg, the United States, Singapore and Switzerland. Many more are waiting in the wings.” Over recent years other specialist funds focussing on wine, watches and cars among other assets have been launched. As well as offering a potentially lower risk entry into this market, these funds offer access to a broader range of investors, as the rise of platforms to trade “shares” in art, such as My Art Invest, testifies.

Of course, emotional assets increase in value in a less logical way than many other investments. “A very old wine might be undrinkable but people might still value it as a collectible, and therefore there are opportunities to invest in it,” says Professor Dimson. Storage is another issue that needs to be addressed. “You can store a work of art by hanging it on the wall or you can put it into storage. But if you put a violin into storage it will deteriorate. It needs to be played, and so some investors in musical instruments choose to lend the violins they own to violinists for nothing.”

The challenges of valuation against a background of changing taste, fashion and trends are increasingly significant, as the prices of these assets rise and interest in them among investors increases. “However, today we have more tools for accurate valuation than we did, say, a decade ago,” says Dr Anna Dempster of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, a winner of the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award during her PhD in Management Studies at Cambridge Judge (1999-2004).

“Valuation is an area that has been very fragmented, with many of those who have research and insights, such as art historians, actuaries and investment analysts, speaking to each other from different perspectives,” she says. But as collective funds are providing a solution to illiquidity issues, Dempster believes bringing disparate art experts together could have a similar impact on valuation techniques.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and we are in the business of the unique,” she says. “However, the more market transparency there is, the more valuation becomes objective. Technology is making the art market ever more transparent with information about prices and transactions increasingly widely available.”

Dimson agrees. “Valuation can be on a systematic basis,” he says. “Hedonic pricing [where price is determined statistically from characteristics of the goods being sold and external factors affecting them] and pricing on the basis of comparables – two techniques used in equity and real-estate markets – are now in widespread use among valuers.”

So, thanks in part to the increasing availability of more objective valuation and the growth of pooled investment funds, the interest in emotional investments is increasing:

“This is the area in which very wealthy people have a big impact,” says Dimson. “If the global economy prospers and income-inequality accelerates, then we can anticipate increasing financialisation of high-end collectibles.”

In 1780 a group of gypsies was hung in Northampton and their supporters threatened to set the town alight. Nothing is known about the crime for which the gypsies died or, indeed, if there was one. A law passed in 1562 had made it illegal even to be a gypsy (‘those calling themselves Egyptians’) and throughout history the poor with no fixed abode or occupation had been, at best, viewed with deep suspicion. However, the ‘Egyptians Act’ was finally repealed in 1783. Four years later, a German writer called Heinrich Grellmann published the first taxonomy of gypsies which documented “the Manner of Life, Economy, Customs and Conditions of these people in Europe, and their origin”. The book caused a surge of public interest in what a gypsy might be.

These three events, which marked the beginning of a shift in the narratives surrounding one of society’s most marginalised groups, provide a powerful backdrop to the topics explored in Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period by Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker, a lecturer in English at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. The book, published today (30 October 2014) by Oxford University Press, treads new territory in its analysis of portrayals of travellers and wanderers in literature between 1783 and 1832. Its author touches on work by well-known poets and novelists – including John Clare, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Henry Fielding and Charlotte Bronte – as well as literature once popular but now largely forgotten.

Notable among the more obscure works is the wickedly titled The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, the Noted Devonshire Stroler and Dog-Stealer, a biography of an adventurer and rogue thought to have been written by a Dorset printer. First published in 1749, and repeatedly republished when it became a best seller, the book tells the (highly improbable) story of a well-born young man who runs away from school to live with a band of vagabonds whose bounteous fun and freedom he is unable to resist.

The book describes Carew’s first encounter with these merry-makers: “…after a plentiful Meal upon Fowls, Ducks, and other dainty Dishes, the flowing Cups of October, Cyder, &c. went most chearfully round, and merry Songs and Country Dances crowned the jovial Banquet: In short, so great an Air of Freedom, Mirth and Pleasure, appeared in the Faces and Gestures of this Society, that our Youngster from that Time conceived a sudden Inclination to enlist into their Company; which, when they communicated to the Gypsies, they considering their Appearance, Behaviour and Education, regarded as spoken only in jest.” From these beginnings, Carew rose to be self-styled ‘King of the Gypsies’.

‘Gypsy’ is today a contested term with modern communities favouring alternatives such as Romani and Traveller. It is, however, the word used by the writers whose work Houghton-Walker discusses and one that she therefore adheres to. In her study, the word ‘gypsy’ refers to an idea or a phenomenon as much as it does to any figures who might have existed – and its connotations in the period that Houghton-Walker considers are both positive and negative, much as they are today.

In her examination of how writers represented gypsies, Houghton-Walker brings to light a number of literary interactions that confound expectations. The politically radical Wordsworth, whose love of the Lakes was profoundly influential on the literary production of the period, reveals a conflicted response to the gypsies he encounters. His poem ‘Gipsies’ depicts them as lazy whereas, as the wandering poet, he portrays himself as a more valuable kind of "traveller under an open sky". The poem, it has been argued, reflects Wordsworth’s own anxiety about being an idle wanderer with no ‘proper job’.

The conservative novelist Austen, on the other hand, constructs a much more sympathetic picture in a chance meeting between Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill and a group of gypsies that creates a moment of crisis and crux in the plot of Emma. The gypsies camped on a verge in Highbury are not straightforwardly nasty, dirty thieves and their threat is seen to lie only in the over-active imagination of silly young women. Perhaps counterintuitively, Austen seems to suggest that despite their reputation for criminality, the gypsies have a place in English society and must therefore be accommodated within it.

Perhaps Houghton-Walker’s most striking discovery in researching the book was the description of an encounter between Princess (later Queen) Victoria and a group of gypsies. The princess records in her diary for Christmas Day 1836 that her mother had ordered broth, fuel and blankets, as well as a worsted knit baby jacket, to be taken to the gypsy family. The diary reveals the Princess’s compassion for the “poor wanderers” who are “the chief ornament of the Portsmouth Road” – and “a nice set of Gipsies… not at all forward or importunate, and so grateful”.

It’s no coincidence that the gypsies Princess Victoria met in Epsom were half-starved. The half century covered by Houghton-Walker’s study was a time of rapid social and economic change in both town and country as the growing population put pressure on all kinds of resources. The open commons, wide verges and uncultivated heathlands that had long afforded space for encampments of gypsies and grazing for their animals, were increasingly being enclosed.

Growing industrialisation saw the loss of traditional and seasonal tasks that previously had provided an income for groups of travellers. Clare’s poems show gypsies interacting closely with the day-to-day life of the village, mending chairs and playing the fiddle. At the same time, the belief systems practised by the rural poor, including travellers, were changing, with the old customs pushed out by the sceptical empiricism of the enlightenment, just as reforming evangelical Christians brought their own pressures to bear on the gypsies’ way of life.  

Representations of the Gypsy stems from Houghton-Walker’s preoccupation with walking and verse, and her fascination with the way in which metrical feet seem to interact with human ones. Her work on Clare, in particular, prompted her to consider the broader theme of wandering and the ways in which the figure of the gypsy embodies anxieties about identity and questions about Englishness. As wanderers, whose presence is often not discovered until they have moved on, gypsies are repeatedly figured in the Romantic period as fascinating and feared, familiar yet exotic, known and unknown. They thus provide a lens through which questions about what is and isn’t understood can be focused.

“The Romantic period marks the moment when, after a long stretch of being classed as foreigners and outsiders, gypsies find a new place in the English rural landscape. They are shown to be deeply conservative in their loyalty to old-fashioned ways, and in their resistance to any change at all while, at the same time, representing a brand of radicalism that’s both troubling and seductive for writers,” said Houghton-Walker.

“We’re talking about a period that saw a significant change in attitudes to people who were wanderers. Unless you were a member of the local community, if you turned up on foot at an inn in the 18^th century, you would be suspected of nefarious motives. No-one walked unless they had to. Towards the end of the century, however, walking became a fashionable pursuit. Wordsworth, who may have walked around 180,000 miles in his lifetime, contributed to this vogue for travel on foot. Walking was newly understood as a means of encountering and responding to landscapes.”

In a chapter devoted to representations of the gypsy by artists of the Romantic period, Houghton-Walker focuses on the painters Thomas Gainsborough and George Morland. The work of both artists can be seen to engage with subtle class differences within the context of the English landscape. “In Morland’s painting ‘Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman’, we witness the stereotypes attached to gypsies – they sit on the cold earth, sheltered only by a rough structure, while the sportsman sits astride his horse - but also a particular kind of defence of gypsies on the part of the artist,” said Houghton-Walker.

“Morland’s gypsies challenge conventions. The young man boldly returns the rider’s gaze and there’s little deference evident in the group around the tent. What’s striking is the contrast between the gypsy and the bagman (the sportsman’s servant). The almost Messianic light emanating from the sportsman’s horse illuminates the gypsy camp while the bagman is cast into darkness. But, through the composition of the painting, Morland shows us that the gun the bagman holds still matters. The ‘benevolent sportsman’ is the temporary identity of a man who pays this same servant to shoot at gypsies.”

In Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847 but set earlier in the 19^th century, Mr Rochester dresses as a gypsy to tell Jane’s fortune and therefore reveal truths that will move the plot onwards. Jane is taken in by his disguise and speeches. Yet by this point in literary history, a profound shift has taken place in the representation of gypsies.  Houghton-Walker said: “By the 1830s, the gypsy in literature has become merely a piece of theatre – a mask that can be picked up or put down on a whim. Tamed now, and owned by the cultural imagination in new ways, the figure of the gypsy abandons its sublimity and becomes instead the figure of cultural conservatism that the Victorian age was to draw on and delight in.”

Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period by Sarah Houghton-Walker is published by Oxford University Press on 30 October 2014

Beauty and Revolution traces Finlay’s artistic development from the 1960s to the 1980s; from the poems that made him Britain’s most internationally acclaimed concrete poet, to the images and texts that marked his engagement with the ideas of the French Revolution. It also presents his famous garden, Little Sparta, through photographs and film.

Visitors to the exhibition will encounter Finlay’s work through prints and paper sculptures, photographs and film; its title Beauty and Revolution reflects the visual wonder of the works on show, which cannot be divorced from Finlay’s engagement with revolutionary ideas.

Finlay’s experiments with language developed first of all through his poetry. In 1961 he co-founded the Wild Hawthorn Press to bring a new international perspective to the Scottish literary scene. His fascination with the visual effect of words in space soon resulted in the creation of a distinctive visual language that is embodied first in his standing and folding poems, and later in poem prints, emblems, medallions and inscriptions. These works range in their themes from the world of the fishing-boat to the heroes of the French Revolution, often incorporating the artist’s characteristically humorous puns on words.

The last room of the exhibition will show original prints by some of the major photographers who have recorded his work, together with the colour film from 1973 that provides the first visual documentation of Little Sparta– his classically inspired garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.

Finlay first met and began to correspond with Jim Ede, the founder of Kettle’s Yard, in the autumn of 1964. In the same year, a group of Cambridge students had started to exhibit, publish and write about his concrete poetry; one of them was the art historian Stephen Bann, who subsequently built up an extensive collection of Finlay’s works. An internationally recognised authority on Finlay’s art, Professor Bann is the curator of Beauty and Revolution.

This new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard offers a unique opportunity to view Bann’s collection of poems, prints and sculptures alongside Kettle’s Yard’s permanent collection, which Finlay much admired though he himself took a different path. An inscribed stone that was later acquired for the collection is entitled KETTLE’S YARD / CAMBRIDGE / ENGLAND IS THE / LOUVRE OF THE PEBBLE (1995).

Beauty and Revolution: The Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay runs from Saturday 6 December 2014– Sunday 1 March 2015

The intricate pencil drawings and watercolours in the sketchbooks were made by Conrad Martens, shipmate to Charles Darwin as they travelled around South America on the voyage of HMS Beagle.

Now, for the first time, all of Martens’ Beagle sketches have been made freely available online through Cambridge University Library’s Digital Library: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/ and can also be seen in the photo film above.

Martens made the drawings between the summer of 1833 and the early months of 1835. Cambridge University Library owns his two sketchbooks from this period and has made the above audio slideshow to celebrate their addition to the Digital Library.

“These drawings were made almost two centuries ago but even now, they still really vividly bring to life one of the most famous voyages in the world and arguably the most famous in the history of science,” said Dr Alison Pearn, Associate Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

“Each of these pages is only 14cm by 20cm. It’s wonderful that everyone now has the opportunity to flick through these sketchbooks in their virtual representation and to follow the journey as Martens and Darwin saw it unfold.”

The first sketchbook begins just before Martens heard that the Beagle was looking for a new ship’s artist, capturing street life in Montevideo in August 1833. The later sketches give a sense of how hard and difficult the journey must have been both on sea and land in uncharted territory.

Martens did not have much time to make his sketches and the notebooks are littered with hastily-scribbled notes to himself about colours, textures and the geology of the landscapes before him.

“Darwin described the Beagle voyage as the most formative experience of his life and to see it through the eyes of one of his companions is a very vivid reminder of the reality of that journey,” added Pearn. “Martens' sketches are a visual counterpart to Darwin’s letters home. Both bring to life a really remarkable adventure in a vast and remote part of the world.”

‘The Royal Academy at Wolfson’ is an extraordinary exhibition, curated by Anthony Green RA, which includes paintings, prints, drawings and small sculptures that have been lent to the College by the artists. Many of these works have never been exhibited before and, as a group, they represent some of the finest art being produced in Britain today.

With free admission, the exhibition will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday afternoons 2–4pm from 31 January to 19 December 2015. It will feature works by the following Royal Academicians: Ivor Abrahams, Eileen Cooper, Gus Cummins, Anthony Eyton, Peter Freeth, Paul Huxley, Timothy Hyman, Neil Jeffries, Sonia Lawson, Ben Levene, Christopher Le Brun, Chris Orr, Mick Rooney, Anthony Whishaw and Anthony Green himself.

The exhibition is the first in an outstanding programme of modern and contemporary art events designed to celebrate Wolfson College’s 50th anniversary. One of the most cosmopolitan of the 31 Colleges in the University of Cambridge, Wolfson is a leading academic research institution with fellows, postgraduate students, and mature undergraduates from 80 countries around the world. Distinguished by its modernity and diversity, but also by its informality and egalitarianism, Wolfson was the first College to admit men and women as both students and fellows. Professor Sir Richard Evans FBA, Regius Professor of History until 2014 and currently Provost of Gresham College, London, is the fifth President of the College.

‘The Royal Academy at Wolfson’ will also be accompanied by the display of a significant and unique collection of pottery made by potters who worked in the studio of the renowned Bernard Leach CBE. This collection was recently donated by collectors Dr Harry Bradshaw and Dr Norma Bubier, senior members of Wolfson College, and will feature alongside works by other notable potters, including: Richard Batterham, Clive Bowen, Amanda Brier, Alan Brough, Ray Finch, John Leach and Bill Marshall.

Admission is free via the Porter’s Lodge, Barton Road.

For further information, please contact finearts@wolfson.cam.ac.uk.

For public enquiries, please contact the Porter’s Lodge on 01223 335900 or porters@wolfson.cam.ac.uk.

There was never any debate about her name: it had to be Clare.  She is a metal sculpture of a T-rex, and she made a spectacular debut as the centrepiece for last summer’s Clare College May Ball which had a ‘primordial’ theme.

The puzzle of what to do with the sculpture once the celebrations were over was solved when the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences expressed an interest in homing her.

The morning after the party, the model T-rex was trundled through the centre of Cambridge by a posse of dinosaur-attendants clad in high-vis tabards. She has seen out the winter hidden in a corner of the Downing Site.   

Now Clare has found a permanent home outside the entrance to the historic Sedgwick Museum, the oldest geological museum in the world, where she is likely to become one of Cambridge’s best loved landmarks.

Clare was formally welcomed to her new stamping ground earlier today (30 January 2015). The unveiling was attended by Clare’s creator, the sculptor Ian Curran, along with members of Clare College and the Department of Earth Sciences.

Sedgwick Museum director, Ken McNamara said: “The sculpture will add to the excitement experienced by visitors as they arrive to see our unique collection. It includes thousands of fossils, including dinosaur remains and a life-size Iguanodon.”  

The model is a half-size artistic representation of the iconic T-rex, a species which lived 66-68 million years ago. It was made by Curran in his Doncaster workshop and travelled down the A1 to Cambridge on the back of a lorry.

Curran said: “It's tremendous to see one of my sculptures in such a prestigious location. I'm thrilled that the Sedgewick Museum has her on display where she will be seen by so many more families.

“Normally my work is displayed on my front lawn for the benefit of local children and the grandparents who bring them, so this wider audience is an absolute thrill.”

Cambridge conservation scientist Spike Bucklow uncovered the knock-down cost of the 1260 AD ‘Westminter Retable’ while researching his latest book ‘Riddle of the Image’, which delves into the materials used in medieval works of art.

Commissioned by Henry III during the construction of Westminster Abbey, the altarpiece’s use of fake gemstones is already well documented. However, what has not been known until now is just how little the king would have paid for the Retable, the oldest known panel painting in England.

Using centuries-old records of accounts from Westminster Abbey, Bucklow was able to determine prices for the amount of wood used, the area of glass needed, each pigment of paint, and the wages the carpenters and painters were paid. This information was combined with practice-based research into the Retable whilst it was being restored at the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

“This is bargain basement stuff, it was all dirt cheap,” he said. “While some of the other objects in Riddle of the Image would have been cost the same as a farm or country home, the Westminster Abbey altarpiece would have cost no more than eight cows or about £5 in 13th century money.

“Historians have often thought that a financially constrained Henry was cutting corners, but you don’t spend as much as he did on the rest of the Abbey and then cut corners on the most visual and most important area for the crowning of monarchs.”

Rather than penny-pinching to preserve pounds, crowns and shillings, Bucklow believes that Henry III deliberately chose cheap materials and fake gemstones to accentuate one of the key themes of the altarpiece – miraculous transformations.

“It is no coincidence that all three surviving painted scenes show Christ involved in a transformation. Transformation is key to the whole Retable. It was the backdrop for transformations in a very real sense. In front of it, once in a generation, someone was turned into a monarch, while much more often, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

“To make a fake gem you take sand and ash and transform something ordinary into something beautiful. Henry is telling us that art is above gold. We know how engaged he was with artists of the day. I really believe that he was dedicating human ingenuity and skill to God. He’s making a statement.”

As well as determining the cost of the Westminster Retable, The Riddle of the Image is an attempt to look at medieval works of art through the eyes of those who commissioned and made them. Bucklow believes that our modern-day appreciation of cultural artefacts – such as mobile phones – is completely divorced from our understanding of the materials that go into their making.

In medieval times, however, there was a widespread knowledge of artists’ materials that contributed deeper meaning to objects such as the Metz Pontifical (c.1316) and the Macclesfield Psalter (c.1330), both beautiful illuminated manuscripts now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as the Thornham Parva Retable, which was also restored at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and the Wilton Diptych, Richard II’s iconic portable altarpiece.

Bucklow believes this is because many of the pigments and materials used in the pre-modern world for artistic purposes also had common, everyday uses such as cochineal and lapis lazuli being used in make-up and medicine. (Red dyes were used in heart tonics and the blue stone was used to 'dispel melancholy' and lower fevers.) As such, artists' materials were readily available from apothecaries of the day.

By examining the science of the materials, as well as the techniques of medieval artists, Bucklow hopes to further the reader and art-world’s understanding and appreciation of the paintings, and medieval art in general.

Each chapter in the book is devoted to one of five objects and each builds on the cultural relevance of materials, exploring the connections between artists’ materials and their everyday life; showing how materials could be used philosophically and playfully.

For example, in one of the book’s featured artworks, two blues, one of which cost ten times as much as the other, were used side by side, even though they could not be told apart with the naked eye. In another manuscript, the strange choice of materials matched the bizarre contorted hybrid figures seen swarming across the page margins.

The Riddle of the Image, published by Reaktion Books, is available now.

Faced with the prospect of his rapidly approaching nuptials on 29 October 1442, and with no wedding gift purchased for his bride-to-be, Francis I of Brittany (1414–1450) did what many of us have done at some point: he ‘re-gifted’. He took something that was already in his possession and gave it to someone else.

But this was no ordinary gift: it was an illuminated manuscript, made for Francis’ first wife, Yolande of Anjou, who had died in 1440. Francis had it altered and presented it to his new bride, Isabella Stuart, daughter of James I. The portrait of his first wife was covered with that of Isabella and an image of St Catherine was added, using cheaper pigments. Then, when Francis was made a duke, the portrait was painted over yet again to give Isabella a coronet.

Art historians have written volumes on the Hours of Isabella Stuart over the last century, but a cross-disciplinary Cambridge project is using a variety of imaging techniques to uncover this story of re-gifting. The team’s work is challenging previous assumptions about this and many other manuscripts, helping them to see and understand medieval painting and illumination in new and unexpected ways.

Combining research in the arts, humanities, sciences and technology, MINIARE (Manuscript Illumination: Non-Invasive Analysis, Research and Expertise) currently focuses on uncovering the secrets of medieval art, but it is anticipated that many of the imaging techniques they are adapting may be used to study other types of art, from a range of different periods.

The project is led by Dr Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Professor Stephen Elliott of the Department of Chemistry, who are working with colleagues from across the University and around the world.

“Working in a truly cross-disciplinary way can benefit art history, scientific research and visual culture in general, while pushing technology forward at the same time,” said Panayotova. “Thanks to the imaging techniques we’ve been using, we can see things in these manuscripts that we couldn’t see before.”

Much of what we know about illuminated manuscripts comes from art-historical analysis and circumstantial evidence. Since they are so delicate and the layers of pigment are so thin, manuscripts are seriously compromised by taking samples, which is common practice for the analysis of panel or fresco paintings. To gather hard evidence about how these manuscripts were made, while preserving them, non-invasive techniques are required.

“For our team, it was about finding new applications for existing techniques, and pushing them far beyond current boundaries in order to analyse the very thin layers of a manuscript,” said Elliott. “Part of our research is in the area of medical diagnostics and environmental sensing, where we analyse materials in very thin layers, which is not so different from analysing a painting. So we could certainly see what the problems were.”

Using a combination of imaging techniques, including photomicroscopy, visible and infrared imaging at multiple wavelengths, reflectance imaging spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography, the MINIARE team is able to peer through the layers of a painting to uncover its history, as in the case of the Hours of Isabella Stuart.

“We do have to adapt conventional analytical techniques to make them safe to use on something as fragile as an illuminated manuscript,” said conservation scientist Dr Paola Ricciardi. “For instance, Raman spectroscopy is a brilliant technique, but it’s a challenge to use it on a manuscript as we tend to use one-hundredth of the laser power that we would on a less fragile object.”

The technological challenge for the MINIARE team is making sure the imaging technology is non-invasive enough to keep the manuscript safe, but still sensitive enough to get an accurate result. Many of the imaging tools that the team use are in fact not cameras, but scanners that acquire a spectrum at each point as they scan an entire object. The resulting ‘spectral image cubes’ can then provide information about the types of materials that were used, as well as the ability to see different layers present in the manuscript.

Combining these non-invasive imaging techniques not only helps the researchers to distinguish between artists by analysing which materials they used and how they employed them, but also helps them to learn more about the technical know-how that these artists possessed.

“Many of the artists we’re looking at didn’t just work on manuscripts,” said Panayotova. “Some of them were panel painters or fresco painters, while others also worked in glass, textiles or metal. Identifying the ways in which they used the same materials in different media, or transferred materials and techniques across media, offers a whole new way of looking at art.”

For example, Ricciardi has found evidence for the use of smalt, a finely ground blue glass, as a pigment in an early 15th-century Venetian manuscript made in Murano. The use of a glass-based pigment is not unexpected given the proximity of the Murano glass factories, but this illuminator was working half a century before any other Venetian easel painter whose works are known to contain smalt.

Another unexpected material that the MINIARE team has encountered is egg yolk, which was a common paint binder for panel paintings, but not recommended for manuscript illumination – instead, egg white or gum were normally used. By making a hyperspectral reflectance map of the manuscript, the researchers were able to gather information about the pigments and binders, and determine that some manuscript painters were most likely working across a variety of media.

The techniques that the team are developing and refining for manuscripts will also see application in other types of art. “All of the imaging techniques we’re using on the small scale of medieval manuscripts need to be scalable, in order that we can apply them to easel paintings and many other types of art,” said Dr Spike Bucklow of the Hamilton Kerr Institute. “It’s an opportunity to see how disciplines relate to each other.”

MINIARE (www.miniare.org) involves the Fitzwilliam Museum, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Departments of Chemistry, Physics, History of Art, History and Philosophy of Science, and Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Durham University, Nottingham Trent University, Antwerp University, Getty Conservation Institute, J Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and SmartDrive Ltd.

Inset image – top: Macroscopic X-ray fluorescence imaging has allowed to prove the presence of smalt, a cobalt-containing glass pigment, mixed with ultramarine blue in selected areas of this early 15th century manuscript fragment painted by the Master of the Murano gradual; Left: Fitzwilliam Museum, Marlay Cutting It 18; Right: Cobalt distribution map; Credit: S. Legrand and K. Janssens, Department of Chemistry, University of Antwerp.

Inset image – bottom: Hyperspectral reflectance imaging in the visible and near-infrared range confirms evidence for the use of egg yolk as a paint binder only in figurative areas within the decorated initials in the Missal of Cardinal Angelo Acciaiuoli, painted in Florence ca. 1404; Left: Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 30, fol 1r (detail); Centre: RGB composite obtained from the hyperspectral image cube; Right: egg yolk distribution map, showing its use to paint the figure of Christ with the exclusion of his ultramarine blue robe; Credit: J. K. Delaney and K. Dooley, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

After being awarded £100,000 by the Art Fund to build a collection of work from Australia, South Africa and Canada, the museum officially opened The Power of Paper yesterday. The exhibition focuses on artworks made in those countries during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by Aboriginal, Inuit and black South African artists – a rich variety of indigenous art from the 1950s onwards as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land and belief, as well as struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

"This show is a revelation," said Nicholas Thomas, Director of MAA and the exhibition's curator. "It presents visions of place and history that are rarely given the attention their eloquence and power deserve, even in today's supposedly global and inclusive art world.

“I'm taken aback by the sheer artistic accomplishment of all the works included, but also love the quirkiness of the artists' take on everything from empire, to township life, to climate change. Why should a military helicopter be hoisting an oversized caribou, walrus and polar bear through the air? You need to come to the show to find out."

Modern art was more than just a project of great Europeans. From the late 1950s onward, as the end of empire gathered momentum, artists in native and local communities began to produce work in modern media in both remote community workshops and city studios; wryly expressing everyday life in townships or settlements, and often illuminating both personal and collective concerns in artworks that could be evocative, oblique or polemical.

Responding to the very limited representation of modern indigenous art movements in British collections, in 2011 the Art Fund awarded the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge £100,000 to build a collection of work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa.

For more than two years, working with a network of artists, workshops and specialist curators, Thomas embarked on what he described as a ‘dream shopping trip’, building a unique collection of around 300 works. While some of the artists are internationally famous, only a few of the works have been on display in Europe.

Art on display in Britain for the first time includes the very first prints produced at the famous Rorke’s Drift print workshop, which played a major role in the development of black art during apartheid.

South African artist Frank Ledimo, whose work King Ubu Encounter (2002) is featured in the exhibition, said: “I create work that is based on the urban landscape in which I live. I have been fascinated by the representation of the figure to relay messages of urban squalor, city life, survivors and victims of urbanisation.”

Added Thomas: “The Power of Paper gives voice to great but marginalized artists, whose words caption their own work. The exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom.”

The Power of Paper runs at MAA until December 6, 2015. The exhibition will also feature a working press with opportunities to participate in practical workshops as visitors explore the medium of printmaking as a form of expression.

Gaudier-Brzeska moved permanently to London in January 1911. He made a significant contribution to the development of modern sculpture as one of the key members of the Vorticist movement and by influencing a later generation of sculptors.

His precocious artistic talent was cut short by his death at the age of 23 while fighting for the French army in Neuville St Vaast, France, in 1915. As Ezra Pound wrote in 1916: ‘A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist is gone’.

The exhibition, NEW RHYTHMS Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Art Dance and Movement in London 1911-1915, is the first to explore the artist’s engagement with dance and movement. New Rhythms brings together sculpture, drawing, photography, film, and archive material, combining the strengths of Kettle’s Yard’s sculpture and drawing collections with important loans from national and international institutions.

The exhibition includes work by Gaudier-Brzeska’s contemporaries David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Percy Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Auguste Rodin, Helen Saunders and others who engaged with the subject of dance.

Kettle’s Yard holds one of the largest collections of sculptures and drawings by Gaudier-Brzeska, acquired by the creator of Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede in 1929. Ede went on to write the first seminal biography of Gaudier- Brzeska ‘Savage Messiah’ in 1930, using the letters that were exchanged between Gaudier-Brzeska and his partner Sophie Brzeska.

New Rhythms takes as its starting point Gaudier‐ Brzeska’s two contrasting sculptures Red Stone Dancer and Dancer. The exhibition looks in detail at the inspirations for the two sculptures of 1913, using them as studies for a wider exploration of the artist’s interests in the subject and the cultural milieu in which he was working.

For example, his engagement with the dynamic performances of the Ballets Russes is brought to the fore through his bronze Firebird (1912). As well as exploring dance, New Rhythms will investigate the artist’s wider fascination with motion, the physical dynamism of bodily movement, and wrestling.

The new dance trends that exploded onto pre‐war London stages and screens such as Apache dance from Paris and Tango, and performances by the Ballets Russes, will be represented through photographs, printed sources and film.

The show culminates by asking how Gaudier‐Brzeska’s dancers can inspire new rhythms now, through a contemporary dance and music commission. The work by Malgorzata Dzierzon, performed to new music commissioned from emerging composer Kate Whitley, will feature in the exhibition through film.

This will be the final exhibition at Kettle’s Yard before closing for a major development of the site and offers a chance for visitors to enjoy the house and an exhibition intimately linked to it and the permanent collection. It closes on June 21, 2015.

For more about the development plans and off site activity visit www.kettlesyard.co.uk. 

The exhibition will tour with selected works to Harewood House, Leeds, from 11 July to 1 November 2015 and is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.