Walker Art Gallery Research Articles

Take me to the River: Sophie Anderson and Elaine of Astolat

ABSTRACT Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823–1903) is not a painter of considerable critical acclaim; her work has been largely disregarded by art history and criticism, charged on the often-fatal count of sentimentality and lumped in with the kinds of ‘kitsch’ art rejected by modernism and its descendants. Despite this, her work continues to sell – at multi-million-dollar auctions and printed on cheap paraphernalia. Anderson’s appeal at these very different cultural echelons is testament to her technical effectiveness and to the enduring quality of her particular brand of Victorian mawkishness, and though her many paintings of children may never quite find purchase amidst the innovations and revelations of art in the recent century, these qualities do lend themselves to a deeply sympathetic mode of historical and literary painting. Anderson’s large, Tennyson-inspired literary depiction of Elaine of Astolat signalled her desire to enter the aggressively male-dominated space of historical and literary art and offers a valuable new perspective on a story and a character which has been so often – even obsessively – depicted by men. Elaine, which sits high above the entryway to Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, was one of the first such paintings by a woman to be purchased with public funds, and it represents a valuable entry-point for critique – both of the Victorian art establishment and of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Anderson’s artistic choices betray a profound sympathy for Elaine of Astolat and serve to highlight the pathos of a character who has seen her story and her character distorted from its inception.

Twentieth-century private collecting

Abstract Dr Philip Nelson, who died in 1953, was an antiquary and collector who lived in Liverpool. One of the highlights of the collections of classical sculpture in the World Museum, part of National Museums Liverpool, is a group of statuettes and busts acquired by Nelson from the 12th Lord Kinnaird and formerly housed in Rossie Priory, near Perth in Scotland. Although Nelson bought only two sculptures from the first auction of sculptures from the Rossie Priory collection, held at Sotheby’s in London in December 1948, it is apparent that he acquired several others, either directly from Lord Kinnaird or through dealers. Details of this process can be found in the archives of the World Museum and the Walker Art Gallery, also part of National Museums Liverpool, including hitherto unpublished letters, notebooks and invoices, reproduced here in an online appendix. The correspondence provides an insight into the formation of a private collection of ancient sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century, a period often overlooked in collecting scholarship.

Protecting Museum Collections from Vibrations Due to Construction: Vibration Statistics, Limits, Flexibility and Cooperation

ABSTRACT Vibrations due to heavy construction work continue to be a major concern for museums. Although there has been an increase in research on the effect of vibrations on objects of cultural heritage in recent years, selecting measures to protect collections and remain open during construction work continues to be difficult because of a lack of data on what objects can actually withstand, the complexity of vibration loads, and the uniqueness of each situation. The major renovation of the Central Library in Liverpool, UK, which shared walls with the World Museum and Walker Art Gallery, both of which belong within National Museums Liverpool, showed how museums and other institutions can successfully deal with such situations. An integral approach was taken, beginning with an extensive risk analysis to determine which objects could remain on display, which needed extra protection and regular condition monitoring, and which had to be removed. The museums then negotiated a vibration protocol and action plan with the contractors, including continuous monitoring, and trigger levels requiring consultation or work stoppage. Vibration data were also stored and used for later analysis. This integral approach was successful in protecting the collections on exhibition, with only two incidents of reported damage directly related to vibrations. A combination of museum staff experience, excellent communications with the contractors, and some flexibility in defining vibration limits provided a successful recipe for both museums. The analysis of the vibration data using the basic engineering concept of the Palmgren-Miner rule, supports a more flexible approach to setting vibration limits based on recently published guidelines.

Exhibition: David Hockney and the BJGP.

David Hockney Tate Britain London , 9 February 2017–29 May 2017 One of the nice things about going to a David Hockney exhibition is that almost everyone comes out smiling. This was certainly true at the recent Tate Britain retrospective David Hockney: 60 years work which brought together, in a compact show in only 12 rooms, key pictures from the 1960s to the present. Rather like a visit to the Frick Collection in New York, a Hockney exhibition contains almost nothing ugly, visceral or alarming, although it raises plenty of questions. I am hopeful that a visit to the Life &Times section of the BJGP also puts a smile on some of our readers’ faces, and makes you ask some questions. I trust that you will not think it too fanciful if I draw some parallels between Hockney’s career and the development of the Journal, and of general practice more broadly. Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool acrylic paint on canvas by David Hockney, 1966. Photograph by Richard Schmidt. Copyright David Hockney, National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Hockney is 80 this year, despite being a dedicated smoker, and began his …

Exhibition Reviews

Abstract Gallery Survival in the Age of Austerity, Craft and Design Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2016 Making Movies: The first UK craft film festival

Edward Morris (1940–2016)

Edward Morris, who died on 29 May 2016, was on the editorial board of this journal from its foundation in 1999 until 2001, and has earned himself a tribute in its pages, perhaps above all for his heroic efforts on behalf of the PMSA's National Recording Project. He was chair of the NRP editorial board virtually from the outset, and it was largely thanks to him that 17 volumes, including his own, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside (2012), have been published, and that several more are in preparation. This selfless editorial labour was not his only contribution to sculpture studies, and was itself a kind of coda to the art-historical and curatorial experiences of a lifetime. This is how it appears in retrospect, but it was hardly an outcome that those like myself, who knew him as a student at the Courtauld in the 1960s, or even Edward as a student, could have foreseen.The fact that he was born in the early stages of the Second World War, the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, may account for the deep-rooted sobriety of his character, offset, admittedly, by a fairly acute sense of the ridiculous in life generally. His education at first followed a standard patrician pattern of prep school, Rugby, and a BA in history at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1959). Between school and university he briefly taught English in Spain, and in the process improved his own Spanish. His interest in art appears to have grown during a five-year period spent working in the City. A college friend remembers their going together to Spain, and his being brought up to scratch on Romanesque architecture by Edward, who had read Kenneth Conant's recently published Pelican, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800-1200. In 1964 Edward enrolled for an MA course at the Courtauld, and was perhaps upset to find that the institute's medievalists were not impressed by Conant. His courses there were on French eighteenth-century painting with Anita Brookner and seventeenth-century landscape with Michael Kitson and Anthony Blunt. In his conversation at that time he showed an awe-inspiring familiarity with nineteenth-century authors, from Stendhal to Henry James, through Ruskin and the less fashionable Thackeray.It was at the Courtauld that Edward met his wife, Penny, and both of them were lucky enough to find congenial work in Liverpool at the end of their courses in 1966. His grounding in nineteenth-century history and literature were excellent qualifications for work at the Walker Art Gallery, where he was to remain as curator up to his retirement in 1999. It was at this period that Mary Bennett was spearheading the exposure of Pre-Raphaelite painters at the Walker, but the gallery's holdings of nineteenth-century art were impressively international, and Edward took a special interest in the French paintings. Despite some recent efforts to bring this area into conformity with twentieth-century priorities, with purchases of works by Monet and Degas, Edward was not at all unhappy that the bulk of the collection still reflected the tastes of Liverpool's mercantile classes from the early days. His researches in this area were to culminate much later with the publication of his ambitious volume, French Art in Nineteenth Century Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2005. By this time substantial advances had been made in exploring the activities of French sculptors in Victorian Britain, and these contributed to the rich texture of the book. In 1994, the Walker Art Gallery, under Edward's watch, had acquired, with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, an important French sculpture executed for an English destination: Henri Chapu's marble effigy of the Duchess of Nemours (1883), from the Orleans family oratory in the church of St Charles Borromeo, Weybridge.With the man who was his boss in those crucial days, Timothy Stevens, Edward gave a detailed account of the extraordinary boom for Liverpool's museums and galleries in the late 1980s. …

History of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1873-2000

This unofficial history of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, formerly the largest municipal art gallery in England, and since 1986 a national museum, is an insider account by two long-serving former members of its senior staff. The Gallery owes its name to the brewer Andrew Barclay Walker (1824–93), a staunch Tory with only a modest interest in art but probably the richest man in Liverpool, who announced in 1873, the year of his election as Mayor, that he would erect ‘at my sole expense’ a public art gallery, to provide a venue for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. These selling exhibitions of new art, modelled on those at the Royal Academy, had been organized since 1871 by the municipal council. Thus, the Walker was built not to house a formerly private collection, but to accommodate an annual show of contemporary art from which a public collection would gradually be formed. A spokesman explained in 1877 that the councillors ‘did not want a man who was a great judge of pictures or to dictate to them’, so the earliest curators of the Walker were primarily administrators rather than museum professionals like those running the South Kensington Museum, and until the 1930s effective control lay with the Arts and Exhibitions Sub-Committee of the City Council. Its chairman during the first decades of the Gallery’s existence was the forceful Philip Rathbone (1828–96), a Liberal Unitarian merchant and an art collector, who bequeathed many fine paintings to the Walker. To counter press complaints that the Gallery would be ‘almost exclusively used by the upper classes’, he insisted that ‘Art is the permanent expression of a nation’s thought ... what literature is to the individual mind art is to the common mind of the community’.

Earlier British paintings in the Walker Art Gallery and Sudley House

More than 300 paintings by British artists born before 1770 are featured in this catalogue raisonne. This is the first time that they have been addressed as a full group by period, and their strengths - and weaknesses - carefully examined. Artists featured include Fuseli, Gainsborough, Hilliard, Hogarth, Hoppner, Kneller, Raeburn, Reynolds, Romney, Stubbs and Joseph Wright. The Walker Art Gallery and Sudley House together house some of the best publicly owned art in the UK, with the works featured in this catalogue forming one of the most significant parts of these renowned collections. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of the paintings, Kidson provides a comprehensive overview of this important collection, weaving an eloquent path through the history of collecting and taste.

Art in the Age of Steam : Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 April–10 August 2008

Art in the Age of Steam : Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 April–10 August 2008

Pamela Robertson, ed.,Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair, exh. cat. Aldershot, Eng.: Lund Humphries in assoc. with Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; and Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liver-pool, 2006. 191 pp., 145 color pls., 20 b/w ills., chronol., bibliog., index. $80, £40.Elizabeth Cumming,Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPamela Robertson, ed., Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair, exh. cat. Aldershot, Eng.: Lund Humphries in assoc. with Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; and Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liver-pool, 2006. 191 pp., 145 color pls., 20 b/w ills., chronol., bibliog., index. $80, £40. Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn, distrib. in U.S. by Interlink, Northampton, Mass., 2006. 240 pp., 90 color pls., 20 b/w ills., bibliog., index. $50, £25.Lynne WalkerLynne WalkerSenior Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 16, Number 1Fall-Winter 2008-2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/652821 Views: 18Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in Studies in the Decorative Arts (1993-2009), which is continued by West 86th (2011-present). © Copyright 2008 by The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and CulturePDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair, edited by Pamela Robertson

Reviewed by: Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair John Morrison (bio) Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair, edited by Pamela Robertson; pp. 191. Aldershot and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2006, £40.00, $80.00. Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair is a companion volume to the exhibition of the same name that took place in the Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow, in 2006 and in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 2007. Essays by Juliet Kinchin and Joseph Sharples, Pamela Robertson, Janice Helland, and Annette Carruthers occupy nearly one-third of the book, while the remainder consists of a catalogue raisonné of the work of Macdonald and McNair. The four essays deal in turn with the cultural milieux of Glasgow and Liverpool where the husband and wife designers McNair and Macdonald spent their active working lives, the lives and work produced by the two during their time in the two cities, their whole room designs, and finally their three-dimensional designs. Robertson's preface explains that the lives and work of Macdonald and McNair have not been thoroughly or consistently examined or documented and, further, that the present volume draws on new research and recently discovered works to present the first comprehensive survey of the achievements of the two artists. The book deals centrally with the decade from 1895, the most active period of their professional lives. It discusses only briefly the well-worn tale of their involvement with Frances's sister Margaret Macdonald and Margaret's husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the informal grouping known as "The Four," and offers a short summary of Macdonald's and McNair's lives after 1909. Macdonald died in 1921 leaving little extant work from the last decade of her life. McNair, who may have destroyed much of his wife's later work, died in 1955 having ceased active work as a designer more than thirty years earlier. The essay by Kinchin and Sharples compares Liverpool and Glasgow, the two sites of the artists' careers, mainly to the detriment of the former city. While both cities are portrayed as commercially successful and confident metropolises, Glasgow is identified as a more diverse, cosmopolitan city with a vibrant visual culture and an evolving aesthetic language of its own, while Liverpool, with occasional exceptions, is revealed as a provincial centre with a narrower economic and cultural base. Interestingly, Glasgow's relative sophistication is linked explicitly to the city's status within the nation of Scotland, and Liverpool's to its less-exalted station within England. This analysis of the visual culture of British cities as simultaneously congruent because of their Britishness, but distinct by virtue of their older identities as English or Scottish, is worthy of further exploration. Robertson's piece chronologically follows the careers of Macdonald and McNair, beginning with their initial critical success in Glasgow and McNair's apppointment as instructor in design in the newly established School of Architecture and Applied Art at University College Liverpool in 1898. The pair's activities in the ultimately less-receptive environment of Liverpool, their marriage in 1899, parenthood in 1900, interior decoration of their Studio-featured flat in 1901, and participation in international exhibitions across Europe, are documented through to the artists' impecunious return to Glasgow in 1908, following the disadvantageous restructuring of McNair's teaching post and the collapse of his family fortune. Helland's treatise is at a tangent to the others. Rather than chronologically or contextually grounded, she explores theoretically the "conflation of art and life" in Arts and Crafts design and McDonald and McNair's construction of their "domestic [End Page 720] interiors as mirrors of their art practices" (56–57). The parallel theme of the undermining of the tradition of gender-specific spaces makes this the most speculative, challenging, and ultimately most interesting of the four essays. There is a sense here that, faced with a paucity of evidence, every last ounce of meaning is wrung out of the available material, both documentary and visual. Carruthers's contribution, in contrast, is the most descriptive. It documents the artists' three-dimensional design work and concentrates on establishing...

Diasporic Body Double: The Art of the Singh Twins

The London-born artists Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, the daughters of a Sikh doctor who immigrated to North England from the Punjab, are identical twins: they have the same DNA, they look and sound exactly alike, they wear the same clothing, and they received their training in art together. Often referred to as “The Singh Twins,” the sisters have adopted the language of Indian and Persian miniature painting to depict the complex urban and domestic landscapes of the contemporary world. The twins have exhibited their work to international audiences in Britain, Europe, India, and North America: a recent show, titled Past Modern: The Singh Twins, featured more than sixty paintings and was hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 2003 and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 2005.1 Significantly, Amrit and Rabindra Singh's collaborative practice is not simply an innocent expression of an affectionate bond between sisters, but rather a self-conscious engagement with the notion of singular authorship and the cult of the individual that has pervaded post-Enlightenment art-historical tradition. Not since Diane Arbus's 1967 black-and-white photograph of identical twin girls in New Jersey has such a memorable rendering of sameness and belonging, normativity and exclusion, and identity and difference been sustained so provocatively within the contemporary art world.

REVIEWS OF EXHIBITIONS

Mantegna to Rubens. Drawings from Liverpooľs Weld‐Blundell Collection, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

THE SCENT OF ROSES: ALMA-TADEMA AND THE OTHER SIDE OF ROME

Alma-Tadema’s Rome is not the Rome of Caesar and Cicero, Livy and Virgil, nor the Rome of mifitarism, heroism, and triumphant imperialism. Instead i t is a hedonistic society preoccupied with the pleasure of the senses. From the ostentatious public facade of the city itself, to the dolce vita along the Bay of Naples, it is the unofficial, the ‘other’ side of Roman culture which Alma-Tadema invites us to enter and enjoy. We are to be fascinated by the idle rich at their leisure, to delight with the revellers who carouse and the lovers who make love; and to marvel at the magnificence, opulence and utter decadence of the imperial circle. Surprisingly, perhaps, this Rome is not a fantastic vision crcated to pander to a taste for the exotic, but a world carefully constructed from ancient sources. In it we can discern the amusing and anecdotal historical world of Suetonius, the all-too-luxurious and corrupt society exposed in the moralistic writings of the elder Pliny and Seneca, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius, and the Rome of wine and roses as proclaimed by Catullus, Horace and the elegiac poets. The artist selects historical and literary texts and archaeological artefacts which seem calculated to draw our attention to the exciting, the corrupt and the risqut. And yet another surprise, perhaps Alma-Tadema never appeals directly to the senses in that we see few scenes of debauch or erotic nudity; instead it is the intellect which he seeks to provoke and to intrigue. To realise the ‘Bacchanalian phrenzy’ which so upset Ruskin,* we are directed to a cleverly coded imagery concealed within his canvases: inscriptions are obscured, statues cut off, and references made to half-remembered histories. On an initial reading many paintings appear little more than gorgeous depictions of marble, flowers and Mediterranean sunlight, until we decipher the imagery which invariably subverts apparent meaning. In Alma-Tadema’s quest for the underside of Roman life, roses have a special significance. Flowers appear in a large number of his paintings: women smell flowers in Confidences ( I 869: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), In the Peristylum ( 1 866: untraced) and In the Corner of my Studio ( 1 893: Private Collection), while flowers serve as colourful accessories in many other works. Roses, in particular, are presented as gifts between lovers in A Love Missile ( 1 878: untraced), Welcome Footsteps ( I 883: Private Collection) and A Silent Greeting (1 889: ’ An earlier version of this article was delivered as a paper to two different audiences at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and at King’s College London. My thanks in particular to several members of the Department of Classics at Kings for their helpful comments. * In his famous lecture, ‘Classic Schools of Painting: Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema’, delivered at Oxford in May 1883, Ruskin describes Alma-Tadema’s images of ancient life a. ‘the last corruption of this Roman state, and its Bacchanalian phrenzy’; The Art und the Pleasures of En~lund (London 1900) 86.

“When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland: A Review Essay

“WHEN TIME BEGAN TO RANT AND RAGE”: FIGURATIVE PAINTING FROM TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND: A REVIEW ESSAY ROBERT TRACY “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth -Century Ireland. Exhibit organized by the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum. Curated by James Christen Steward. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (October 1998 to January 1999); Berkeley Art Museum (February 1999 to May 1999); Grey Art Gallery, New York University (May 1999 to July 1999); University of Michigan Museum of Art (September 1999 to January 2000). “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth -Century Ireland. Exh. Cat. Ed. James Christen Steward. London: Merrell Holberton (in association with the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum), 1998. with seventy-five paintings, this is the largest exhibition of Irish art ever shown in Britain and the United States. James Steward makes no excessive claims about the artistic merit of his selections, though in fact many of them suggest that Irish artists can more than hold their own if art were judged competitively. Steward has given himself a different, indeed a double , mandate: to make us aware that Ireland has produced some impressive painters since 1900, and to suggest how Irish painting interacts with, indeed interdepends on, the political history of Ireland during the century we are about to leave. The exhibition is supplemented by a splendid catalogue, which provides a critical history of Irish painting in the twentieth century, and to some extent a political history of Ireland as well. James Steward has assembled an impressive band of scholars, and together they establish the FIGURATIVE PAINTING FROM TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND 288 theme of the exhibition, “the Irishness of Irish art.” In his own essay, Steward rightly argues that Irish art is intimately connected to Ireland’s political and social development. Few Irish writers or artists have enjoyed the American luxury of feeling free from history. Colm Toíbín, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, and Aidan Dunne emphasize the art-politics nexus in their searching essays; Bhreathnach-Lynch is particularly good on certain painters’ response to the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War. In “Irish Women Painters and the Introduction of Modernism” Marianne Hartigan rightly stresses the central role of Mainie Jellett, but also comments perceptively on a number of other women not represented in the exhibition. Paula Murphy explores, with wit and tact, the iconography of Ireland-as-woman-as-victim in “Madonna and Maiden, Mistress and Mother: Woman as Symbol of Ireland and Spirit of the Nation.” These essays set the paintings in their political context. The other critics generally confine themselves to aspects of Irish art history. Bruce Arnold, fresh from his monumental study of Jack B. Yeats, gives us an overview of that artist’s long career, analyzing Yeats’s “careful crafting of an Irish identity” and his self-engendered project, to “represent Irish people and the life of the nation.” Kenneth McConkey uses Sir William Orpen’s “Homage to Manet” (1909) to discuss Hugh Lane’s 1904 Impressionist show in Dublin and its part in liberating the Irish visual imagination to create its own “image community.” Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith focuses on two more recent exhibitions, one at Trinity College’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1990–1991, the other the Irish entries at the 1995 Venice Biennale, to comment on Irish painting since the end of the 1980s, shrewdly and generously appraising some of the younger painters. Peter Murray looks at the small group of artists who worked in the thirties and forties to develop a modern Irish school, at a time when many established Irish artists were hostile to “modern art,” and the Advisory Committee to the Municipal Gallery twice rejected a proffered gift, Roualt’s “Christ and the Soldiers”; ironically, the Catholic bishops of Ireland, Maynooth’s governing board, accepted it gladly. Long after the exhibition has ended, this catalogue and its essays will continue to be essential for anyone interested in Irish painting. “When Time Began to Rant and Rage” ironically takes its title from a poem in which Yeats declared himself no less an Irish poet than those who chose conspicuously “Irish” themes, specifically defending his interest...

Richard Laurence Millington Synge: 28 October 1914 - 18 August 1994.

There is no doubt that Dick Synge was a very exceptional person. According to his family, this first showed itself in the memory of an event, which occurred when he was only fifteen months old, when he was allowed to play with the gravel outside the church during the christening of his sister. The Synge family consisted of two branches, one of which, the Irish Synges, contained the famous playwright, J.M. Synge. They trace their ancestry back to a Thomas Millington also called Singe of Bridgenorth (born ca . 1500). The English Synges were also certainly present in Bridgenorth in the early 16th century. The Irish and the English Synges are known to have been in touch with one another in the 18th century. The English Synges remained as fairly prominent citizens of Bridgenorth until the late 19th century. Both branches of the family used the name Millington as a Christian name. For unknown reasons the spelling of his surname, Sing or Synge, varied. Family legend has it that the origin of the name Millington, which was used by both branches of the family as a Christian name, was that they had lived at Millington Hall in the parish of Rostherne (Cheshire). Because a member of the family sang so beautifully before King Henry VIII he was told to take the name of Singe. One of Dick Synge’s great uncles, born in 1863 and always known as ‘Uncle Millington’, became Warden of St Edwards School, Oxford. Among Synge’s recent ancestors was his grandmother who was a Thornely. All the Thornelys were mildly academic and quietly eccentric or unconventional in one way or another, so that Synge is thought to have inherited much from them, even including his height. Two generations further back was William Roscoe, M.R, who helped to abolish slavery and whose art collection still forms the nucleus of the Walker Art Gallery; he also founded the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Synge came from a distinguished family which included his grandfather, A.M. Sing, who was President of the Liverpool Athenaeum and a Governor of the Liverpool Collegiate School.

Turning the Other Cheek: Profile Direction in Self-Portraiture

The spatial organization of the forty-seven self-portraits in the exhibition “Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artists' Self-Portraiture” held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, was analyzed and compared with previously published studies, all of which have obtained their data predominantly from non-self-portraits. In the seventeenth century there was a significant asymmetry in self-portraits for both the direction of profile, with most paintings showing the right profile, and the direction of lighting, with most paintings showing the light coming from the left of the painting. Both these asymmetries declined over time and were not present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings. The lighting asymmetry and the temporal change confirmed findings with non-self-portraits, but the profile asymmetry was in the opposite direction probably because of the use of mirrors to generate the image being painted. Taken together, the findings support an explanation for asymmetries in portraits of all kinds in terms of the conventions of studio organization.

Poussin's "Infancy of Bacchus" Once Owned by Sir Joshua Reynolds: A New Addition to the Corpus of His Early Roman Pictures

In the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds by 1778, Poussin's The Infancy of Bacchus and its missing pendant were still in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century, when Jean Lemaire incorporated figural components from each into the foreground of his Youthful Romulus now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Not unlike the bacchanalian pictures Poussin would have painted for Cassiano dal Pozzo, The Infancy of Bacchus is perhaps stylistically closest to The Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), The Venus and Adonis, (sections in the Musee Fabre, Montpellier and private collection, New York) and The Nurture of Bacchus (National Gallery, London), all generally dated to 1625—1627. While bacchanalian motifs and handling of these pictures point to Venetian influence - a reason, perhaps, for their popularity - their subject matter stems from antique reliefs, passages in Philostratus's Imagines, or specific late-Renaissance texts. Some of his early Roman works may also reflect Poussin's desire to convey a mood of tenderness (tenerezza), a sentiment frequently encountered in the pastoral poetry of Giambattista Marino (1569—1625).

A Late Sixteenth-Century Garden: Fact or Fantasy. The Portrait of Sir George Delves in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

A Late Sixteenth-Century Garden: Fact or Fantasy. The Portrait of Sir George Delves in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Progress in Traffic Separation

Capitaine de Frégate Oudet's paper was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool on 20 May 1966, with the President in the Chair. The paper was, in the absence of its author, read by the Executive Secretary who also summarized for the meeting the report of the Working Group on Traffic Separation at Sea (see p. 411).In December 1962, at a meeting of this Institute, I gave an account of the work that had led to the adoption of one-way routes for the Dover Strait. I now have the honour of describing the balance of work effected since that time, or more exactly, since the Eastbourne conference where the decision was made to carry on the organization of converging areas.