Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World

Queen Caroline of Ansbach, Joseph Highmore c.1735, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

When history is written, it’s usually the men who take centre stage, their spouses relegated to the shadows. So a new exhibition at Kensington Palace that puts the spotlight on three intelligent, dynamic and cultured women is to be welcomed. Caroline, Augusta and Charlotte were German-born Protestant princesses who married into the Hanoverian dynasty and moved to Britain.

Queen Charlotte, Johann Joseph Zoffany 1771, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Caroline and Charlotte became queens consort to George II and George III respectively, while Augusta was Princess of Wales, regent and mother to George III.

Augusta, Princess of Wales 1754, Jean-Etienne Liotard, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

With more than 30 children between them, they fulfilled their dynastic roles, even if there was much inter-generational feuding.

Children of George III and Queen Charlotte, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth

 But despite the years of childbearing, they found time to actively support the latest scientific and medical advances. They championed inoculation and publicly backed the creation of London’s Foundling Hospital for deprived and abandoned children.

Samples of English silk, January 1795, used to make clothes for Queen Charlotte & family for wedding of future George IV (c) Historic Royal Palaces

They also acted as patrons of British trades and manufacturing. Their outfits showcased locally designed and made fabrics, some of which are on show.

The Music Party Frederick, Prince of Wales with his Three Eldest Sisters, Philippe Mercier 1733, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth

It was an age known as The Enlightenment, a time of intellectual awakening, when many of the old ideas were being challenged. The exhibition examines how the princesses befriended and encouraged some of the greatest cultural and intellectual figures of their age, welcoming writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, astronomer Isaac Newton (who performed light refraction experiments at Kensington Palace) and composers including Handel, Mozart and Haydn.

Views of the Garden and Buildings at Kew, Sir William Chambers, 1763, © The Royal Board of Trustees of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

They were keen gardeners too - Augusta was involved in the creation of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and in 1763 she commissioned the much-loved 10-storey pagoda, currently being restored to its original splendour with the missing 80 dragons recreated.

'Anti-Saccharrites, - or - John Bull and his Family leaving off the use of Sugar', 1792 (c) Historic Royal Palaces

Living at a time when newspapers and journals had become freely available, everything they did attracted public attention.  The royal family was often subjected to savage satire and criticism. Some of these cartoons are on display.

Yinka Shonibare, Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina, 2017, Yale Center for British Art

As part of their outward-looking remit, they also made use of the many products from across the empire – exotic plants, rare birds and wild animals -  and encouraged their study. Also in the exhibition is a new work created for the occasion by artist Yinka Shonibare. The sculpture interprets the 1753 encounter between Mrs Eliza Pinckney, the owner of a slave plantation in South Carolina, and Princess Augusta. Beside it is Mrs Pinckney's original letter to a friend, recounting their meeting.
More than 200 objects are featured in the exhibition, including some loaned by the Queen. They provide a fascinating insight into the lives of these three remarkable women, and celebrate the public roles they played in shaping ideas of a national identity.
Enlightened Princesses runs until November 12, 2017
https://www.hrp.org.uk

The V and A's new £48m Exhibition Road development

The Sackler Courtyard. Photo: Hufton + Crow

The V and A’s new Exhibition Road Quarter opens to the public this Friday evening (June 30), marking a new era for the museum. Among the highlights is the Sackler Courtyard, a sweeping public space complete with cafe, that provides an additional way into the popular tourist attraction. The courtyard and stairs are paved with 11,000 hand-made porcelain tiles arranged in 15 different patterns - a nod to the museum's historic association with ceramics.

A dramatic staircase just inside the entrance leads down to the stunning 1,100sq m Sainsbury Gallery, 18m down but with windows to courtyard above that allow in daylight. It's column-free, so can be configured in any way to house blockbuster temporary exhibitions. The first of these opens on September 30: Opera - Passion, Power and Politics.

Passersby get their first view of the development through the Aston Webb Screen, erected more than 100 years ago to block off a service area that housed a boiler room and other utilities.  (These were supposed to have been hidden underground but as money was tight, they ended up in what was initially to be a courtyard.)

The screen has now been opened up and transformed into an elegant colonnade, with doors that can be closed at night. The bomb damage to the original stonework sustained during the Blitz is still visible, and is also recorded on the perforated metal of the doors.

The museum's director, Tristram Hunt, says the development has created a living room for London which blends the street and the museum. The opening is being celebrated with a week-long free public festival, Reveal, (to July 7) with art, performance, fashion and family activities.

On Saturday, Exhibition Rd will be closed to traffic, allowing easy access between the V and A and the Natural History and Science museums opposite – as was originally intended. When Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the Aston Webb building in 1899 she said: “I trust that the Museum will remain for ages a monument of discerning liberality and a source of refinement and progress”. The museum says the project is the next stage of fulfilment of her hopes.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/exhibition-road-building-project

For details of the Reveal festival: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/reveal

Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave

A confession: I hadn’t really appreciated the extent of the influence of the Japanese artist, Hokusai, until I visited the current exhibition at the British Museum – Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave (until August 13. So it was fascinating to discover through the background material on display the fame he achieved in his own lifetime and the impact his prints had when they were first exhibited in Paris in 1867, almost 20 years after his death. Van Gogh later wrote All my art is based to some extent on Japanese art. Monet himself acquired 250 Japanese prints, including 23 by Hokusai, and I spotted The Great Wave beside a dresser while at the painter's home in Giverny a few days after the show opened.

Hokusai created The Great Wave in 1831, when he was already seventy. It shows three fishing boats heading into a great storm wave. Just visible are the oarsmen who crouch forward, battling the water’s power. The wave encircles Mt Fuji, spray falling like snow on its sacred peak. It was part of an immensely popular series – as many as 8000 impressions were made. With its use of deep perspective and imported Prussian blue pigment, it reflects how Hokusai adapted and experimented with European artistic style, which was just starting to be seen in what had hitherto been a closed country. Mt Fuji remained a model for him in his quest for immortality during his later years. He styled himself Gakyō Rōjin (Old Man Crazy to Paint) and believed the older he got, the greater his art would become.

This exhibition is the story of Hokusai’s art in old age and many of the works have never been seen before in the UK. From iconic landscapes and wave pictures to deities and mythological beasts, from flora and fauna to beautiful women, they are amazingly varied.

The success of the Great Wave led to more print series, featuring waterfalls, bridges and flowers, such as these poppies.

He was supported by his daughter Eijo, herself an accomplished artist, who worked with and alongside him. There is one powerful painting by her in the exhibition, which shows in graphic detail a scene from a Chinese novel of the 1300s, in which a physician cuts into the arm of a general to remove an infected bone.The stoic general himself continues to play a board game, while others avert their eyes from the knife and blood.

China was a major source of cultural inspiration for Japan. Hokusai reinterpreted its traditions, making them accessible to ordinary people. This man checking for a break in the snowy weather may be a portrait of a heroic bandit from another Chinese novel of the 1300s, Outlaws of the Marsh.

Hokusai had many pupils and produced manuals for painters and craft artists. In 1848 he wrote in a postscript to one of them: ...from ninety years I will keep on improving my style of painting. After I reach one hundred, my only desire will be to revolutionise this vocation. He died in 1849, just short of his 90th birthday. He had already started to use a seal on his paintings with the character Hundred and was producing technically brilliant works to the end, often revisiting his favourite subjects, including waves.

These ceiling paintings were created for a festival cart and date from 1845.

A fellow artist executed this portrait of Hokusai in the 1840s. It was later inscribed with his deathbed poem:

Maybe I’ll unwind

by roaming the summer fields

as a will-o’-the-wisp.

http://www.britishmuseum.org

Behind the garden wall at Lambeth Palace

The private garden of Lambeth Palace – the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury –  is open to the public on the first Friday of the month until September. It’s been continuously cultivated since the 12^th c, longer than any other in the country and various incumbents have put their own stamp on it.

The Palace is behind a high brick wall that runs along the Embankment. One of the first things you see on entering the courtyard is an enormous fig tree to the left of the entrance to the Great Hall. A White Marseilles variety, it was brought from Italy by Cardinal Pole when he arrived to become Queen Mary’s Archbishop in 1556. It still gives two crops of fruit a year, in July and October. The tree has also returned to Italy. In 2014, Archbishop Justin Welby visited Pope Francis in Rome and gave him a cutting from the tree as a symbol of the common heritage of the two religions.

The garden covers 10 acres and includes a terrace, Jewel Border, Rose Arbour, herb garden, bee hives, composting area and many mature trees. Among them is a Tulip Tree, a species introduced to England by Royal gardener John Tradescant the younger, and which was in flower in early June.

Fittingly, Tradescant is buried next door in the churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now the Garden Museum and recently reopened after a major refurbishment.

Open day visitors can go on a short guided walk around the Palace garden and learn more of  its  history and of future plans. These include a new purpose-built library and archive which will provide a climate-controlled home for the Palace’s collection of 200,000 precious books and 4,600 manuscripts, some of which go back to the 9^th c. It will be at the far end of the garden, surrounded by a new garden designed by Dan Pearson.

Some of the historic books can be seen in the Great Hall, which was open at the same time as the garden. It’s been recently refurbished - a stunning new black and white marble floor has been laid and the lantern in the elaborate hammer beam roof  repaired. We were also able to look into the Crypt Chapel, described by the architectural hsitorian Nicholas Pevsner as one of the best preserved medieval stone vaults in London.

Allow at least two to three hours for this fascinating visit. Admission to the garden is £5, and refreshments are available in a marquee on the lawn.
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/pages/visit-the-lambeth-palace-gardens-.html