Latest news with #FitzwilliamMuseum
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Julia Ball obituary
My friend Julia Ball, who has died aged 94, was an artist and art teacher. An outstanding abstract landscape painter, she exhibited in London, Brighton, Norwich, Liverpool, King's Lynn, Bury St Edmunds, and many times at the beautiful Old Fire Engine House in Ely. She also held an annual open event at her studio for 50 years running. A member of the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors, she held group exhibitions annually throughout the 1980s and 90s at the Fitzwilliam Museum. In addition her work can be seen in the collections of three Cambridge colleges – Churchill, Lucy Cavendish and Murray Edwards. Julia was born in the village of South Tawton, Devon, to Rosamund (nee Gill), a housewife, and Edward Ball, a clerk in holy orders who ministered to a series of parishes. Her secondary education came at St Mary's, Calne, a boarding school in Wiltshire, before she went on to do an art degree at Reading University. After graduating she taught art in a series of secondary schools and adult education colleges in London, and then from the mid-1960s in Cambridge schools. Eventually she became a tutor in painting at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology from 1975 until her retirement in 1990. One of Julia's proudest achievements was her role in helping to set up, in 1974, Cambridge Open Studios, an annual event that provides members of the public with the opportunity to visit working studios in the city and to buy art direct from the artists. Partly as a result of that initiative, innumerable households in and around Cambridge have one or more of Julia's marvellous oils, watercolour pastels, drawings or prints. Her work has covered everything from the north Norfolk coast and the fenlands around Cambridge to the domes of Isfahan in Iran. Aside from her artistic preoccupations, Julia – a socialist and feminist – took part in numerous political actions over the years, marching in support of the Grunwick demonstrators, the 1984-85 miners' strike, CND, the Greenham Common peace camp and in opposition to the Iraq war. Though she closely guarded her need for solitude, she was at the centre of a strong group of passionate female friends for whom she was a great inspiration.
BBC News
18-04-2025
- Science
- BBC News
The Cambridgeshire Fens and the flat Earth conspiracy
Conspiracy theories might feel like a modern phenomenon, but one has its roots in the flat landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens and dates back nearly 200 years. Camay Chapman-Cameron, who lives in March, has been exploring how Fenland was for many years the centre of a series of experiments to prove the Earth was local historian came across the story of Samuel Rowbotham, a 'flat-earther' who was desperate to disprove the ancient knowledge our planet is a globe. "He was what we would call today a conspiracy theorist," says Ms Chapman-Cameron, a volunteer at March and District Museum. The rise of flat Earth belief began with American author Washington Irving in his 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus."In it he declared that, as a man of his time, Christopher Columbus and his contemporaries believed the Earth was flat, which led to his navigation errors, and the fear of his crew that they would sail off the edge," said Ms Chapman-Cameron."This is completely false. Columbus's errors were to do with miscalculating distances, and no one knew better than a sailor the Earth was a globe."While there had been belief in the flat Earth among the peoples of ancient India, China and Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), this had largely been overturned from 5th Century BC. More recently, physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was the first to suggest it was not perfectly round but an oblate Mr Rowbotham was attempting to do was overturn at least 2,500 years of acceptance the world we inhabit is a globe. The Manchester-born man had studied the Bible intensely as a child and was part of a devout movement of people who shared the view "any interaction between religion and science will lead to hostilities", said Ms Chapman-Cameron, who previously worked at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, Brighton's Royal Pavilion and Bath's Roman Baths."Rowbotham hated the discoveries of Newton and wanted to destroy his legacy, so he thought the way to do this was to come to the Old Bedford River - a six-mile stretch of completely straight, flat water in the Fens and conduct an experiment," she enable this, he joined a socialist farming collective called the Manea Colony, near Ely. "Rowbotham sent a boat along the length of the river with a flag on a mast and assumed that if he could see it through his telescope along its entire journey to Welney in Norfolk, it would prove the world was flat," she said. He declared he was able to see it all the way to Welney Bridge, six miles away (9.7km), and to him this proved his theory. Mr Rowbotham repeated the attempt five times in the next 30 years, at the same spot, with the same method and getting the same result, according to Ms Chapman-Cameron's research into the Bedford Level Experiments. He was also a brilliant orator and toured the country giving lectures on his findings, even publishing a book 'Earth not a Globe' in 1865."In 1861, Samuel married a 15-year-old and had 15 children with her, so his flat Earth work took a back seat," she Hampden (1819-1891) took up the baton, having Rowbotham's was "captivated, convinced, and rushed headlong into the flat Earth fray," said Ms Chapman-Cameron. The son of a clergyman, Mr Hampden "was very much engaged with what he considered to be attacks on God by the scientific community", she said."Hampden realised that Rowbotham's 'proof' had been completely ignored by the scientific community, and was sinking into obscurity."As a result, he offered £500 to anyone who could prove Mr Rowbotham's flat Earth theory advertisement was spotted by the eminent naturalist and geographer Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 to 1913) and on 5 March 1870, the pair met at the Old Bedford River. With them were two referees and "a circus of the curious and the credulous". Mr Wallace, using the laws of refraction, was able to prove the Earth did have a curvature. Mr Hampden rejected this and refused to pay libel cases, periods in prison and death threats followed."In the end, Wallace never received a penny of the wager money, but was hounded by Hampden until the latter died in 1891," said Ms Lady Blount (1850 to 1835), was the next to energetically support the flat Earth theory, although she was mostly met by has since found some traction in the United States, where proponents use an ancient Jewish text, the Book of Enoch, to justify their belief. "They seem to me to share the same towering self-righteous rage as Samuel Rowbotham and John Hampden," she said. Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Telegraph
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
That Marvellous Atmosphere, Stanley Spencer Gallery: Intoxicating mayhem in a quaint Berkshire village
That Marvellous Atmosphere at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham hones in on the artist's last major work, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1952-9). The ambitious painting, just over 2m x 5m, was nine years in the making and left unfinished upon Stanley's untimely death in 1959. It relocates the New Testament episode of Christ preaching from a boat on Lake Galilee to the Grand Evening Concert at the Cookham Regatta. Christ, clad in a black boater and cassock, lunges, fire and brimstone, out of his wicker chair aboard the old horse ferry barge towards the assembled villagers, in their Sunday best. For those who are not familiar with Spencer's unorthodox work, the adaptation of biblical stories to a familiar socio-temporal iconography was an idiosyncratic part of his oeuvre. Some of his most famous paintings present religious scenes through the lens of the historic Thames-side village in which he grew up, most notably The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (1924-7), which depicts Stanley's contemporaries rising from the dead at the graveyard of the local Holy Trinity Church. Spencer is also known for his more provocative works. His paintings have sparked controversy as recently as 2023, when Love Among the Nations (1935) was deemed too 'racist' to keep on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Curator Amy Lim succinctly sums up the artistic world of Stanley Spencer as 'God, sex and Cookham'. He considered the village in which he grew up to be a 'Holy Suburb of Heaven' and often used his childhood memories as fodder for creative inspiration. This directs us back to the centrepiece of the Spencer Gallery's summer exhibition, which draws on the artist's recollection of the Cookham Regatta, a bustling social event that took place on Ascot Sunday to conclude the week of races in June. At its peak in 1890, the regatta was attended by 10,000 people, and the popularity of boating on the Thames is reflected in contemporary literature such as Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), which was written in the nearby Cookham Dean. The Spencer family's keen interest in the festivities is documented by Spencer's brother Gilbert who recalled 'how the gentry and their ladies in their evening clothes joined in with the hoi polloi … the mix-up was attractive and complete'. Spencer funnelled his whole imaginative world into this last great painting. His writings record that he stayed up sketching until four in the morning, and one of the studies on show was drawn on loo paper – it seems there wasn't a moment when he wasn't thinking about Christ Preaching. Unfortunately, Spencer was fiscally irresponsible and romantically indecisive (he at one point had two wives simultaneously, and ended up divorcing both). This meant that he spent the final decade of his life fulfilling commissions in order to support himself, rather than working on his less commercial passion project. Spencer's tableau Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1956-7) is one-part surrealist, one-part Botticelli, and two-parts mad. If this picture, on loan to the Stanley Spencer Gallery from the Tate, is anything to go by, the finished version of Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta may even have rivalled his paintings at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere for a position to be his masterpiece. When Spencer died, he had completed three-fifths of the canvas; his patron Viscount Astor bought the unfinished painting and exhibited it at the 1960 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where it was praised as 'the epitaph of Genius'. The Stanley Spencer Gallery was founded soon after this in 1962, in a converted Methodist chapel that Spencer used to attend with his mother. The gallery is run entirely by volunteers, who are admirably dedicated to upholding the legacy of this local artist. From the talented and exceptionally knowledgeable Lim, to the wonderful trustees who get involved in the intricacies of gallery logistics (right down to designing the tote bags) – it is impressive to see the community coming together to celebrate this kooky Cookham disciple. Until Nov 2;
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Cambridge museum offers reflection room for ‘triggering' slavery exhibit
Cambridge's leading museum has provided a reflection room for visitors 'triggered' by an exhibition about the slave trade. The university's Fitzwilliam Museum has launched a flagship exhibition titled Rise Up Resistance, Revolution, Abolition, which explores the fight to end transatlantic slavery. The show's accompanying book has caused an academic row at Cambridge over claims that Prof Stephen Hawking benefited financially from slavery. In addition to a content warning on entry to the exhibition, curators have provided a room for those who 'may feel overwhelmed or triggered by this subject matter'. The Fitzwilliam will also host events designed to facilitate dialogue and centre on key themes in the exhibition. The first of these will cover issues including the 'transmission of cultures by people of the African diaspora in response to empire, colonialism and the slave trade'. The room in the Fitzwilliam provides pamphlets to guide visitors to 'wellbeing' material and other resources. These include the websites of mental health charities, including specialists with the Black African and Asian Therapists Network, and curriculum material covering black history. The guide also directs visitors to citizens' advice. The large room is furnished with tables and soft chairs and filled with books covering issues of race, including volumes by TV historian David Olusoga. Also available is Richard Dyer's set of essays, White, which looks at the 'representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture'. The Fitzwilliam website states that the exhibition is suitable for children and 'for everyone' because 'all live with the consequences of transatlantic slavery, and we cannot understand today's world or the legacies of structural racism and inequalities without knowledge of it'. It covers everything from abolition movements to modern-day racist injustices and has an accompanying book-length catalogue. A central claim in the catalogue is that 'slave trade financial instruments shaped the intellectual life of the university by supporting the country's most renowned mathematicians and scientists'. This states that men including Hawking, Charles Darwin's scientist son George, and physicist Arthur Eddington benefited financially from the slave trade. It says that their professorships were paid for through an initial request in 1768 of £3,500 from a mathematician and university vice-chancellor named Robert Smith. This was from stock bound up in 'South Sea Annuities', stock the Fitzwilliam has claimed was linked to investments in the slave trade. Leading British men of science are therefore linked to what the book exhibition terms 'dark finance'. However, the research has been disputed by leading historians, including Lord Andrew Roberts, Sir Noel Malcolm, and Cambridge professors David Abulafia, Lawrence Goldman, and Robert Tombs. Prof Tombs criticised the work of Cambridge to attach historic guilt, saying that 'we are sadly accustomed to seeing our great institutions damaging themselves and the country that supports them'. 'This case is doubly dispiriting as a great university institution shows itself resistant to argument and indifferent to evidence.' The Rise Up exhibition was launched in February to document the history of black and white abolitionists, particularly those linked to Cambridge. It offers an overview of life on plantations and the move toward abolition and states that some African merchants participated in the slave trade. The book created for the exhibition contains a number of academic contributions on the slave trade and opens with a statement that the 'fight for true equality, justice and repair continues'. The Fitzwilliam said the research was correct and important. A spokesman said: 'The Rise Up reflection space gives the opportunity for visitors to explore, create, read, learn and reflect after viewing the exhibition.'
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Rise Up, Fitzwilliam Museum: A claustrophobic interrogation of the legacy of the slave trade
And so, the Fitzwilliam Museum's sorrowful, self-appointed anatomy of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade continues. Two years after Black Atlantic, a deliberately disruptive show that addressed similar themes, took over its historic galleries, the next instalment, Rise Up, arrives in the temporary exhibition spaces. Bring a tissue, is my advice; aside from the occasional jab at, say, the 'white colonial perspective', or the 'doublethink' of the Countess of Huntingdon, the mood is mostly sombre. A sense of claustrophobia is apparent from the start. A vast painting by the British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo, depicting the 18th-century black campaigner Olaudah Equiano and his white wife (whom he probably met in Cambridge), with their young daughters, is crammed into a tight space at the entrance, hung on a false wall; on the other side, a pair of imposing columns like monumental grave markers, made of wooden planks to evoke slaving ships, and inscribed with horrifying statistics, dominate a dark-grey gallery, as a distracting audio recording recites the names of 29 enslaved African women and young girls from a page inside a plantation inventory presented nearby: 'Sue, Old Juliet, Little Grace, Joan…' Elsewhere, a lump of charcoaled wood engraved with a poem picked out in gold leaf by Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba serves (we're told) as a 'metaphorical tomb' for the 'millions of Africans that were trafficked' (12.5 million, according to the catalogue). The artefact, though, that most moved me was a sampler completed in 1833 by Susannah Edwards, an enslaved girl removed from an illegal slaving ship by the Royal Navy and resettled in Sierra Leone as a 'Liberated African' (as her stitches proclaim). The contrast between the brutality of her life's story and her needlework's ingenuous, homespun simplicity skewers the heart. The history of abolitionism provides a structure. The first room reveals the savagery endured by enslaved Africans in the New World; the second gallery changes tack and provides a lesson in literary history, by presenting influential 18th-century volumes, many by black writers such as Equiano, which rallied the British public to the abolitionist cause. Uprisings in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean are a focus of the final space, before the exhibition peters out, with a curiously lukewarm call to carry on the 'fight', as a label puts it, 'for a more equitable society'. 'How much has really changed in over 200 years?' this same label asks. 'Thankfully,' you might respond, 'a lot.' To offset the glut of documents on display, including ledgers as well as first editions, and so to enliven an otherwise bookish atmosphere, the curators intersperse on-point pieces by various contemporary artists such as Keith Piper. Several, though, are run-of-the-mill. In the foreground to the catalogue, the Fitz's director, Luke Syson, sounds cautious, acknowledging that, as the museum's 'journey of change' is only 'just beginning', 'we will sometimes make mistakes.' It would be wrong to describe this heartfelt interrogation of some of history's darkest chapters and complexities as a 'mistake'. But nor is it a crisp or entirely successful exhibition. From Feb 21; information: Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
