Steve_Bamlett_blog

On First Visiting the Newly Re-opened Auckland Castle @aucklandproject on 14^th November 2019

Of all the riches coming available in Bishop Auckland, I was least interested in the opening of Auckland Castle and thought there was enough, an excess of enough, in the Trevor Gallery and its wonderful exhibitions which opened months before the Castle proper. But so wrong was I, I forgot to take my weekly look at Poussin’s Triumph of Pan, whilst it is with us.

What follows is a merely impressionistic (first impressionistic) account – no doubt riddled with errors of understanding.

One reason I was so wrong about this wonderful and near-living exhibit is that I had underestimated the power of modern curation. This is the most wonderfully curated experience. This is not least because it defies all the supposed truths about curation. This is an exhibition where you can sit on the furniture, peruse the books, read the letters (in facsimile copies of course) that illustrate the histories associated with the fine objects of art and domestic and political social history. Good curation need not be afraid of being historically selective. In the great dining room where Bishop Trevor held dinner parties, the table is laid as for such a dinner with speech bubbles, in the manner of eighteenth-century cartoons adorning the table with the kind of comments that might be heard, or overheard, at such dinner about the Bishop’s unfashionable attitudes to slavery and his deliberate attempts to defy British Anti-Semitism.

Central to the latter was the conscious decision to adorn his walls with Zurbarán’s Twelve Sons of Jacob collection. Purists might scoff at the reduction of these great paintings to such a contingent reading, and not the usual gallery presentation such as could be seen in the Prado in Madrid, the Meadows at Dallas or The Frick Collection in New York when they were displayed there recently. But they should not. The space of the Dining room allows great freedom to stand and gaze. The absence of wall plaques forces you to seek information about their rich iconography as paintings and colour values not just to passively absorb received opinion. The tour takes you through rooms that emphasise different manifestations of the Prince Bishops – from a wonderful visual animated cartoon presentation of the origin of the Prince Bishops in Border Was between Scotland and England that leave you in the eighteenth century and the themes progressively revealed in the rooms upstairs – once welcomed through the more than impressive portal of the Throne Room.

Each room takes a moment and reconstructs how a certain Bishop might be seated and what he might be doing – writing, for instance, letters about the strange confluence of the mine-owning and ‘spiritual’ interests in interaction. On a first visit some things will be got wrong and my memory of names has faded before I got home. How powerful, though, to see how the Bishop of Durham who led the Bishops in the House of Lords to oppose the Great Reform Bill of 1832. More powerful still to see the room in which conflict between miners and mine-owners was mediated by a Bishop. In this room, you sit on a period-appropriate sofa, and watch what you had thought to be wallpaper of the period progressively stripped from the walls to see underground scenes of well-proportioned semi-naked miners beneath that cover. Then these underground scenes open up to surface scenes of mining militancy. The whole is a wonderful introduction to the splendid Mining Art Gallery which visitors may see later in their Bishop Auckland day.

See an original 1830s wallpaper in the next room only semi-restored and feel the power of not restoring objects and surfaces properly. It is as if you were seeing time itself exhibited, in at least one of its manifestations. In Bishop Jenkins room (I could not forget that hero of my own youth). It was him of the Honest to God exchanges he supported with Robinson against non-authentic approaches to a ‘good God’, him marching with the Miners to the representations of him on an age-appropriate TV in news items and the latex figures of Spitting Image (the one where he disabuses the Archbishop of Canterbury from a belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy). See all that on that smallest of small screens whilst one sits on period-appropriate armchairs. On rising we look at his music tapes – George Michael indeed – lying around the room and pick them up, just as in the late nineteenth century library we were enabled to peruse )hold in our very hands) a Bishop’s books.

This is curation of the highest order. It enables differentiated responses to the whole and its parts , and the relationship between these. In future visits, I will pay more attention to the religious paintings from the Baroque to the nineteenth century ‘realist’ versions of Biblical scenes, especially of Jacob. This held surely the campest painted ‘ladder’ to God I have ever seen.

So just first impressions – full no doubt of erroneous knowledge. But true experiences of objects from the past must be tolerant to such mistakes – to the process of learning itself as a discovery that occurs over time and at variant paces over varied domains.

I had never thought such riches would be made available. When the Spanish Art Gallery opens, for which the Art Fund has bought an El Greco Crucifixion, we will find Bishop Auckland now a centre of global art – a place from which to search the fine Spanish, and other, art in County Durham. But also a place to re-evaluate mining, the relationship between lost experience that has been undervalued, like the art of Tom McGuinness, and that, like Carracci, possibly overvalued. People will need to see what the Coal Board cleared from the landscape of County Durham to see through into its past and the context of the great Christian collectors, including our own great Jonathan Ruffer (the first time I’ve ever thought a financier great), who made it possible for the place to become what it s becoming.

These confluences between traditions were once better understood than they are now popularly. One of my own experiences I still treasure is finding an edition (discarded from Wiltshire libraries) of Sid Chaplin’s My Fate Cries Out. This novel traces the end of the importance of lead mining in the Dale, the growth of coal mining and the role of coal-mining Bishops up against radical popular political traditions. This novel born in the imagination of a County is, unlike other Chaplin stories, now forgotten, but it pays respect to ways that sought to understand how histories interacted in this county. The new Auckland Castle does the same. Here’s a meeting between the family farmer-miner hero and –

He looked at me, and that look laid me bare. There was something sinister in it; yet, if I am not mistaken, a touch of compassion. Then he wheeled his horse about and rode away at a gallop. And, dull-witted though I may be, I realized (sic.) that I had come face to face with the Bishop himself.

Chaplin (1949:57)

Of course this is part projection. The Bishop (crabbed with greed and corruption) is also the compassionate father of this good-looking dimwit. It is like Luke Skywalker meeting Darth Vadar for the same time.

Before going though, don’t forget the Bishop’s Chapel and the sumptuous gold-plate in its vestry (Stuart royalist as it is). I need to know about the provenance of those striking angels in the Chapel, because they move me so much. But the roof of the Chapel alone (now restored to full colour effect with its wonderful eagles – claws facing the altar) is worth the entry fee.