Russia: Royalty and the Romanovs

Sir Godfrey Kneller, Peter I, Tsar of Russia. Royal Collection Trust

This sumptuous new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery covers some three hundred years during which Great Britain was linked to Russia's ruling Romanov dynasty through exploration and discovery, diplomatic alliances and family ties. It begins with a monumental portrait by Sir Geoffrey Kneller of Peter the Great, who in 1698 was the first Russian ruler to set foot on English soil. He stayed for three months at the home of diarist John Evelyn in Greenwich, using paintings as target practice and wheelbarrows as go-karts but in between soaking up knowledge about shipbuilding and navigation that enabled him to build a mighty Russian navy from scratch. This portrait (above) depicts him as a young and vibrant ruler, looking to the West and hoping to establish a new, ‘open’ Russia. When he left, he presented it to the King, William III, beginning a tradition of gift-giving and exchanges that continued through the centuries.

Franz Kruger Emperor Nicholas I 1796 - 1855. Royal Collection Trust

After the defeat of Napoleon by allied forces, including those of Britain and Russia, a steady stream of Russian emperors, empresses, grand dukes and grand duchesses were entertained in Britain. The future Emperor Nicholas I (above) visited in 1816 – 17 and was guest of honour at a banquet of more than 100 courses, hosted by the Prince Regent at the Brighton Pavilion.

After George Dawe, Princess Charlotte of Wales.  Royal Collection Trust

As a thank you, his mother, Empress Maria, sent the Prince Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, the insignia of the order of St Catherine, the most prestigious award for women in Imperial Russia, and she was painted wearing it on a Russian-style dress (above). Later, two daughters of King Christian X of Denmark married into the Russian and British royal families, creating a close familial link.

Laurits Regner Tuxen, The Marriage of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia. Royal Collection Trust

This bond was strengthened by a number of marriages. One of the rooms in this exhibition is devoted to these family links and portraits, displayed in opulent frames.

Laurits Regner Tuxen, The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887.  Royal Collection Trust

To celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, a detailed painting of her surrounded by her extensive family was commissioned, emphasising how personal the political was.

Fabergé, Mosaic Egg and Surprise. Royal Collection Trust

The Royal Collection also includes a number of works by Carl Fabergé. On display is one of the famous bejewelled Easter Eggs, with its 'surprise' beside it. It was confiscated after the 1917 revolution and ended up in Cameo Corner in London, where it was bought by King George V in 1933, probably as a birthday gift for Queen Mary.

Fabergé Chrysanthumums. Royal Collection Trust

The exhibition also includes some exquisite lifelike flowers, crafted from precious and semi-precious stones – just the thing to brighten up a long, dark Russian winter.

Cossack uniform belonging to Tzarevich Alexei. Royal Collection Trust

As in all families, things did not always go smoothly. There's a poignant reminder of the fate of the Romanovs after King George V declined to rescue them during the revolution – a little Cossack uniform once worn by the Russian heir, Alexei, who, with the rest of his family, was shot dead in a cellar. It was later found in a government shop in Leningrad. And in the mid 19th c, Britain was at war with Russia, trying, along with the French and Ottomans, to stop its expansionism in the Crimea. The stark realities of this conflict were captured on camera by the enterprising early photographer Roger Fenton when he visited the area in 1855.

Roger Fenton, Cossack Bay, Balaclava. Pioneering nurse Mary Seacole had travelled there on one of these ships.

His images of exhausted troops and desolate landscapes – including the scene of the Charge of the Light Brigade – brought the impact of war into public consciousness for the first time. An exhibition of these photographs, Shadows of War, runs alongside Royalty and the Romanovs, providing a stark contrast between the two worlds.  

Fabergé, Basket of Flowers Egg, 1901 Royal Collection Trust

Russia, Royalty and the Romanovs, Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 28 April 2019, with Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855. £12 (concessions available).

I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria

The title of this fascinating new British Museum exhibition comes from the claim of Assyria’s last great ruler, Ashurbanipal (reigned 669 – 631 BC). To say you are king of the world might seem like an exaggeration, but this man ruled an empire that stretched from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the mountains of western Iran. As we see in the more than 250 exhibits, some never seen in the UK before, he expanded by treaty and conquest what had been inherited from his forebears. He ruled from his massive capital at Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, where temples and palaces were adorned with sculptures of lions and human-headed winged bulls, such as this one from the palace of Nimrud (above) and an elaborate system of canals brought water to his pleasure gardens and game parks (below).

The lighting of the exhibits is imaginative. Special effects are used to project colours on reliefs, picking out the details and showing how they first looked. These three gods (below) once decorated the throne room in Nineveh.

Ashurbanipal's empire was highly organised and efficient, arranged in provinces, each administered by a governor he had appointed. A system of royal roads criss-crossed the territory, allowing a sophisticated mail system to deliver orders swiftly. Obedience was rewarded, but there were brutal punishments for those who disobeyed; in one relief a surrendering general is about to be beheaded and in another, prisoners have to grind their fathers’ bones before being executed. His older brother, given the province of Babylonia to govern, rebelled against him and died in the attempt. Lord Byron painted a picture of the regime’s fearsome war machine in his poem, The Destruction of Sennacherib. (Ashurbanipal was Sennacherib’s grandson.)

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold...

Ashurbanipal was ruthless. Millions of displaced people were forcibly resettled to cultivate barren land, build cities and produce luxury goods. But unlike his predecessors, he didn’t go into battle himself, instead sending a general to command his forces. He preferred to display his bravery and skills as a warrior in carefully organised lion hunts (where there was plenty of backup) and had them recorded in wall reliefs (above.) He prided himself on being literate and cultured, and is portrayed with a stylus tucked into his belt. On display is a practice letter to his father, composed in cuneiform on a clay tablet while still a boy. Elsewhere, he boasts about his achievements: “I am able to recognise celestial and terrestrial omens and can discuss them in an assembly of scholars ... I have carefully examined inscriptions on stone from before The Flood.” 

He created a huge reference library in Nineveh, aiming to unite under one roof all the traditional knowledge inherited from earlier times. This covered instructions for contacting the gods, letters, historical texts and administrative matters – all things he believed would help him rule. The exhibition has a whole wall of surviving fragments (above).  It must have helped – he held the throne for almost 40 years, longer than any of his ancestors. In later life, he enjoyed banquets and relaxing in his garden. Here, servants bring snacks of grapes, pomegranates and dates to a feast.

After he died, his son took over, but the empire began to fall apart with civil wars and invasions. In the ensuing battles, the palace was systematically demolished and the library burnt down. However, 30,000 clay tablets survived in the ruins, baked hard by the flames. The exhibition displays a whole wall of them (above). Their cuneiform writing, giving a detailed picture of life and beliefs in the ancient world, was first deciphered in Victorian times; researchers continue to study the fragments.

Nineveh was rediscovered in the 1840s. A young British explorer, Austen Henry Layard, began excavations with initial financing by the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then occupied the area. The Ottomans authorised the Ambassador to export some of the sculptures found to England, and the first of these arrived at the British Museum in 1847. A sketch of this event appeared in The Illustrated London News on 28 February 1852 (above). The finds sparked a fashion for Assyrian designs in painting and art. The winged bull and the lion hunt even found their way on to Victorian jewellery.

In recent years, many archaeological sites in Iraq have been systematically targeted and destroyed by ISIS, including those where exhibits were found. The final section of the exhibition highlights the challenges faced in protecting Iraqi cultural heritage, and outlines the British Museum’s scheme for training 50 Iraqi archaeologists in rescue archaeology. At the same time, the cuneiform tablets are being digitised, which will enable their closer study and ensure that they are available to all to see.

The BP exhibition – I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria. British Museum to Feb 24 2019. £17 (concessions).

Charles I - King and Collector

Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in Three Positions

One of the last things that King Charles I saw on January 30 1649 as he made his way through the Banqueting House to the scaffold outside was the glorious ceiling painting he had commissioned in honour of his father, King James. The work of Peter Paul Rubens, it was one of some 2000 works of art in Charles’s collection, and one of the few not sold off after his execution by Oliver Cromwell. This sumptuous exhibition at the Royal Academy reunites 140 of them, including more than 90 pieces rescued and returned to the Royal Collection by subsequent monarchs. Charles acquired a taste for art when in 1623 he visited Madrid to pay court to a Spanish princess. He returned to England without his prospective bride but with a number of paintings, including some by Titian and Veronese. Bitten by the collecting bug, he went on to acquire works amassed by the Gonzaga family of Mantua, who had fallen on hard times. Among them were paintings by Leonardo and Raphael, as well as many from Northern Europe, and some antique sculptures, including this Crouching Venus (2nd c AD).

By now he had married Henrietta Maria, sister of King Louis XIII of France. She had grown up in a court surrounded by art, and her sophisticated tastes are thought to have influenced her husband.

Anthony van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson, 1633

She commissioned van Dyck to paint the triple portrait of Charles (top) that graces the first room of the exhibition. It was to be the basis of a marble bust of the king by Bernini, and was sent to him in Rome. (He was too busy to travel to England.) Sadly, the sculpture was destroyed in a fire in 1698, but the portrait remains.

Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in the Hunting Field c 1636

Three other van Dycks are reunited to form the core of this exhibition – two equestrian portraits of the king, and the celebrated one of him hunting, on loan from the Louvre and back in England for the first time since the seventeenth century. (It’s thought that Queen Henrietta Maria took it with her when she went into exile in France after her husband’s death.)
Interestingly, not all the works reflect the king’s personal taste – many were gifts from ambassadors or other nobles. Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar c 1484 – 92, which fills a dedicated gallery (below), might have been seen as somewhat old-fashioned when it arrived; it was displayed at Hampton Court, rather than Whitehall Palace.

It also seems Rembrandt was not held in the esteem he is today, which was reflected in the price fetched by an exquisite portrait of an elderly woman, probably his mother, in Cromwell's sale - just £4. However Titian's Supper at Emmaus, (below) went for £600, while Raphael's La Perla, now in the Prado, was valued at £2000.

Titian, The Supper at Emmaus, c.1530

The works the Stuart monarch amassed have been described as “the finest collection of pictures ever assembled in this country,” and are credited with changing the appreciation of art in England. It’s taken five years of planning and international negotiations, aided by the support of the Prince of Wales, to stage this exhibition. As well as the Royal Collection, major lenders include the National Gallery, London, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, and Mobilier National, Paris.

Among the treasures from Paris are the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles, perhaps the most spectacular set of tapestries ever produced in England (above). The curators have been helped in understanding the importance to the king of various items by a working draft of a 1639 inventory (below) by Abraham van der Doort, the first Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.

In it, he describes the works and where they were hung. It reveals that the van Dyck painting in the background, showing the King and Queen with Prince Charles and Princess Mary, was known as the "Greate Peece" and was in the Long Gallery at Whitehall Palace. Sadly, around 1600 of the items listed have disappeared, lost, destroyed, or perhaps lanquishing unrecognised in private collections or archives. The curators are hoping that the interest created by the exhibition might prompt a closer look at works in storage, to see if they bear the tell-tale 'C' and crown.
Charles I, King and Collector. Royal Academy, London, until April 15 2018. £20 (concessions available)

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Winter Lights at Canary Wharf

Canary Wharf's annual celebration of light technology and art is back, cheering up London's dark January evenings. More than 30 installations and artworks are dotted around the estate, both indoors and out. They range from small intimate displays to impressive interactive artworks you can enter and explore. So much to see - just remember to wrap up well. Here are some of the highlights:

This 6-metre wide Sonic Light Bubble greets you as you emerge from the Jubilee line tube's west entrance. It pulsates with light and sound when you approach or touch it, and constantly generates new visual patterns to a unique soundtrack.

Abstract, in Montgomery Square, is inspired by the concept of time and relativity. The lights move up and down five-metre poles, interweaving in an almost balletic mode.

Nearby is Intrude -  two huge inflatable giant rabits, their ears twitching in the breeze. They may look like something from a fairytale, but the environmental message is that in Australia, they are an out of control pest, leaving a trail of ecological disaster in their wake.

There's fun for all ages with the Luma Paint Light Graffiti. You can instantly create your own art on the wall of the Roof Garden, using a special light tool. When you're finished, the wall becomes blank again.

The giant Dazzling Dodecahedron invites you to step inside and bathe in the glow of the jewel-like colours from the panels, made of iridescent acrylic. In effect, it's a giant disco ball.

Future Fashion takes garments into the digital age. The panels react to audience input by changing colour, animating and displaying text.

Of all the displays, Reflecting Holons was to me the most magical. Long strips of oil-like transparent foil combined with spinning motors create ever-changing bubbles that look like drops of water.

This being Canary Wharf, what better to light up a dark corner than this rainbow lamp, a tribute to the estate's iconic central tower?

And if you are tired, take a break on the illuminated colour-changing benches in the Columbus Courtyard. They are now a favourite part of Canary Wharf's permanent collection.

Winter Lights runs until Saturday, January 27, 1700 - 2200. It's free, and relatively uncrowded.
You can download a map of the installations from canarywharf.com, or pick one up when you arrive.