Jenny Uglow is the author of The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World and, most recently, Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. (February 2019)
On August 26, 1768, a day of fresh winds and cloudy skies, James Cook guided his ship, the Endeavour, past the coast of Cornwall into the open sea. On board, he noted in his journal, were ninety-four men, “Officers Seamen Gentlemen”—including the wealthy young naturalist Joseph Banks—and the ship carried …
In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Byron’s Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace
by Miranda Seymour
Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist
by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice
On March 20, 1816, Annabella, Lady Byron, received a poem in the mail. In fifteen stanzas, Byron’s “Fare Thee Well” was a cascade of brokenhearted loss and love: All my faults perchance thou knowest, All my madness none can know; All my hopes, where’er thou goest, …
Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum
by James Delbourgo
When the first visitors entered the newly opened British Museum in Montagu House in Bloomsbury in January 1759, they walked past a stone from the Appian Way, the skeleton of a unicorn fish, and a buffalo head from Newfoundland. Beneath their feet were pillars from the Giant’s Causeway in County …
Toward the start of his fascinating book The Match Girl and the Heiress, Seth Koven states that it “joins efforts by historians to reclaim pre–World War II Britain for Christianity, a salutary historiographical Reconquista.” This may set alarm bells ringing, with its implication that more secular-minded scholars should be driven …
“Oceania” is not the historical, ethnographic show that Western museum-goers might expect. At the entrance a shimmering wave of blue material cascades from the ceiling. Titled Kiko Moana, this flowing wave uses ancient techniques of weaving, embroidery, layering, and cutting, but it’s a contemporary work in polyethylene and cotton, created by four Maori women from the Mata Aho Collective in New Zealand who have also compiled an online archive of stories about the supernatural spirits of the waters. Old and new technologies meet.
It is a tricky and ambitious plan to show Rembrandt’s works alongside those of his admirers, imitators, and copyists, as the National Gallery of Scotland’s “Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master” does. Although Rembrandt’s presence was dominant, the exhibition told a rich and revealing story of the historical response to his work in Britain. The start was slow. There is continuing debate about whether or not Rembrandt actually visited England.
Profoundly influenced by Van Gogh and later by Munch, Emil Nolde (1867–1956) rejected Impressionism—which catches the external impression of a scene—in favor of Expressionism, which tries to convey the artist’s inner response, using exaggeration and distortion to delve into the nature of being. Yet Nolde seems to go even further, to be in love with the “expressiveness” of paint itself, its power to manipulate emotions, to delight, inflame, provoke.
Some critics mutter “tame” and—dread word—“charming,” and sneer at the twee marketing of Edward Bawden’s prints on greetings cards, handbags, kitchen tea-towels, and fridge magnets. But there’s more to Bawden than that. His admirers proclaim him as a mischievous genius, an edgy, brilliant designer, blending tradition with modernism. Yet the question echoes, as it so often does for those who follow a commercial career: Is he “a proper artist”? But after seeing the rich and surprising variety of work in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s show, who can say that Edward Bawden is not?
An attempt to show how artists have responded to the history and ethos of empire over the last five centuries, and to address its legacy “not just in public monuments, but in social structures, culture and in the fault lines of contemporary global politics.”
Jenny Uglow writes, “It’s two weeks now since I saw the exhibition of portraits, yet I’m still puzzling over the nature of the Swiss-French painter Jean-Étienne Liotard’s charm and strength.”