Oxford and too much choice

We’ve had a trip to Oxford, which is somewhere we hadn’t been for about forty years. Last time we weren’t impressed, because it was completely choked with traffic, and we much preferred Cambridge. Now, of course, the traffic is under control, though we each nearly got mown down by a bike. It brings home to you how much you normally rely on your hearing when crossing streets.

Some of the rather horrible insectivorous plants
the botanical gardens seemed to specialise in.

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We had one lovely autumn day and at least it didn’t rain the next day. We visited the Ashmolean, Christ Church picture gallery, the Natural History Museum, and the Pitt Rivers, so I had four opportunities to choose my one object to take home.

Christ Church picture gallery was the most difficult. The picture that really gripped me was Annibale Carracci, “The Butchers.” I liked the way all the characters are concerned with what they are doing, so it’s like a snap shot. I liked the faces, intent and busy, not posing at all. But in spite of the realism, you could read meanings into it, for example the sheep at the forefront awaiting slaughter – was that a reference to Christ? So even after we’d moved on I kept returning for another look. BUT – if I’m going to take it home, am I going to enjoy living with a picture of butchered carcasses?  I don’t think I’ve properly worked out the rules of this game.  Have a look at the link and see what you think. It’s a pretty big painting, so the carcasses are not far off life size, too.

www.chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery/the-collection/paintings/carracci-butchers-shop

Anyway, in the end I decided that I was going to have to choose something else, because you wouldn’t want the Carracci in your lounge. It reminded me of the story of how Frith, of the Frith collection in New York, chose his paintings. They had to be things he liked to live with.  It sounds kind of anti-intellectual, art as interior decoration, but he has a point. You might like a Lucian Freud nude in your picture gallery, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to look up from your dinner and see it. So in the end I chose a Tintoretto portrait of a young man, but although liveable with, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the Carracci. So not a great decision.

Blackwell's - book heavn

The Divinity schools. Duke Humfrey's library is even better, but I haven't a
good enough camera.

In the Ashmolean, it was easier, although I was torn between a Turkish plate, decorated with carnations, and a set of Indian bird pictures, very accurately done as a natural history rather than as art. I went for the birds, although really nobody much has a house big enough to display the set.

And in the Pitt Rivers, I fell for the Inuit clothing, which was just amazing. I hadn’t realised that a new set was made every year – it wasn’t tanned, because if it was tanned it froze completely solid in the winter temperatures and was unwearable, but that meant it rotted in the summer. The work that went into it!

I really liked the Pitt Rivers; you could spend hours and hours in there, and make hundreds of visits, though there was quite a lot of gruesome stuff, which Phil really didn’t appreciate.  I think I’ve got a childish enjoyment of the gruesome – the cases on head flattening and scarification held me gripped. Surely, scarification occasionally caused septicaemia? I read that Montgomery’s wife died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite, pre antibiotics of course, so surely cutting people all over and rubbing ash and other stuff into the cuts to make sure they produced keloid scars must have killed people, too. It wasn’t discussed in the museum –a rare and disappointing omission.

In the natural history museum, of course we liked the dinosaurs. Our younger grandson spends quite a lot of time being a tyrannosaur, a spinosaurus or a utahraptor. We couldn’t help thinking of how thrilled he would have been to see all this stuff, although we probably shouldn’t encourage him to spend even more time chasing me around the flat, being a velociraptor while I have to be a lamb. He can’t say “l”, so it comes out as “You be a yam, granny.” At first I thought I was in for an easy afternoon, lying on the floor being a vegetable, but no such luck. So it was an easy decision – we’ll take the tyrannosaur skeleton, please.