Tuesday, 6 April 2010

Week 11: V&A/Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

I don’t know about you but I feel like killing myself this morning want to be back in bed hiding from the cruel cruel world. I hope you had a delightful Easter weekend, mine was very nice but don’t worry, I wont bore you with all the details. Due to the fabulously long weekend this weeks cultural exploration is slightly late and having occurred a full 4 days ago please forgive me for forgetting large chunks of the exhibition, probably for the best anyway. This weeks cultural activity took place last Friday, when the bank holiday seemed to stretch before us like a land of dreams – why can’t I be back there?? WHY?? Accompanied by the beauteous John and Diccon we strode out in the pouring rain to South Kensington and the Victoria and Albert museum for the exhibition Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill.

As usual I must confess to my supreme ignorance re Horace and his hill, he was very important/famous/arty/loaded I do know that. I had heard of him and everything and knew he has stuff to do with Gothicism but, embarrassingly, I thought he was early 19th century not mid 18th – oops!!! Basically I have only ever really been aware of him in relation to Victoriana-arama, which sadly is true of most of the pitiful jumble of knowledge accumulated in my tiny brain, so there. Anyway, to cut a long and frankly highly homosexual story short he was the very rich and no doubt highly eccentric son of Prime Minster Robert Walpole and spent what must have been a not inconsiderable fortune collecting and housing his ever expanding collection of Gothic and Renaissance art and artefacts.

Strawberry Hill was his country residence near Twickenham. I have to say if I had the means for a country seat I would have gone a little further afield than provincial old Twickenham. I suppose it can’t be too far away from London as you would want to be able to access it fairly easily and not put people off coming for weekend parties. Ahh, can you imagine being able to hold your own country house weekend parties, only ones NOT full of posh wankers!?! Would have hunting and fishing and shooting and cream teas on the lawn with croquet and me wearing a big hat and playing charades whilst pissed like in Northanger Abby or whichever one it is. Which one is it? Who knows.

Anyway, I digress massively. Strawberry Hill is currently undergoing restoration and will open to the public again in late September and, top tip here, if you to the exhib at the V&A which is £6 or free to students; at the back of the guide is a token for 2 for 1 entry to the house which is valid for a year once it opens. Not bad. This brings me nicely to what was my overriding experience of the exhibition: it’s basically a dirty great big advert for the grand re-opening of Strawberry Hill later this year. Now, it’s not that I mind this or anything, in fact I know it’ a good, nay great thing to publicise this great national treasure chest etc. But, in my heart of hearts I do object to it, yet know not quite why. I think, maybe, if the house was unrepaired or a thousand miles away or protected by a fire breathing dragon or something I would understand but it’s not, it’s in bloody Twickenham and if you just waited a few months then got off your fat arty arse you could go and see all the objects in situ, where they belong. Obviously some of the pieces are stand alone fabulous works of art or historical interest or whatever. Great. But some of it, some of it IN the exhibition, was stately home junk shop crap that no one really cares about unless it’s in situ. For example; some paintings AFTER Poussin, some paintings AFTER Holbein, some paintings once thought to be by someone mildly important and since proved not to be. Who the hell cares? This stuff would look great on the walls of a fabulous stately home designed around its collection, but here!! Frankly, and this is a personal opinion I know; I wouldn’t pay to go and see an exhibition of real bloody Poussins let alone some 300 year old rip offs who the hell cares about them?

The whole exhibition, to me, seemed to hinge around one thing: the viewers ability to successfully visualise the usual Strawberry Hill setting for the objects. The curators even included floor plans of the house in the exhibition guide. The first thing the viewer sees when walking in is a load of, quite pretty, sketches and paintings of the exterior of the house. Throughout the exhibition there are images of the interiors including architectural plans, satirical sketches and informal visions of the rooms. Great but again, what’s the point? Just go to the sodding house it’s NOT THAT FAR and NOT THAT LONG TO WAIT. I felt continually throughout the show that the viewing experience was somehow displaced and alien, post modern in a bad way. I don’t really need to see millions of, frankly quite amateur landscapes of some house. They would look lovely in the reception hall, or the downstairs loo, but aren’t worth anything to anyone hanging on the walls of the poky V&A exhibition space surely? I am positive I am very very wrong about this, but for me it is undeniably how it felt. It was a feeble reflection.

The exhibition was curated oddly around a sort of zigzagged corridor. Apart from fashion exhibitions I have never been to a well curated show at the V&A. Everything always looks shoddy and badly thought through, shoved into corners with absolutely no understanding of space or light. They also have a really bizarre fetish for shoddy, wobbly looking faded cardboard screens with some insipid and depressingly faded looking pattern on. I have never been to a non-fashion show there that didn’t give me the impression leaning against a wall would knock the entire exhibition down like dominoes and we would be left in a room that hadn’t been dusted for about 35 years. They love beige as well, why?

Disregarding all this for a moment the house does seem wonderful and I am very much looking forward to going at some point. Walpole acquired the lease in 1747 stating "I am going to build a little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill", and he asked his friends for objects and enlisted the help of his friends Richard Bentley, who was an artist and draughtsman and John Chute who was responsible for much of the main elevations of the house and the interiors. He spent the rest of his life filling it with various pricey objects, writing histories, criticism and founding a printing press there in 1757. His novel, "The Castle of Otranto", the first Gothic novel was inspired by the rooms there.

Seemingly every element of the interior and exterior are based on models from Gothic buildings both around the country and abroad. I greatly admire this – it reminds me of a documentary I saw a few years ago about Paul Daniels and Debbie McGees house which is new but built out of elements of old buildings to create a totally random jumble of architectural styles and influences. You can’t help feeling it all smells very much of new money, even if it doesn’t. It does look beautiful indeed and I like the fact that it was a hub of artistic and intellectual society. Towards the end of the exhibition there is a small section on female artist who Walpole somewhat patronised there.

Each room was ‘themes’ – a bit like a 13 year old girl crossed with Vegas. There is a Holbein room and a specially designed circular or octagonal or something room for the display of his most important treasures, which he housed in a really odd cabinet also displayed in the exhibition.



















A few things that stood out for me where:


The wooden cravat c. 1690 Walpole wore to greet his guests one weekend; he must have been some CrAzY dude:


















I was also fascinated by the toothpick case c. 1780 given to him by a friend as a gift. Who gives friends toothpick holders? What was said ‘friend’ attempting to tell him???:


Anyway, an altogether odd exhibition I felt but non-the-less worth a visit.