City of contrasts
Andrew Lambirth
London, 1753 British Museum until 23 November
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the 1 British Museum was founded by an Act of Parliament, the first national public museum in the world. The London in which it stood was the largest city in the Western world, a thriving centre for international trade with a population of 700,000. It was a centre, too, of artistic excellence, with men of the calibre of Hogarth, Dr Johnson, David Garrick and Thomas Chippendale demonstrating
their various rare talents at full throttle.
The 18th century was a high point in the capital's history, and yet there were huge and very visible discrepancies between rich and poor. As Casanova said, 'In London, everything is easy to him who has money and is not afraid of spending it.' Those who were not so fortunate sought oblivion in cheap gin — 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, straw for nothing', as the saying went.
This city of extremes and contrasts is now celebrated in a fascinating exhibition entitled London, 1753 at the BM. It is mounted in the galleries devoted to Prints and Drawings for that is what comprise the majority of the 300 or so exhibits, and at first glance the display might seem a trifle dusty and scholarly. It is, in fact, the reverse, animated by strange and moving collections of objects. Take, for example, the foundling tokens left by mothers to identify their children. One is a bone fish, a gambling token. Another is the clipped half of a silver shilling from the reign of Edward VI (i.e. 1547-53). A third is an enamelled bottle ticket marked 'Ale'. Each suggests the most poignant story. It is perhaps not by chance that the exhibited copy of Dr Johnson's great Dictionary lies open at the page defining 'libation'.
Elsewhere are two groups of porcelain figures, one from the factory at Bow, the other from Chelsea, produced in emulation of the fashionable Chinese porcelain imported by the East India Company. I particularly liked the Bow figure of a ratcatcher and the Chelsea fortune teller group, done after Watteau. Another group of the Chinese ware itself, including colourful snuff bottles, is so assembled to remind us of the objects on the mantlepiece in Hogarth's famous satiric print cycle 'Marriage a la mode'. These kind of cross-references and connections bring the exhibition to life and make sense of its accumulation of objects.
Social history is recreated for us by such items as a set of steel spurs and season tickets for a cockpit in St James's Park, by the condoms of animal membrane to be fastened with pink silk ribbon (for the purpose of preventing disease not pregnancy), and by the pair of blue-green silk shoes trimmed with silver lace and lined with white kid. A painted stone shop sign presumably for a tavern called The Ape and Apple is a very satisfying piece of chunky design. But the most bizarre exhibit must be the dried body of a monkey grafted ingeniously to the tail of a fish, to convince the credulous that it is the mummified corpse of a merman.
If the groups of objects do draw the eye more readily at first than the prints and drawings, there are nevertheless many twodimensional images here of the very highest quality. Among them is a clutch of Canaletto's pellucid drawings, of London Bridge and Westminster Bridge, for example. I have never liked Hogarth's print of the great radical John Wilkes, though I have a great deal of sympathy for the man himself. Now to see the drawing hung next to the print is revealing. The drawing is a far more human and convincing interpretation because less caricatural, which just goes to show what can he lost in the mass production of the printing process.
Other fine things include William Hoare's black and red chalk drawing of Frederick Zink, painter in enamel, a refreshingly informal image of the artist at work. Next to it is Paul Sandby's watercolour of the Lambeth Drug Mill, for the grinding of medical preparations. Sandby's two broad panoramas of the river from the gardens of Somerset House are particularly striking. I've always been interested in the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and here are silver admission tickets to Vauxhall, stamped with classical motifs, and depictions of the great rotunda at Ranelagh, 150 feet in diameter with an orchestra at its centre and tiers of boxes around it. People took their entertainment very seriously in those days when fairs lasted from two to six weeks, and Bermondsey Spa was thought perfect for a Sunday jaunt. Gibbon was being sniffy when he declaimed, 'The pleasures of a town life . .. are within the reach of every man who is regardless of his health, his money and his company.' In 1753, London. as ever, was bursting with life.
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