Annie in Oxford

Extra Bits

2009-08-15T10:43:00.005-04:00

Trumpet voluntaries in the chapel! A nice way to close out the week.

This interactive map offers a great virtual tour of our very special digs for the past week. Sadly, it doesn't include the constant chorus of bells.

And this video, a marketing piece for prospective students, as well as short youtube clips, show off the beauty of the quads and buildings.

Last Day

2009-08-15T10:19:00.003-04:00

A final treat was touring Blenheim palace and gardens today, spoils of war for one of the Dukes of Marlborough. Follow the link to find out which one. I can't remember. In one of the state rooms, at one end is a huge Reynolds family portrait, at the other a Sargent capturing the later family where the Vanderbilts have brought money and heirs to the then duke's flagging fortunes. Bio, Alva and Consuela, tells all apparently.

The grounds are Capability Brown's crowning installation, many thousands of open acres with carefully selected framing "natural" plantings. Many families strolling about. Elizabeth, one of our instructors, lives nearby and had brought her 2 children and Rex the springer spaniel to say goodbye.

We paraded through the room where Winston Churchill was born, where there was displayed a sweet little white linen infant vest, beautifully darned in a couple spots, that he had worn.

Final Class, Concluding Thoughts, Free Afternoon

2009-08-14T12:11:00.004-04:00

So Jefferson found English artists, gardeners, builders incorporating classical elements, political statements in literary allusion. He clearly takes from England a sanction for what he wants to do anyway. He finds Whig support for liberty and sees how it's been incorporated into cultural expression. He sees on this adventure and remembers creatively when he gets home.

For my part, the afternoon afforded lots of sunny weather for seeking out some of Oxford's treasures --- Addison's Walk around Madgalen College's Water Meadow, the funky Museum of Science in the original Ashmolean Museum building, Exeter College [Philip Pullman's Jordan College] with its charming garden seating on the wall overlooking Radcliffe Square. The Camera and the Bodleian are Right There and you are in a garden bower. But wait, there was just time ...

I had to climb the tower of St. Mary the Virgin for the View. The golden tree in this picture is in the Merton College garden, my home for the past week.

Stowe Gardens

2009-08-13T17:13:00.005-04:00

Swans by the Palladian Bridge.

Great house, follies, grotto, Paladian Bridge, antique temples and sculpture stretch across hundreds of acres in

Capability Brown's vast landscape garden.

Lectures, Botanicals, Evensong, & Pub Crawl

2009-08-12T19:11:00.006-04:00

Magpie on the lookout as we walk to morning lectures in the Examination Schools, a huge Victorian-era building where students from all colleges come, formally gowned (wearing subfusc), to take final examinations (schools) at the end of term.

Keeping to the period of Jefferson, Justine Hopkins lectured on British artists on the Grand Tour and on painting the English landscape. The young gentlement were sent abroad with a tutor [a bear handler!] to keep the experience academic! The GT experience encouraged painting epic/heroic scenes with classical literary references, antique elements.

Interestingly, the GT afforded only views of Roman copies of Greek statuary since Greece was under Turkish control during the first half of the 17th century & off limits. They brought home tons of swag until the first museum of antiquities opened in Rome in 1630. By the time of Jefferson, landscape painting was including elements of the exotic and the sublime, moving toward the Romantic Age.

And Richard Wilson traced the development of English gardens, a turning away from the formalized European model. Landscape design was consciously natural, picturesque, combining beauty pleasing to the imagination with strong literary allusions, harmony, and sublime vistas inspiring awe. The picturesque landscape has variety, movement, irregularity; it is nature framed. 18th century garden sculptural elements often contained a political message. Temple of the Worthies at Stowe salutes liberty, Whig values espousing democratic rather than devine right monarchy.

But before all this Food for Thought, I'd taken an early morning walk around Christ Church meadows along the Isis where rowers were diligently practicing and bullocks lowing.

Late afternoon treat was a tour of the Botanic Garden guided by the passionate conservator Louise.

The garden was established as a collection of specimen plants in 1621, the oldest in Britain, and the oldest tree in the place is this English yew, which according to Louise, is featuring in botanical applications for cancer treatments.

Tolkien, in what's reputed to be the last photo of the man, leans against his favorite tree in the garden, the ancient Austrian pine.

My favorite is Victoria cruziana, clearly known to Beatrix P!

The day closed with Evensong at Christ Church cathedral. Alice's daddy was dean. Here's his niche:

After lowering the bollards ...

2009-08-11T16:36:00.012-04:00

... today's field trip begins as the coach lumbers off to Hampton Court and Chiswick House, where Jefferson visited in March 1786 and where he might have noted to self, "Some dome!"

The architects in the group show me the repeated frieze motifs -- egg and dart, green man, swimming dolphin ?:

At Hampton Court, an enfilade of state rooms decreasing in size runs the length of the William & Mary era section of the palace.

And this cunning feather duster is one of four adorning the corner posts on the royal bed.

These elephants feature in 15th century tapestries woven with gold & silk threads.

Had the weavers ever seen an elephant?

We saw the 17th century Wren addition piled on top of William & Mary's baroque chambers and Henry VIII's Tudor chimney pots, the 250 year old Capability Brown grape vine still producing in the greenhouse, green budgeries flocking in the treetops, and a stately heron perched on the fountain in the Privy Garden.

Lectures and Walking Tour

2009-08-10T17:02:00.006-04:00

Justine Hopkins' lecture on British portrait painting pointed out that by mid-18th century the new middle classes had become subjects, as much as the rich and powerful. Gainsborough and Reynolds exemplified the two developing streams, with G painting who people are, capturing his subjects' humanity, personality in conversation pieces, and R, using classical compostion, painting WHAT people are, formal paintings that include assembled symbols emblematic of a defining moment of success & power.

This golden age of the amateur was the last moment when one could know everything about something and something of everything.

On our walk, Richard Guy Wilson and Justine pointed out English architecture Jefferson would have seen on his 1784 landing at Cowes, Portsmouth; his 1786 10 day garden toot with Adams; and his 14 day layover preparing for departure back to Philadelphia in 1789.

Jefferson and Adams came through Oxford, but what they saw is all speculative since he left no written comment, but maybe the 4-tiered frontispiece with its stacked orders by Henry Savile at Merton College.

Maybe Hawksmoor's Clarendon Bldg [Oxford Press]; Wren's Sheldonian and the original Ashmolean, the first purpose-built theater and museum; maybe Gibbs' s Radcliffe camera- all standouts in the heart of Oxford.

I liked this decorative oxhead detail on the Bodleian:

The day ended with Merton gardener Lucille leading us along the paths lined with all manner of greenery for which she only knew the Latin names, plus a 17th century black mulberry [a mistake, not the right kind for silk production], a huge chestnut and dawn redwood, the croquet lawn ...

And a brilliant PhD candidate in Middle Eastern history, an unlikely but enthusiastic docent shared rich details about the medieval chapel, the bells, Wren screen, the stained glass and brass lecturn that escaped the reformation purges ... Perhaps music there as the week's finale on Saturday night.

Sunday, August 9

2009-08-09T16:42:00.006-04:00

Guided tour through Merton College included the Mob Quad, oldest in Oxford, 14th century, and the gothic chapel where all alumni can be "hatched, matched, and/or dispatched". Merton College alumni include Sir Thomas Bodley, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan.

We'll be having our lectures in the Examination Schools where students from all colleges in the University come at the end of each term, sub fusc (in formal gowns) for "schools" (exams).

My room is in Rose Hall, reminiscent of St. Andrew's, meals in the College Hall, vaulted great room in use since 1277.

Well, Jefferson and Adams visited Oxford in March-April 1786,

but didn't comment.

How could they see the Radcliffe Camera and say nothing?

To compare the worlds they came from and were visiting: in 1790 New York, the largest city in the new republic, totaled 33,000 pop., London , 700,000.

Exploring - Day 1

2009-08-08T14:08:00.004-04:00

Bedazzled from the splendor, the hordes of tourists from every spot earth [What about the global recession?], and sleep deprivation, I walked the streets, explored tiny alleyways and strolled paths along gardens and meadow.

The old buildings are mostly oolitic Cotswold limestone, honey colored in today's bright sunshine. The round building is the Radcliffe Camera, a private reading room for the Bodleian Library.

I enjoyed a half pint and a "matured cheddar" sandwich in a pub called the Bear, open for business at that spot on Boar Lane since 1272.

My camera's eye can only capture some few details. This is the decoration above a doorway on the Christopher Wren Sheldonian Theater.

Here, apparently the public library, though nobody was loitering about the lovely entry way:

Dreaming Spires?

2009-08-01T18:26:00.002-04:00

Matthew Arnold's poem Thrysis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough (1866)

includes these lines describing the view of Oxford from Boars Hill: "And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,/ She needs not June for beauty's heightening".

Background Reading

2009-08-01T16:53:00.006-04:00

Perfect timing! Here is this -- just out, and a great read about botany as a major impetus behind 18th century global exchange and exploration:

By the time Jefferson and Adams toured Stowe and other gardens in the 1790s, it was 60 years after Bartram in PA & Collison in London began exchanging seeds and seedlings. And that's just the beginning. I'm so glad to have read this book.

The adventure begins ...

2009-07-30T11:27:00.001-04:00

Here's the course description that enticed me to sign on. How could I resist?