Tag: V&A

The V&A Biscuit Tin Collection

Glory

It strikes me that it may be somewhat idiotic to be fascinated by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s biscuit tin collection, but I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at them, and I’d like to consider why. This, of course, isn’t self psychoanalyzation, but a ponderance of why humans have decided to produce ornate biscuit tins. Any plain bag, box, or tin would work, so why make them so darn cute?

Well, we’ve been decorating vessels for centuries, our first containers for holding food and water created as far back as 9000 BCE. Fast forward as few thousand years, and in 1861, the Licensed Grocer’s Act allowed groceries to be separately packaged. From there, tins for sweets were created, and the advent of offset lithography allowed for designs to be printed on in color. Pretty cool. Why would we bother doing this?

From an advertising perspective, adding colorful designs to tins that are already full of sweets that children enjoy is common sense. That may be true, but I doubt children would enjoy a Wedgwood casket-inspired tin, nor the Edward Burne-Jones tin I was sureIMG_20190202_151802 to snap a picture of. Of course, some of these designs are novelty, and appeal to adults as well as children. There’s a tin for everyone it would seem, in a variety of shapes and designs, to fit every fancy.

All of this said, my first impression of these tins was not that they were small advertisements lined up in a display case, but that they were short glances into the daily life of the person that once owned these tins, and perhaps picked them for their own interests, or to satisfy a child’s sweet tooth. Perhaps an egyptomaniac once owned the odd tins in the shape of an egyptian vase, or a child played with the tin in the shape of a cottage long after the biscuits were all eaten.

These tins are an excellent example of material culture, and let us know what people took an interest in during the first half of the 20th century. Britain doesn’t really make biscuit tins like this any more, as their production ceased during the rations of the second world war and didn’t become popular again after it was over.

I can’t help but wonder what traces of our 21st century life will be put into display cases and pondered.

Dale Chihuly- A Sidenote

Glory

As I headed for the exit after my visit with Turner and Constable, I happened to glance up, into the great dome of the V&A, and I was immediately glad that I had. A great blue and green glass chandelier loomed above, its organic tendrils reaching out and touching my memory.

I sent a quick picture to my mother, who informed me that the artist is Dale Chihuly, whose work I’d looked at a thousand times in my hometown museum, The Art Museum of South Texas. Everyone in town knows Chihuly’s glass, in part because it was on the museum’s promotional ads for many years, and as children, we all took our turns looking in awe at Blue Cascade, which I’ve always considered a small divinity.

chihuly
Blue Cascade, 1999 Credit: Corpus Christi Caller Times

 

However, when I looked up and saw the V&A rotunda chandelier, Blue Cascade became a mere anemone in the face of an entire reef. I had to make sure my memory did not deceive me, so I looked into the Art Museum of South Texas’ digital archives, only to come up with nothing. Sadly, the website doesn’t appear to have more than 100 or so works online, which is a real shame, particularly in this case.

I love Blue Cascade, and I love Dale Chihuly’s glass. From the Art Museum of South Texas, you can see the ocean, the Harbor Bridge, and pelicans floating on the sea’s surface. Underneath is the fish, the plants, and often, the glass. Broken bottles beat against the sand and the rocks until frosted, smooth, and safe to collect, which is just what my mother and I would do when I was a bit younger.

Glass and water have a special relationship as things that shine, refract, and hold one another. The glass may be full of water, but one look into the ocean and you’ll see that the water is also full of glass.

Chihuly’s work incorporates space, color, light, and the most whimsical forms. Like most art, his work is transformative, from sand to glass, and glass to art. Shadows and reflections cast onto walls and ceilings elevate Chihuly’s art even further, and so I must say that if you ever get the chance to see his work in person, DO IT! Without a second thought. Pictures simply can’t do it justice.

East Cowes Castle; The Regatta Starting for their Moorings, J.M.W. Turner, 1827-1828

J. M. W. Turner — Oh My God

Glory

When visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum to view the works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, there was clear favoritism that developed as I viewed the works of both artists. Don’t get me wrong– Constable’s more expressive works drew me in, as did the billowing clouds that populate so many of his revolutionary landscapes. It’s a bit difficult to look away once you’ve begun looking, to say the least!

That being said, when it came to Turner’s work, I could spend a thousand lifetimes living and dying in front of them– and that’s putting it lightly. The work which captured my attention most readily was the seascape of East Cowes Castle, a location which one can’t help but feel Turner had frequented.

However, when looking at Turner’s body of work, it quickly becomes clear that the magic and genius of it lies not in his locations, but in the lighting of his pieces. I initially attributed the brightness of Turner’s sun to his potential use of lead white, which many other artists of the era would have been fond of. (It’s said to be beyond replication in its glowing brightness, after all.) However, that alone cannot elevate a piece to inspire fixation as Turner’s does.

Rather it lies in his depiction of the sun, not as a cool, still dot, but as a collection of rays, waves, ellipses, etc. Turner understood, just as others during his time were beginning to understand, that the sun is not observed by the human eye as a particular shape, rather, as beams of light collecting and reflecting. As we can see, this realization served Turner well. While East Cowes Castle is not particularly sublime in nature, we are able to see this concept in Turner’s larger body of work. Sublimity is associated with grand awe or terror in the face of the natural world. This can be seen in Turner’s Snow Storm, which is a bit more expressive and conveys the sheer force of nature over man’s often futile endeavors. In his portrayal of this scene, he achieves the sublime to some degree.

Also tying in nature, there are two suns in the East Cowes Castle, The Regatta starting for their Moorings piece, one in the sky, and one reflected in the gentle waves of what is presumably the River Medina. The light spreads from the point that represents the sun, and reflects onto the landscape, sailboats, and the absolute swarm of people on the banks of the river. The people and boats stand out twofold in their warm beigey, browny tan-ness, and in the darkness that stands in contrast to the cool pale sky and bright sun. It invokes the feeling of a cool wind that blows in from the sea on an otherwise humidly tepid day. As a child of a city on the sea, I must say I like it.

Much of the paint was cracked upon viewing Turner’s pieces in person, which makes one wonder whether they cracked 150 years ago due to the sheer thickness of paint that Turner applied, or if the 150 years since the scene was first rendered have been unkind to Turner’s art. Regardless I pray that his art remains in the many free galleries of London, a city so often overcast, as a source of sunshine on an otherwise dreary day. His work is just as intended, and achieves what so many artists of his day yearned to be.