Grumpy heads north

Last week I enjoyed a splendid long weekend in North East England, visiting some stately homes and museums, and cycling in the Pennines. 

Picture: Harewood House

First stop was Harewood House, with its stupendous Robert Adam interiors (partly done over by Charles Barry in the nineteenth century). I know the house well - I've even looked at Adam's original designs at the Soane Museum - but nothing prepares you for the experience of walking through these wondrous rooms. The Chippendale here is some of the best furniture ever made - the Diana & Minerva commode, the great mirrors, the state bed. Chippendale's library desk was sold in the 1960s and is now at Temple Newsam, a nearby museum with an encyclopaedic collection of English furniture. It looks great at Temple Newsam, but it's a shame they don't lend it back to be seen in the room it was designed for.

Many of the old masters at Harewood were collected in the twentieth century, at a time when many English stately homes were selling off their treasures. There are some duds, and some of the best were sold off in the later twentieth century (including Titian's The Death of Actaeon in the National Gallery), but fine things remain - although the portrait claimed as a Titian is clearly no such thing. Virtually the entire ground floor is open to visitors, but the upper floors are private. That makes me wish there was a more substantial guide book with fuller details about the rest, as the plans for the upper floor were more carefully thought out and more grand than in many great houses of that time. 

I was impressed by the organisation and display at Harewood - far better than the ghastly National Trust. Barriers are regrettable, but clearly necessary when you see how badly some visitors behave in old houses. The room stewards were excellent. Highly commended, and well worth taking a full day to see it properly. 

Picture: Landmark Trust

Picture: Landmark Trust

Mrs Grumpy and I stayed at the Banqueting House at Gibside, a magnificent eighteenth century garden building owned by the Landmark Trust. It was designed by Daniel Garrett, who assisted Lord Burlington. There's a grand drawing room (left), and a small bedroom with outstanding plasterwork on the walls. The setting is amazing, with a view down to a pond with a colony of Great Crested Newts.

A descendant of the builder of our holiday cottage founded the Bowes Museum, which was next on my itinerary. 

Picture: Bowes Museum

The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle is an incongruous French chateau rising above a small provincial town, making quite a contrast to the Georgian gothic banqueting house.

The collection is a charming mix of paintings, furniture, decorative arts and archaeological finds from different times and places and of very mixed quality. Well-known pictures by great masters like Sassetta and El Greco are hung with some mediocre wall-fillers. The dense display makes a tremendous impression, and even some of the minor works are interesting. There's a feeble copy of Raphael's La Perla that's worth seeing because it gives a good sense of the background scenes that are now much darkened in the original. There's also some good furniture including an English cabinet incorporating a superb Boulle marquetry panel and a wonderful Thomas Hope bookcase.

Despite these riches, I was disappointed by the Bowes. Their greatest painting - a Goya prison scene - was on loan ('somewhere in Italy' a guard grunted at me before demanding to see my ticket). The main exhibition was of a well-known fashion designer. It's bad enough that a museum prostitutes itself to promote a major fashion house. Worse is that the loud pop music accompanying the exhibition blasts into the picture gallery above, ruining the experience.

The wall text is weak and sometimes inaccurate. Here's what it says about the copy of La Perla:

This painting is a copy of Raphael's La Perla, which is now in the Prado, Madrid. The original picture belonged to Charles I who considered it to be one of Raphael's finest paintings and the pearl of his collection. The King and his adviser, Diego Velazquez's, admiration for this work may explain why it has been repeatedly copied and reproduced.

Philip IV of Spain called it La Perla. Charles I would surely have called it The Pearl!

Other exhibits were badly displayed. The French fountain mask below is mounted with big modern industrial bolts protected with poor-quality glass giving off a nasty glare.

Picture: MS

Picture: MS

The Bowes has a big 'social media' presence and has sent out 4,500 tweets, but can't get its wall text right. It holds great works of art, but it promotes frivolous fashion shows. It has some splendid large picture galleries, but it ruins them with blaring pop music. This museum has the wrong priorities. It has betrayed its founders and it cheats its patrons.

The trip was timed to coincide with a cycling event in the Pennines, superbly organised by Wiggle. Ernest Hemingway said "it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them." There was much sweating, and much coasting last Sunday. I attribute my mediocre performance entirely to the two punctures I suffered, and not at all to my own unfitness.