Female company in Cambridge

Last week I made a short visit to Cambridge to do some research at the Fitzwilliam for my Renaissance  course  and to see friends, those who actually live there and one who came all the way just for lunch (and we had a very nice one at Jamie's Italian where the food was good and the company even better).

I chose last week so that I could go to  the Vermeer Exhibition, Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence, before it closed but the plan nearly backfired.  This has been one of the most successful exhibitions staged outside London and the queues during the final week snaked right through the museum galleries.  Having gone to the Museum on Tuesday to look at the portrait medals for my project, I beat a strategic retreat afterwards, and returned on Wednesday morning to get an early place in the queue.  I did get straight in when the museum opened and was able to see the paintings before the hordes overwhelmed the small gallery space.  It was well worth the effort  (particularly since admission was free to the exhibition as well as to the museum) but confirmed the wisdom of not going to London on spec to see the Leonardo exhibition.

Jacob Vrel Woman at a Window
Image: Fondation Custodia

There were in fact only four Vermeers in the exhibition, the Lacemaker, small and exquisite, is the star of the show and on loan from the Louvre, but there are other works from the National Gallery, the Royal Collection and a private collection - all of them studies of  ladies at the virginal.  So although the exhibition is marketed as Vermeer's women, the exhibition principally consists of a number of Dutch genre paintings of women in interior settings and private spaces.  As such it is full of charm, absorbing images of women absorbed in their own worlds.   It is a very cleverly curated show, divided into three stages - the Invitation, paintings where the women invite you into their space; the Threshold, where they hover between the inner world and the outside and the Sanctuary, where their routines continue undisturbed by the viewers.  The Vermeers are in a class by themselves, but I particularly liked the paintings by Pieter Hooch, which show the street and courtyard and especially those by Jacob Vrel, the most mysterious and reminiscent of Whistler - what is she looking at through the window?  Who would have commissioned such a painting?

The exhibition is over now but you can still visit it on the Big Picture on YouTube

In and out of the museums

Bruges has lots of museums and they are on each other's doorstep so you just trip out of one and fall into the next, and if you fancy popping back into one that you liked (as we did with the Memlingmuseum) you can just nip back in as you go past it again.

The main collection is in the Groeningemuseum, which has a permanent collection of Flemish art from the fifteenth century to the present day.  Bruges' artistic heyday was the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but there have been some interesting, if not world famous, artists since.  Their own collection has been squeezed to make room for a travelling exhibition Imperial Treasures, from Vienna. The paintings in the exhibition are all by early Flemish artists, and were collected by the Hapsburgs during their long rule, so in a sense they are coming home, for a little while at least.  It is an interesting collection but actually the works in the Groeninge's own collection are more impressive, including a beautiful altarpiece by Jan Van Eyck and the affectionate portrait of his wife, Margaret, a companion piece to his self-portrait in the National Gallery.  One of the great pleasures of the Renaissance Faces exhibition in London a few years ago was the opportunity to see these two paintings reunited, one the earliest surviving self-portrait in oil and the other perhaps the earliest known portrait of an artist's spouse.

Across the courtyard from the Groeningemuseum is the Arentshuis, a mansion given over to the works of Frank Brangwyn, an English artist, born in Bruges in the late nineteenth century.  He was a prolific painter, engraver, designer, printmaker and graphic artist and he left part of his collection to the city of Bruges when he died in 1956.  The house itself is quite lovely and the collection is worth seeing. It's not in the same league as the Renaissance art but it's good to see something different.

Interestingly, nowhere in Bruges is the term Northern Renaissance ever used.  Art history courses, like my OU course, now routinely refer to the Northern Renaissance - chiefly I think to counteract the overwhelming impression that the Italians had all the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the time we get to the mid-sixteenth century, the artistic flowering in Northern Europe is overtaken by the Reformation, where the emphasis is firmly on the Word and not on the image.  Up until then, though, and certainly in the fifteenth century Bruges, and other Northern centres, are as important in the history of art as any in Italy.  Oil painting was far more advanced in Northern Europe, portraiture and landscape were pioneered and printmaking was invented.  In Bruges these artists are referred to as the Flemish Primitives, although they are anything but primitive.  I prefer the term their contemporaries used Ars Nova, the New Art, they were the radicals of their day.

All in all we got excellent value out of the €15 Museum Passes.

The Bruges Masterpieces

Bruges was one of the great European centres in the fifteenth century. It was much nearer the sea than it now is and it was a port of some importance.  The Medici maintained a branch of their bank here, just as they did in London, and the city had a cosmopolitan community whose members came from Germany, Italy, England, Portugal and Spain.  The Dukes of Burgundy set up court here - they owned extensive lands across Northern Europe and they married into the Hapsburgs, Mary of Burgundy's son became Charles V of Spain.  They were fabulously wealthy and great patrons of the arts, employing the greatest Flemish artists of the century.

Hans Memling was not actually Flemish, he was born in Germany but he was apprenticed to the great Flemish artist, Rogier van der Weyden, and he set up his own workshop in Bruges.  He was one of the great painters of altarpieces and also one of the early innovators in portraiture, in which the Northern artists excelled.  Six of his masterpieces are on display in St John's Hospital, one of the oldest such buildings still existing in Europe, dating from the twelfth century.  Now a museum, it is a wonderful space and you do feel that you are viewing these works as they were meant to be seen. Indeed, four of them were commissioned by the sisters of  the hospital or for other institutions in the city.

The most spectacular works are the St Ursula Reliquary, which tells the story of the martyrdom of St Ursula on its painted panels, the St John Altarpiece, the central panel of which you can see above and the  Virgin and Child with Martin van Nieuwenhove, a diptych integrating portrait and landscape into a devotional work.  The Flemish masters at this time were arguably the most innovative and accomplished artists in Europe, and to see the Memling works is to understand why.

Across the street from the Hospital is the Church of Our Lady which houses a Madonna and Child by Michelangelo, the only Michelangelo sculpture outside Italy.  It is certainly worth seeing but, in Bruges, Michelangelo is the sideshow not the main event.

The Stadhuis

At the end of the walk we ended up in the Burg, a beautiful square in the middle of the city, with a glorious array of buildings encapsulating the history of European architecture from the Romanesque to the Modern, and nearly everything else in between, including the Renaissance and the Baroque .

Gothic Hall
Image Source Wikipedia

The most spectacular of all these buildings is the Gothic Stadhuis, or Town Hall, which was begun in the fourteenth century, but extensively added to and restored over the centuries.  The exterior is authentic but the Gothic interior is a late nineteenth century recreation, with a beautiful vaulted wooden ceiling and murals depicting scenes from the history of the city, a collaboration between architects and artists.

It is now part of the network of city museums, one more reason to buy the Museum Card, great value at €15, and we took the audio guided tour.

In Bruges

St John's Hospital

There are some places that you visit because the opportunity comes along and then there are those places that have been right at the top of the list (yes of course I have a list, doesn't everyone?) but, for one reason or another, you haven't made it there.  Bruges has been in my Top Three for a long time and I haven't gone before because of the logistics of getting to it from here.  It involves twelve hours by car, plane and bus to get there and the same to come back, and it is, quite frankly, exhausting and I'm hardly the better of it yet.  This may be to do with age and increasing decrepitude and it certainly rocketed me up the crabbit meter, particularly getting up at 4.30 for the return journey.   Fortunately, though, Bruges itself did not disappoint, it is an exceptionally pretty city, full of art, architecture and history and the weather was kind, even sunny at times, if cold and windy at others.

It is also a very compact city, and we were never more than ten minutes away from the hotel.  We stayed at the Hotel Academie.  It was central (although I think all the hotels are) and the staff were very nice and that's about it.  You can read my Trip Advisor review here.  The Tourist menu is pretty much the same in all the restaurants and it is not easy to find alternatives, all thirteen vegetarian restaurants close in the evening apparently.  However, we managed to eat well on two evenings and exceptionally well on the other, at the Baobab, a restaurant specialising in superb South African food. This was the best meal I've had on holiday since we went to the Nourish in Banff.  It was Tuesday night and we had the place completely to ourselves.  The food was so good it didn't matter and we were very well looked after by the owner whose wife was doing the cooking.

The Beguinage

Normally we travel independently but this time we took a package, as much because it included the transfers to and from Brussels airport.  Getting there was hassle enough without having to get ourselves to Bruges via public transport.  The package did include a walk on the first morning, and it really helped both to orientate ourselves, and get a feel for the city's geography and history.  We started off at the Beguinage, a refuge in the heart of the city and then wandered along canals and back streets, through little parks, to the Markt and on to the City Hall.

Degas at the Royal Academy

Poster with Three Dancers,
Landscape Scenery (detail)

I long ago decided that I would avoid the landmark art exhibitions, the ones that attract the huge crowds where you shuffle around with the rest of the rabble, trying to edge your way to the front for a ten second glimpse of the object hanging on the wall.  However, there are always exceptions, where my interest in the artist trumps my dislike of the multitudes  - although when I realised that our visit to see the Edgar Degas exhibition fell right in the middle of half term, it did give me some pause for thought.  Art exhibitions do not always attract families and children but the ballet brings out little girls in large numbers.  In any event, I had invested too much anticipation in this exhibition to be so easily deterred.

The exhibition is called Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement.   It takes as its premise Degas' own words that his ballet scenes were "a pretext for depicting movement".  Dancers, rather than women, or indeed men, of any class, provided him with the opportunity to study the human figure in action, in complex and extreme movements.  This, rather than a fascination with the world of the ballet or backstage life, is what drew him to produce hundreds of drawings, paintings, pastels  and sculptures of dancers.

Dancer (préparation
en dedans)

The drawings are, for me, the backbone of this exhibition and it is they that show most clearly his attempts to convey how the body moves through space in time.  The influence of developments in contemporary photography in building up animated sequences (this of course was just before the development of cinematography) and his own use of photography towards the end of his working life are explored at some length, with examples from contemporary experimental photographers, with whose work he is likely to have been acquainted.

The Royal Academy website has a short video about the exhibition, with many images and an interesting commentary.  The lectures linked with the exhibition are available as audio podcasts,  I listened to two of them before I went and they added immeasurably to my understanding and enjoyment of the works.

A couple of years ago I blogged about the Degas dancers at the Courtauld Institute.  The blog post is here and includes a link to a video of a gallery talk about the bronze sculptures of dancers which are on permanent display, and examples of which are included in this exhibition.

Romans and Victorians

Guildhall Art Gallery and Amphitheatre website

The Guildhall does not feature much in any recommendations for places to visit in London and it has never occurred to me before that it might be worth visiting.  But it is and I do recommend it.

The Guildhall itself belongs to the City of London Corporation and is an integral part of the history of London.  The Corporation has an extensive art collection, some of which is on permanent display in the Guildhall Art Gallery.  Currently the gallery features paintings from its Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian collections, including works by Rosetti, Millais and Leighton.  There is a statue too of Margaret Thatcher that truly does her no favours.

I had wanted to go to the Gallery because it was hosting a touring exhibition  Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight, whose name I could not resist and whose nocturnal paintings of Victorian English cities are particularly atmospheric.  I did like the exhibition, and it has been extremely well reviewed, but not all Grimshaw's paintings are of the same quality so the exhibition does feel padded out in places.

Flickr Image: Roman Amphitheatre

The real attraction of the Gallery, we discovered, is underground. When they were excavating the foundations of the building some twenty odd years ago, the remains of London's Roman Amphitheatre were uncovered.  These are managed by the Museum of London and are now open to the public in a controlled environment in the underground gallery and you can see parts of the arena walls, the entrance tunnel and the gate.  Digital technology is used, very effectively, to explain both the extent of the original structure and the games that were held there.

We did not see much of the Guildhall itself, parts of which are closed to the public when there are events going on.  But that's a reason to go back another day.