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October 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1363

New Galleries at the National Scottish Museum

 

NEW MUSEUM GALLERIES are surely reasons to be cheerful. Shining, clean, full of promise and optimism about the public’s continued enthusiasm for art galleries and museums, they are an investment in our cultural capital of the future. And they happen, even against a backdrop of agonisingly prolonged cuts in funding and staff, witness the European galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean’s generously funded gallery of nineteenth-century art, to name but two, and the opening on 8th July of ten new galleries in the National Museum of Scotland on the 150th anniversary of its inauguration. The Museum of Science and Art, as it was then called, was designed in the Lombardic Renaissance style by the self-taught engineer architect Francis Fowke (1823–65). It combined science and natural history with art and design and was a pet project of Prince Albert’s, who laid the foundation stone in 1861. Now a Grade A listed building, it has emerged after five years’ work by Hoskins Architects and the exhibition specialists Metaphor with meticulously restored decorative arts galleries in which treasures from the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Museum have been brought together to dazzling effect.

The grand main entrance up a broad flight of steps has not been used since the Museum reopened in 2011, and the way in, through a crypt-like former storage basement, is a startling contrast to Fowke’s soaring light-filled iron-and-glass Grand Hall (Fig.I). Perhaps inspired by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851, the Hall most resembles the nave in Fowke’s iron and glass structure designed to house the International Exhibition, held in London in 1862 on the site now occupied by the Natural History Museum. Fowke died at the early age of forty-two, probably of overwork, before the National Museum was finished. At its opening it was still only partially completed.

Four of the new galleries are devoted to European art, design and fashion; the date span for the themed displays ranges from 1100 to the present day. Many exhibits are new acquisitions or have been rescued after decades languishing in storage. Chronologically, the displays begin at the top of the building, on Level 5, reached by a long escalator from the Grand Hall. The first gallery, devoted to the Arts of Living and arranged thematically, demonstrates the wealth, sophistication and cosmopolitan taste of the Scottish nobility, a breathtaking array of goldsmiths’ work, silver plate, Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea and Derby porcelain, gold boxes and medieval tapestries. Here, too, are the Venetian Baroque De Lucci table once owned by the dukes of Buccleuch and the huge Kinghorne table carpet from Glamis Castle.

The Napoleonic treasures from Hamilton Palace – Pauline Borghese’s silver-gilt nécessaire de voyage, a gift from her brother the Emperor, and Napoleon’s own travelling tea-service, the other half of which is in the Louvre – are joined by a carved fireplace wall from Hamilton Palace, recovered from the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the 1990s, and the Hamilton–Rothschild tazza, a large Byzantine sardonyx bowl on an enamelled gold stem (acquired in lieu of death duties in 2012). In a vista of glass cases the show unfolds: a gold tea-service owned by William Beckford (father-in-law of the 10th Duke of Hamilton); armorial silver from the earls of Moray; the Lennoxlove toilet set made in Paris and assembled around 1672 for the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox and the silver-gilt ‘Warwick’ Vase and Triton-and-shell table salts by Paul Storr (1771–1844) from the 5th and 7th Lairds of Ferguson of Pitfour, presented through the Art Fund in 1995; Storr’s sculptural silver candelabrum made for the Bishop of Ripon, is perhaps (a small caveat) somewhat over-cleaned. At the far end of this large Level 5 space the Art of Devotion houses a moving display of medieval religious sculpture and church plate.

Design for Living, 1851–1951, is the title of the second gallery on Level 5. The display includes recent purchases that subtly complement works that have long been in the collection. Two cabinets of similar size book-end a long enfilade; one is by the Art Nouveau French furniture designer Louis Majorelle, acquired in 1988, and the other by E.W. Godwin with panels painted by Whistler, bought in 2014. A pared-down Gothic Revival reading table by A.W.N. Pugin shares a stand with Christopher Dresser’s Egyptian chair (both bought in 2014), and examples of Dresser’s silver plate (acquired in the 1980s) show Victorian design at its most modernist. Wrought-iron gates by Bruce Talbert (bought 2014) echo lace-like window grilles from the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries shown next door. Samples of silks designed by William Morris, given in 1889, are partnered by a delicate embroidery designed by May Morris and worked by Theodosia Middlemore for Melsetter House, Orkney, acquired in 2014. Alexander Fisher’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Garden of the Hesperides, was acquired in 2008, a three-dimensional sculptural overmantel in copper enamelled in the round, with silver and abalone shell, and with ivory for the hands of the figures (Fig.II). The overmantel is formed of three domed niches, and the garden in the centre is flanked by the figures of Inspiration and the Recording Spirit in the adjoining niches. Made for Arthur Balfour’s dining-room at Whittingehame House in East Lothian, it dominates the unrivalled holdings of Scottish Arts and Crafts enamelling and jewellery. C.R. Mackintosh and Phoebe Traquair take their place as designers of international significance; the Museum has extensive holdings of both.

Below, on Level 3, the gallery showing Making and Creating (divided into sections on Designing for Industry and The Studio Movement from 1950) uses ceramics, glass and textiles to compare modern industrial production with handmade ware. Eduardo Paolozzi (brightly coloured geometric plates designed for Wedgwood) rubs shoulders with Picasso and Braque and modern Venetian glass made by Memphis and Alessi. Although the gallery bears these thematic labels it is in simple terms a demonstration of how designers met the diverse challenges of late twentieth-century product design.

The Fashion and Style gallery on Level 1 is a dramatic and innovative installation, with a case of extraordinary hats like those Victorian confections of shells, feathers and beads under glass domes, ‘cat-walk’ mannequins in showcases positioned as if in urgent movement and one dress appearing to fly through an ingenious use of wires. The 1750s brocaded floral silk ‘Mantua’ court dress of immense and unwieldy width for its female wearer is in its way as whacky as Paco Rabanne’s 1967 chain-linked armour-plated tunic. This important costume collection comprising about one-third of the departmental holdings and including the Jean Muir and Bernat Klein Archives is also presented thematically, with a strong emphasis on originality and technical innovation. All these new galleries are equipped with dozens of screens, cleverly positioned to be quite inconspicuous. The pieces mentioned in this editorial can be found on the Museum’s website.

 

CHARLOTTE GERE