THEY used to be called the English galleries. Now, after a closure of four years and a $22 million refit, they have been reimagined as the British galleries. This is not the only shift in the display and interpretation of the Metropolitan Museum’s splendid collection of decorative art from this country (largely, it has to be said, English ). The principle remains the same, however: a narrative walk-through, celebrating the quiddity of British furniture, ceramics, glass, silver, textiles and objets d’art, from 1600 to 1900. This is serious stuff, object-focused and without a hint of dumbing down. We should be flattered by the undertaking. France is the only other foreign country whose decorative arts are so honoured; there are no Spanish galleries, for example. When one hears that a reason for the redisplay of the British collection is that the previous presentation, dating only from 1995 (COUNTRY LIFE, August 17, 1995), was not well visited, one is doubly grateful for the Met’s courage in doing it. Brown furniture is out of fashion. Time to realise not all Georgian furniture was brown.
Indeed, despite the gloom in which fugitive textiles must be displayed, one of the first things to leap out of the show is its colour. The tapestry Don Quixote Tilting at Windmills, from a series that shows Quixote’s adventures in grotesque, is in a remarkable state of preservation; made in 1674, under the direction of Charles II’s arras-maker Francis Poyntz, it is a lively and humorous composition of reds, blues and greens. This is one of several new acquisitions on display.
This is a journey through British taste, all the richer for being undertaken abroad
Esta historia es de la edición August 12, 2020 de Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
