Too Hogarth to handle!

There is no denying the fact that the National Lottery has helped make gambling respectable. All those pound coins cast by millions of dreamers into the great Fountain of Eternal Hope with the consolation that, if you don't win a fortune, at least some worthwhile charity or focus-of-need will benefit from that myriad of 'little somethings' and get a cut of the proceeds!

Here in Bristol lottery funds cushioned a fair wack of the £27 million it cost to give the old Industrial Museum ( and former 1950's quay-side warehouse) a very expensive make-over. Money well spent, says the City Council, who point out that, less than a year after the new M Shed opened, its already welcomed nearly three quarters of a million visitors. This of course is latest the attraction to adorn their watery residential 'pleasure park' and one which tells the story of the city and its people in a fun and strikingly visual way.

Finding novel and compelling ways of experiencing the past in the present is big business at the moment as, increasingly, Western Society finds it difficult to get excited about a fraught and uncertain future. Bristol can pride itself on being rather good at re-inventing things – although sometimes very reluctantly. Further along the Floating Harbour – itself a major historical make-over from a once thriving but rather grimey city dock – the award-laden ss Great Britain rests on both its blocks and laurels. When it was floated up the River Avon into Bristol - back in 1970 – it was a rusty old hulk the City Fathers were convinced would sink and block this vital artery to the sea.

Her return was thanks to a few brave souls with enough foresight to see that this Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed and Bristol-built, ocean-going, propellor-driven, iron-clad steamer would one day justify the expense of the longest marine tow in history. Back across the ocean from its graveyard in the remote waters of the Falkland Islands. The ship could be said to have kick-started the steady transformation of what had been a watery slum. After years of turning our backs on the deserted coal wharves and timber yards we embraced the new-found joys of waterside living and socialising.

M-Shed is also the latest in a cluster of satellite museums scattered around the city. And a big financial gamble in these times of frugality and irate council tax payers, maybe more concerned about essentials like housing, education and public transport.There is already a well-established City Museum and Art Gallery. The place – two summers ago - that witnessed amazing queues as people waited for up to six hours to view the exhibition by local-born, graffiti-artist Banksy. Add to that the Blaise Castle Folk Museum, the Red Lodge with its Tudor panelling, and the Georgian House.

Up to ten years ago there was yet another 'satellite' in the Heritage portfolio. This time an Ecclesiastical Museum – created out of the Blitz-burned shell of St Nicholas Church. It closed in 1991 - a victim, even then, of council cuts. However, while the church plate, illuminated manuscripts and vestments were relatively easy to move elsewhere, one rather large piece of Bristol's history is proving a major embarrassment, and a big obstacle, to disposing of the redundant church and – with the City maybe looking to make some savings – wfforts to recoup some money.

Looking down on the filing cabinets and bookshelves the building now contains is a giant painted Altarpiece. Eight hundred square feet of canvas. Three separate but linked monster-sized paintings from the brush of one William Hogarth (1697-1764) – English artist, engraver, satirist and social critic. A work commissioned originally for another city church that may be the most unloved and unwanted masterpiece in history! One wonders – 20 years after the Church Museum closed whether anyone wants it or knows what to do with it. But before l move on and attempt to answer that – I’d better explain how Hogarth came to paint it and how its been moved around the city over the centuries like a giant game of 'pass the parcel.'

He was , of course, the artist who came up with an original way of engaging with narrative art. The man who produced several series of paintings – reading like a morality comic strip – that often used humor and wit to illustrate the follies and vices of contemporary society. Hogarth's prints and his portrait painting made his reputation and gave him a living. However this painter had ambitions in another direction, as a crusading Englishman who was determined to give his Continental artistic counterparts a run for their money.

He wanted to make his name as a history painter and prove that he, and his countrymen, were just as talented when it came to working in the European 'Grand Manner'. So when, in the summer of 1755, the Vestry of St Mary Redcliffe Parish Church in Bristol invited him to paint a large altar-piece for their church, he jumped at the chance.

Though 'history painting' was regarded as the highest form of the art, there weren't many opportunities in England for gaining commissions. Large-scale religious paintings weren't a popular way of inspiring devotion in our more formal and Protestant-fuelled land. We had no 'native' school of history painting. In the mid 1730's Hogarth decided to do his own 'advertising' and offered his services free of charge to the governors of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, in an effort to stop the job being awarded to an Italian painter. Hogarth produced two stunning religious murals, with figures seven feet high, on the walls of a staircase leading to the hospital's Great Hall. Ten years later he organized a gift of four 'home-produced' history paintings to the Foundling Hospital, one of which he had created himself.

But his exercise in self-promotion met with limited success. Apart from the Bristol altar-piece, he had only one more giant canvas to show in support of his argument that English painters could achieve the same qualities of intellectual dignity and greatness of style as those in France or Italy. In 1748 he painted St Paul before Felix for the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn – though it proved to be too big and was hung in the Hall instead.

The paintings for Bristol proved a little on the large size too when they were eventually hung above the altar of the medieval parish church of St Mary Redcliffe. Only the Ascension was visible from the nave – hung under crimson draperies and slightly higher than the two side panels – featuring The Three Marys at the Tomb and The Sealing of the Sepulcher - placed at right angles to it and facing each other.

There Hogarth's altarpiece stayed for a hundred years until changing tastes in architecture and a huge bill for urgent restoration work sent it off to wander around Bristol for 115 years. The Gothic Revival of the mid-Victorian age had no place for such Georgian baroque embellishments which many considered spoilt the appearance of so many medieval churches. In Bristol, St Mary's wanted, amongst other things, to re-build its spire - demolished during a storm in the fifteenth century. It hoped the sale of the three giant canvasses might contribute towards the £40,000 they needed.

Letters were exchanged with the National Gallery and Christies Auction Rooms ( founded in 1766 - two years after Hogarth's death), and advertisements placed in The Times and in local newspapers, but without a buyer coming forward. Seems both the size of the canvasses and their subject matter was working against them. Despite the fact that Christies had sold Hogarth's series of satirical paintings Marriage a la Mode in 1797 for 1,000 guineas. They now hang in the National Gallery.

The man who finally helped find the unwanted altarpiece its first new home was Alderman Thomas Proctor – a local businessman and churchwarden who owned a fertilizer manufacturing plant near St Mary's – and who now chaired the church restoration committee to which he donated two and a half thousand pounds of his own money. In 1858 he offered to buy the canvasses for a nominal £20 and present them to the Royal Academy for the Promotion of the Fine Arts to look after. A prestigious and private art establishment with at least one gallery wall big enough to take Hogarth's giant canvasses.

But this is not the end of our story. The Academy – now the RWA - tried to sell the altarpiece in 1910 to raise cash for new building work. The building was in need of restoration work and the Academy preferred its walls covered with more contemporary and home-grown art.

The pictures were taken down, rolled up and put on show in London. Bristol's local press lambasted the Academy for 'preferring hard cash to art treasures' and public opinion saved the day. For lack of display space and a refusal from St Mary's to have them returned, the giant altar paintings went back into storage. The rolled canvasses spent their war in the basement of the City Art Gallery. There they lay forgotten – at least until 1953 when a former Sheriff of Bristol suggested the paintings be installed in the city's impressive new Council House on College Green. You've guessed it already. They were just too big. By this time Hogarth's artwork was being stored in a bonded tobacco warehouse. The biggest and most expensive 'roll-up' in the building.

Two years later and finally a deal was done for the altarpiece to hang 'in perpetuity' in the Bristol's Corporation's Art Gallery, that's after first being sent to the National Gallery in London for restoration and re-hanging. Incidentally, it happened to be the first job for the newly-appointed chief restorer Arthur Lucas who would go on to win fame and controversy for his work on Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. The altar paintings were re-erected as an impressive backdrop in the Art Gallery's two-storey high Wills Hall and – at an opening ceremony that coincided with the meeting of the British Association in Bristol – a senior keeper from the British Museum described the triptych as “the last great monument of Baroque painting in the country, and surely one of the most splendid pieces of religious art to have been executed by an Englishman since the Reformation.''

There had been post-war plans, meanwhile, to build a new museum and art gallery complex on space cleared by enemy bombs in the historic centre of the city and beside the River Avon. However, when rising costs brought an end to this proposal, the Council re-kindled its vague interest in using the old blitzed shell of St Nicholas Church, at one end of the proposed site, as a church museum. Once more the canvasses were taken down and sent for restoration. They were then erected at the east end of the newly converted building – a rather large reminder of the city's more flamboyant ecclesiastical past. They are still there - looking down now on computer screens and filing cabinets. The museum has become office space for museum services.Very few people ring the door bell and ask to see them. For the trickle of callers, there is a viewing platform - so as not to disturb those now using the church floor as a workspace.

It is my understanding the Council may be exploring ways of getting rid of this unwanted real estate. They cannot demolish the building – its listed - and the giant canvasses are a bit of a sticking point. I have privately asked a London art dealer to place a value on them. He was a student in Bristol and knows the work. Limited by its size and genre he said he could see it raising no more than a million pounds. Getting rid of the building may prove easier but who would want it with Hogarth's canvasses still in situ?

Some may ask whether the new harbourside museum should have found room for it and acknowledged its place in the city's history? Who else has a wall big enough to hang it? St Mary Redcliffe does not want it back and nor does the RWA. Or maybe some people feel – with the opening of M Shed and the transfer to it of artifacts from elsewhere, it may have freed up space to put it back on display at the old City Museum at the top of Park Street.

That, according to Julie Finch, the City's Director of Museums, Galleries and Archives, is now exactly what they have in mind. It seems the Hogarth is now considered part of a wider plan for the redevelopment of the City Museum and Art Gallery and they intend keeping the paintings as part of the collection as they are 'important to Bristol'.

Whatever happens. Dismantling the canvasses and transporting and re-erecting them once more is going to cost a great deal of money. However, leaving them alone in a building that could be better used by someone else offers no long-term solution. I'd welcome some other views on the subject. After all – grand bank and insurance buildings in Corn Street have been transformed into bars and pizza houses with many original fittings still in situ. But if you feel that's a better solution for this little 'problem' – just mind where you're shaking that bottle of tomato sauce!

Easter week-end will take us seven weeks into our move to Bath. We've settled well at Larkhall. Enough energy from D to wizz through a transformation of our home. We have one room left to 'do'. The cats have settled well and are already enjoying frequent trips to our local vets with tooth extractions and gashes. It is an interesting and very mixed community. A bit of a Totnes feel to the main street with its local theatre, established butchers, green grocers and three-shop fronted ironmongers! That has to be the biggest l have ever seen! You can walk into town on the London Road and l have mastered the 6 in and 7 out bus service. Changing numbers ensures the most direct route home. I have joined the YMCA gym. Funny how l was a Red Triangle player all those years ago at Weston-super-Mare. Feel l have come full-circle! Am meeting up with old friends from HTV and developing frustration over media work. Maybe exploiting a cyber future could be an answer. We will see.

I am angry! Forget the News Corps story and foam flam-flingers, l am angry about the culling of sixty thousand badgers here in the South West because of the spread of TB in dairy herds. Does it kill the cows or just infect the milk? Why, when they can rush through vaccines for human use when new strains of flu arrive on the scene, cannot they find a vaccine for cows, or even badgers, to stop the spread of TB? I suppose now they cannot legally kill foxes - charging around like idiots in their little red coats and surrounded by their snappy dogs - they go out instead and have a go at 'brock.' What gives us the right to exact such judgement on Nature. Wait until Nature kicks back - as undoubtedly She will.

When will Cameron fall on his sword. How can this podgy-little man stay as Prime Minister when he has such bad judgement and taste in people to surround himself with. I think it's time to send for William Hague. The only real statesman the Tory Party has produced in years.

Friday July 8th, 2011. Totnes. 20C humidity 54 %

It's refuse collection day. The wagons are meant to be out and about early as it's also Market Day in the Civic Square and our traffic congestion reaches choking levels on a Friday. Our small band of seagull supporters continues to take an interest in the one remaining fledgling still hanging on to its young life. There were two hatched on the roof of Alexandra Terrace. The nursery was crammed in between the chimney pots on top of Jon and Lou's home. They normally are there to keep an eye on things but this year are having an extended holiday in Mexico. This gull hopefully grows into a world where he will find little sympathy for his efforts to share the town of Totnes with its human occupants. This morning, coming back from town, l saw an all too familiar sight. A black bag shredded and its contents scattered. Fists will again shake at the gulls. Damn you for the mess, your poo all over our cars and house windows and your raucous utterings! More headlines for the Totnes Times. Put them on the list of 'unwanteds' - along with the grizzly cider-heads sleeping rough, domestic cats and anyone who won't get out of the way of the four by four push-chairs sweeping all before them on our pavements.

Hang on a minute. Gulls have been an 'issue' for half a century as far as my reporting career is concerned. As we fish out the seas, our landfill sites are getting more and more attractive. I was reporting on the gull problem in Bristol and Bath at least forty years ago. Back to the refuse collectors. I have something called a 'seagull proof' bag - issued by South Hams District Council. I do not use it. My rubbish goes in the wheelie-bin. The owner of the contents of the black bag - now scattered over the street - may not have one. Why not?? Where is her wheelie bin??? Don't blame the gulls. It's like inviting guests to a feast and then complaining if they are messy eaters. It is us humans who are the problem. Stop and think about how you are disposing of your rubbish! The gulls are more clever than we are. They know where to find a free meal.

Catching Up

The eve of the royal wedding. Totnes bedecked with two Union flags and some bunting in a couple of charity shops. Be interesting to see if English Heritage flag over the Castle gets swopped for the old 'red,white and blue' when tomorrow comes. Enticements coming from local election candidates getting very amusing. Including one which will see Vire Island renamed Fire Island! Yes - he wants permanent barbecues installed so families can gather to create a summer-time town smog to rival anything being cremated on the banks of the River Ganges. Don't expect my vote. And l don't want more of the castle slopes dug up for bloody allotments when so many people have huge gardens at home. Dig up your own rose beds and leave one of the town's star tourist attractions alone. Please scientists hurry up and design a simple way of harnessing the sun's energy before the whole town suffocates under plastic photo cells. They are hideous and add to the clutter of dormer windows, Sky dishes and old aerials. Look also to the hills as you cross the park towards the leisure centre. Polythene is creeping over Devon's green fields. Do we really new strawberries two weeks earlier than normal. To every thing there is a season.

The storm has passed. We spent yesterday in long periods of silence interspersed with our thoughts on selling up and what a mistake we had made coming here to Devon. I had created the spark that lit the fire. A dead and lonely Friday which l threw in his face when he came in late that evening after driving home from teaching in Bath. It is me who must change. l hold the key to my own self-created prison. Today he struggles with a cold. We will not move. We must start saving for our crumbling chimney stack. The thaw is sending small pieces of frost split brickwork tumbling down the roof. Plus there is the matter of a water leak under the utility room floor. We are too scared to lift the linoleum.

On another matter - how can young, taunting, camp Master Gilmore - pictured swinging from a Union flag attached to the Cenotaph - claim not to know what it represents? I am told that our major wars are part of the school curriculum. Gilmore's father sent him to public school. I am saddened and ashamed and frightened for the future of humankind.

Hiding upstairs in the attic while my partner deals with another massage client in his treatment room below. Try to be quiet. They are paying for peace and relaxation!Rang South Hams District Council yesterday to ask if a traffic warden could come and check out the road above us. Its a single yellow line situation continua;lly abused by a neighbour who often parks one - if not two - cars - there all day. It makes getting our car out very awkward. It also blocks the emergency services. South Hams woman obviously had me down as a "snitch" and failed to do anything. Both cars are there again today and no sign of anyone with a notebook and parking ticket. On a positive note - l have started chanting again. SGI-UK if you must know. Out of the blue the Men's Leader from Plymouth made contact. Guy from Liverpool whose family comes from China. I think we both got something out of our meeting. Two strangers sharing ideas and interests.