More than 126 years after his death, William Thompson Walters, a founder of the Baltimore art museum that bears his name, is finally getting his day of reckoning.
Thousands of taxpayers pounds are being spent on digging into our colonial past to focus solely on the evils of slavery, such as the £160,000 squandered by the NationalTrust on its Colonial Countryside investigation.
Any historic personality or location with the slightest association with slavery is to be outed and shamed with the vigour of a Chinese Red Guard denouncing socialist backsliders.
Of course, we should not cover up this shameful trade in human cargo but equally we should not put it at the centre of our island s glorious story.
Sculptor Sir Antony Gormley recently criticised the British Museum for being obsessed with the classical world, arguing that
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Miraculous Draught of Fishes?
What had piqued my interest was the new presentation of the Raphael Cartoons on the V&A’s website, where an interactive tool allows you to zoom in on high-resolution photographs of the monumental tapestry designs commissioned from Raphael in 1515. According to the site, the fisherman Simon (soon to be renamed St Peter) has caught the following types of fish: barbels, John Dory (also known, appropriately, as St Peter fish), sardines, sea bream, sea eels, shark and skate. Raphael or his assistants knew something about fish, then, but did they know what St Peter might have caught? Perhaps not: the Sea of Galilee is actually freshwater (it’s also known as Lake Tiberias or Kinneret), but the fish caught by Christ’s apostles here, barbels aside, are saltwater creatures.
Nell Jones
As a child, I had an obsession with walled gardens, largely in part, down to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden (ashamed to say not so much the book, but the great ‘90s film adaptation with Dame Maggie Smith). Those ivy-cloaked walls, darting robins and nymphy lily ponds, lichen-covered statues and weathered green houses, all still continue to fuel my romantic imaginings. Of course, the Chelsea Physic Garden is no secret, but it remains a restorative little oasis on Swan Walk, with its own microclimate and wonderfully storied history. The Garden dates back to 1673 when the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries chose this Chelsea village site for its proximity to the Thames to make the most of its warm air currents. As the oldest botanical garden in London, hidden behind high walls, festooned with pomegranate trees, it remains blissfully inured to change.