A Great Englishman

I dropped in on the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury today. One of London's less well known, it's been refurbished recently, so I was curious to see if it had improved from the rather uncommunicative building I'd toured 20-odd years ago. Happily it's been a sensitive and quietly effective job, the building now feels more alive - but not swarming with resting actors in frockcoats and mob caps, never fear - and the story of the Foundling Hospital is well told.
What a story it is. The Foundling Hospital was one of the greatest products of what Hogarth called 'the golden age of English philanthropy', i.e. the mid-18th century, when morality and self-interest flowed together in one beneficent (if narrow) stream. The Hospital's immediate purpose was to offer shelter, care and an education to children who would otherwise be abandoned. At that time, at least a thousand children a year (in a city of half a million souls) were abandoned in the street to die, or thrown on the rubbish dumps on the city margins. This situation so appalled the sea captain Thomas Coram, returning from America, that he resolved to do something about it. The Foundling Hospital was eventually, after many a setback, the result.
As well as being a home for children, the Hospital was an institution of high social tone, very popular with the aristocracy, and, remarkably, a centre for the arts, indeed London's first public art gallery. Handel was a major supporter, wrote an anthem for the Hospital and bequeathed it a fair copy of The Messiah. Concerts were held, and the children were trained in music (as at Vivaldi's La Pieta). Artists - not only English, but French and Italian - donated works. The result is that the Foundling Museum of today is a fascinating and quite unique art gallery, with works by Hogarth (of course), Gainsborough, Reynolds, Benjamin West, Richard Wilson, Roubiliac's great bust of Handel, etc. (Not to mention a dubious portrait confidently labelled 'William Shakespeare'.)
But the most touching and extraordinary exhibits are the unlabelled display cases of tokens left by desperate mothers with their babies as they handed them over to the care of the Hospital. Beads, trinkets, coins and half-coins, medallions, seals, labels, some inscribed, others blank - even, mystifyingly, a label from the neck of a bottle, reading 'Ale'...
Here is Hogarth's Captain Thomas Coram, one of the great English portraits - of a great English man.

Not Cricket

The vexed question of the origins of baseball has been further agitated by the discovery of a reference to the game in a diary of 1755 by a citizen of Guildford, the agreeable county town of Surrey. Guildford also has one of the oldest written references to cricket being played, in 1598. Both games, in their early forms, seem to have been for both sexes - see the telling reference in Northanger Abbey. But of course, like many another innocent pastime, they had to be taken over by the men, systematised with fabulously complicated rules, and given a multi-level competitive structure. Cricket became - in the Test match form of the game - a wonder of the (uncomprehending) world that far transcends mere sport. Baseball survives on this side of the Atlantic as a playground game for both sexes, rounders. In America it was pumped full of testosterone and self-importance and became the modern baseball game - basically rounders, but with the ball thrown so violently as to be all but unhittable, and with lots of burly men dashing around showing off. I can't help but feel that we Brits got the better of the deal. Baseball, when all's said and done, is not cricket.

Still Here - and Artie Is 64!

As Bryan mentions in his blog, he and I did indeed enjoy a night of magic in London's swanky Kensington, where he tucked in to a hearty meal of three prawns and a pea, while I... No, he eats quite normally, despite being barely visible if standing at the wrong angle. What he doesn't mention is that I was wearing a cravate. At sight of it he fell strangley silent and appeared abstracted for some time. Heaven knows what he is planning...
Anyway Bryan and I and the rest of us are still here and must continue our amiable chuntering until the physicists make a proper job of ending it all.
Today Artie Tripp will be celebrating his 64th birthday. Who he? Perhaps this will refresh your memory. Tripp's, it seems to me, is one of the great CVs: classical percussionist, then both the Mothers of Invention AND Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (while also finding time to back Tim Buckley and even the Smothers Brothers), then into that last refuge of the true genius - the insurance business - before finally discovering his true vocation: chiropractice (as practised in the freedom of Mississippi, where a chiropractor can walk tall, beyond the reach of the oppressive state of California). Magnificent - happy birthday, Artie!

Stop Press

Not Bedford. Bedford is closed. Or rather the only conceivable reason for going there - the wonderful Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, with its Edward Bawden collection - is closed, til January next year. As my namesake Molesworth would say - chiz. More Bawden here...
By the way, if those CERN lads turn out to have got their calculations slightly wrong and it's all over as of tomorrow - Bye, everybody. It's been real. Or has it?

Damien Hirst - The End?

Good lord, it's my 200th post on this blog!
I've been thinking about Damien Hirst. It's not fun. Does his forthcoming mega-auction at Sothebys mean the end of the gallery? bellows Waldemar Januszczak here. Almost certainly not - but might it, with a bit of luck, mean the end of Damien Hirst? He looked decidedly nervous and unconvinced by his own schtick on TV last night. As well he might be. The Sothebys show illustrates with brutal clarity the decline of a once mildly interesting artist into a mass producer of kitsch, who happily talks of his various 'production lines'. And of money, with which he is obsessed to an almost Daliesque degree. Hirst grumbles about 'the Van Gogh thing' - the way the dealers get all the money, the artists none- which comes well from the seigneur of 30 or 40 (he's not sure) grand properties. He is determined to get yet more money by making 'the primary market more expensive', i.e. getting most money with the first sale - a tacit admission that his work has no lasting or increasing value. Unlike, say, art...
Anyway, here's hoping the Sothebys sale bombs and Hirst is left with egg (or formaldehyde and bits of shark) all over his face.
Me, I'm off to Bedford. Call it a lonely impulse of delight. I shall report back.

Merdre!

As it's his birthday, let's remember that little firecracker Alfred Jarry. Wikipedia's potted biography gets funnier as it goes on - the horizontally divided apartment is a lovely idea. In fact Jarry is probably more amusing and interesting to read about than to read - I don't see myself ever returning to the few works of his I read, years ago when I was young and impressionable. But such figures have their place, and (as the hoary cliche has it) the world would be duller without them. Besides, there's something about his (anti)system of 'Pataphysics that almost makes sense - 'the laws that govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one' might well have a place in the crazy world of modern physics.

Scepticism Is Conservative

Clearly excited by Sarah Palin - aren't we all? - Bryan is on fire just now, but I'm going to take him up on this one. He suggests here that a true conservative would be bound to buy in to the anthropogenic global warming package, and that those of us who don't have been corrupted by those twin impostors, neoliberalism and noeconservatism. Well pardon me mister, but it seems to me that a position of scepticism (note, scepticism, not outright denial) is entirely consistent with a conservative outlook that is naturally suspicious of anything that approximates to a universal explanatory system , that is equally conscious of the limitations and the provisional nature of human knowledge , and that deeply mistrusts universalist, transnational 'solutions' that overlook the deep complexity and variety of human institutions (especially solutions that involve huge concentrations of state power and huge expenditure of other people's - i.e. our - money).
It is surely perfectly possible to respect the complexity of natural systems and to wish to minimise human disruption of them, without believing in the anthropogenic warming model (which is in itself an inevitably simplistic representation of an endlessly complex system). For myself, I can see a good deal of sense in many 'green' imperatives - and, as I've observed before, my 'carbon footprint' is a great deal smaller than that of most of the warmists I know. But I still think scepticism on the Big One is the sanest position -and, as it happens, a genuinely conservative one.