by Natalie Bennett

It is something of a surprise that in an exhibition entitled Brilliant Women, focusing on England’s great saloon group of the 18th century, the first painting is of a man, Benjamin Stillingfleet, a botanist and close friend of Elizabeth Montagu, who can be blamed for the title blue stocking, after he came to a gathering wearing blue wool stockings rather than formal white silk. But he seems like a decent sort, as those stockings would suggest. He was a Linnean, and is pictured holding one of the great botanist’s bools, and the table is decorated with grasses reflecting his recent (1759) book on the subject. You can’t see his stockings, but he is wearing what is certainly a very fine white shirt with frilly sleeves.

Beside him is one of the intellectual stars of the Bluestocking Circle, Elizabeth Carter, painted in about 1738 when she was 21 and already a celebrated poet, with Samuel Johnson celebrating her as a rival to Alexander Pope. (Okay, hands up who’s read Pope but not Carter – you can remedy that on Google Books.) She must have had to have been careful with the inkpot, given the lemon silk dress she is wearing.

The circle first met at Montagu’s home in Hill Street, Mayfair, probably often in her dressing room, which had a Robert Adam ceiling and matching carpet, for which there are drawing here, suggesting the privilege that enabled Montagu to be a grand patron. Later as a rich widow, with income from coal mines in Northumberland, she built a mansion on Portman Square, which gave her gatherings a less intimate scale.

A painting of Montagu by Allan Ramsay shows her with a remarkably intelligent, thoughtful gaze – she is here at the head of the gallery, as she would have been at the head of the table.
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by Natalie Bennett

The exhibition “Sleeping and Dreaming” at the Wellcome collection has much to delight the amateur scientist and collector of trivia. Did you know that lack of sleep changes your blood chemistry? That laudanum was invented by Paracelsus? That some of the first resuscitation devices – there’s one here from 1774 – involved tobacco being blown into the body via the rectum?

There’s also much to please the amateur psychologist. Did you know that roughly every second dream contains bizarre elements? That sexual dreams seem less common than is generally supposed? (Whatever is commonly supposed.) That women dream as often of men as women, but men dream more of men?

Yet this is also an art exhibition, from the traditional sculpture, “The Yawner” by Messerschidmt, part of a set of 100 heads showing all human emotions and moods, to distinctly modern work, such as Nils Klinger’s 2003
“The sleepers” photos – with an exposure as long as candle takes to burn down, so the movements of sombolence are mapped into one space.
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by Claire George

A Jacobean playwright is waiting to get together with old friends in Trafalgar Square, but he needs your help to settle in. The Sussex-born John Fletcher was one of the most successful dramatists of the early 17th century. A collaborator with Shakespeare, most famously on Henry VIII, he succeeded the Bard as house playwright for the King’s Men.

Fletcher also had a long-running writing partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom, on one account, he lived in scandalously close quarters on Bankside, with “one wench in the house between them”.

Now the National Portrait Gallery has a chance to buy the only surviving picture of Fletcher to have been painted from life, a work that was featured in last year’s Searching for Shakespeare exhibition. By an unknown English artist, its history is well-attested, it having been in the Clarendon collection, assembled by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, in the mid-17th century and held initially on his great mansion in Piccadilly.

The National Portrait Gallery has collected a significant proportion of the £218,000 purchase but needs to raise a further £50,000 from public donations by January 20.

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by Natalie Bennett

At the start of “Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now”, the Barbican curators are almost paranoically determined to remind you that you are in an art gallery, not some slimy back street show, despite the “strictly no under 18s” sign on the door. So, they proclaim, “We are offering you the pleasure of being seduced by the artistry with which sexual subjects have been brought to life. Above all we hope that seduced will help us reflect on what we share with people from different ages and cultures.”

And they even show a playful turn, beginning with a plaster cast of fig leaf for Michelangelo’s David “unknown artist probably English 1857” – apparently it was presented to Queen Victoria at her request, to protect the modesty of those viewing a plaster cast of the original. After that, it might not surprise you to know that there are few English, or British, artists here. Or that in the Bourbon Museum in Naples the “reserved cabinet”, where visitors had to get a special permit, most requests came from Englishmen.

The claim for some sort of universalism in approach to sex made at the entrance is further dispelled by the ancient material. To the Greeks and the Romans sex was about much more than, well sex.

I can’t imagine precisely the purpose of meaning of the tintinnabulum, a chime shaped as a large winged penis that has limbs that are also penises (or should that be penii? I’ve not previously had cause to ponder that grammatical question.) But surely it must have been symbolic and religious – just like the art of Pompei.

Then, by the Apollodoru painter, is an Attic kylix of circa 490BC showing a sapphic scene of a crouching woman fingering another. But she’s holding a vase in one outstretched hand and perhaps playing a musical instrument in the other – the meaning is surely symbolic rather than erotic.

And into early modern times, particularly but not solely with work of “popular”, “low art” forms, some of this ancient sense of sex as symbol remains. I was struck by the curiously prosaic imagine on a French 16th-century polychrome majolica ceremonial dish of a woman with a basket of phalli. She’s seated on the ground in a demure posture, with her legs tucked under skirt and a serious expression. Similar in feel is an etching by Giulio Romano (Pippi) of a naked woman approaching a man on a bed to kill him. A fully dressed haggard man, perhaps death, holds back the curtain for her.
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By Claire George

You can get your hands on history and help the soap opera of Victorian life unfold before the eyes of the world in a colourful corner of West London. That’s the offer being made by Uxbridge Central Library, which is seeking volunteers to help with the Heritage Builds Bridges project.

The national lottery-funded scheme is built around a website that brings together major heritage collections from Brunel University, the British and Foreign School Society and the London Borough of Hillingdon. “The collections were united because they present a unique and complementary picture of Hillingdon – its people, its industries, its geography and how Hillingdon is developing,” said the project manager, Mandy Mordue of Brunel University.

The combined collections also document the history of education in Hillingdon schools and at a national level. The BFSS holds one of the world’s leading research resources for 19th-century elementary education and teacher training. Brunel University’s archives contain records from two teacher training colleges, and illustrate the fight to raise the status of women teachers.

“The website has two main strengths, the breadth of the collections and its usefulness as a teaching tool,” said the Central Library museum curator, Clara Pereira.

Heritage Builds Bridges has worked closely with local teachers to tailor the website to suit schoolchildren. The schools section uses old photographs, prints and collection artefacts to take youngsters on an evocative tour of 19th-century childhood, industry and trade. It also employs characters and games to teach children about the differences between life then and now.

But the aim is to reach much beyond the immediate locality. “We were careful not to make it too local, so teachers in other parts of the country can use it,” said the assistant archivist, Paul Davidson.
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By Natalie Bennett

The buzz at the British Museum just now is all around China, with the hottest tickets in town being for what’s universally known as the terracotta warriors exhibition. But it’s worth taking a little extra time to pop upstairs, to a small but powerful display on the slave trade. It aims in one small room to take in a lot, from the economics of the slave trade, on which it is academically strongest, to the echoes of slavery today, which is attracting plenty of attention from visitors for its eclectic power.

Opening and dominating is “Beyond my grandfather’s dreams”, a contemporary bronze by Fowokan George Kelly. In form and styling it is like a traditional European portrait bust, but it depicts a beautiful black woman whose face is dawn in suffering.

But then the focus moves from pain, so often often the focus with exhibitions on slavery, to the other side, all of the wealth and comfort Europeans were able to enjoy as a result of such suffering – tobacco, ivory, sugar, markets for manufactured goods that built the wealth of Victorian Britain. As Ignatius Sancho, who was born on a slave ship between West Africa and the Americas, wrote: “The grand object of English navigators – indeed of all Christian navigators — is money…”

The ways in which this trade was a complete integrated system are made clear in this exhibition. The tobacco grown by slaves in the Americas was a luxury commodity, but the lowest grade was often sent to Africa, where it might be used for buying more slaves. A similar pattern was seen with sugar: the fine products were sent to Europe but molasses, the byproduct of the dangerous refining process (boiling in huge open kettles – known as the Jamaica Train), was sent to Africa to buy more slaves. Josiah Wedgewood advocated abolition, but made beautiful sugar bowls for the luxury product, which surely helped encourage its consumption.

Chain gangs of slaves for export carried with them elephant tusks for the luxury trade in ivory. On display here are gambling tokens from London’s gentlemen’s clubs and piano keys from polite drawing rooms – some of the myriad of items into which it was made.
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