Suzanne Fagence Cooper's Blog, page 4

Effie in paperback

Effie is out today in paperback! I'm especially pleased that Emma Thompson so enjoyed reading it.

Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass talk, Sat 21 April

'Stanhope Country' study days
21-22 April 2012, Cannon Hall, Cawthorne, South Yorks, S75 4AT

Saturday - free study day 10am-4pm
Sunday  - tour of sites associated with Stanhope around Cawthorne, £18

John Spencer Stanhope's masterly mural in Hoylandswaine Church was whitewashed in 1961.  This study day will focus on Stanhope's work in South Yorkshire, and the work of his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues. 

I will be talking about the stained glass designs installed by Morris &Co. in Yorkshire, and their place in the wider story of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Other papers will be given by Simon Poe (on J S Stanhope), Janet Douglas (on W H Crossland), Michael Hall (on G F Bodley), Sally-Anne Huxtable (on Edward Burne-Jones)
For more information contact janetdouglas21@hotmail.co.uk

Whistler's London: Black Lion Wharf

I have an oyster shell beside me on the desk. Worn by the water, it is a relic of an older London, washed up on the shore of the Thames.  I found it on Tuesday as I explored the riverbank below the Tower.  I was searching for Black Lion Wharf, working from a copy of a mid-Victorian map and my memory of the etching that James Whistler had made here in 1859.  In Whistler’s day this part of Wapping was busy with watermen and dockhands, barges laden with barrels, a web of masts and rigging.  Now Black Lion Wharf has disappeared, the river tidied up and embanked.   Wooden piers are concreted over with barely a stump showing. Only the massive gateposts at the entrance to the docks give a clue to the volume of river-traffic that used to flow through here.  Wapping Basin was Blitzed, and then obliterated by steel-and-glass apartments.  A low-maintenance Memorial Garden reminds those who pass of the livelihoods lost.

Yet there are remnants of the river-life that Whistler would recognise.  At Hermitage Moorings a dozen families have made their home on sailing barges.  From a distance, their spars and sheets resolve into a one of Whistler’s watercolour.  Intrigued by a small sign on a gate, I clatter down onto the pontoon.  Albatros, Ethel Ada, Weatherlight: the working lives of these boats reach back a century or more.  This week there is a Christmas cafe in the floating community hall, and I am welcomed with coffee and flapjack.  A print-maker tells me about her neighbours.  She has been gathering memories from the folk who live by the river.  There are a couple of fishermen, she says, who still come down to set their nets for eels.  One of them writes poems about the water and the changes he has seen.  It is time to press on before the light fails.  Further along Wapping High Street the new flats give way to Victorian warehouses.  I find a narrow passage between a pub and an early 19th century merchant’s house. This is the way down to Wapping Old Stairs.  The steps are slippery and green.  In the 1850s mudlarks gathered here, waiting for the water to recede.  Unschooled, filthy, ankle-deep in ooze, they scavenged for anything that would make them a penny or two: lumps of coal, a nail, a coil of rope.  The tide will soon return to cover the stones and deposit more debris on the shore-line.  But for the moment I can step onto the riverbank, and search among the broken bricks for some souvenir of Whistler’s London – some tumbled glass, perhaps. I pick up an oyster shell. The Victorian poor ate them by the barrelful: oysters were plentiful and cheap.  I pocket it, and carry on.Stark walls of warehouses dominate the riverbank here.  Their names are painted in bold black and white – Aberdeen Wharf, Gun Wharves, Phoenix Wharf.  Inside, the vast storerooms have been subdivided into flats and offices.  At King Henry’s Stairs a new pier has been built, with a couple of luxury river cruisers tied up alongside.  But even here, the Thames is quiet and empty.  A few redundant cranes and gantries jut out over the water.  A century ago, this was the engine-house of Empire, a noisy, jostling, reeking place.  Every new tide brought a wealth of goods, and the wharves were piled high with cotton bales, timber, sugar, rubber.  Small fortunes swung in through the open doors. Dockhands staggered under their weight.  The overhead walkways, joining warehouse to warehouse above Wapping High Street are silent now, laden with little more than a pot plant and a picnic table.  The only noise comes from the buses rumbling over the cobbles of the High Street.  They pass me, and push on towards Shadwell, but I turn North, heading for Tobacco Docks.  This is where I leave the Thames behind.  When Whistler was here, this road was called Gravel Lane, but it has changed its name and its character since.  Whistler would not recognise the ornate Anglo-Catholic church of St Peter, although he would surely have heard of its founder, Father Charles Lowder who began his mission to the Docks in 1856. A memorial plaque, set up after the vicar’s death in 1880 outlines his story.  Father Lowder’s ritualistic style of churchmanship was provocative.  In a corrugated-iron chapel filled with incense and candle-smoke, the vicar and his tiny congregation would try to live out the beauty of holiness, even when his sermons were being interrupted by dancing prostitutes and small boys throwing stones, or worse.  But by 1860 Father Lowder and his team had established a school, a soup kitchen and a ‘dirty girls club’, caring for the roughest, most vulnerable folk in his parish. Within a decade, they had built a magnificent Gothic Revival church, served by a community of celibate priests and devoted women. Gravel Lane was grim, a breeding-ground for cholera, a culvert between the transient world of the Docks and the viciousness of the Ratcliffe Highway.  Even today, in the gathering dark, the Highway is unlovely, lined with boarded-up pubs and overgrown demolition sites. I do not feel much like lingering as I walk back towards the City. Now as I sit at home, I half-remember a description of this area.  It is not too hard to find it in my notes. ‘The Night Side of London’ was written by J. Ewing Ritchie in 1857, just a couple of years before Whistler took lodgings near here.  Whistler’s oil-painting, Wapping, looked at the area with an unsentimental eye, noting the seedy transactions that went on around him.  Like Whistler, the writer of ‘Night Side of London’ was fascinated by the prostitutes and their clients.  He said the women were ‘wild-eyed, boisterous, with cheeks red with rouge and flabby with intemperance’.  He claimed there were hundreds of them ‘decked out with dresses and ribbons of the gayest hue’, encouraging sailors to buy them a drink.  He could not help looking and looking again, even though he found them ‘coarse and insolent’.  By his account these girls are ‘pitfalls’, they are ‘infamous’, they are ‘villainous’.  Whistler, on the other hand, did not judge the woman he painted nor the sailor who sat with her on the balcony of a pub. Whistler had served his apprenticeship in Paris, and had certainly seen more squalid sights.  He was a young man-about-town, detached, observant, ready with his sketch-book, on the look-out for a subject that would stir the complacent Victorian art world.  Critics over the years have accused Whistler’s work of being effete, concerned only with surface pleasures.  No doubt he dressed like a dandy, and signed his pictures with a butterfly. But wherever he went, in Paris, London or Venice, he drew labourers and shopkeepers, working girls and the demi-monde.  He painted paradoxes.  His canvases were gorgeously coloured, swift and delicate, but the subjects he tackled were often gritty.   Like Father Lowder, Whistler was a pioneer, discovering beauty in the most unlikely corners of London.  They were both divisive figures, who forced their fellow Victorians to face up to their fears and prejudices.Whistler’s Black Lion Wharf is now lost, overlaid with a century and a half of change.  So is his riverside pub, with the waters slopping against its blackened timbers.  But on my pilgrimage through Whistler’s Wapping, I felt the overlaps between his world and our own, a slippery sense of the past and present co-existing - on the wet foreshore, in the narrow spaces between the blank brick walls of the warehouses, in the faintest smell of incense from behind a closed door, in the pale smoothness of an oyster shell.                       

Forthcoming events

Henley Literary Festival
Illustrated talk about 'The Model Wife: Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais'
Sun 2nd October, 10am at Phyllis Court, Henley
sponsored by BBCHistory Magazine
for more information contact
http://www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk/programme_2011/sunday_programme.html

Forthcoming lectures

Poppleton Arts
Thurs 15th Sept 2011
'Heavenly Bodies: the Pre-Raphaelites and Stained Glass'
contact http://www.poppleton.net/popparts/page2.html for more info

Stoke Newington Bookshop
Mon 10th October 2011
'The Model Wife: Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais'
contact http://www.stokenewingtonbookshop.co.uk/events.php for more info

SUZANNE FAGENCE COOPER is a writer and lecturer. He...

SUZANNE FAGENCE COOPER is a writer and lecturer.  Her most recent book, 'The Model Wife: the Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais' was published by Duckworth (UK 2010) and St Martins (USA 2011). She is also the author of ‘Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria & Albert Museum’ and 'The Victorian Woman'.  Her knowledge of Victorian art, gained during her 12 years as a Curator and Research Fellow at the V&A Museum, has led her to work as a consultant for the BBC. She is an invited speaker for Cunard voyages, and is a NADFAS lecturer. Suzanne lives in Yorkshire.