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Arts & Culture

Patrick in Parliament

The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

March 18, 2024 1:40 pm | Link | No Comments »

Articles of Note: 13 March 2024

Articles of Note
Wednesday 13 March 2024
■ I consider myself a reasonably aware person when it comes to church architecture, but I was blown away when I first visited the Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and St Ignatius at Chideock in Dorset.

My then-flatmate was getting married the next day and much pottering-about sorting things was required but the idiosyncratic beauty of this building captured my imagination — part Norman, part Moorish. I was almost insulted that I hadn’t come across it in any of my bookish explorations.

The historian Edmund Harris covers Chideock in his lusciously illustrated post on Recusancy in Dorset and the ‘other tradition’ of Catholic church-building.

■ Generations ago it was said that the three institutions no British politician dared offend were the trade unions, the Catholic Church, and the Brigade of Guards. In 2020s Britain there is only one caste which must always be obeyed: the ageing, moneyed homeowners.

Not only do these “NIMBYs” (“Not In My Back Yard”) jealously guard their freeholds, they do whatever they can to prevent more houses being built to guard the value of their prize possessions, vastly inflated by a combination of lacklustre housebuilding and irresponsible leap in migration. As old people vote and young people don’t — and when they do, vote badly — few sensible people can find a way out of this quagmire.

It might be worth looking to the Mediterranean, where Tal Alster tells us How Israel turned urban homeowners into YIMBYs.

■ It’s disappointingly rare to see intelligent outsiders give a considered impression of the current state of play in the Netherlands — that’s Mother Holland for us New Yorkers. Too often commentators in English are either rash cheerleaders for the hard right or bien-pensant liberals eager to castigate and chastise. Both rush to judgement.

What a rare diversion then to read Christopher Caldwell — the only thinking neo-con? — attempt to explore and explain the success of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections.

■ One in ten of Lusitania’s inhabitants are now immigrants, and this discounts those — many from Brazil and other former parts of the once-world-spanning Portuguese empire — who have managed to acquire citizenship through various routes.

Ukrainian number-plates are now frequently be seen on the roads of Lisbon, as far in Europe as you can get from Big Bad Uncle Vlad.

Vasco Queirós asks: Who is Portugal for?

■ Speaking of world-spanning empires, in true andrewcusackdotcom fashion, we haven’t had enough of the Dutch — but we have had enough of their wicked wayward heresies.

Historian Charles H. Parker explores the legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch empire.

■ The City of New York itself is the best journalism school there is. Jimmy Breslin dropped out of LIU after two years, eventually taking up his pen. Pete Hamill left school at fifteen, apprenticed as a sheet metal worker, and joined the navy.

William Deresiewicz argues that a dose of working-class realism can save journalism from groupthink.

■ The New Yorker tells us how a Manchester barkeep found and saved a lost (ostensible) masterpiece of interwar British literature.

■ Our inestimable friend Dr Harshan Kumarasingham explores David Torrance’s history of the first Labour government on its hundredth anniversary.

■ And finally, one for nous les normandes (ok, ok, celto-normandes): Canada’s National Treasure David Warren briefly muses that the Norman infusion greatly refined Anglo-Saxon to give us the superior English tongue we speak today.

March 13, 2024 9:55 pm | Link | 2 Comments »

Cambridge

There’s a Dutch vibe to Cambridge that I rather like — but also a lingering Protestant Cromwellianism that I don’t. These two factors are not unconnected, and the highway that once was the North Sea is not so far away.

It is not a bad town. It’s like they took Oxford apart, put it back together again in not quite the same way, and added a lot of Regency infill. Oxford is more mediaeval, Georgian, and neo-mediaeval, whereas Cambridge is mediaeval, Tudor, and Regency.

The Cam is slower, quieter, and more peaceful than the Isis, which again gives it the quality of a Hollandic canal. I suspect the punting is better — or at least easier — here than at Oxford.

And of course it is rather more spacious than Oxford, which is hemmed in by geography in a way that Cambridge isn’t.

But it is also eerily quieter. A smart restaurant on a Thursday night was dead by half ten, and the staff refused our plaintive request for a second round of Tokay. (Protestantism.)

March 9, 2024 3:00 pm | Link | 3 Comments »

Immanuel on the Green

The prettiest situated church in the little state of Delaware

In the old Delaware hundred of New Castle on the town green sits the Immanuel Protestant Episcopal Church — the first Church of England parish in what is now the State of Delaware. This part of the world started out as New Sweden, but our Dutch forefathers of old, settled as they were in New Amsterdam, quickly took umbrage at the Scandinavian presence in what they viewed as a distinctly Netherlandic domain.

By the time Sweden and Poland went to war in 1755 — a conflict, confusingly, called the Second Northern War by some and the First Northern War by others — a Polish citizen of New Amsterdam had convinced the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, to let him take a team to go and establish a Dutch fort in the lands claimed by the Swedes. Stuyvesant named the settlement Fort Casimir after the many legendary Polish kings to bear that name, as well as the reigning King of Poland at the time, John II Casimir.

The dastardly Swedes captured Fort Casimir in 1654, led by an Östergötlander by the name of Johan Risingh. (As it happens, Rising had studied at Leiden in the Netherlands in addition to his native land’s university of Uppsala.) The Swedes had seized the fortress on Trinity Sunday, and so they rechristened it as Fort Trinity — or Fort Trefaldighet in their own tongue.

Stuyvesant was forced to lead an expedition himself to kick the Swedes out and, after a scrap that went down as “the Most Horrible Battle Ever Recorded in Poetry or Prose”, he returned to Dutch Manhattan in triumph.

“It was a pleasant and goodly sight to witness the joy of the people of New Amsterdam at beholding their warriors once more return from this war in the wilderness,” no less a source than Diedrich Knickerbocker recounts.

The schoolmasters throughout the town gave holiday to their little urchins who followed in droves after the drums, with paper caps on their heads and sticks in their breeches, thus taking the first lesson in the art of war. As to the sturdy rabble, they thronged at the heels of Peter Stuyvesant wherever he went, waving their greasy hats in the air, and shouting, ‘Hardkoppig Piet forever!’

It was indeed a day of roaring rout and jubilee. A huge dinner was prepared at the stadthouse in honor of the conquerors, where were assembled, in one glorious constellation, the great and little luminaries of New Amsterdam. … Loads of fish, flesh, and fowl were devoured, oceans of liquor drunk, thousands of pipes smoked, and many a dull joke honored with much obstreperous fat-sided laughter.

But the joyous dominion the Hollanders held over the former Swedish territory was to be short-lived. By fate and the divine hand, the Duke of York — later our much beloved and since departed majesty King James II — seized New Amsterdam without firing a shot in 1664 and New Netherland became the Province of New York overnight.

Down on the banks of the Delaware, the Dutch-founded Fort Casimir, re-consecrated as Fort Trinity by the Swedes, had returned to Dutch control under the name of Nieuw Amstel. The English now named it New Castle, a name which has stuck ever since.

By a livery of seisin, the Duke of York transferred this part of his fiefdom to William Penn in 1680, who went and founded Pennsylvania a year later. But the English, Dutch, and Swedish inhabitants of “the lower counties on the Delaware” bristled under the dominance of the culturally distinct Quakers. They petitioned the Crown to be governed by a separate legislature, which privilege was duly granted in 1702.

(more…)

March 2, 2024 3:20 pm | Link | No Comments »

A Happy Home in Maida Vale

Mary Christianna Lewis was better known under the most prominent of her various pen names, Christianna Brand, the author of such mysteries as Green for Danger, Death in High Heels, and Heads You Lose.

Her ‘Nurse Matilda’ series of children’s books was illustrated by her cousin, Edward Ardizzone RA, and was later adapted for the silver screen as the Nanny McPhee films starring Emma Thompson.

Brand and her husband lived in this rather happy looking home in leafy Maida Vale which has now come up for sale.

Built in 1822 (and Grade II-listed), the house was also deployed as a setting by the author — sometime chair of the Crime Writers’ Association — in her book London Particular.

As Brand described the story:

It is set in a London house and everybody is either a member or close friend of the family – it is a doctor’s house, a Regency house in Maida Vale; in fact, it is my own house with all my own family and animals and things in it just for fun.

Maida Vale has also been the setting for mysteries written by PD James and Ruth Rendell — and of course the ‘M’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’ stand for Maida Vale itself.

(more…)

February 25, 2024 3:00 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

St Mary Overie in Lent

The days are getting longer and Lent is already upon us.

Here in Southwark I nipped in to Evensong in the late twilight of a winter’s day. They do it very beautifully with a full choir at the Protestant cathedral — old Southwark Priory or St Mary Overie to us Catholics, St Saviour’s to our separated brethren.

As it is the penitential season, the Lenten Array is up at Southwark Cathedral, theirs apparently designed by Sir Ninian Comper.

What is a Lenten Array? Sed Angli writes on the Lenten Array in general while Dr Allan Barton has written on Southwark Cathedral’s Lenten Array specifically.

And of course our friend the Rev Fr John Osman has one of the most beautiful Lenten Arrays at his extraordinary Catholic parish of St Birinus — a stunning church previously mentioned.

(The photograph of our local array is from Fr Lawrence Lew O.P.)

February 19, 2024 8:24 pm | Link | No Comments »

ICAA Videos on Architecture

The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art is one of the absolute gems of American civic society.

As part of their remit of promoting traditional architecture and its many associated arts they have a good many videos on their website covering numerous subjects and in a variety of depths and lengths of time.

Here are just a handful.

The Urbanism of Greenwich VillagePart I (1h09m) and Part II (1h06)
Rodrigo Bollat Montenegro gives a half-hour introduction to traditional urbanism, followed by an hour and a half exploring the development, design, and streetscapes of Greenwich Village. (We will excuse his inability to pronounce Gansevoort Street.)

Colonial American Architecture: A Design Resource for Contemporary Traditional ArchitecturePart I (46 min) and Part II (47 min)
Calder Loth survey’s America’s colonial-period buildings and their utility as a resource for domestic residential design today.

The Architecture of Place: Filling the ‘Missing Middle’ of the Housing MarketVideo (55min)
Alireza Sagharchi, Robbie Kerr, Dan Parolek, and Jason Syvixay on solving the housing crisis through traditional methods that can create better places to live without harming the urban environment.

Edith Wharton & Her New YorkVideo (1h13m)
Francis Morrone — my favourite columnist from the New York Sun in its printed days — explores the Wharton’s home town from the time of her birth at 14 West 23rd Street in 1862 to her departure for France at the turn of the century, and the world of The Age of Innocence.

In Your Neighborhood: Pasadena City HallVideo (5min)
There are also shorter videos like this one from the In Your Neighborhood series in which architect Christian Arndt explores the history and design of the almost preposterously — but gloriously — grandiose Pasadena City Hall.
February 17, 2024 2:20 pm | Link | No Comments »

Hawksmoor’s Dream

Andrew Ingamells, Hawksmoor’s Dream
crayon, pencil, and waterccolour,
27½ in. x 17¾ in.; 1987-1991

(and available as a silkscreen)

Andrew Ingamells is an excellent draughtsman who is probably the finest architectural artist in Britain today.

His depictions of Westminster Cathedral and the Brompton Oratory (amongst others) are in the Parliamentary Art Collection, and he has done Loggan-style portrayals of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge as well as three of the four Inns of Court in London.

The above capriccio is a wonderful treat. I think someone should build it.

February 4, 2024 10:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

Canterbury Gate

JMW Turner, Canterbury Gate, Christ Church
graphite and watercolour on paper,
10 in. x 16¼ in., 1799; Tate Collection

Turner’s painting captures Christ Church’s Canterbury Gate from Oriel Square. (As it happens, this is Canterbury Gate at Christ Church in Oxford and, conversely, there is a Christ Church Gate at Canterbury in Kent.)

Given the greenery of the vegetation, this is almost certainly not the work that inspired Betjeman to write his winter poem ‘On an Old-Fashioned Water-Colour of Oxford’:

Shines, billowing cold and gold from Cumnor Hurst,
A winter sunset on wet cobbles, where
By Canterbury Gate the fishtails flare.
Someone in Corpus reading for a first
Pulls down red blinds and flounders on, immers’d
In Hegel, heedless of the yellow glare
On porch and pinnacle and window square,
The brown stone crumbling where the skin has burst.

A late, last luncheon staggers out of Peck
And hires a hansom: from half-flooded grass
Returning athletes bark at what they see.
But we will mount the horse-tram’s upper deck
And wave salute to Buols’, as we pass
Bound for the Banbury Road in time for tea.

February 4, 2024 4:30 pm | Link | No Comments »

Whitechapel Library

There are precious few suitable uses for former church buildings.

At the worst end of the spectrum is nightclub, though bar or restaurant often doesn’t fall terribly far behind either. To my mind, I can hardly think of a more suitable use for an elegant and beautiful former church than to be turned into a library.

An example: the former Anglican parish church of St Philip, Stepney, in Whitechapel. Designed by Arthur Cawston, of whom I know little, it reminds me of J.L. Pearson’s Little Venice church for the eccentric “Catholic Apostolic Church”.

St Philip’s was declared redundant in 1979, at which time the neighbouring London Hospital still had its own medical school. This has since merged with that of St Bartholomew’s into “Barts and the London” or “Barts” or “BL”, under the auspices of Queen Mary University of London.

As St Philip’s sat pretty much smack dab in the middle of the campus of the London Hospital (augmented to the Royal London Hospital from 1990) and the college was surviving in cramped accommodation, it was decided to restore the fabric of the church and convert it to a library and study centre. The crypt of the church was adapted to house computer, teaching, and storage rooms as well as the museum of the Royal London Hospital.

Rather than preserve it in aspic, the medical school decided to keep this as a living building by commissioning eight new stained-glass windows to replace plain glass. They are completed along rather forthright German modernist designs and are dedicated to such themes as Gastroenterology and Molecular Biology. They will not be to everyone’s taste, but it is admirable for a medical school to commission stained glass windows at the turn of the millennium.

The Survey of London’s Whitechapel Project has a typically thorough entry on QMUL’s Whitechapel Library / the former church, including these applaudable photographs the Survey commissioned from Derek Kendall.

January 31, 2024 11:40 am | Link | No Comments »

Architectural Exhibitions

The Architecture Association is renowned as the most pedantic of training schools for the profession. Housed as it is in an immaculate set of Georgian townhouses in Bedford Square, its students are rigorously trained to avoid anything that might be beautiful, expressive of the inherited tradition of millennia, or pleasing to the human condition.

Nonetheless, I love architectural models, and the AA is having an exhibition of a handful of models of the various places in which the Warburg Institute has been housed across its peripatetic and tumultuous history until it found its thus-far permanent home in Woburn Square in Bloomsbury.

“Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture,” the AA opaquely tells us.

“Between 1923 and 1958, designs were commissioned for buildings, interiors, and exhibitions, as the Warburg Library and Institute moved through a series of homes, first in Hamburg and then in London,” they more helpfully inform.

“This exhibition, an itinerant archive of models and drawings that portray the seven different spaces the Warburg Institute has occupied, sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture.”

Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive
19 January 2024 to 7 March 2024
Mon-Sat, 11h00-19h00
Gallery, Architectural Association (free)

Connectedly, the University of London is hosting an exhibition looking at Charles Holden’s masterplan for that institution’s Bloomsbury campus.

This show “celebrates the architect’s vision of what a modern university could be through displays of detailed architectural models, archival documents, photo albums, and other mixed media”.

Senate House is an amazing building but I think we can be glad the full scale of its original plan — stretching all the way up towards Gordon Square — was never completed.

Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus
17 Jan 2024 to 17 March 2024
Mon-Fri, 09h00-17h00
Senate House, University of London (free)
January 25, 2024 9:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

City Hall Post Office

New York’s Lost Second Empire Gem

The Second Empire as an architectural style in America has always bad rap. The most prominent example in the New World is the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, D.C. — formerly known as the State, War, and Navy Building after the three government departments it housed in the days of a slimmer federal state.

The OEOB was designed by Alfred B. Mullett, a Somerset-born architect who had immigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. Mullett trained as an apprentice under Isaiah Rogers who was Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department. In practice, the Treasury’s architect designed all the American federal government’s office buildings across the Union, and Mullett inherited the job in 1866.

At that time, the ever-expanding city of New York was desperately in need of a new post office, having occupied the former Middle Dutch Church since 1844. Congress approved funds for a new building, and an architectural competition attracted fifty-two entries. Instead of choosing one of the entries, five leading contenders were selected to collaborate on producing a single design.

Mullett criticised the joint design as too expensive and called in the job to his own office so that he could design the building himself.

Mullett’s Second-Empire design provided for a post office open to the public on the ground floor, mail sorting rooms below it, and space for federal courtrooms as well as offices for federal agencies in the floors above the postal facilities.

The original design (above) called for only four storeys but during the design process the need for more space to serve the growing city moved Mullett to slip another floor in beneath the mansard roof. (more…)

January 17, 2024 10:20 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

A Cape Dutch Garden at Chelsea

Jonathan Snow at the 2018 Flower Show

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most florid event on London’s social calendar. It is a delight flâneur-ing around the neighbourhood the week of the Show as many of the pubs, restaurants, and businesses in the vicinity pull out the stops in terms of their own floral displays.

I used to live in Chelsea but escaped to Southwark and there are some delightful gardens in our vicinity. But I’ve never regretted avoiding the Chelsea Flower Show more than when I discovered Jonathan Snow’s delightful entry of a Cape Dutch garden in the 2018 exhibition.

Snow and his wife had been on holiday in the Cape a few years before and the beautiful fynbos captured the designer’s imagination. The architecture must have too, for Snow topped his garden off with a pocket Cape Dutch house that ties it all together.

I can well imagine taking a morning koppie koffie on that stoep — and perhaps either a stiff gin-and-tonic or some ice-cold vin de constance as the sun goes down.

An excellent effort that makes me pine for the Cape.

(more…)

January 10, 2024 11:50 am | Link | 1 Comment »

Articles of Note: 6 January 2024

Articles of Note
The Epiphany – 6 January 2024
■ It is well-known that ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigners’, whereas Cymraeg, the Welsh word for ‘Welsh’ means ‘fellow-countrymen’. As the linguist Danny Bate muses upon, this is not quite the case. Wales, walnut, Walloon, and Wallachia all have the same etymology, Bate explains.

■ I had the great privilege of studying French Algeria under the knowledgeable and congenial Dr Stephen Tyre of St Andrews University and the country continues to exude an interest. The Algerian detective novelist Yasmina Khadra — nom de plume of the army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul — has attracted notice in Angledom since being translated from the Gallic into our vulgar tongue.

Recently the columnist Matthew Parris visited Algeria for leisurely purposes and reports on the experience.

■ While you’re at the Spectator, of course by now you should have already studied my lament for the excessive strength of widely available beers — provoked by the news that Sam Smith’s Brewery have increased the alcohol level of their trusty and reliable Alpine Lager.

■ This week Elijah Granet of the Legal Style Blog shared this numismatic gem. It makes one realise quite how dull our coin designs are these days. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an updated version of this for our currently reigning Charles.

■ Meanwhile Chris Akers of Investors Chronicle and the Financial Times has gone on retreat to Scotland’s ancient abbey of Pluscarden and written up the experience for the FT. As he settled into the monastic rhythm, Chris found he was unwinding more than he ever has on any tropical beach.

Pluscarden is Britain’s only monastic community now in its original abbey, the building having been preserved — albeit greatly damaged until it was restarted in 1948. The older Buckfast is also on its original site but was entirely razed by 1800 or so and rebuilt from the 1900s onwards. (Pluscarden also has an excellent monastic shop.)

■ An entirely different and more disappointing form of retreat in Scottish religion is the (Presbyterian) state kirk’s decision to withdraw from tons of their smaller churches. St Monans is one of the mediæval gems of Fife, overlooking the harbour of the eponymous saint’s village since the fourteenth century, and built on the site of an earlier place of worship.

Cllr Sean Dillon pointed out the East Neuk is to lose six churches — some of which have been in the Kirk’s hands since they were confiscated at the Reformation, including St Monans.

John Lloyd, also of the FT, reported on this last summer and spoke to my old church history tutor, the Rev Dr Ian C. Bradley. More on the closures in the Courier and Fife Today.

What a dream it would be for a charitable trust to buy St Monans and to restore it to its appearance circa 1500 or so, available as a place of worship and as a living demonstration of Scotland’s rich and polychromatic culture that was so tragically destroyed in the sixteenth century. You could open with a Carver Mass conducted by Sir James MacMillan.

■ And finally, on the last day of MMXXIII, the architect Conor Lynch reports in from Connemara with this scene of idyllic bliss:

January 6, 2024 2:10 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Old Church, Paarl

Edward Rowarth, Old Church Paarl
oil on canvas, 19½ in. x 60½ in.;
Private hands
(formerly in the KWV Collection)

The church in die Paarl is the third-oldest NGK congregation in South Africa, after the Groote Kerk in Cape Town and the Moederkerk in Stellenbosch. It is often known as the Strooidakkerk (straw-roof church) for obvious reasons.

This part of the Drakenstein was first settled by Huguenots, where the dominee Pierre Simond preached in French from the foundation of the church in 1691 until he returned to Europe in 1702.

More than two-and-a-half centuries later, its preacher was ds. Jacobus Johannes ‘Siebie’ Sieberhagen, who became one of the most formidable leaders of the domestic mission in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (NGSK) for members of the Coloured (mixed-race) community in South Africa.

(In their typically racially minded way, there was also the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa [NGKA] as the corresponding church for black Africans.)

January 4, 2024 7:00 pm | Link | No Comments »

Unfinished Business at Audubon Terrace

One of the little tragedies of New York urbanism is that when Archer Milton Huntington was transforming a block of upper Manhattan into an acropolis of culture he failed to buy the entire block.

Huntington named his complex Audubon Terrace in honour of the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon whose home, Minniesland, overlooked the Hudson at the western end of the block. His failure to obtain Minniesland meant that the remainder of the block was snapped up by developers instead of incorporated into his campus.

In the 1910s, the speculators built apartment buildings that turned their rather rude and unadorned backs to Audubon Terrace, terminating the vista from Broadway. When you imagine the potential prospect all the way to the river, it is all the more tragic.

The crass posterior of these apartment blocks naturally dissatisfied the members of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, whose building sits on either side — and indeed beneath — the part of the terrace immediately adjacent to them.

McKim Mead & White had designed the first phase of the Academy’s handsome building facing on to West 155th Street, which opened in 1923, and Cass Gilbert was chosen to design the auditorium and pavilion which would complete the body’s portion of the site.

The Academy used the pavilion for art exhibitions and other events, with the terrace in between serving as a useful spot for springtime drinks parties for the academicians and their many guests.

The infelicitous nature of their neighbours clearly irritated the Academy, and in 1929 they had a conversation with Cass Gilbert about designing some sort of screen to satisfyingly terminate the vista down Audubon Terrace and block the view of the apartment buildings.

Gilbert sketched out a plan to build an arched screen connecting the pavilion to the main building across the terrace, topped off by a sculptural flourish.

There is a danger its scale may have overwhelmed the space, but that seems a preferable struggle to face when compared to the problem of the rude neighbours.

Events, as they so often do, intervened. The Wall Street Crash badly affected the American Academy’s finances, and Archer Huntington was forced to increase his already generous subsidy to the body even more just to make ends meet.

Gilbert’s final completion of Audubon Terrace was not to be.

The Academy was founded as a bastion of the old guard against the avante-garde, but in recent decades it has let its hair down a little, and leans more towards the modern than the traditional.

All the same, its current president is an English-public-school-and-Cambridge-educated philosopher from one of the most aristocratic families in Ghana, so it’s reassuring they’re keeping a bit of the old with the new.

The terrace is often used as a filming location for cinema and television, given the high quality of its architecture and the fact that it is visually not well-known even among New Yorkers, so can be deployed as a foreign setting.

The HBO programme ‘Boardwalk Empire’ used the American Academy’s terrace as an Italian port, using green screens (instead of a Cass Gilbert monumental arch) to transform the piazza.

Audubon Terrace and its surviving institutions — the expanding and renovating Hispanic Society, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza — are an intriguing hidden gem of upper Manhattan, well worth a visit.

I don’t imagine anything like Cass Gilbert’s screen will ever be built, but every time I drop in to this neck of the woods I can’t help but thinking there’s some unfinished business.

December 21, 2023 5:00 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Crisis Averted at Chartres

The rather garish and invasive plans to renovate the parvis of Chartres cathedral, turn it upside down, and install a museum underneath — previously reported on here in 2019 — have been radically revised in an infinitely less offensive direction.

The City of Chartres has released the final approved designs which show the esplanade of the cathedral renovated but left largely in place.

Instead of the original plan up reversing the grade of the parvis upwards away from the cathedral, the entire museum will be kept underground and out of sight. (more…)

November 15, 2023 12:10 pm | Link | No Comments »

Dom Miguel de Castro

Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Kongo
Jaspar Beckx, c. 1643;
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
The history of the Christian kingdom of Kongo from the conversion of Nzinga a Nkuwu (King João I) in 1491 to its effective abolition in 1914 is a rich and turbulent one.

During the 1640s, a conflict arose between Kongo’s pious and militarily successful King Garcia II and his vassal, the Count of Sonho. Seeking the help of the Dutch Republic and its stadtholder, the Count sent his cousin, Dom Miguel de Castro, to the Netherlands as an emissary.

Dom Miguel arrived at Flushing in June 1643 and proceeded to Middelburg where he was received by the Zealand chamber of the Dutch West India Company.

During the Kongo nobleman’s fortnight in Middelburg, the chamber commissioned these portraits of Dom Miguel and his two servants painted by Jasper Becx — or possibly by his brother Jeronimus.

The Zealand chamber gave the trio of portraits to Johan Maurits — Prince of Nassau-Siegen, governor of Dutch Brazil, and originator of the Mauritshuis — who in 1654 gave them to Frederik III of Denmark, along with twenty Brazilian paintings by Albert Eckhout.

A full-length portrait of Dom Miguel was taken back to Africa by him and, alas, is now lost.

Diego Bemba, a Servant of
Dom Miguel de Castro

Jaspar Beckx, c. 1643;
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Pedro Sunda, a Servant of
Dom Miguel de Castro

Jaspar Beckx, c. 1643;
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Diego Bemba and Pedro Sunda, servants of Dom Miguel de Castro

https://www.smk.dk/en/highlight/don-miguel-de-castro-emissary-of-kongo-c-1643/

https://www.africamuseum.be/en/discover/history_articles/kongo-kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Dom_Miguel_de_Castro,_Emissary_of_Congo

September 21, 2023 3:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

Horseshoe for Quebec’s Salon bleu

Refit will change seating plan in Quebec’s parliament chamber

An upcoming renovation to the Hôtel du parlement in Quebec City will also bring a change in the seating plan of the Assembly’s parliamentary chamber. Deputés agreed a moderate alteration to the current Westminster-style seating plan: a horseshoe shape will replace the crowded back two rows of desks with a curved arrangement.

The original clerks’ table designed by the building’s architect, Eugène-Étienne Taché, in 1886 will also be returned to centre-stage in the Salon bleu (formerly the Salon vert) of Quebec’s National Assembly. The room is also, I believe, the only parliamentary chamber to feature in a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Renovations are scheduled to begin in January of next year, when deputés will start convening in the Salon rouge that formerly housed Quebec’s Legislative Council, abolished in 1968. (Quebec was the last Canadian province to abolish the upper house of its parliament.)

“The Salon bleu has a strong symbolic value for the Quebec nation,” claims Éric Montigny, professor of political science at Laval University (founded 1663).

“We must respect this tradition and evolve in a very, very gradual manner,” Professor Montigny told the Journal de Québec. “A parliament is not trivial.”

The Assembly numbered only sixty-five members when Taché’s edifice was completed in 1886, while today 125 deputés have to fit into the parliamentary chamber.

The new arrangement would make room for as many as 130 legislators, plus the Président in the speaker’s chair. It will also allow for a good number of the historic desks in the chamber to be retained.

Other potential arrangements were considered and rejected, including introducing a half-moon hemicycle akin to Paris, Washington, and other republican legislatures.

Prof Montigny dismissed claims that semicircular arrangements lead to more collaborative dialogue and constructive work between government and opposition parties:

“It’s an argument that is raised regularly, but I don’t know of any studies that will support this theory.”

The most significant change to the chamber in recent years was the removal of the crucifix from above the président’s chair, first installed in 1936 by the giant of Quebec politics, premier Maurice Duplessis.

That crucifix, and its 1982 replacement, were removed in 2019 and are now displayed as historical artefacts in an ancillary part of the parliament building.

[NDLR: I wrote about the crucifix back in 2008.]

The horseshoe seating plan seems a happy compromise: Westminster-style parliaments — even those that are unicameral like Quebec’s — are honest about the antagonism between government and opposition, and the horseshoe preserves the antiphonal arrangement conducive to this, while rounding it off with a curve at the end.

For my part, I will be happy to see the removal of the arbitrary trapezoid of the modern clerks’ table (below) and its replacement by its historic predecessor.

September 21, 2023 1:44 pm | Link | No Comments »

Fortress London

What could be more mundane than the Country Bus Services Map? Not when you put the design in the hands of Max Gill. Younger brother to the more famous (but controversial) Eric Gill, Lesilei Macdonald “Max” Gill was a polymathic artist: cartographer, designer, sculptor, painter, and letterer.

In 1914, Frank Pick, inventor of the London Underground brand, hired Max Gill to create the Wonderground Map. Each Underground station had a copy of this map with its inventive and amusing illustrations, such as the two figures hurling hams at Hurlingham. As one newspaper said when it was introduced, ‘People spend so long looking at this map – they miss their trains yet go on smiling.’

The Country Bus Services Map dates from 1928 and depicts London as a great crammed and crowded fortress city from which bus services flow forth to allow the citizens to escape its walls and experience the rustic beauty of the surrounding countryside.

St Paul’s Cathedral looms large between shields depicting the arms of the City and County of London, with the Monument, the Port of London Authority, and the Tower cuddling up to it.

Lambeth Palace and the Oval at Kennington are the only features south of the river that make it into Gill’s walled metropolis.

London (After Max Gill) by Adam Hayes

In more recent years, the designer and typographer Adam Hayes decided to issue a cheeky update entitled ‘London (After Max Gill)’ (available as a print as well).

Choked by smoggy traffic, the Shard now looms large, while a cheese grater represents the Cheesegrater. Tree stumps are joined by fussy signs instructing NO THIS and NO THAT and CCTV cameras are omnipresent.

‘Wonderground’ and the Country Bus Services Map were not the limits of Max Gill’s work for London Underground. The London Transport Museum holds many examples of his work within there collection, some of which have been digitised and are viewable online — though irritatingly not in any sufficiently zoomable detail.

July 26, 2023 1:10 pm | Link | 1 Comment »
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