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Last April I had a lovely day visiting Kew Gardens, taking in a Matt Colllishaw exhibition, and enjoying a pizza and a Fanta. Yesterday was a very similar today except it was Walpole Park (in Ealing) I visited, Alison Watt's art I looked at, and there was no pizza. Although there was a Fanta.
Hircus (2024)
Walpole Park is lovely (though almost everything looked lovely yesterday in the gorgeous June sunshine) and I will endeavour to include it in a future London by Foot walk because it's too delightful a spot to keep for myself. But I'll write more about that in a bit. The reason I was there was, ostensibly, to see Alison Watt's small, but impressive, exhibition From Light.
The Scottish artist, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art and as far back as 1987 won the John Player, now BP, Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, served as Associate Artist for London's National Gallery between 2006 and 2008 and has even shown at Florence's Uffizi. Alongside the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Durer.
That's a pretty big deal and though Watt's art can't seriously be compared to any of those artists she can certainly draw and paint. Inspired by Pitzhanger Manor in Walpole Park (where the exhibition actually is), Watt looked to create a dialogue between her practice and the former home of the celebrated architect John Soane (1753-1837, noted works:- Dulwich Picture Gallery, the now Sir John Soane Museum, the Bank of England (though not much of his work is left there), and Pitzhanger itself).
The title of the exhibition, From Light, gives you a pretty big clue as to what to expect. Though Watt paints flowers, death masks, tea cups, tablecloths, and paper it is the light, and the shadows caused by the light, that are the essence of her painting. There seems to be me to be a clear influence of the French master of still life painting Jean Simeon Chardin and the fact that Watt has named one of her works Chardin only serves to underline this.
But I was also reminded of the work of Avigdor Arikha and even Wilhelm Hammershoi. It's the quietude, the sense of stillness, that you can find in Watt's work. A portrayal of quotidian items that somehow manages to convey a sense of eternity. There is, in her work, a feeling of absence, of something left behind. Most obviously with the death masks but even with something as a simple as a folded napkin.
The death masks marked not only the end of life but the end of the exhibition so with the sun still shining brightly in the sky it was time to explore Pitzhanger Manor itself and, more importantly, the surrounding Walpole Park. Once John Soane's garden. He must have had some money. I guess building the Bank of England would do that for you.
I couldn't explore the entire manor though, I'd received prior warning via e-mail, because Naomi and Michael were getting married there and using some of the rooms as well as, of course, the garden. What a beautiful place to get married and what a beautiful day to get married. I was tempted to gatecrash the wedding but decided better of it.
Instead, I took a look at the few rooms that were open. An ornate bed, some other furniture, and a painting that was supposed to be an imitation of a Turner (one of Soane's friends) but didn't look much like a Turner to me.
In one of the rooms I got chatting to a volunteer. A friendly, local, and knowledgeable retired lady who told me a little about Soane, about the manor, and about the chinoiserie wallpaper hanging that I had mistakenly attributed to William Morris. We talked more and she told me that, with other retired friends, she was in the process of walking the Thames Path. As me and my friends are too.
We compared routes, talked about other walks, discussed our culinary preferences for walks (she likes to stop for a banana, we stop at a pub and usually go for a curry), she told me about other recent Pitzhanger exhibitions I'd been unaware of and therefore missed (Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry - both artists I like), and we chatted for a good fifteen minutes or so. I should have taken her name so I could credit her here. It was lovely to stop and chat but I'd taken enough of her time and the beautiful park was winking at me.
Before I left the manor itself though, I chanced upon a curious couple of rooms given over to victims of injustice. People who have served sentences, or even been executed, for crimes they did not commit. Many of them I had never heard of but some were familiar. This, it turned out, was a sculpture collection named J'Accuse put together by the French sculptor Nicole Farhi and "created in anger to help us remember".
Among them you could find models of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (wrongfully accused by the French of being a German spy, primarily a case of antisemitism and one which inspired Emile Zola to write J'Accuse, the name taken for this small exhibition), Timothy Evans (a Welsh lorry driver wrongfully accused of, and executed for, murdering his wife in HMP Pentonville in 1950 - the real murderer was John Christie), and, much more recently, Andrew Malkinson who served seventeen years in prison for a rape he was completely innocent of.
It's not just within the manor itself that justice is celebrated. In Walpole Park (named for the historian and civil servant Sir Spencer Walpole and not the Whig and builder of Strawberry Hill gothic mansion Horace Walpole) there'a small garden that commemorates the 1807 Act of Parliament that ended Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Complete with a Black History Month plaque.
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