Art of the State: Chester: Grosvenor Museum.

Art For years, my annual Christmas shopping ritual was to visit Chester, Manchester, Southport, Formby and Cheshire Oaks.  But thanks to my monthly visits to London and each losing their distinctiveness, I've visited some of these places less and less.  But I've stuck with Chester which has tended to survive intact, dodging somewhat the destruction of the high street.  Not any more.  Rather like a more picturesque Stoke, large sections of the shopping areas are now filled with vacancies and businesses which have been in situ for decades have slowly disappeared.  Although some places have demolished old stock and started again, Chester doesn't have that option.  So what will they do about such places as the block of shops opposite the cathedral which used to house some wonderful jewelry and sweets?  All is not completely lost.  A new vinyl shop has opened just around the corner from here selling new releases and back catalogue at premium prices but how long will that survive?

Access To Collection.

The Museum is open Monday to Saturday 10.30am–5pm, 1pm-4pm on Sundays.  The Grosvenor hasn't changed much since my visit for the last project over ten years ago. The paintings are still displayed between the three areas, the lecture theatre, stairwell and room on the first floor. There hasn't been a significant rehang, although the lecture theatre now contains work by more contemporary local artists, a rather strange portrait of HRH The Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester by Tom Wood has been given pride of place in the main display room (he "re-opened" the museum after refurbishment in 1992) and the still fabulous depictions of workers at Williams & Williams, purveyors of cast iron window frames have been moved to the help yourself tea room in the ground floor of the adjoining 22 Castle Street, a National Trust-style recreation of a 17th century home (currently decorated with trees and tinsel ready for Christmas).

Collection Focus.



Painted and acquired since my original visit, Francis Mullen's Ferris Wheel, Chester, Christmas 2010 captures the town in its ideal state, snow on the ground, grey skies, winter clothing, ancient buildings behind the city wall and lighting and an incongruous object.  Somehow, I'd completely forgotten that the wheel had been in place at the beginning of the decade, but this isn't an imagined scene.  Here's a photograph of a similar scene from an angle behind the spire of St Mary's Church.  Here's how Chester News covered the announcement of the event.  Mullen himself donated the painting to the Museum in 2013 and he goes into some depth on his methodology in this interview which also includes a brief biography.  This is his only painting on the Art UK website.  Most recently around Christmas time, this is how I imagine Chester will be, which is why I keep returning each year despite my increasing levels of disappointment and probably still will.

Art of the State: Stoke-on-Trent: The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.

Art My first recollection of hearing the name of the place was back in 1984 when Liverpool's International Garden Festival closed and there was much publicity for a similar event in Stoke which I was very keen to visit but wasn't old enough to make a convincing argument to my parents. So when I was casting about for places which were (a) easy to get to and (b) relatively cheap on the train, it was at the top of the list. The museum is in the Hanley area whose city centre is not unlike a lot of the north western towns I saw for the other project, modern block paving and pedestrianisation for nought thanks to the decline of the high street and also in this case what seems like half the town having been demolished to make way for a shopping mall where all of the high street chains monolithically cohabit with a Cineworld and food hall.

The Potteries has numerous other museums dedicated to local manufacturing.  A glance at Google Maps shows why this is a tourist destination for people interested in china and pottery, which to be frank is something ... I'm ... not.  Despite everything, I have a disconnect with most plates, cups and vases unless they have some kind of fine art or sculptural element.  Which isn't to say I won't be returning to the area when the weather improves.  The local council also runs the Gladstone Pottery Museum which as Doctor Who fans will know was the scene of the Sixth Doctor's final battle within the Gallifreyan Matrix against the Valeyard in Trial of a Time Lord (a connection which is not immediately obvious from the website for some reason).  That I have to see.

Access to Collection.

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery is open Monday to Saturday 10am – 5pm and Sunday 11am – 4pm. The "art gallery" section of the museum title is a bit overstated. The majority of the displays present a massive collection of decorative arts from local hoard finds through to pottery manufactured in the area along with a smattering of local history.  This includes Ozzy the Owl, an old Antiques Roadshow find which was sold the museum at auction.  Only about a ten percent of the six hundred and eighty two paintings listed on the Art UK website are on display with a special emphasis on local artists although around a quarter of the wall space is set aside for their numerous Lowrys.

As this handy guide on the Art  UK site explains, the collection "grew out of a bequest from Dr John Russell, OBE in 1927 who had attached a condition that the Corporation of Stoke-on-Trent ‘provide a building or part of a building to be set apart for the reception and storage of pictures and to be maintained as an Art Gallery’"  How would he feel about the works which have been chosen?  Other than the Lowrys and a Constable, it's not a hugely significant collection, but I'd argue that there are some works in the archive which are aesthetically more interesting than what is on show, but I appreciate that's a matter of taste,



Collection Spotlight.

John Collier has become one of my favourite artists. He produced the ravishing Lilith at the Atkinson in Southport and the incredibly powerful depiction of Clytemnestra at London's Guildhall Art Gallery.  Brotherhood of Man which is the most eye-catching work in the space, depicts a collective of anarchists meeting to review a bomb which has been invented by a member of the group.  As Art UK explains "the posters in the background are based on actual Bolshevik designs that were confiscated by Scotland Yard and, at the time Collier was painting, held in the British Museum."

Perhaps most interestingly for the purposes of this project is that the "figure holding the bomb is Charles Robert Chisman who founded the Art Exhibition Bureau that circulated works by living artists to provincial museums. The organisation acted as secretaries to many painters including John Collier."  So arguably he's the man who created the explosive spark of culture across the country which meant that galleries didn't simply wallow in the past.  It was gifted to the gallery in 1936 by Collier's widow, two years after his death.

Art of the State: Liverpool: Tate Liverpool.

Art There's not much more that I can add to the last time I visited Tate Liverpool as part of one of these grand projects. In 2013 I suggested that Tate Liverpool saved my life and there's not much to add to that in the six years since, other than to an extent it saved me again.  What I didn't mention then (due to the blog rules) was that at around that time, a company called Morris Hargreaves McIntyre employed me as a market researcher, which amounted to stopping people as they left the building and asking them what they thought.  The number of shifts per month were variable, but quite often they got me over a few financial bumps although it did mean that whenever I attended a press day there, the resulting review would be more diplomatic, shall we say, than perhaps they might be.  Eventually, I began following Thumper's philosophy and just wrote about those exhibitions that genuinely engaged me.

Access to Collection.

During the winter months, Tate Liverpool is open Monday to Sunday 10.00–17.00, extended to 18.00 during over the summer.  But the gallery as such does not have a permanent collection, its contents a mix of loans for the paid exhibitions and items from the Tate's larger archive in the form of Constellations and In Focus displays, both of which rotate their topics on an annual basis if not longer.  The Art UK website lists four paintings as being in this location which is an error.  Perhaps you could say that it has a permanently temporary collection, a way for people in the North West to enjoy items which would otherwise be in storage or on display in London.  It's worth noting that in the past I've privately been pretty scathing about the level of work which has made its way up here, but at the moment there's an astonishingly good selection on display.



Collection Spotlight.

The current "in focus" exhibition is considers Op Art, a movement which unsurprisingly sprang from the sixties given that the proponents, as the Tate website describes, "combined lines, geometric shapes and eye popping colour to create artworks that fool the eye. Images could be subtle or disorientating, giving the illusion of movement".  In many ways this exemplified by Jesus Rafael Soto's Twelve Blacks and Four Silvereds (1965) in which dozens of thin vertical parallel lines are broken by a series of black squares floating above the surface which cause the said lines to "move" when the viewer shifts their weight forth and back.  This is an interactive display, the viewer being coaxed into participating in each piece even though for the most part they're two or minimally three dimensional objects which we're not allowed to touch.

Unifying the exhibition is Jim Lambie's Zobop, an installation with a 1999 insep date which has been recreated in the gallery space.  Perhaps I'm being obtuse in selecting this as my favourite piece because it won't exist in this form once the exhibition closes, but it is an excellent example of how an art collection doesn't just contain objects but also ideas or at least the prerequisites necessary for the recreation of a work.  It's listed on Tate's website as "presented by Tate Members in 2006" which presumably means that when it's constructed by the artist or someone else, unless its inside a Tate building its essentially "on loan" even though it's contents are a series of coloured lines spread across a floor.  The record for Zobop contains images of an instance of Lambie's effort on the floor of Tate Britain, a much larger space than at the Albert Dock.

The work is the most striking part of the space, filling two of the three display room on the second floor.  Lambie pleads the 5th on the meaning of the work, which he's recreated in black and white and materials other than the 3M tape which adorns the Tate Liverpool floors.  The lines twist and turn around the corners of the place like Tron cycles or a manic game of Snake, frame within frame within frame.  I spent a few minutes following a green line around as it shifted between corners and over concentric ovals which from a distance look like curved slices, an optical illusion often exploited by chalk street artists.  What I'd really like to know is how this is held within Tate's vaults.  Is it a patent-like statement of intent wrapped around to reels of tape?  Photographs of its various installations across the years? 

Art of the State: London: British Museum.

Art The British Museum (which you can read more about here) is the first of these institutions which caused me to have an anxiety attack. This was last month before this project officially began when I decided after three or four years of monthly London trips it was about time for a visit (although I'm taking the Amy Adams in Arrival approach to time now and including anywhere I may have visited recently as being part of the project even if I didn't know the project had begun yet).  Everything began as usual on entering, toilet then lunch from the museum cafe then find the section I was focusing on for the visit, on this occasion Europe in the last millenium.

Truth be told, I'd already been nervous about that London visit for some reason.  The week before hadn't gone completely to plan for various reasons so I was already on edge when on reaching the Museum I discovered that the one working men's toilet was in the basement (as long term readers will know I spend half my time in museums and art galleries traipsing to and from the lavatory so the closer it is to the objects the better).  Then the wrap bought in the cafe was pretty horrendous, a smooshy concoction with large raw piece of broccoli root in the middle.  Then there's the map of the museum which is incredibly confusing if you don't already appreciate the geography of the building.

Such things sound like pretty low level issues but if you're already a bit tense they begin to add up.  Once I was in the museum space with the map searching for the Europe section, my head began to spin.  When I eventually reached the section I was after, my bladder was already screaming at me, the toilet so, so far away.  Between that, the sheer number of people moving around and existing and objects in display cases placed so close to each other in the rooms, one of the largest museums in the world began to give me sensory overload, like the final moments of the Doctor Who episode Turn Left but with the word "distraction" printed across all the surfaces.

Everything just got too much for me and I ended up having to run to a bench and phoning someone I could trust so that I could hear a voice which would take me out of the environment.  Eventually Mum was able to coax me back and I left as soon as I could, feeling incredibly defeated.  Apart from a visit to the nearby camera museum with its chronology of machines in the basement, the day went pretty much downhill from there and I ended up getting an earlier train home.  Although I'm sure it's not for these reasons, for the first time I understood why some people don't like London.  Sometimes it's a little bit too everything all together.

Access to the Collection.

The museum is open daily 10.00–17.30 and Fridays 10.00–20.30.   Due to its size, I can't honestly say how many of the paintings on the Art UK website are on display.  When it first opened, the National Gallery was essentially part of the British Museum so its art collection was transferred there. As one of the notes on the Museum's Wikipedia page says, "Sculptures and applied art are in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the British Museum houses earlier art, non-Western art, prints and drawings. Art of a later date is at Tate Modern. The National Gallery holds the National Collection of Western European Art. Tate Britain holds British Art from 1500 onwards."



Collection Spotlight.

Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is graphically complex and thrilling artwork depicting the threat of watery chaos against three boats off the coast of the southern prefecture of Japan.  The white foam looks like claws about to pull the fishermen to their death, demonstrating the ongoing conflict between man and nature.  It also somewhat captures what it's like to have anxiety, forever under threat that you're about to overwhelmed knowing that eventually you will be engulfed despite taking medication, despite knowing that it will pass, hoping that that if you do capsize you'll still be able to make it back to shore.

Two things worth noting for the purposes of this project.  Firstly, it's not listed on the Art UK website which again opens up the discussion about the line drawn between museum ethnographic artifacts and public art collections - although it's worth nothing that because the database began life as the Your Paintings section on the BBC website, it doesn't necessarily feature prints or drawings yet, that would be another massive undertaking.  But it is one of my favourite objects in the BM's collection and with the greatest respect far more interesting than the paintings which do feature on the Art UK website which are mainly of interest in relation to the history of the museum.

Secondly, it isn't on the walls, only brought out every couple of years as a precaution against damage, something I only discovered on a further visit this month to see it.  Not wanting to be emotionally destroyed by a building, after visiting Leighton House and the surrounding sites, I returned to the museum, taking advice from a few people online to use the side entrance which was indeed a lot more civilised and with less queues.  Holborn tube station may be adorned with British Museum advertising, but Goodge Street is just as close and allows you to skip the crowds.  London is always somehow less intimidating when you're acting like a local.

Before visiting I googled the artwork to check whether it was on display.  You see I did do some homework, and this page on the website indicates "On display: G35/od" - I assumed the letters and numbers were some kind of room designation.  Not wanting to have to deal with the map again, I approached the information desk for directions, only to be told that it wasn't in fact on display.  Dejectedly I suggested that perhaps the website should be updated to say as much upon which the clerk showed me this page which does indeed show that it is "not on display". Being me I trapsed up to the Japan gallery to check anyway only to find a sign on the wall explaining its absence.

Needless to say, I've emailed the collections database department at the museum for an explanation.  Looking now, the acquisition details are different in each entry which suggests the British Museum actually owns two copies of the print but that doesn't explain why one of them is listed as being on display when it appears neither of them are.  I'll rewrite and complete this paragraph when I get a response.

Art of the State: London: Leighton House Museum.

Art A couple of days before visiting Leighton House Museum, Dr. Bendor Grosvenor noted on Twitter that one of its paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby, which had been featured in a season two episode of Britain's Lost Masterpieces had been put up for sale.  As is noted there, it was actually bequeathed to Royal Kensington Borough Council who now run the museum and had decided to put it on display there and it was their decision to sell the work, which will fetch a couple of hundred grand.  This nevertheless shows the increasingly precarious position local art collections are in.  Presumably the bequest was made on the understanding that it would be on view to the public and now it'll doubtless return to private hands.

Leighton House, as the name suggests, was the home of the painter Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, and is a rare for the period example of a purpose built home and studio.  Designed by George Aitchison for whom this was his most notable work and taking thirty years to complete, it's best known for its Qa'a, a reception room with a high golden dome and islamic influenced tiling and mosaics.  It is indeed spectacular and I was desperate to sit and take it all in, but none of the chairs in the building appear to be for sitting on, with pine cones on top of all of them detering the visitor.  The rest of the building is constructed around this fancy, the most remarkable effort being the huge studio space now doubles as an education and events space.

Accessibility of the Collection.

The museum is open daily from 10am to 5.30pm; last entry at 5pm.  But despite being a council run building there is an entry charge of £9 for adults, £7 concession.  Fortunately I had my National Art Collection card so received free entry.  Word of warning.  Apparently, it's always very busy with school visits.  When I first wandered in there was what seemed like the entire year of a junior school in and a bit later an A-Level class, both of which were pretty noisy and given how small the building is, pretty disruptive to the concentration.  In the end I left and came back a couple of hours later, after they'd gone.  If you're someone like me who's becoming increasingly tricky in a crowd (see future entry on the British Museum), I'd phone and check first, especially if you have to pay the full entrance fee.



Collection Spotlight.

Much of the work on display is by Leighton himself and of these I have a soft spot for Corinna of Tanagra. But let's focus on this portrait of a girl by Emilie Isabel Barrington.  It's one of two works by Barrington in the Leighton House collection which have been brought out on display as part of an imminent refurbishment and extension plan (the rest of the reserve collection are going into storage).  Except they're also the only two works in the Art UK's database.  Barrington's wikipedia page mentions her work as a biographer and columnist, but nothing of her work as an artist.  So how did these two beautiful works happen and what was her connection to Leighton and the house?

This useful blog post from the Friends of Leighton House site has a number of answers:

"Mrs Barrington lived with her husband in Melbury Road [round the back of Leighton House -- Ed.] with the Thornycroft family of sculptors on one side and G.F. Watts on the other. She befriended many of the artists living nearby. Her devotion to Watts (who gave her painting lessons) and habit of dropping in on him unannounced, became an irritant to Watts’ second wife Mary, contributing to the couple’s decision to establish a second home at Compton in Surrey.

"Following Leighton’s death and with his home facing an uncertain future, she was behind the move to establish the house as a centre for the arts in Kensington. In 1906 she published a substantial biography of Leighton which remains an invaluable source and a number of the works by Leighton on display in the house were presented by her. Having fallen out with a committee of the great and good established to secure its future, she financed and ran the house more or less single-handedly until its transfer to the council at the end of the 1920s."

So it was George Watts who gave her painting lessons and its because of her that we have a Leighton House Museum now. Frankly she sounds like she deserves her own biography, although that seems unlikely since her key works are only in print because of the British Library's duplication service (although the Internet Archive has her Watts book).  There are plans for a new wing include a display commemorating Barrington's contribution.  Hopefully this will also include some conservation work on her painting - as you can see from the photograph, the surface has a gash out of it on the bottom right. 

Art of the Stare: London: Mayor's Parlour.

Art If Geoff and Vicki on All The Stations have awkward stations, then it's inevitable in my rip-off project that I'm going to come across some awkward venues. The Mayor's Parlour in Kensington Town Hall, a lovely (yes lovely) brutalist edifice designed by Sir Basil Spence (an architect perhaps best known for Coventry Cathedral) in the late 60s and finally opened in 1976 (ten days after his death).  The building resembles a kind of alien embassy with its geometric wall structure and spacious yet intimate interior, with a hallway on the ground floor large enough to host events.  The blog of the Kensington Central Library's local history department has a series of photographs showing the construction of the building from foundations upwards.

Accessibility of Collection.

Well. After wandering aimlessly around the ground floor of the town hall, which is also on the Art UK list but doesn't merit its own blog post due to having only two paintings listed in the database and neither on display, I stumbled upon a reception. Sheepishly I asked the the clerk if the "Mayor's Parlour" was open to the public, she smiled and said yes, there was a meeting on at that moment, but I was welcome to go and take a look, pointing me towards stairs up to the first floor.  Slightly bewildered, I wandered upwards and through some thick oak doors found some interconnected corridors.

Along one of these I could see the meeting room, where there was indeed a meeting happening and next to this another door.  I glanced in.  This was the Mayor's Parlour which turned out to be a literal private office.  Tea making facilities, large impressive desk and lots of books.  Is this what the desk clerk meant?  There were just a couple of paintings hung up and the rest stacked against a wall near the door, one of which had a Royal Academy label on the back.  I did not touch anything and decided to make my retreat.  So no, I would not consider this to be an accessible collection.

Collection Spotlight.



Henry Pether was following in the family business. His father, Abraham Pether was an English landscape painter, recognised for his skill in depicting moonlit scenes, to the point that for a while he was known as "Moonlight" Pether. He was also an inventor, constructing telescopes and microscopes and lecturing in electricity utilising machines of his own construction.  He was also the father of nine children and was barely able to sell his paintings fast enough to fit their demands, so when he fell ill and was unable to work, he fell into poverty.  Eventually his wife went into business selling pencils. 

Both of Abraham's sons Sebastian and Henry became landscape artists who also became known for their moonlit landscapes of which Chelsea by Moonlight (c. 1850) is a great example.  Henry himself had a busy life which you can read about in this database of Southampton history which included a poor investment in a railway leading to a period in debtor's prison, owning patents on machines for producing the tiles used in mosaics and for ornamental bricks and throughout all of that he continued to paint.  The Art UK website has forty-three paintings by him. 

Art of the State: Liverpool:World Museum.

Art The old Liverpool Museum has changed much since it began as a two room display of the 13th Earl of Derby's natural history collection on Duke Street in 1851. Between remodelings and recreations both before and after a bombing decimated the building during the Blitz it expanded to fill the space across the bottom end of William Brown Street. My own connection with the museum began at school and continued through working there in the late nineties on the reception desk during the brief period when the eight museums and galleries in what was then National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM) attempted a nominal charging structure.

The redevelopments have continued.  In 2005, the current atrium and entrance was created and since various displays have been refreshed, notably most recently the classical world galleries, which have allowed for much more of the collection to go on display.  It's name has also changed to World Museum so as not confuse things with the new Museum of Liverpool on the city's waterfront.  But some of the displays, notably the horology galleries and natural history sections are almost exactly as they were when I was in primary school, so visiting now really is like stepping back in time.  Presumably this means that the refurbishment will continue shortly.

Accessibility of Collection.

The museum is open daily from 10am-5pm and is free to enter, although none of the works shown on the Art UK website are apparently on obvious public display (it is possible that they were amid the World Cultures gallery although speaking to the invigilators led me to believe that wasn't the case).  Including general museums in Art UK does open up a discussion about why what are considered ethnographic or historical items in museums aren't included.  Much of what's there now is built on the old BBC Your Paintings project and is expanding to feature sculpture, but will it eventually include any items of artistic merit such as ancient polytheistic icons, cultural heritage of the Americas or the Roman and Greek statuary?

Collection Spotlight.


© the artist. Photo credit: World Museum Liverpool
Tsewang Tashi's Untitled No. 6 (2006) is part of the museum's Tibet collection, which contains "over 2,000 Tibetan objects gives an insight into the lives of British India officers connected to Tibet and the Himalayas."  Tashi was born in 1963 in Lhasa and as the entry on the museum website indicates, that although it's not currently on public display, this painting's inclusion in the collection helps in "understanding the development of the younger artists now emerging out of Lhasa" and that it is "also reminiscent of the colonial officer’s attempts at ethnographic photography".  Nothing in the image indicates directly that the subject is Tibetan, which could be seen as a reference to how the people of that area are viewed within China and the rest of the world.  Tashi stringently refuses to include any elements in his work which perpetuate the myth of Tibet being some kind of Shangri-La, knowing that "contemporary art cannot be created when contemporary life is ignored."

Art of the State: Liverpool: Liverpool Central Library.

Art William Brown Street is actually graced by a series of adjoining buildings, originally conceived as a single library and museum building designed by John Weightman, Surveyor to Liverpool Corporation, and completed in 1860. Since then various extensions have been added, like the Picton Library and the Hornby Library. For a brief period in the noughties, a door was opened up that allowed visitors to the library to visit the museum via the old entrance hall and vice-versa. The World Museum has since been through extensive refurbishment work and so has this library, reopening in 2013, making a virtue of the older architecture and transforming what was quite a dated, dingy entrance space into an extraordinary open atrium which has become a minor tourist attraction and is always in heavy usage.

Accessibility of Collection.

The library is open 9am-8pm Monday to Friday, 9-5 on a Saturday and 10-4 on a Sunday. None of the paintings listed on the Art UK website are on public display, although some of the sculpture is, notably the busts which are dotted about the historic areas of the library.

Collection Spotlight.



As the name suggests Salthouse Dock was a key part of Liverpool's salt export industry, the city being a hub for the refining of rock salt and its transfer into Cheshire and abroad. John Atkinson Grimshaw traveled the country painting these dockside scenes, the evocative lighting influenced by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.  Few in painting have captured the feeling of gaslit streets and this is subject he returned to again and again.  His Salhouse Dock, Liverpool (1884) could almost be a preparatory sketch for Glasgow, Saturday Night, although that has much warmer colours.  I wonder where it is currently - it deserves to be on public display.

Art of the State: Liverpool: The Walker.

Art Let's begin. Back when I was completing the old project, I decided to leave the Walker Art Gallery until last because as I said when writing about that visit, "having worked there, being so familiar with the collection, it seemed more valuable to head out and visit the places where I’d never worked and was unfamiliar with the collections". Since this is both a new project and a continuation, I decided to begin there again knowing it would be a relatively short visit.  The permanent display hasn't changed much in the meantime.  The portrait of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia which has been in the Walker's collection since the 50s and was until recently listed as from the Studio of Van Dyke has now been confirmed as being by the master himself.  But there's little point in me repeating any of the material which was in the original post, which you can still read here.

Accessibility of Collection.

The Walker has free entry and is open from 10am-5pm Monday to Friday. Their website has an extensive collections section highlighting prominent works. The Art UK website lists all 2,255 artworks.  As with most larger art collections, there is a lot of minor works but what's on display is incredible.  That said, it would be good to have a room or two which revealed works from the pre-1900 collections in themed displays as happens in other regional galleries.  A large proportion of the gallery is currently consumed by a display of John Moores Prize winners which are usually empty when I visit even though the rest of the galleries is buzzing.  There are some items in the stores which would be star attractions at some smaller locals like Bolton or the Atkinson in Southport.



Collection Spotlight.

This is Fantine (1886) by Margaret Bernadine Hall. Illustrating the character from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, this is a devastating example of how lighting and staging can draw the viewer into the space of a subject. When Fontaine is sacked from her job because of her illegitimate child, she falls into prostitution to survive (the Anne Hathaway sequence in the film version of the musical).  What strikes you is the contrast between how the child is painted, all rosy cheeks and contented sleep and her mother in stark monochrome.  They living in different words, and Fontaine is fighting to keep it that way, to shade her baby from the darkness.

Hall was both in 1863 in Wavertree.  Her father Bernard Hall was a merchant, local politician and philanthropist, and elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1879.  In 1882, her family moved to London and from there she went to Paris for five years to study painting, a time when she would have found herself amid the Impressionists but few female artists.  It's in this period she must have produced Fantine at just 23.  Between 1888 and 1894 Hall travelled extensively to countries including Japan, China, Australia, North America, and North Africa, returning to Paris in 1894.  She died in England in 1910, at the home of the playwright George Calderon in Hampstead Heath.

In an ideal world, Hall would be lauded as one of our great painters.  But since her death, most of her paintings have apparently disappeared.  Her brother Douglas offered Fantine and and other of her works Les Abandonées to the National Gallery but they were declined. During the following year he offered them to the Walker Art Gallery, and Fantine was accepted.  I haven't been able to track down where Les Abandonées ended up, but Art UK lists another of her works at Trinity College Cambridge, a sketch portrait of Sedley Taylor one of the librarians at Trinity College.  This was a complex life worthy of further study.  But her single biography is out of print.

Art of the State: Introduction.

Art Back in 2015, when I wrote the final blog post describing my adventures working through the late Edward Morris's book Public Art Collections in North West England, which was naturally the Walker Art Gallery where we both worked together in the late 90s, I closed with the slightly tortuous line: "When really it's about time for the project to end. Here. For now."  Even as I ended that little crusade, something was nagging at the back of my mind that I'd end up back on the trail again in some form.  What about all the art collections Edward didn't include in his book?

In the past couple of weeks, I've been "boxsetting" the YouTube series, All The Stations, which records how rail enthusiasts Geoff Marshall and Vicki Pipe visited all the stations on the National Rail Network during Summer 2017. Seeing them dashing between trains and wrestling with logistics has made me nostalgic for the old times of some of my more specific projects. After a few rather sedentary years, I know that it's about time I got myself back out there and however enticing it is to repeat their exercise, it feels like it's been done. Plus I'd be lonely. And it would cost a lot of money.

So instead, having recently also signed up for an Art Fund card, I've decided to take a crack at all the art collections Edward didn't include in his book. The Art UK website, formerly the BBC's Your Paintings and mentioned weekly on the likes of Britain's Lost Masterpieces and Fake or Fortune, lists over three thousand two hundred venues. I don't for one minute think I'll end up visiting all of them, which is why this isn't called All The Art Venues or something less clunky, working my way through all the Art UK listed sites feels like a decent guideline.

What to do about collections I've already visited in my life?  Geoff and Vicki conducted a couple of test days as part of their Kickstarter campaign and then went back to those stations again as part of the main project.  This seems like a good guide, plus it's been four years since The Walker and times change, people change.  I'll also be tackling them in a slightly different way, talking about how accessible the collections are and choosing a single favourite items from what's on display (or not as I expect will be the case sometimes).  There will be some ground rules.  Here we go again.