Vilhelm Hammershoi

As part of our joint New Year Resolution to get out and about more when the sun is shining, Jane and I went to Bath earlier this month. We always enjoy visiting Bath, in part because the architecture reminds us of Edinburgh which we have also come to love, but also in its own right.

*^{One Of The Georgian Crescents Below Sion Hill, Bath}*

Jane always seems to find a treasured, discreet parking spot on Sion Hill. The walk from there to the centre of town takes us past takes us past Georgian terraces and crescents and through big open grassy slopes with broad vistas. It is an early treat on our visits, especially on a sunny day. Then in the city centre, there are the impressive squares and circuses of intact Georgian houses, the river and its bridges, and the Roman Baths and Cathedral, all clad in wonderful local stone.

A highlight of most of our Bath visits is the opportunity to pick up sourdough bread from Landrace bakery in Walcot Street. It is simply our favourite bread. This time we also visited The Fine Cheese Company a few doors along. The service from the French chap behind the counter was a little snooty (perhaps because we enquired about English cheese) but he was very efficient in giving us a taster of the smooth and luscious Old Winchester cheese which we went away with.

Jane had spotted that there was an exhibition of Gwen John’s work on at the The Holburne Museum and, for all the attractions of picking up top quality bread and cheese, seeing that was the prime purpose of our Bath trip. I was only vaguely familiar with Gwen John following a recent conversation with friends in our village who had seen an exhibition of her work in Chichester. They had recommended it and, anyway, I trust Jane on choosing worthwhile exhibitions like this one.

The exhibition proved to be small but interesting. Gwen John was clearly a formidable and influential woman. It seems that her popularity has grown since her death but in life she mixed with, modelled for and inspired a wide range of other artists and produced attractive and innovative paintings. I particularly liked the set of paintings on show called the ‘Convalescent Series’. These are portraits with muted colours with an unusual surface texture apparently produced by the oil paint soaking into a chalky glue mix which caused bubbles and then small perforations in the finish.

*^{‘Woman Seated’; Part Of ‘The Convalescent Series’ by Gwen John}*

When Jane and I met up outside the exhibition room afterwards we both said how much we had enjoyed John’s paintings but, amusingly, we both through that the best painting on show was one that was hung to illustrate her influence on other artists. This was an interior with a single female figure by a Dane, Vilhelm Hammershøi. We both thought it lovely.

^{‘Interior With Writing Table And A Young Woman’ by Vilhelm Hammershøi}

I recall seeing a Hammershøi painting in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris last year when I began to appreciate his work for the first time. I love his understated views of rooms, his grey palette and the ambiguity that stems from not being able to see the faces of the figures in his pictures – or the lack of a figure at all in the case of the painting I saw in Paris.

Alongside the Gwen John exhibition was a small exhibition of rather strange works by Gillian Lowndes. The point of these seemed to be to mix as many different materials as possible so they looked like weird debris dug up from a brownfield industrial site somewhere. The results weren’t uninteresting but I wasn’t moved by them.

*^{Two Of The Works By Gillian Lowndes On Show At The Holburne Museum}*

The Holburne Museum also had a display by Lubaina Himid called Lost Threads. This involved piles and streams of beautiful, brightly coloured Dutch textiles strewn across the floors of the museum rooms and woven between the pillars at the front of the building. Jane and I had been to see a substantial exhibition of her work at Tate Modern a couple of years ago. Like then, while we enjoyed the vibrant colours, we weren’t bowled over by works.

*^{The Holburne Museum Clad With Textiles By Lubiana Himid}*

Having got a dose of culture, we went for lunch at Oak. We had a very tasty lunch of vegetarian small plates. These arrived at a relaxed and, for us, ideal pace – always a pleasant surprise in small plates-oriented restaurants where, too often, things seem to arrive with a timing to suit the chef not the customers.

My life back at home has been largely routine. The weather hasn’t been very conducive to gardening and, while I have recommenced work in the field, there is still a lot to do to ready the vegetable patches for the new season and to plant some pot-bound trees I acquired a couple of years ago.

The weather hasn’t stopped some good local walks. Indeed, between the bouts of rain, we have had some lovely sunny days.

I’ve enjoyed the displays of snowdrops and the growing enthusiasm for the coming Spring being demonstrated by small birds singing their hearts out.

I have also spotted some interesting fungi which seem to be thriving in the mild damp. Just yesterday I saw a great pile of some sort of puff ball mushroom.

*^{Crazy Mound Of Puff Balls Looking Like A Pile of Discarded New Potatoes}*

A little earlier this week I saw, for my first time, a myriad of small bright red fungi growing on felled tree trunks and branches and dotted through a few square yards of undergrowth. These are Scarlet Elf Cap fungi. A friend tells me that it is from these little red cups that the wood elves drink the dew to refresh themselves each morning; nice story and a lovely sight.

While I have taken myself off for leisurely walks or lounged around rather too much, Jane has been very busy organising an exhibition of local artists work as part of the village’s cultural festival (called Horsley Unwrapped). Trying to tie down artists to various deadlines for facts about the work they want to display and any sale prices has been like ‘herding sheep’ at times, but the display boards have arrived and hanging of the work has started. After the exhibition this coming weekend, Jane is suddenly going to have a lot of discretionary time available!

*^{On My Way To Get The Newspaper: Winter Sunrise}*

My only contribution to the festival so far has been supporting Jane with some of the collateral materials for her exhibition. However, next week I am organising a Fun All-Comers Darts evening as part of the Festival. Goodness knows how that will go – I haven’t played darts for a few decades! I’ve bought some darts and am ready to go. More on this next time perhaps….

Football Footnote: Forest Green Rovers, who I support through thick and thin, have just had their first league win since October 2023 following a run of 15 winless league games. Incredibly there is a team worse than us in our Division (English Football League 2) and the win took us off the bottom. This one win has turned hopelessness into absurd levels of hope that we can avoid a consecutive relegation this season. But as someone on the FGR Fans Forum often says, ‘it’s the hope that kills you’. Hope will either burgeon or turn to dust again this coming weekend as we play again the team we beat last October. My fingers are crossed….

We wanted an early start on our last day. Jane had spotted, during our first two days in Paris, a hotel that was renowned for its early and good quality breakfast. This was Frenchie Pigalle in Hotel Grand Pigalle where the chef (Greg Marchand) was a Jamie Oliver mentee/colleague who had now struck up successfully on his own. Certainly the coffee was good, my omelette was nice and Jane enjoyed her granola. Satisfyingly replete, we set off to fulfil our pre-booked visit to Sainte-Chapelle.

In a bit of spare time we walked around the front of Notre Dame Cathedral. A huge crane towers over the site but it is clear that the restoration following the great fire in April 2019 is well under way. Its current closure is presumably adding to the popularity of nearby Sainte Chappelle and the queue we joined outside the Palais de Justice was rather chaotic and substantial – even with our pre-booking.

We had a good moan to ourselves about the French system of queuing and the bottlenecks around security checking but actually we were in chapel with 30 minutes and had to reprimand ourselves for our impatience. The visit was, in any case, well worth the wait.

*^{Palais De Justice (With Sainte Chapelle In The Background)}*

The building dates from the 14th century. Its highpoint are 15 terrific stained glass windows telling stories from the Old and New Testaments which date from that time. These windows are set in huge panels over 15 metres high under the extraordinarily high, barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Upper Chapel. Although the stained glass (over 1,000 pieces) is only of five colours, the overall effect is spectacular and there is huge detail in each piece. Apparently these details, such as facial features, have been picked out by painted-on mixes of powdered glass, oxides and vinegar.

The bright colours of the windows have been replenished through careful cleaning in recent years and luck and happenstance seems to have allowed the chapel to avoid predations of the French Revolution and war. It remains an awesome, gigantic space.

*^{Stained Glass Windows, Sainte Chapelle (The Pictures Can’t Capture Their Marvel)}*

Beneath the upper chapel was a lower one that, with its low ceiling, resembled a crypt. It too has beautifully coloured stained glass, walls and columns. It was another lovely room.

Once back outside, we left the Ile De La Cite and strolled through the shopping streets of St Germain. I dived into the church of Saint-Sulpice while Jane bought socks. This is the second largest church in Paris (after the Notre Dame) and its simple internal structure ensured that its sheer size was the first thing I noticed. There are some famous murals including one by Eugène Delacroix but I found more interest in a small display showing the way the church had been realigned and then expanded from its inception in 1646 through to the late 1770s.

Saint-Sulpice

Jane and I split up for the afternoon. While she returned to the Marais district’s shops, I spent the afternoon in the Musée d’Orsay. This is a large, old railway station converted into multiple galleries for art but with the original carapace of the building still very much on show. It is yet another impressive Parisian building.

The art on show isn’t bad either! The collection of Impressionist art is perhaps the museum’s crown jewels. Its home on the top floor, alongside an equally strong collection of post-impressionist art, was the busiest part of the museum and by the time I arrived at the Van Gogh section I was flagging in the crowds a bit. This was despite the wonderful familiarity of his self-portraits and a version of the gorgeous ‘The Starry Night’.

Certainly there are so many famous paintings at the Musee D’Orsay. Occasionally, as a layman and non-artist, I felt a little frisson of self-satisfaction as I entered a room and either spotted a painting I knew or guessed correctly its artist creator.

Famous Pictures By Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet and Degas at Musee D’Orsay

Of course there was much that was new to me too. In particular I was struck by what I think I understood to be a number of ‘realist’ painters. I understood that realism predated impressionism; while realism focused on portraying accurate, detailed, almost unadorned depiction of everyday scenes, impressionism developed to capture how light interacts with the subject matter.

On several occasions my slow wandering around the museum was arrested by a picture that caught my eye and it often turned out to be by a realist painter. In the future, I will look out for painters I’d not heard of before this visit like James Tissot and Ernest Messonier.

Pictures That Caught My Eye By James Tissot

….And By Ernest Meissonier

I will also look out for exhibitions of work by Vilhelm Hammershoi, a Danish post-impressionist (I think – I’m no expert in all the genres) with strong artistic links back to 17th century Dutch masters. I saw two of his works, liked both and thought that Jane would like the grey tones in them.

*^{Interieur, Standgrade 30 By Vilhelm Hammershoi (1904)}*

I wandered back through the Tuileries to our hotel to meet up with Jane. I was both pretty exhausted and over-exposed to art by this time but I was very ready for another go at Buvette for dinner (rather than breakfast which we had tried earlier in out trip).

My coq au vin was excellent but the vegetable dishes were a little strange. Jane’s beetroot and horseradish dish and my chopped brussel sprout, raisin and nuts mix were both cold (deliberately) and so large that it was as well we were prepared to share rather than overdose on each. It felt good having had another dose of French food though – when in Paris…..

I’m looking forward to the next time!

My Retirement Journey

I've Retired! What Next?

A Bath Trip and Interesting Fungi

Paris: Our Last Day