Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Embroidered T shirt sleeve (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I do very little embroidery for myself but after I finished the children’s Christmas T shirts, I suddenly had the fancy of doing a bit of decoration on the much neglected sleeve bottoms of a few new T shirts. Not a lot of space to get carried away over, I thought, but then, like Topsy the embroidery just grew and grew and  was more embroidery than I’d anticipated. I’ve possibly let my stitching go too far up the arm so that what I at first imagined being subtle decoration has now become de trop. We shall see.

Embroidered T shirt sleeve (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

design for T shirt sleeve

Meanwhile The Wilson, Cheltenham’s unhelpfully named art gallery and museum, is still closed, supposedly for a certain amount of remodelling internally, although we regularly have cause to go past it and have yet to see signs of any sort of constructive activity. Well, that’s not quite true for one day there was a scaffolding tower (bereft of workers) which caused us to look up and then we noticed the window on the Hugh Casson front of 1989 looking very sad. The quirky stained/painted glass panels commissioned and handmade for the new extension were visibly cracked, broken, missing in places and some had suffered the even worse indignity of being blocked up with what looked like bits of old cardboard.  When we went past the art gallery the following week, it was clear that all individual panes of glass that once flashed zigzags of warm yellows and orangey reds when the room behind was lit up had been replaced by undistinguished pieces of clear modern glass.  The glass had never been an enormous in your face sort of feature but the lack of such detailing has diminished the look of the whole front, much as a once elegant and stylish outfit is never quite the same when distinctive buttons are lost and replaced by department store basics. Woe. Experience suggests, make-do repairs very often become permanent.

The Wilson/Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum Sir Hugh Casson extension 1989

But The Wilson is not forgotten in my husband’s art appreciation sessions at Chapel Arts for he likes to show images from Cheltenham’s collection and, thanks to Art UK, the charity and online home for oil paintings in every public collection in the UK, he can do this quite easily. Since 2003 Ark UK has digitised over 280,000 paintings and all are now available just a few keyboard taps away. And of course, the really great thing about an online depository is that you have access to all those paintings which would otherwise live hidden lives secreted away in museum stores and dusty basements. (Bendor Grosvenor’s programme ‘Britain Lost Masterpieces’ is in part based on his trawling such minimally frequented depths with a connoisseur’s eye and choosing paintings which he thinks merit further consideration. His success rate is impressive and additionally his researches make for some of the best of television viewing of the visual arts.)

The Wilson/Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum: Sir Hugh Casson extension 1989: detail of first floor window

It’s always a joy to come upon women successful in their chosen fields and even more so when they lived in a historical past littered with more obstacles, prejudices and domestic commitments than we would find fair today. The Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch (1665 – 1750) is one of these special breeds of women. The Wilson is fortunate to have a portrait of her and also one of her still lifes which genre she specialised in. Women painters of this period often concentrated on still lifes for practical reasons for flowers were easy to come by. As Rachel’s father was a professor of anatomy with interests in botany, his collections of botanical specimens were an additional source of inspiration. Rachel assisted her father in preparing specimens for the collection and producing  botanical studies showing plants in the various stages of life. She later even taught her father and sister how to paint flowers accurately. From such work, still lifes became a natural progression. As with other practitioners of the genre, her paintings are a sort of theatre for flowers, complete with dramatic effects. Gorgeous blooms bustle together regardless of seasonal flowering. Peonies of May and  poppies of full summer nod their heads between branches of spring blossom and wayside weeds while the odd leaf of a distinctly overblown cabbage contrasts nicely with the soft petals of a drooping rose. Close up and lushness visibly tips into decline – dry leaves curl and discolour with age, disease or infestation by insects. Lighting is spectacular in its artifice hitting bunches of flowers face on, then picking out the odd petal or stem here and there; the background, like the backdrop in a theatre is sooty black to enhance those glorious flowers.

Schalcken, Godfried; Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750); Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/rachel-ruysch-16641750-62014

Rachel was very successful and utterly in tune with the taste of a time when the burgeoning middle class were building their elegant canal side houses and in need of paintings of the right size to sit on either side of their fireplaces. At a time when Rembrandt was earning something like 500 guilders for a painting, Rachel was getting 750-over 2,000 guilders. And if that’s not impressive enough, she did all this and gave birth to 10 children too. Fortunately she was married to a fellow painter who seemed to appreciate her work.  There is a lovely painting she did of both of them with one of their children. She is looking directly yet languidly at the viewer, while her husband stands  behind her with one hand on her shoulder and the other pointing somewhat proudly at a painting on an easel. The child has eyes only for her mother to whom she is offering something, while the not very maternally looking mother seems to be somewhere else entirely!

Ruysch, Rachel; Flowers in a Glass Vase; Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/flowers-in-a-glass-vase-62007

In 1722 the family won the lottery. Today Rachel Ruysch is largely forgotten. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Band of folk embroidery (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Before the beginning of the Second World War, Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery in London, had the foresight to despatch the gallery’s permanent collection of paintings to storage in North Wales. In fact, the first batch of 50 paintings  arrived in Bangor on the 30th September 1938, the same day that Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler signed the Munich accord. With the imminent prospect of war averted, all 50 paintings were turned round and promptly sent back before the day was through. No doubt conservators had their heads in their hands as so much journeying was probably not incredibly good for the paintings but as a dress rehearsal, it must have been invaluable; within the year it was clear that war was unavoidable. This time all paintings were packaged up and sent away for safekeeping, mostly to various destinations in Wales, the lion’s share going to Manod Quarry, an abandoned Slate Mine in Snowdonia.

Maria Prymachenko, Ukrainian folk artist (1909-1997)

Clark was fortunate in that he had warnings of what was to come. The Ukraine had little idea of what was in Putin’s mind and even when western intelligence reported a build up of Russian military equipment on their most vulnerable borders, there was hope that it was military manoeuvres, sabre rattling or, at the worst, there might be an attempt at a rapid and limited incursion. Instead, with little notice of the enormity of what was to happen, as bombs and artillery rained down indiscriminately on the Ukraine’s cities, feverish work has gone on to try to save the most important art and artefacts of Ukrainian culture. The city of Lviv, a Unesco world heritage site has cleared its museums, galleries and churches and sent irreplaceable treasures to secret locations – for many, which have survived multiple wars, this was not the first time.  Statues, like Odessa’s statue of the French Emigré, the Duke of Richelieu have been encased in a pyramid of sandbags. Richelieu fought for the Imperial Russian army, governed Odessa from  1803 to 1811 and went on to twice be French Prime Minister. His statue has survived the Crimea War, two world wars and numerous civil wars. Special attention has been given to items of Ukrainian heritage as the fear is that Putin will destroy those wilfully, especially where they contradict his distorted, not to say inaccurate, historical perspective. Some Soviet items have been left in storerooms or in some cases on display – a bust of Lenin (not even a favourite of Putin who blames him for Ukraine’s self determination) sits firmly on a window sill  at the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum along with other communist grandees.

Left: Anastasiia Prymachenko, the artist’s great granddaughter
Right: Maria Prymachenko – May I Give This Ukrainian Bread to All People in This Big Wide World

Unfortunately, Russian targeting of Ukrainian culture is all too real. Early on a Saturday morning at the end of February, Russian forces attacked a small town 30 miles South of Chernobyl and 50 mile North-West of Kyiv and shortly afterwards videos on Twitter showed a small squat building ablaze. This was the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum which, among other things had a collection of 25 works by Maria Prymachenko, one of Ukraine’s best known folk artists whose work Picasso and Chagall were much taken with. The museum was the first building the Russians destroyed when they entered the town. Fortunately they didn’t hang around and a local man was able to rush into the burning museum and collect as many of Prymachenko’s paintings as he could carry. The painter’s granddaughter Anastasiia, director of the foundation named after her great grandmother, thought he had saved about 10 poster sized paintings. The largest collection of Maria’s work, about 650 items is in the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art in Kyiv. Many more of her paintings are dotted around the Ukraine but sadly in areas where there is little or no protection.

Maria Prymachenko: My Beloved Plows the Field

Picasso and Chagall first saw her work at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937 where her drawings were awarded a gold medal. Picasso was invigorated by what he saw, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian “, while Chagall described his own magical realist creatures as “the cousins” of her “strange beasts”. Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times 4 March 2022) describes Prymachenko’s  symbolic works as belonging “to the hinterlands that lie between the mystifying and the meaningful.” On the one hand hand, she says, her work is full of very traditional symbolism (in which for example, a rooster stands for fire and spiritual awakening) while other paintings have texts on their reverse that point the reader in the direction of the mysterious and surreal (“Corncob Horse in Outer Space”). Prymachenko knew hardship and her own life had met war full on. Her fiancé was called up to fight in the second World War when she was pregnant. He never came back and she was left alone with a child to bring up. Her brother was shot by Nazis.  Later paintings, especially those made when Brezhnev  was leading the USSR are anti war.  A bright pink and yellow lion-like animal  (See picture below) is decorated with missiles and warheads, while strings of grenades terminating in  claws like grappling hooks stream down its limbs. From the beast’s mouth two serpents emerge and promptly diverge to spread wider death and destruction. Maria’s title for this this painting is “May That Nuclear War Be Cursed”!

As I finished writing this, I’ve just checked the news to discover the Russians have bombed an art school in Mariupol.

Maria Prymachenko: decorative plate thought to have been lost in the museum’s bombing

Maria Prymachenko: May That Nuclear War Be Cursed