Conservative History Journal

October 16, 1834 was the day Parliament burned down to be rebuilt eventually into the grand edifice we know today with Westminster Hall the only remaining mediaeval part. Caroline Shenton, a Parliamentary Archivist and author of  The Day Parliament Burned Down, describes the events of that traumatic day.

J. M. W. Turner played the role of a disaster photographer by setting up his easel on the other side of the Thames and getting down as many sketches as he could.

Tory Historian finds it extraordinary that those in the culture industry (and it has become an industry though not all of it creates anything) should have such a sneering attitude to the businessmen and women who have made the money that made much of our cultural heritage possible. According to many of them the proper person to subsidize their activities is the taxpayer whose opinion is never asked and who contributes the money involuntarily. The alternative, they so often pronounce, money contributed voluntarily by the person who made or earned it, makes that lucre somehow tainted.

One has to admit that with government cuts, though they do not go far enough in TH's opinion, this attitude is changing. Even the BBC, usually the leading apostle of the ideology of sneering at people who actually make money, has put up a fascinating article about Sir William Burrell,

celebrated as an art lover and philanthropist. He left a wealth of objects to the people of Scotland in the magnificent Burrell Collection.

"It was often said he was ruthless, but that's not the right word," says maritime historian Martin Bellamy, Head of Research at Glasgow Museums. "He was an innovative business operator with an inspired commercial mind.

"He was a typical Victorian entrepreneur. He exploited the world of opportunities that the British Empire created.

"Burrell took over a modestly successful family business and expanded it enormously."

Burrell's secret was his ground-breaking operation of a type of trade called 'tramp shipping'.

Unlike liners which followed a set route of destinations, tramp ships did not have scheduled deliveries. They sailed to whatever port their cargo took them.

While a ship was unloading, the captain would make arrangements to find the next job. This led to delays and meant ships often sailed only part full. But Burrell had a solution.

"He travelled the world and set up a network of agents," says Bellamy. "They would do the work of the captains and secure the next cargo before his ships arrived.

Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, a collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Yale Center for British Art, makes a virtue of Zoffany's marginality and mobility, showcasing his panoramic gaze. He was as interested in beggars and streetsellers as nabobs and queens.

Zoffany was a man on the move: painting in Germany, Italy, back to Germany, England, back to Italy, India and back again. One of his rare disappointments was the failure to secure passage as ship's artist on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas. Zoffany's career exemplifies the fertile possibilities of a booming European and global art market.

Rome was the great artistic cosmopolis, teeming with architects studying classical ruins, artists in training from all over Europe, as well as young British milordi picking up a smattering of taste and connoisseurship before they went home to inherit. It was the capstone of a gentleman's cultural education. A man who had never visited Italy was always conscious of some inferiority, said Dr Johnson. In Rome, the young German learnt the visual lingua franca of the British.

Suitably polished, Zoffani returned to Germany in 1757 and achieved his first appointment as "court and cabinet painter" to the elector of Trier. But a hidebound and peripheral court was an anti-climax after cosmopolitan Rome. Though he married an innkeeper's daughter from Wurzburg, the ambitious artist did not cool his fiery heels for long in Germany. Three years later he moved on to London – the metropolis of commercial modernity, the biggest city of western Europe. To modern eyes, Georgian London may look small and compact, only a few square miles, which could easily be crossed on foot, but to contemporaries the English capital was a breathtaking phenomenon, a very monster of greatness. To Daniel Defoe, London was the new Rome: "Such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does, or ever did equal it, except old Rome in Trajan's time."

London represented an intense concentration of commercialised culture, retail and art, as well as rank and buying power. It was the great city of opportunity for a young man of parts.

Tory Historian has always found visits to Tate Britain, home of the superb collection of British art, intellectually stimulating and emotionally soothing. Not so, this afternoon. Most of it has been turned into an outpost of Tate Modern.

While the Clore Wing remains largely devoted to Turner, it now has an exhibition of Romantics, which intersperses paintings by artists who were more or less his contemporaries as well as modern artists who paint supposedly in the same vein. Whether Turner can be called a Romantic is a moot point but the idea of following British romanticism through is an intriguing one. TH, feeling a little tired for various reasons, decided to return to this huge exhibition some other time and returned to the main rooms to be stunned by the latest arrangement.

Tate Britain changes periodically the way it hangs the paintings, an idea that may have sounded better in theory than it has proved to be in practice. The latest decision was to devote almost all the main galleries to twentieth century British art, the later part of which, large and full of installations, ought to be in Tate Modern, where there is room for it.

The rest of the collection seems to have been secreted. There was on gallery, in which about thirty paintings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were hung in a rather shambolic order. This was described as the highlights of the historic collection. The Tate is supposed to show that historic collection not pick out a few examples from it.

There were three small "focused" exhibitions: a very good one of the Camden Town Group drawings, an interesting one of Rubens and Britain though that could have been bigger, and a completely nothingy display of odds and ends under the title of The Protestant Church after 1660. Small, "focused" exhibitions, successful or not, are of interest in conjunction with the large display of what is the glory of Tate Britain: British art from the 1500s to the present day, which cannot be seen at present.

To add insult to injury TH found an extraordinarily silly and unpleasant painting entitled Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III, as well as a concrete bust of Stalin by Peter Peri, a Hungarian refugee, originally a constructivist and later a socialist realist. The bust was made in 1942 and is displayed without the slightest explanation. When TH was angrily relating this to someone, the question came whether Mao, the greatest of all mass murderers was there as well. As, having reached this display, TH stormed out of the gallery, the answer remains unknown.

Tory Historian was thrilled to read yesterday in the Evening Standard that a previously unknown portrait by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez has been found among various paintings by a little known British artist, Matthew Shepperson, whose own work, about to be auctioned is unlikely to bring in more than a few hundred pounds apiece.

Portrait of a gentleman, bust-length, in a black tunic and white collar, was previously owned by 19th Century British artist Matthew Shepperson.

It was discovered after a number of artworks by Shepperson were consigned for sale last year.

Further examination and an x-ray confirmed the work to be Velazquez.

The painting first came to attention when the current owner - a descendant of Shepperson - brought the works to Bonhams auction house in Oxford. In-house experts noticed the stylistic similarities to works by the Spanish master Velazquez.

It led to extensive research which was confirmed by Dr Peter Cherry - professor of art history at the University of Dublin and one of the world's foremost authorities on Velazquez - and then by the Prado Museum in Madrid, which carried out the technical analysis.

Tory Historian spent the morning at the Tate Gallery or Tate Britain as it is now known and saw The Vorticists exhibition. By no stretch of imagination were the Vorticists conservative but the movement was genuinely exciting and innovative in Britain with real links to Continental art movements (though they refused to be associated with Marinetti and the Futurists). It is, Tory Historian thinks, their refusal to fit in with the rather cosy, attractive and unthreatening modernism of the Bloomsbury Group and surrounding artists together with the soi-disant leader, Wyndham Lewis's hatred for the British Left, the Soviet Union and the Communist fellow travellers that has ensured a certain disdain for him and the group among art critics and historians.

So there is the charge sheet: Wyndham Lewis dismissed the Bloomsbury Group, opposed the Soviet Union, despised the Communist fellow travellers in the West, was pro-American and was an early supporter of Anglospherist ideas. Definitely a fascist, m’lud. The widespread undermining of Wyndham Lewis’s reputation shows the extent to which the Left has managed to control cultural understanding in Britain.

Tory Historian rarely finds anything in the news to smile about but this is certainly one such item. The BBC and other outlets such as the New York Times reports that when cleaning a painting that was supposed to be possibly by Bruegel the Younger, the Prado restorers that it was, in fact, that rare thing a signed painting by the most talented of all Bruegels, Pieter the Elder.

Whatever John Constable's political views might have been his vision of the country not only chimes in with conservative (small c) attitudes but is the one that is seen as reality by many outsiders. Constable's England is the England that is known to those who do not know the country. And yet it is not entirely wrong either as a visit to Suffolk or a view down the Thames or a walk in Hampstead Heath can prove. Tory Historian who loves Constable's paintings and drawings is celebrating the great man's birthday today. He was born on June 11, 1776.

Tory Historian spent a good deal of today within the Victorian sphere. First a visit to the newly reopened Leighton House Museum, once home of Frederic, Lord Leighton RA, the only artist to have been ennobled. Sadly, he did not have children so the title died with him.

Another book was the 1998 reprint of the fifth Earl of Stanhope's Conversations with the Duke of Wellington. This counts as Victorian history as the conversations took place between 1831 and 1851, the Duke's death.

Stanhope's chief achievements were in the fields of literature and antiquities. In 1842 took a prominent part in passing the Literary Copyright Act 1842. From the House of Lords he was mainly responsible for proposing and organising the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1856. A sculpted bust of Stanhope holds the central place over the entrance of the building, flanked by fellow historians and supporters Thomas Carlyle and Lord Macaulay. It was mainly due to him that in 1869 the Historical Manuscripts Commission was started. As president of the Society of Antiquaries (from 1846 onwards), he called attention in England to the need of supporting the excavations at Troy. He was also president of the Royal Literary Fund from 1863 until his death, a trustee of the British Museum and founded the Stanhope essay prize at Oxford in 1855. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1827.

No, this is not one of those peculiar games people play in which one is supposed to put together the most unlikely concepts into one sentence but an account of Tory Historian’s jaunt to Leicester last week-end.

The pretext was an exhibition of what was billed, justifiably as it turned out, as the largest collection of German Expressionist art in the UK. In Leicester? Tory Historian was somewhat surprised but also fascinated by the tale behind the collection.

The exhibition was marking the beginning of that splendid collection: in 1944, a most unlikely moment in history, the then Director of the Museum, Trevor Thomas, put together an exhibition of German Expressionist art, having talked various German refugee collectors, whom the wise British Government of the day had interned, to lend the splendid works they had managed to bring out of their country.

The exhibition was, astonishingly, successful both with critics (the local newspapers were rather proud of having such an outstanding and imaginative art gallery director) and the public. The gallery collection was started by several painting purchased from the exhibition and continued to grow, becoming world famous, though not so very well known among British art visitors.

The most recent addition to it was a large and fascinating collection of German Expressionist works, particularly of prints, put together by a businessman who had been born in Leicester, Michael Brooks. Tory Historian is delighted to see that the old tradition of businessmen spending money on art or architecture to honour their own city is alive and well. One must tip one’s hat to Michael Brooks and the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery who appreciated the gift.

The rest of the day was taken up by walking round Leicester and seeing the Cathedral (a little disappointing) as well some superb churches, the most exciting of which was St Mary de Castro.

Possibly the most exciting part of that walk for Tory Historian was the discovery that the City and the good burghers of Leicester clearly never abandoned their loyalty to the one they call King of England, Richard III. He is supposed to have been buried somewhere in the City or, perhaps, thrown into the ditch just outside it in the charming way those Tudors behaved. The story is quite convoluted as this article explains and the truth remains unknown.

There are several memorials as well as streets and schools named after the last Plantagenet King. This statue shows him as a young (well, he was youngish though not for those days) and romantic hero with nary a sign of a hump. Eat your heart out, Will.

Near the remains of the castle there is a board, put up in 1985, at the 500th anniversary of the year when two kings visited Leicester. It is quite clear which one the city saw and still sees as the rightful one: Richard III is described as King of England who rode into Leicester some time before the fateful battle of Bosworth Field; Henry VII came to the city on the evening of August 22, after he had “vanquished” Richard and brought his body with him. One can imagine the sullen burghers of Leicester watching the arrogant invader as he rode in with the body of the rightful Kind in the baggage van.

Tory Historian cannot praise highly enough the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Constable Portraits - the Painter and his Circle. Despite several tragic tales behind the portraits, it is a happy exhibition because of the light in the pictures and in the sitters.

Constable is the compleat English painter. His landscapes seem to be England and many a person who had never seen the country arrived here convinced that everything will look like those pictures of Suffolk or Hampstead. Strangely enough, there is some truth in that. Though much has changed, the essential landscapes are still there.

The portraits, too, present a gallery of English faces - fine-featured and blunt, shrewd and innocent. A particular form of entertainment for those who manage to get to the exhibition is to try to pick some of the portraits for characters in the novels of Jane Austen, Constable's contemporary.

The artist's sisters can fit several heroines, as Miss Austen liked writing about sisters. The young man, Dr Herbert Evans, Constable's family doctor, on the other hand, has a distinct air of Mr Darcy about him, despite the class difference between them. Would Mr Darcy have liked being compared to a mere physician?

As mentioned before, Tory Historian is reading Roger Scruton’s fascinating little book, called “Beauty”. It is taking longer than expected because there is rather a lot to digest and several passages need to be read over and over. (And also because time in Prague was taken up with meetings.)

In his chapter on “Natural Beauty” he contrasts our understanding of nature and its beauties with that of art, where there is a deliberation in what is seen and presented. Then he adds:

Although true so far as it goes, that observation ignores two vital features of our encounter with the natural world. The first is the role of nature as raw material for visual art. The great landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century, such as William Kent and Capability Brown, were responding to the taste of their patrons. They lived at a time when cultivated people made discrimination between landscapes, argued over what was or was not in good taste, and set out to build, dig, plant and adjust with intentions comparable to that of the painter whom they would later commission to record the outcome.

Indeed, the cult of the ‘picturesque’ arose because our responses to landscape and our responses to painting feed into each other. The eighteenth-century habit of decorating the landscape with ruins began from a love of the Roman Campagna not as it is, but as Poussin and Claude had painted it. Tourists in the eighteenth century would often travel with a ‘Claude Glass’: a small tinted convex mirror, which helped them to appreciate the landscape by compressing and composing it in a manner reminiscent of Claude. And the landscape architects of the day regarded architectural ruins and follies, as well as classical bridges and temples, as continuous with the trees, lakes and artificial mounds of earth which were the raw material of their art.

It is difficult to believe that our attitude to natural beauty is founded completely differently from our attitude to art, when the two are so intimately connected.