Writers of Influence @ Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens

http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/sunderland/thingstoseeanddo/exhibition/2011/01/29/writers-of-influence-shakespeare-to-jk-rowling/

Writers of Influence is open to the public for free until 27th March 2011; it is housed in the Special Exhibitions room on the second floor of Sunderland Museum. This is an excellent collection of mainly paintings and photographs of significant writers - from William Shakespeare to Dizzee Rascal. Poets (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) are juxtaposed with children's writers (A.A. Milne); pop lyricists (Jarvis Cocker) with genre novelists (John Le Carre).

Most of the works are originals courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The literal centrepiece of the exhibition is John Taylor's Shakespeare (c.1610, pictured above), the 'Chandos' portrait said to be the only one of the bard definitely drawn from life. It is great to see this in the flesh: the watchful, worldly looking Will replete with earring and modest attire. This painting is placed right in the middle of the room and is flanked by a plaster cast of John Keats' face (taken from a life-mask) to the right and an angular James Joyce to the left, fashioned from wood:

There are the household names - a selection of Catherine Cookson memorabilia accompanying her photograph (with the caption providing a salutary reminder that a third of all books borrowed from public libraries were hers, at some point in the 1980s), an odd 3D JK Rowling and a drawing of Arthur Conan Doyle, wittily depicting the author, head in clouds and chained by his ankles to an intensely etched impresson of that English legend and eccentric, Sherlock Holmes. Add to these a beaming Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Roald Dahl and a tiny, early photograph of Lewis Carroll.

There are personal favourites and inspirations; such as a lovely Patrick Lichfield photograph of Kate Bush, one of this country's greatest artists in the field of popular music:

Then there is Philip Pullman, so eloquent in his recent lecture attacking the coalition's planned library closures - http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/philip-pullman/this-is-big-society-you-see-it-must-be-big-to-contain-so-many-volunteers - photographed on the threshold of his secluded writing shed. Northern nature poet (and strong environmentalist) Ted Hughes is accompanied by his excellent quotation on Shakespeare; Thomas Hardy looks especially rueful, looking down over his considerable moustache in William Strang's 1893 portrait. There are two writers I am currently reading: Charles Dickens (in a substantially framed 1855 painting by Ary Scheffer) and George Orwell, photographed in his modest tie-jumper-overcoat apparel, by Felix H. Man c.1947. I am reading Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (Penguin, 1970) at the moment, and had just been reading his ambivalent essay on Rudyard Kipling only to be faced with both of them in this exhibition! The Kipling painting is fascinating, showing a commanding, moustachioed Rudyard sat in an ornate study, flanked by musty volumes, a dormant pipe and a nautical painting on the wall. He looks as much like an imperialist administrator as a writer, clerkly glasses perched on his nose...

Further founding fathers of English literature on display as well as Shakespeare include a decidedly portly Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1400) and a young, idealistic looking John Milton (c.1629), captured in paint many years prior to the publication of his visionary religious fantasy, Paradise Lost. In terms of the early novelists, sadly no Defoe, Swift, Sterne or Brontes, but a curious little silhouette in a notebook that is assumed to be Jane Austen.

There are key 20th century figures other than Joyce: T.S. Eliot in an appopriately cubist portrait, a Feliks Topolski impression of the visionary socialist science fiction writer H.G. Wells and a formidably sceptical, bespectacled Aldous Huxley - captured in a 1934 photograph by Man Ray. There is a grandfatherly, slightly condescending looking George Bernard Shaw, appearing in a bromide print of 1943 - with the panel containing some of his rather less than complimentary thoughts on Shakespeare. There is a Bloomsbury-school painting of Virginia Woolf; cannot say I particularly like that style of art, having seen plenty at the Tate Britain last year (I much prefer Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash).

The images are imaginatively arranged - many of them in relation to Shakespeare, with the accompanying panels containing the various writers' thoughts on him. Ted Hughes, for example, has this evocative estimation of the bard's power: "In spite of its Elizabethan ruff, Shakespeare's language is somehow nearer to the vital life of English, still, than anything written down since."

Overall, this is a fascinating exhibition; I only spent around thirty minutes in it today, but could easily have spent longer perusing and probably will be back. Much recommended, if you happen to be in the centre of Sunderland with a little time on your hands. The nearest public transport is Sunderland Central station, a mere two minute walk away.

Bryan Talbot - Alice in Sunderland (2007)

Book Review

Given my love of history, it came as something of a surprise to me that I hadn’t given much thought to Sunderland’s own history. Perhaps, not being a born-and-bred Wearsider myself, I may have had that all-too-familiar idea that many around the country seem to have – that it’s something of a second city to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. While this is arguably true in some respects, it certainly hasn’t always been this way. As such, this book, by Wigan-born graphic novelist (okay, comic artist, then) Bryan Talbot was a major eye-opener for me. And yet it shouldn’t have been so, as the clues were all there for me – for three years, I studied in a building right next to the oldest church in England, so I should have been aware that the place had some history.

Talbot’s book weighs in at a little over 300 pages and deals with two major subjects – Sunderland, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The two, we find, are indelibly linked. A third topic also rears its head, which is that of the comic, clearly an art that Talbot holds in great reverence. Not so much linked to the others, but links of a sort can be seen.

Stylistically, the book is a mix of numerous comic styles, some presumably Talbot’s own; others imitated, such as Hergé’s instantly recognisable style from the Tintin books. The book opens with the vision of a man, possibly Talbot himself, entering Sunderland’s Empire Theatre. A White Rabbit rushes past him, only to appear on the stage before his eyes – or is this another version of our author, in a mask? This, whoever it might be, is our narrator – and he takes us through various facets of his chosen topics, links them together from numerous angles, with some wonderful surprises along the way – about Sunderland, Alice and comics.

It’s the first subject, Sunderland and its history, that appeals most to me. I’d had no idea of the richness of the City’s past. It links many people to the area – Lewis Carroll, Lawrence of Arabia, Charles Dickens and Sir Henry Irving, the first actor to receive a knighthood for his work. We’re taken through many of the episodes of the past, from the cholera epidemic of 1831 to the reluctant fame of national hero Jack Crawford, whose statue currently stands in Mowbray Park. We find out the origins of the two cannons that flank Sir Henry Havelock on Building Hill in the same park, as well as where the single cannon in Barnes Park came from. We find out much about Sunderland’s landmarks, from Penshaw Monument to the artworks at the Marina. This is the tip of the iceberg, however.

The Alice in Wonderland angle has much to do with Sunderland. Carroll himself lived in and around Sunderland, as did the influential family of Alice Liddell, the girl for whom Carroll invented his famous daydreamer. That’s not where the connections end, however – Carroll’s fabulous poem, The Jabberwocky, was completed in Sunderland and bears some similarities to the famous local legend of the Lambton Worm.

The Comic angle is interesting. Not content with keeping the idea of the comic to graphic novels or strip-cartoons, he sees it as the idea of telling a story with pictures. He cites Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Beer Street as examples of the genre, as well as the Bayeaux Tapestry.

All of this is beautifully and cleverly put together, and it certainly doesn’t require an interest in all of the topics covered to appreciate it. I can imagine that even a born-and-bred Mackem would find much surprising in this book. It goes to show how little we can be aware of our history, and indeed of the wonderful things that can be found in our locality, wherever that might be, simply because we have not taken the time to look. As a result, I don’t see Sunderland as subordinate to Newcastle now, as I might have done in the past.