Tuesday 26 April 2016

Hillsborough Verdicts-Liverpool Fans Vindicated.....After 27 Years.


With the verdicts of Unlawful Killing delivered today in Warrington at The Hillsborough Enquiry, this is the beginning, of a full vindication for the people of Liverpool. 
Jury finds that Liverpool fans behaviour did not contribute to disaster.

David Duckenfield is, a walking conscience, that has caused misery to so many people. 
Should he go to jail for what his lies?
The way that the good name of the people of  Liverpool has been sullied is starting to become fully understood and will now become common currency. 

And with the verdict, some of those old stereotypes will be lost. 
The reasons for anger and despair from those tough working class masses with relatives at Hillsborough that fateful day, that just wanted to show their pride for their city by supporting their team will now become self evident, that they were not to blame. 
The anger that came about and was shown against the establishment will now be understood and it has now been proved that the tarnished brush with which this sad affair was painted came from the very top, in cover up, after despicable cover up.
And those, some who have been campaigning and fighting for half of their lives will be applauded for never giving up, to clear the name of the 96 and the bad name of my city.
There will be those who will never understand the anticipation of a game, that they had looked forward to all week.
How someone could need to beg steal or borrow to get to the match. It was their lives.
Some had a reason to live, some to escape the daily rigours, just for a couple of hours. 
A couple of hours of watching the team play the beautiful game, the game of football, that game from childhood dreams, and comic book strips of Roy of the Rovers, of  Hero's who would save the day. 
Save the pride.
 The pride they took away from us on that fateful day for their team. 
We all knew someone who was there, might have been there or should have been. 
I haven't cried so much over anything every anniversary was the same. 
Tears. 
 And they sullied our name of our dead and they called us animals by default, and they trod our name into the ground and they insulted the dead. 
And the dead rose through the spirits of the living. 
Those who loved them would never let their names die in vain and they have kept on fighting, when there was no money, no hope, no chance. 
And to the top rose new hero's and heroines who would not give in. 
By stealth and cunning and regret they kept on going for the names of their loved ones and the name of our town.
 And the town knew that, and they give them support and the ranks grew and in dignity they got their day in court for a form of apology from the lying establishment. 
And what of David Duckensfield the one who we should have been able to trust....the police.


Its only a game. 
No its more serious that that Bill Shankly once said. 
Its life and death. This was that.
 And in death they gave us life to take on the establishment of dodgy bent coppers and political cover ups at the highest level. 
There is a good reason why some people hated Margaret Thatcher and its Tory cling on's like the misguided Boris Johnson with his past disparaging remarks. 

They conspired against us and they could never understand that we could not let that happen. 
The bereaved relatives fought for all of us.
                                               So we supported them.

         We should now find that the cover up went right up the ladder.

      Today is a good day for Justice and those who died will be vindicated.
                                   YOU WILL NEVER WALK ALONE.

Friday 8 April 2016

Archibald Knox-And The Liberty Style.

Archibald Knox has for some time been recognised as one of the countries most influential designers who worked predominantly for the company Liberty & Co.
The famous shop in Regent Street would become an international focus of art, design, and good taste. Its founder would shape art history through the wares that he sold.
Knox helped to create the Celtic revival.
In Italy Style Liberty is the term generally used to describe Art Nouveau, such was its reputation.
Though England would help shape the worlds art through the thought process best exemplified by John Ruskin and William Morris on the continent the inspirational work of Viollet-le-Duc would also help give birth to a movement that had more freedom.
The restraint that developed in Britain steered the public away from the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose Glasgow School of Art was sneered at as out of date when completed. On the continent he helped inspire a generation of artists and designers such as Joseph Hoffman as head of The Wiemer Werkstatte.
In Europe the freedom to express forged a more liberated version of art Nouveau.
The term Art Nouveau, French for new art was the name of the shop opened by Samuel Bing that was a direct influence from the Liberty & Co store.
The Celtic style would remain popular for a generation and the man who was to do more to drive it forward would be Archibald Knox.
Knox was born 1864 Cronkbourne (Tromode) Isle of Man. His father was an engineer and he was expected to follow the family tradition. He felt isolated amidst the pressure to, like his brothers join the family firm. Robert Knox was concerned about his sons use of the pencil complaining “Why he doesn't even know how to hold a hammer”.
At an early age he lost the top of his index finger and was happy to sketch and draw.
He was surrounded with Ornament of a Celtic nature, he would be sure to be influenced by this.
Owen Jones Grammar of Ornament would be published in 1856 and would hold a section on Celtic ornament.
Principles of Ornament would be outlined by Christopher Dresser in 1876 in his volume Studies in Design.
He attended St Barnabas Elementary School and then Douglas Grammar School both in Douglas becoming a pupil teacher 1878-1883.
In 1887 he passed the examination in 'Design' with a first class result in 'Principles of Ornament and went on to achieve a Art Masters Certificate in 1889
In 1893 he published an article in 'The Builder' entitled 'Ancient Crosses in The Isle Of Man'. He was possibly working in the offices of the architect and designer M.H. Baillie Scott until 1896.
He left Isle of Man in 1897 to take up a teaching post at Redhill Surrey.
Knox contacted the firm of Liberty possibly through his association with Baillie Scott who had been designing fabrics for the company from as early as 1893.
He became design master at the art School Kingston-upon-Thames in 1899 the same year as the first Cymric patterns became available in the Liberty store.
In 1900 the same year as he purchased a cottage at Sulby on the Isle of Man the cheaper Tudric range was introduced in direct competition to the continental manufacturers. Knox submitted several of piece meal designs.
He would live close to Christopher Dresser who designed, indirectly for Liberty.
1903 sees Liberty taking part in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition with four items by Knox.
By 1904 he was submitting huge amounts of designs for Silver, Pewter, carpets, pottery, jewellery, textiles and possibly furniture to Liberty's. While still teaching at Kingston-upon-Thames. In 1904 he was appointed principle at Wimbledon.
In 1909 Liberty & Co sold several designs to their competitors James Connell.
South Kensington Examiners complain about Knox's style of teaching which he rejects and resigns.
One of the pupils pull out a bunch of designs in a waste-paper basket in Kingston Art School and save them. These are now in the V&A.
Denise and Winifred Tuckfield along with six other students leave in disgust at the acceptance of Knox resignation.
He returned to The Isle of Man in 1912 but on the 21st august that year left for Philadelphia from Liverpool on a schooner named Dominion. He failed to find suitable employment though he taught for a while in Pennsylvania School of Industrial arts. In a letter to Denise Tuckfield he states misgivings about the Renaissance architecture that made up the city. A style of architecture he did not like. 'Renaissance architecture is a scholars work-Gothic is work done by a man of sentiment and feeling'. He would say.
He had carried a letter of introduction from Arthur Lazenby Liberty which no doubt helped him secure work with Bromley and Co designing carpets.
He also carried with him Liberty catalogues and his work was recognised. Though in the letter to Ms Tuckfield he states that one firm called it the art of the drug store.
He moved to New York. In 1913 he returned to Isle of Man.
He taught at the Aliens Detention camp there and served as a censor during the war.
In 1917 Arthur Lazenby Liberty died. Knox designed his memorial stone at The Lee Church in Buckinghamshire.
1920 sees him teaching art at Douglas High school and he also travels to Italy to study frescoes.
He held a one man exhibition in Ottawa Canada of his paintings.
In 1933 he died suddenly and was buried at the age of 69 in Braddon Cemetery Isle of Man.

The Knox designs held in the V&A have long thought to be the rejected designs.
Knox designs have long held an attribution based on elements of design known to be by Knox's own hand.
There is a formula to the work of Knox he would take a rough sketch and rework it over and over again and eventually the Celtic interlacing would appear as if through a fog of smudges and marks. This a very interesting way to work it almost feels mystical. When the work was coming to life with smudges and all and parts of the paper rubbed out with grey lines all over the paper, a transfer was taken by tracing the design using a sharpened lead pencil.
Where semi precious stones were to be placed would often be highlighted with watercolour.
The designs would be annotated with shape size and details such as stones and enamels.
Numbers that were intended to relate to the grouping of several pieces in sequence maybe to be used as a unit such as a tray to be combined with a tea service.
Knox kept a stock book detailing which designs Liberty & Co actually purchased.
The majority of the designs held in the V&A collection were intended for the Cymric range of metalwork.
By 1900 the output was catching up with design and what had been happening on the continent with pewter was put into practice.
Lazenby Liberty had acquired the designs for several competition winners held by The Studio magazine. There was a rule that the purchase of the design could not be purchased for more than the prize money won.
At this stage the numbers are not up to 50 and the Tea Caddy design from the Studio by Tramp (David Veazey). The design for a tankard by ' Parnassus' Charlotte E. Elliot, 111 Chatham Street Liverpool has the number 049.

Rivet as much as you can;
Don't countersink the rivets;
Give them a firm head so they may have a firm grip;
complete them that they cannot hold dirt;
Give them desired form; they are sin clipped:
Flattened too obviously.
He would proclaim to his pupils.
With the pewter range there was no need for riveting in the moulded production and it seems that this is intended for silver work.
The discarded drawings were from 1911-12 when they were binned when he stormed out of his position at Kingston.
So it is by attribution that we put many designs as the work of Knox and Liberty was adamant that the name Liberty & Co would be the only attribution that would appear on the work.
Though the Cymric and Tudric pewter wares are widely known to be by Knox.
Most of the Liberty & Co archives were destroyed by enemy bombing during the war.
That said the Celtic revival that Archibald Knox helped to bring to the masses leaves him placed as one of the most influential designers of the Arts and Crafts period.

The students who walked out from Kingston now formed the 'Knox Guild of Craft and Design' and set up premises at 24 Market St Kingston. He supervised and attended several exhibitions and showed his rarely viewed watercolours.
They exhibited at the 1924 exhibition hall not only work but set up looms and other equipment.
Denise Wren (nee Tuckfield) continued with designs at Oxshott Pottery which is still run today by her daughter Rosemary. Her designs of 1913 show direct reference to the principles of design laid down by her mentor and do look familiar in style. She also designed alphabet that look as if it could have been made at the hand of Archibald Knox.
Liberty sold designs attributed to Knox that were manufactured at the Watts Pottery, Compton.
Most of his work was attributed to Liberty under the usual format.
He seems to have been an unassuming character who would not have minded preferring to be part of something much bigger.

He leaves us a legacy that helped to form the Celtic spirit and the history of its artistic presence in these isles that now too becomes a part of its recent history to inspire further generations in the not too distant future.

Thursday 24 March 2016

Christopher 'Kit' Wood-A Life Wasted? Or An Inspiration To Others?

Christopher “Kit” Wood. Left Liverpool at the age of 19 and proclaimed that he would become the greatest painter the world had ever seen. He had £14 in his pocket.
He was born in Huyton, then in the countryside near Liverpool.
He was sent to boarding school in Malvern at an early age.
He had been interested in medicine and architecture at Liverpool University where he met the painter Augustus John who was then teaching there.
He arrived in Paris in March 1921 at the invitation of the collector Alphonse Kahn.
There he studied at the Academie Julian where he met many of the worlds soon to be famous painters.
He was bisexual.
Paris was the modern city and the capital of art.
Rules had been broken and the intellectual way of painting had arrived decades earlier. 
'Kit' got some bad habits, such as Opium which may have been introduced to him by his rich Playboy lover, Antonio de Gandarillas
His addiction would greatly hinder him.
“My brain is working too hard, he said, and I don't know where the end will come, I work so hard and produce nothing whatsoever to satisfy me”
In Feb 1927 none other than Picasso recommended that Kit design the set for Serg Dagliev's Romeo and Juliet at Theatre Du Chatelet.
It was a disaster. As Dagliev had a blazing row with him and he was sacked.
In 1927 his plans to elope and marry heiress Meraud Guinness were frustrated by her parents whereupon he required emotional support from Winifred Nicholson.

Despondent but with fresh ideas swimming around in his head he headed for Cornwall. His mother was Cornish.
 In the summer of 1928 Kit joined Ben Nicholson on Sunday 26th August for a sketching trip to St Ives.
 He had high hopes on the English Riviera. 
They headed for Porthmeor beach and painted.
After a successful day spent painting they packed up and set for home


Then something happened that would change both their lives 
There in a small cottage with an open door they both peered in and in a room full of paintings.

 They had discovered the work of Alfred Wallis. 

The naivety was an inspiration and Kit stayed on for the autumn, renting a place closed to Wallis.

Nicholson went back to London to spread the word of the encounter as if the Messiah had arrived. 
“If I am here long enough, he said I am going to paint good things”. Kit said.

He began to paint scenes inspired by the Cornish Coast with its fresh light.
Had he finally found the inspiration he desired. Cocteau who said he was an exceptional painter, now meant nothing to him.
He started painting inspired by Wallis who he visited every day, but the hallucinogenic addiction that he had to Opium was preying on him.
He became paranoid and began to lose his mind painting some sinister scenes in what would be some of his last works.
Wallis opened up a spirit in him and his work was beginning to bear fruit. 
He felt as if he belonged to the light of the coast of St Ives.

Wallis became a cult recording the decline of the fishing industry in his own silly way that seems to have conjured up dreamlike sequences for aspiring artists who now flocked there. Wallis painted on anything he could find and he was free not having had any training. 
He was poor and in 1890 after chasing shoals of fish out in the deep sea. He painted from memory and his perspective is very strange indeed, but it was this charming naivety that the new modern artists adored.
Kits work then took on a paranoid sense of his own gloom laden opium twisted senses.
In 1929 he held a solo exhibition at Tooths Gallery in Bond Street.
 He met Lucy Wertheim there, she would become a supporter of his.
"I know that my future as a painter from now on will be bound up with your own, and I shall become great through you!" He would say to her.
In May 1930 he had a largely unsuccessful exhibition with Nicholson in Paris. In June and July he made a second trip to Brittany to create new work.
 Later in July Lucy travelled to meet Kit in Paris, to choose the paintings for a one-man show that would be the opening exhibition at her new Wertheim Gallery in October.
While discussing the exhibition over lunch the day after her arrival, Wood issued her with an ultimatum: "'I want you to promise to guarantee me twelve hundred pounds a year from the time of my exhibition, one hundred pounds a month being the least I can live on. If I can't have this sum I've made up my mind to shoot myself'".
 When she complained, he begged her forgiveness, and they went to review the paintings again.

On 21st august 1930 Kit met his mother for Lunch in Salisbury and then through himself under a train. He was 29.
This was reported as an accident.
Following his death the show was cancelled; it was eventually staged as a memorial show at a different gallery in 1931.
He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Broad Chalke.
 His gravestone was carved by the sculptor Eric Gill.




CODA
Alfred Wallis.
An ex fisherman he retired from the sea in 1890 and opened a marine supply store.
When his wife died in the 1920's he began to paint.
 Little did he know that his melancholy would inspire a generation.
He was naïve alright and poor he painted on anything he could get his hands on.
He had no idea about perspective and his subliminal thoughts began to show through and inspire others. He would say that he painted out of his mind as it was.
Wallis was sent to a madhouse as he was chased by ghosts. He died a celebrity amongst the artists and he was entombed by Bernard Leach who erected his epitaph.
The art community came to pay its respects.






Friday 26 February 2016

Henry Tonks-The Real War Artist.

Henry Tonks was a war artist of the highest degree. He did not do landscapes.
He was a Professor. Maybe a little old fashioned.
Henry Tonks said when he taught art at the Slade “I will resign if this talk of cubism continues”

He had taught many artists such as Paul Nash at the Slade School of Art but he did not teach him enough. Paul Nash's paintings have become an important visual reference for us when thinking about the conflict, including this powerful, apocalyptic vision of nature violated by war. Nash was commissioned by a government scheme, in 1916, which initially aimed to illustrate publications with drawings to supplement the limited photographs available. Nash had served briefly in the Ypres Salient in 1917 before being invalided out. When he returned to Belgium as an artist, he was shocked by the devastation wrought by the battle of Passchendaele. All of the commissioned artists’ work had to be passed by the official censor. While depictions of dead British soldiers were unacceptable, this devastated landscape managed to pass unchallenged due to its symbolic, rather than literal, content. Nash’s startling, new, modernist vision would bring him huge acclaim in the art world.
However, Colonel A N Lee, the censor, could not foresee this. He wrote: “I cannot help thinking that Nash is having a huge joke with the British public, and lovers of ‘art’ in particular. Is he?”

While Paul Nash was basking in glory, stylising suffering as official war artist, Henry Tonks was recording the reality of war on a very intimate scale.
Tonks too old for front line action volunteered as an orderly.
Dr Harold Gilles had helped set up a pioneering new hospital specialising in facial surgery. 
When Gilles, who was the head surgeon realised that Tonks was working there his instincts to record the remodelling or rebuilding of a face were assisted when he asked Tonks to help him.
 He needed colour and Tonks with his background as a surgeon and then as a demonstrator of anatomy understood what Gilles needed.
He was in the right place at the right time to do his bit for the war.
Reconstructive surgery at that time was largely at its infancy and mostly made up of just clinching flesh, and pulling it over to close up a wound and stitching it into a part of the face that would help it to resemble what was there before.
Tonks sat with forlorn soldiers who had given up hope, whose lives were dead inside.
Some would never recover from the wounds they had endured. 
When we say the scars of war, he recorded them in all their disfigured glory. 
They were humans who had given themselves in the cause of freedom.
With dignity Tonks made a portrait in soft pastel of Walter Ashworth of the Bradford Pals who injured on the first day of the first world war.
In the first few minutes the Pals were cut to ribbons.
He also made a diagram of where to stitch and then he painted him again after the reconstruction that gave him what was described as 'a pleasant smile'.
Art as modernism in a modern age. He had to use the skills of Leonardo Da Vinci for a new age, after all he was qualified.
He said about his portraits “These are the only works of which I am not ashamed.”
He would help in rescuing these wretched creatures lives, of abandoned luck and malicious evil.
Artistic compassion was required.
Imagine the sitter seeing his image and knowing how he looked.
 The sharing of this ordeal will have been hard.
It is so difficult today to look at these images, even in reproduction through the internet or on TV.
But look you must, because in these images we see why war is wrong and those heroic stories of heroism in the face of fire fall heavy down to earth when you witness what Henry saw. 
Fire in the face.
No matter how hard I look I turn away from the reality. I try again and still my mind wont let me focus, it is too real, I turn away again and again I try to look.
It seems as if you don't want to, so as not to defy a lifetime of watching war films made, rightly to testify to those brave sods who went over the top. But this is reality.
But, we the world turned its back on the truth and it is only now a hundred years later that we can palate the truth of Henry Tonks images of soldiers brave, those without palates, for a lot of them had been blown to smithereens.
 Those poor people who would not only be reminded, after the war, of that indiscriminate trajectory missile that scarred them.
These faces would remind every one else of the horrors of war and so they would be saddled with carrying the guilt of others lives cut short.
They say when you are staring into the abyss you find yourself, but these poor people look like lost souls, like ghostly images from the deep. I have spared the reader the full horror.
Or are they just the depths of our of our own spirit?
They make you realise that those who were lucky, were sometimes dead. They did not have to live the horrors for the rest of their life. They were free of the stigma of half a decade of mass murder on an industrial scale in those Flanders Fields.

You don't see this sort of stuff in films such as Where Eagles Dare or Force 10 from Navaronne.
We do not see the blood of war like the trench reality would have been.
You cant smell the stench of rotting flesh.
Even though we know Spielberg can do such a brilliant job of convincing us, of showing bullets flying through the air and hollowing the sounds war makes, he would never dare show this. The censors would not let him. But look we must.
When the Americans chased Saddam Hussains Iraqi army out of Kuwait and bombed the hell out of them on the road back to Basra they left many of them as charred skeletons torn of flesh. The images captured by brave war correspondents, of this stench of death, were banned from being shown to the American public.
They might ruin the breakfasts of a nation and spoil their day.
There is no redemption for the victors of war, for they write history. And as with the Vietnamese murder zone a picture can tell a story.
PR can save a President who should be shot or be on trial for war crimes.
For these works by Henry Tonks show the side of war that I want to forget, but I must look at.
I must learn to stare and so I should challenge Presidents and Prime Ministers and Saudi Princes in pure white stainless linen with blood on their hands.
Tony Blair should be made to look at these pictures of the aftermath of war.
Those who survive who will be forever locked into a dream like sequence of recurring nightmare night after night, cast into perpetual recollection for perpetuity, waking up every night screaming need compassion.

So not only is the suffering of war written on the faces of those Tonks Tommy soldier boys they were branded with them for life, or what was left of that life.

How could these boys be taken and destroyed in the flowering of their youth.

And while I am writing this article I see an image by Francis Bacon.
It looks like one of Tonks Tommies with a twisted face, yet this is of his lover.
It seems that he is copying Henry Tonks style?.......but as a way to make himself look clever, to show his prowess as a painter. He has captured Tonks images.
It may be that he has just stumbled across a style.
Bacon grew up during the blitz it is well recorded. He saw bad times.
But did Bacon ever see these images of real despair by Henry Tonks?

Bacon was brave enough to use the twisted and tortured souls of his portraiture and turn it into modernism.
Why can we look at Bacon's work with ease?

No matter how we tell ourselves its haunting we flinch to turn away from images of poor Tommy boys crying inside, bleeding from within.
Is this because Bacon was capturing emotion and not recording the tragedy of grief?
Who could except the compassionate respectful and watchful eye of Henry Tonks?
Who was the better artist?
For to Tonks I tip my hat, to a man who cared, not for himself, because the pastels and watercolours he did was not gallery work, that would hang for all to see on pristine white walls. But show us our guilt of futile pride and slaughter.
  Tonks work has been hidden from public view for almost a hundred years. From a public who would be upset, who would not turn up if they were displayed in a gallery. Maybe they should not be displayed on public view.

They were much more important than that.  

Friday 5 February 2016

Daum Vase-Piece of the Week

DAUM.
Founded by The Brothers Auguste and Antonin in the town of Nancy in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine.
They would create glassware of exceptional quality with varying techniques of finest workmanship that would, at times, rival the work of Galle.
The first Department of Art was created within the small family glassworks which would interpret the spirit of Art Nouveau.
They moved with the times through the Twenties and Thirties an evolution into a Art Deco style.


They would welcome in a new era in the 1950's and still make glasswares today.
100 years ago it was not just the case of expressing a new artform but aquiring the techniques to express it in glass. To imbue a feeling or a sincerity, the Daum Brothers wanted to make work that would outshine its rivals.
Works that would create an arousal, not only in the style but an understanding of the complexity of the piece, heightening the sense of achievement of the craftsman and designers collaboration.
Shape, Decoration, Colour and Material would be the four elements that would contribute to the organic processs that would be the hallmark of Art Nouveau.


Spirits of Autumn Summer and Winter would all be brought into play with hues and glows that conjure up a feeling inside each work of art.
It is as if they have been found on the floor of the forest rather than in a glasswork factory.

Its not as if you can go and get a recipe book. The artistic glassmaker would have to carry out his own experiments and write down the formula.
Lets as example think how would you obtain the exact colour, in glass for, lets say and Orchid or a Thistle head of a Cow Parsley.
 Or crisping leaves in autumnal differing grades of decay, of red and gold.
A few companies such as Appert of St Denis would supply Antonin Daum with some of his early supplies.
Often glassworkers would move companies or transfer to a different area and it was important to train the skilled workers of the future.

In 1925 Paul Daum refined and transformed the pallete.
Michel Daum would start working in lead crystal. After the Second World War the company would largely abandon glass in favour of lead crystal.
Between 1891 and 1914 3,000 different models appeared.
1920 to 1939 saw 2,000.
They won medals and honours, first prizes galore taking the official exhibitions extremely seriously in helping stimulate revenue through sales. Chicago 1893. Nancy and Lyon 1894. Brussels 1895 and 1897. There was a Legion of Honour for Auguste. In 1900 at the World Fair, like Galle, Daum were awarded a First Prize and Antonin a Legion D'Hounour.
Exhibitions at Ecole de Nancy the Pavillion de Marsan 1903 and Nancy itself in 1905 and 1908. Strasboug 1908 Paris and Brussels 1910. Then Gand 1913 and Lyon 1914. It just went on, and on. After the Great War they would show their style at the Paris Expostion des Art Decorative Et Industrial Moderne in 1925 moving into a more geometric and angular vision that would lend itseld to acid etching pattern.
This petite slimly bulbous vase is only 20cm high and is a yellowish base or pallette where the green hues of leaves blowing in the wind have been overlaid and carved back by wheel cutting. Several different colours of glass tinted by oxides can be seen to be applied to make up the overall effect. It is a painting in molton glass.
The base clearly displays the Daum Nancy mark and proudly proclaims the Cross of Lorraine as a symbol of defiance.
Alsace Lorraaine was lost to the Germans in 1870.during The Franco Prussian War.
Napoleon III had won Nice and Savoy in 1861 from Turin. It had been Italian.
Famous for Quiche Lorrane Alsation dogs, it was named Elsass Lothringen by the Germans. Many Road names are today still in German. There is a marker or two to the Magino line.
Bismark took it in 1871 This was one of the underlying causes of the First World War.

The first world war one charge was an attempt to take it back which they didn’t do till 1918.Germany took it again in 1940 The Germans re-uniting with the motherland of the German Reich. The French re occupation happened in 1944.

Thursday 7 January 2016

Antiques Roadshow 2016 Valuation Location Dates

There are some great venues for 2016 from a Scottish World Heritage Site to a Cornish Garden.

 2015 was a very good year with an average of six million people watching the show.

I had a great time as part of the Roadshow team in 2015.

2016 looks like being a very exciting year but we rely on the wonderful people who take the time to bring their treasured possessions along.

 Not forgetting the things that may not appear to have any value, that they may have found in a skip or that may have been in the loft for decades.







We are there to help people understand the items they bring along and hear the stories that are contained within,
 If you can get the chance to pop along to one of the beautiful historic venues you will be assured a great day out.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BFprksgSjpvxsdCTwDFQlJ/roadshows-in-2016

Monday 28 September 2015

PILKINGTON AND ALPHONSE MUCHA: THE 1900 PARIS EXHIBITION


Pilkington exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. 
This was probably the most influential event in its development of artistic products. 
William Burton took a small party of artists to show off products that include floor tiles, wall decorations, fireplaces with hearths both with low relief, raised outline and printed form.

Designs by Walter Crane, Frederick Shields, Lewis F. Day, C.F.A. Voysey, F.A. Steele and John Chambers made up the valuable cargo that crossed the channel.
 Wall mosaics were also shown as was pottery with glazes by William and Joseph Burton.
Its stand proudly proclaimed;

PILKINGTONS Tile and Pottery Co. Clifton Junction MANCHESTER.


The floors of the stand were tiled and the quatrafoiled columns that held up shallow Norman Arches were adorned with architectural exterior tiles. These were holding aloft corbels that were decorated with the Pilkingtons emblem proudly emblazoned in lustre, below a ceramic cornice.

The Senses, a series of panels by Walter Crane which were painted in slips by John chambers and were set, framed within architectural ceramic Ionic pilasters, and with its ceramic apron and cornice was a work of art within itself.
This enabled them not only to show their work but to compare themselves to competitors, and to get themselves acquainted with developments and trends in other parts of Europe.
The main development that came from this journey south into Europe was that they acquired the right of use for designs by Alphonse Mucha.
The Paris office of Pilkingtons revealed that they had the use of 20 designs a year but it is not clear just how many of Mucha's designs were in fact used.

At the 1901 Glasgow Exhibition four panels entitled Les Fleurs were shown.
A set of these also decorated the hall way of the Pilkington factory, they must have been highly prized until the 1940's when the factory was redesigned.


In Liverpool a massive tile panel was conceived by Pilkingtons  own artists made up of five large murals depicting pottery through the ages and photographic evidence remains at the factory and at the Walker Art gallery where it was installed. During World War II the building was badly damaged, though the tiles themselves remained intact they were destroyed when the remains of the building were demolished, no doubt to make way for a cafe.



Pilkingtons tiles were on the ill fated Titanic.