Preliminary snack in the members' lounge upstairs good, if rather dear. And rather too much sugary goo on an otherwise excellent carrot cake. I suppose that, inter alia, the goo helps the uncut cake to keep damp and fresh tasting.
Rather a lot of stuff to take in at one pass, but I was intrigued by the interactions between painters with paint and painters with cameras. So you had pictures taken out doors used as aide-mémoires back at the studio, photographs taking the place of sketches. Sometimes the photographs were touched up in colour. Sometimes they were used as a tracing and an entire watercolour was painted on top. Back in the studio, some enterprising chaps faked up popular paintings with props from the local junk shop and passed off the resulting photographs as photographs of the original painting, much to the annoyance of the owner of that original. Others created elaborate tableaux with models (both clothed and unclothed) and props and sold the resulting photographs as art. All of this taking place in the second half of the nineteenth century and resulting in the death of pictorial art as it had been known in the west for five hundred years. Leaving us with the tripe we mostly get now.
I was pleased to be reminded that Ruskin, while no doubt rather an odd chap, was also a very good draughtsman. Perhaps I will now turn up my reproduction of his once well-known book on the subject.
I also puzzled over some wood engravings which looked very much like sketches done with pen and ink, puzzled because I had thought that the blocks from wood cuts and wood engravings all printed from the uncut surface of the block, letterpress might be the printers' term, unlike steel engravings which printed from the cuts, as it were. Wikipedia explains that during the nineteenth century hey-day of mass producing illustrations using wood engravings, the idea was to produce something that looked like a drawing, reproducing the effect of the pencil line by cutting the wood away from around the line to be printed, a rather tedious process which was claimed to be an abuse of medium by the time we got to the first half of the twentieth century when wood cut was reborn as an art form (rather than a craft) and much more use was made of blocks of black and of white lines on black, rather than the black lines on white of the preceding century. There was, of course, plenty of overlap, but there was a change of emphasis.
Out to lunch at the 'Constitution' of Churton Street, a pub once run by a former manager of TB. Lunch taking the form of macaroni cheese, nicely presented if a bit wet inside, and white wine, surrounded by lots of what used to be called working men, that is to say people who did not work in offices. They were mostly there for the football, but I was pleased that there were still proper pubs in the otherwise thoroughly gentrified Pimlico, an area which was very shabby and run down in my student days. Lots of flop houses, aka cheap hotels and rooming houses used by all kinds of shabby people of both sexes. Intrigued to learn afterwards that England, despite being thirty times the size by population, could only beat Wales by two goals to one. One would have thought that numbers ought to make more difference than that - but then I don't do football.
Out to inspect the books in the nearby Oxfam shop, exiting with three finds. One of which was a memorial picture book published by the American Jewish Committee, a book in which I have yet to find any mention of the original inhabitants of what is now Israel, never mind any concern for their health and well being. Although plenty about the disgraceful treatment and worse of Jews in much of Europe - until depressingly recently. And another of which was a 1961 copy of Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', complete with battered dust cover. I already had a copy, perhaps from the same printing although without dust cover, but it did not seem very respectful to leave it sculling around in the basement of a charity shop for £1.99.
Last stop Rippon Cheese, where they managed an adequate Emmental, from a shrink wrapped brick of the stuff. Maybe a visit to Borough Market is indicated, a place where I think there are still cheese mongers who can cut the stuff from the wheel for you.
To Vauxhall by No.36 bus.
PS: slightly put out that google, when asked for wood cuts and wood engravings generally, while producing plenty of stuff from the twentieth century, could only only manage one work of Monica Poole and none of George Mackley, although he turns up lots when asked for either by name. In all this, I was reminded how badly their wood cuts reproduce on the computer screen. They don't seem to like reduction to pixels at all, with the result being a very pale imitation of the printed version. But, contrariwise, I was very impressed how quickly one could scan the pages of stuff produced by google, at a rate of dozens to the screen, for the work of a particular artist. Brain seems to be very good at that sort of thing. I wonder whether anyone has tried to train DeepMind to pick out pictures in this particular way?
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_engraving.
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