The Victoria and Albert Museum has a
new permanent exhibition about European cultural artefacts from 1600 to 1815. I
went to see it today, and it was – how shall I put this – fantastic. While my
devotion to the British Museum remains sincere and unalterable, there were
displays here which made me glow with happiness, and I definitely intend to go
again. (And again. Visitors to London, this is where I will be dragging you
next.)
It is a large exhibition, with
variation in both cultural origin and societal usage. We start with Napoleon in
Egypt, move through the French Revolution to home decorations and local
fashions throughout Europe (I particularly liked the Norwegian wooden
tankards), a brief interlude in a Venetian masquerade (where they have a wii-like
game in which you can dance with a harlequin – I would have tried, but there
was a group of very enthusiastic old ladies before me. NEXT TIME.), to
neo-classicism, literary salons, and Louis XIV, finishing with some lovely
Berninis.
There were several pieces I loved.
Cutlery with slogans from the French Revolution was a delight, and I made a
special point of checking if the gift shop had any modern replicas for sale
(they did not). Which is a shame, because I would have bought them and gleefully used them. But I also
appreciated the curation here; it is one thing to know that political events
influenced the production of goods, and quite another to have those goods
presented in their original context. Not only was there information about when
and where they were made, but it was also clear that there were competing
production lines for different political affiliations, pro-king and
pro-revolution, and that this was a way to demonstrate your views. As well as
to manufacture and sell a brand. One thing I would have liked to see was more
information about who owned these particular objects. I appreciate that space
is limited and that provenance is not always available, but it would have been
interesting to know who bought a mug with Louis XVI hugging his family goodbye.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Another favourite was an
eighteenth-century French tray for salon board games, in which players travel
from meeting to friendship and love (or acquaintance, or apathy, or contempt).
Last year I attended an evening of French salon games at the Warburg Institute,
and this game was one of the options offered (We were also invited to make our
own. I don’t remember what I put in mine but I remember enjoying it immensely,
which is slightly ominous in retrospect). The whole evening was highly
entertaining; we played a memory game involving tragic sighs, attached beauty
spots to interesting places, and told romantic stories competitively (I won).
The lady who had organised the event mentioned that she was interested in
arranging something similar as an evening at the V&A – perhaps she knew
they had an original board – but I’ve not heard of any such things happening.
It would, I think, be a draw. Certainly I would draw all my friends in.
The last part of the exhibition
which I will particularly mention (I have saved some for next time, because
there were so many delightful things) is the inclusion of three small rooms: a
mirrored room from Lombardy, the cabinet of a Parisian noblewoman from 1778,
and an interior with wood panelling and classical motifs. These were gorgeous,
and inspired the aforementioned glow, because they showed not only the objects
and the decorations, but also how they may have looked in their original context
and, moreover, how they would have been used. The mirrored room has a harp; I
knew that ladies in the eighteenth century played music, but this showed me
where they might have performed, what kind of an instrument they might have
used, what they could have looked at while they played. Or, I knew that ladies
had closets in which they retired to read and write (Samuel Richardson’s novels
are full of ladies with private closets, and are ostensibly mostly written in
them), but I hadn’t realised what one such room might look like: a fireplace, a
few chairs for receiving visitors, decorated walls so that she would have
something pleasant to look at as she read. In both cases, we get a sense of
what it would have been like to occupy that space. And that, as an imaginative endeavour,
was both fascinating and highly enjoyable.
