February 2008

FROM JAMESTOWN TO YORKTOWN:
ARCHITECTURE IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES 1607-1783

The Farnham Decorative and Fine Arts Society met at the Maltings for its second lecture of 2008 on Tuesday 19 February given by Roger Mitchell, who is a lecturer and researcher at the Universities of Liverpool and Lancaster. His title was “From Jamestown to Yorktown – Architecture in the American Colonies 1607-1783”.

Along with Farnham’s 25th Anniversary and NADFAS’s 40th the lecture celebrates 400 years of a permanent English settlement in America. Colonial America stretched 1000 miles on the eastern seaboard, beginning with the first settlement at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and ending virtually at the same spot 10 miles away at Yorktown in 1781 which was blockaded and the British were defeated. Roger Mitchell took us on a journey from the first settlers who struggled for survival establishing timber framed buildings for shelter using reeds from the area and close to the ships with the food to live on and exporting the local crop of tobacco. This was dried for crossing the Atlantic and sold at huge prices in England and Europe.

The style of building moved on to symmetric brick with wooden shingle roofs and then bigger houses with roof space for upstairs room. Boston became the first city with its harbour being useful for trade and the panorama was like an English city with its James Gibbs’ model churches, Customs House and Georgian style buildings. In Providence, Rhode Island the first Baptist church was in James Gibbs’s design, which is like London’s St Martins in the Field. The craftsmen used books to copy the English styles but adapting them for Americans. Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia for 100 years, is now the best restored colonial town and there were slides of the fine, balanced William & Mary College, the well proportioned President’s House in brick; brick being suitable for the rich and the modest shingle roofed, clapboarded out houses for the less so. There were pictures of grand Plantation houses in the south that could have been in England with their elegant panelled interiors and furniture. The lecture ended showing George Washington’s wooden house at Mount Vernon with its Palladian window, hyphened kitchen to the main house and the modest rooms; an interesting insight to the colonial architecture.

Chairman, Frances Ashworth, reminded members of the forthcoming 25th Anniversary celebration in July with bookings at the March lecture for Peter Medhurst’s recital and lunch for full members. Sir Roy Strong is lecturing at 8pm on 11 March at the Maltings and bookings began for the Study Day on 7 May by Claire Walsh. Don’t miss booking in March for the visit to the American Museum in Bath on 12 May with its special Titanic exhibition.

THE LION OF THE SEA – 500 years of art in Venice - Douglas Skeggs
20th February 2008

Douglas Skeggs came to give us a Study Day on “The Lion of the Sea” – 500 years of Art in Venice. It was a most stimulating and informative day, very well attended.

He explained the birth of Venice, how it rose to prominence, becoming the most powerful city state in the Mediterranean, where the meeting of East and West brought great wealth and thus a rich flowering of artistic enterprise which is reflected in the architecture of its buildings and the many paintings.

He linked the career of artists through the various periods to the society which commissioned their works, discussing among others Crivelli, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Tiepolo, their styles and techniques. He then moved on to the fall of the Republic, its bankruptcy and decadence, illustrated by the paintings of Pietro Longhi, and its rebirth as the romantic city, which inspired Byron, and such artists as Turner, Singer Sargent, Whistler, Ruskin and Monet.

Everyone came away, I am sure, determined to visit Venice again and with a new understanding of how the artisitic legend of the city has been built up.