Art, Colonialism and Change by Stephanie Williams

If you move fast, you can just catch the fabulous exhibition Entangled Pasts 1768-Now, Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy in London which ends on 28 April.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA used the banisters of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for his magnificent piece, 'Woman Moving Up'.  Slowly, but steadily, her head a globe of the world, she heaves herself and a suitcase full of heavy baggage, up a splendid marbled staircase. Photo Stephanie Williams

Moving round this exceptional exhibition, I was struck by how much more powerfully a single work of art – rather than any number of words -- can express the pain and contradictions of history. Yet at the same time, offer a fresh perspective on the brutally contrasting and intimately entangled pasts of Africa, India, Britain and the Americas.

Of which we still know so little.

Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood, 1758,
John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

You enter the RA’s central rotunda to be greeted by a handful of fine portraits of Black men. Strong, handsome, elegant – among them works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley. Each is accorded all the care and dignity, of any of their white sitters of their time. In the centre stands a black stone bust of a man from 1758 by Francis Harwood. Wonderfully lit, it is reflected up on a series of mirrors to alternate with busts of famous white men beneath the dome. The normal order of the white world has been subverted.

This is a show that makes its points with a light touch. Huw Locke’s Armada imagines the flotillas of craft engaged in the servicing of the plantation economy. At first these look magical. Mesmerising, tiny craft: fishing boats and lighters, miniature Spanish galleons. Look closer. High-rigged slaving ships, their sails, blackened and tattered, like the death ships they were. All are realised from abandoned lengths of string and cloth, plastic, wood and rubber and are suspended like flotsam and jetsam on uneven waves from the ceiling.

Hew Locke RA, Armada, 2017–19, Tate.
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. 

Benjamin West’s The Death of General James Wolfe – celebrated in my Canadian past as one of the nation’s great heroes – was painted twenty years after his death after defeating the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759. At his feet sits an idealised First Nation man. In fact he is a Delaware, rather than any of the native tribes to be found in the locale.

Benjamin West, The Death of General James Wolfe (1727-1759) 1779.
National Gallery of Canada

As edition after edition of prints and copies of this painting, conceived as record of a great patriotic victory, were reproduced and circulated around Britain and the world, this image laid the ground for the ideal of the ‘noble savage’ — the admiring onlooker, which recurred in similar works again and again. Here it is challenged by the work of Robert Houle, a Saulteaux Anishinaabe artist, whose Lost Tribes, 1990-1991 can be seen in the next room.

Similarly, Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point series combines print-making and drawing to make the white figures who dominate well-known classical paintings, such as Titian, recede into the background, mere outlines impressed into paper, while traditionally marginalised Black figures rendered in graphite come vividly to life.

Each of these contemporary works force the viewer to assess well-known paintings from the white European canon afresh.

The Royal Academy itself comes under scrutiny for the works of art that were displayed at its Annual Exhibitions. And consider Johann Zoffany’s family portraits. A founder member of the Royal Academy, he had fallen out of favour with his royal patrons and sailed for India in 1783. Colonel Blair and His Family and an Indian Ayah shows an officer of the East India Company listening to his daughter Jane play the piano, fondly holding hands with his wife. To the right of the picture, his younger daughter, Maria, plays with a cat held by an Indian girl of about the same age. She is too young, surely, to be an ayah, the child’s nurse? Much more likely, she is the offspring of Blair’s Indian mistress.

Johann Zoffany, Colonel Blair and His Family and an Indian Ayah, 1786. Tate 

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Poems on Various Subjects,
 religious and Moral, 1773.  The British Library

I make many new discoveries.

I had never heard of Phillis Wheatley, kidnapped from the Senegambia region of West Africa and enslaved by a family in Boston, who became a poet. Writing as confidently as any white male of the time, she bitterly protested the painting made by Richard Wilson of Niobe, — in Greek mythology the archetypal bereaved mother, who weeps throughout eternity for the loss of her 12 children, murdered by the gods. Niobe was made in 1761, the same year in which Wheatley was captured.

Nor did I know Shahzia Sikander, whose Promiscuous Intimacies 2020, knits together the Mannerist tradition of the west with classical Indian art to highlight the contradictions of a one-sided history.

 

Shahzia Sikander Promiscuous Intimacies  
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry

And have fun unpicking the rich symbolism of the Singh Twins in Indiennes: The Extended Triangle from the ‘Slaves of Fashion Series, 2018. 

 

The Singh Twins, Indiennes: The Extended Triangle 
from the 'Slaves of Fashion series, 2018, © The Singh Twins 

I have always been struck by the bombastic power – and incongruity -- of British architecture set down, often by Royal Engineers according to pattern books, in every former colony from Jamaica to Hong Kong. In Primitive Matters: Huts Karen McLean projects a series of large European style homes once owned by wealthy merchants and plantation owners in Port of Spain in Trinidad onto seven huts replicating the local vernacular.

Karen McLean, Primitive Matters, Huts 2010

There is much, more more to see.  Sit for a moment in front of Isaac Julien's film, Lessons of the Hour, about the abolitionist Frederick Douglas, who questioned, What to the Slave is the 4th of July?'  Consider Edwin Long's The Babylonian Marriage Market of 1875 shown not far from El Antsui's poignant Akua's Surviving Children 1996.    University of London, Egham. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry

The counterpoint between past and present is a potent device indeed.  What a waste it is this show is not on for longer.

 

Entangled Pasts, 1768 - NOW 

Art, Colonialism and Change is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London W1 

until 28 April 2024

Photo Bill Knight

Stephanie Williams is a Canadian writer based in London and delighted to be writing for the History Girls, a blog she has often investigated when doing historical research.  Author of BBC Book of the Week, Olga's Story, the life of her Russian Grandmother, her most recent book, Running the Show, was based on an 1879 questionnaire which revealed the extraordinary characters who were Queen Victoria’s colonial governors. She is now at work looking into the back-offices of the East India Company in London to find out  exactly what went on there. See more at www.stephanie-williams.com

Rodin and the Little Japanese Dancer by Lesley Downer

‘It was impossible to hold this look for such a long time. I couldn’t help moving a little bit, and M. Rodin said, “Not so much Hanako, not so much.”’

Hanako

In 1906 Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was 67 and hugely famous. He had brought sculpture into the modern age with his powerfully muscular, uncompromising works like The Kiss and The Thinker. But his great years seemed to be behind him. Nearly a decade had passed since 1898, when he’d laboured over Balzac, but his masterwork had been rejected. In disappointment, Rodin transformed himself into an official artist, churning out busts of famous, well-paying personalities. He seemed to have lost his spark, his edge, the anger which had driven his creativity.

But he was still obsessed with capturing the body in motion. That year he went to Marseilles to the Colonial Exposition to sketch the Cambodian dancers. There he happened to pass a small hut temporarily erected in the woods with banners in front proclaiming the name of the troupe in white on a red background. Inside a small Japanese dancer was performing a death scene. Rodin stepped inside and was transfixed. He later said that there was ‘a flame which illuminated her from within.’

‘A tiny Japanese gifted with graceful form, lively eyes, a rebellious nose, feline movements.’
Hanako was a tough, resilient, sparky little woman - very little; at 38 she was only 4 foot 6 inches tall (1 meter 37 cm), so tiny and girlish that westerners assumed she was much younger.

Hanako 4 April 1908,Vienna, Austria,
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Born Ohta Hisa in 1868 in Aichi, Central Japan, she was the oldest of eight children. Her family trained their daughters to have a profession, to be entertainers, i.e. geisha. From the age of five she learned Japanese classical dance and the yakumo koto, a zither-like instrument.

When she was ten her family fell into debt. She married a man twenty years older than her and endured ten years of marriage, then decided to get a divorce. She was at her wits’ end and broke when in 1902 she heard that a Japanese impresario was looking for dancers for an exposition in Copenhagen. The impresario arranged her passage from Yokohama to Marseilles and overland to Copenhagen. After the Expo ended she formed a troupe of Japanese players and toured Germany, performing plays with titles like Bushido and Hara-kiri, playing to western preconceptions of Japan as a land of samurai.

Then they toured England. Hanako was performing at London’s Savoy Theatre when she was spotted by the American dancer and impresario Loie Fuller.

In her memoir, Fuller described her first glimpse of Hanako on stage: ‘She was suddenly able to transform herself with little movements which froze all the anguish of terror into her features. She was pretty, delicate, strange, and stood out even among her fellow countrymen.’ As for her death scene, ‘She was devastating.’

Painting by Ben Ali Haggin: Mme Hanako. 1910.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Fuller became her manageress. She didn’t think Hanako’s plays were powerful enough so she wrote some ‘Japanese’ plays herself. Each play ended in hara-kiri - not women’s suicide, cutting one’s throat, but cutting open the belly. It was completely inauthentic but westerners didn’t know or care.

Fuller took Hanako off to Paris, where she performed The Martyr and other plays, all from Fuller’s prolific pen. She was a huge success. Every play ended with the heroine’s suicide. Hanako cut open her belly with a sword so enthusiastically that the audience in the front rows were sprayed with fake blood.

A reviewer in L’Illustration, November 3 1906, wrote, ‘Hanako is a tiny Japanese gifted with graceful form, lively eyes, a rebellious nose, feline movements.’ Her death is ‘almost too realistic.’

‘An expression of cold terrible rage.’
Back in Paris after that fateful meeting in Marseilles, Rodin invited Hanako to lunch at his atelier, where he asked her to sit for him. He was burning to make a mask of her anguish as she was ‘dying’, to capture the intense expressivity of her face.

Head of Death showing nirami

After that Fuller drove Hanako to Rodin’s atelier every day for half an hour before the afternoon performance. Hanako didn’t speak French or English and Rodin didn’t speak Japanese. Hanako remembered that he followed her obsessively, demanding that she hold her face still without moving a muscle.

‘When I even moved my eyes,’ she remembered, ‘he shouted, “Stop, don’t move your eyes!” He tried to create my head of death with that cross-eyed look I made on the stage. It was difficult to hold the same expression every day. People warned me that my eyes were getting funny.’

Judith Cladel, Rodin’s biographer, writes, ‘Hanako did not pose like other people. Her features were contracted in an expression of cold terrible rage. She had the look of a tiger, an expression completely foreign to our Occidental countenances. With the force of will which the Japanese display in the face of death, Hanako was enabled to hold this look for hours.’

In later years Hanako told her family that it took a tremendous effort to maintain this pose, which was completely opposite to her normally cheerful disposition. ‘Afterwards,’ she said, ‘I was in a good mood for days.’

Head of Death
with nirami

Far from being evidence of a peculiarly Japanese ‘force of will’, Hanako’s expression of ‘cold terrible anger’ was actually a standard kabuki pose called nirami, where one eye turns inward while the other stares straight ahead. A kabuki actor can hold nirami for 20 - 30 seconds. Hanako said she could stay cross-eyed for 3 to 5 minutes. But Rodin forced her to hold this expression for half an hour. No wonder her eyes were going funny!

 
It took 67 attempts before Rodin was satisfied that he had her eyes right. He finished the first Head of Death in September 1906 and went on to create many more.

That summer, during the theatre off season, Hanako stayed at Rodin’s home in the Paris suburbs. She was relaxing in the garden when he ran out shouting, ‘Don’t move, don’t move.’ He grabbed his pencil and declared he was going to make a mask of A Meditating Woman.

‘After that he spent every morning making Head of Death and every afternoon making Meditating Woman,’ she remembered. For him it was a new lease of life.

Meditating Woman

For the next twelve years she stayed at Rodin’s every summer for 3 months, living like a member of the family. His dog slept in her room. If he ‘found her purse thin’ he gave her money. In Paris his acolytes and admirers introduced her to artists, socialites and politicians. She mixed in glamorous circles and was invited to many parties. ‘I was fascinated by the flowery social life of Paris,’ she wrote, ‘and every day was a dream.’

There were rumours that she was his lover, because they were seen on walks together. But there’s no evidence for that, added to which Hanako was also close to Madame Rodin. The old man must have appreciated the company of this bright, lively, cheerful young woman.

Hanako continued to tour. She performed all over Europe, including Sweden and Russia, and went twice to the United States. She wrote letter after letter to Rodin and sent him photographs of herself. And she always came back to Paris and resumed modelling for him.

Hanako’s last meeting with Rodin and Mme Rodin was in 1915, at the start of World War 1, when they were staying outside London and came to see her perform. Rodin died in 1917. Hanako - who must have been 50 by then - visited his tomb the next year at Meudon and wept when his dog wagged its tail when it saw her.

Photograph signed
‘To Monsieur Rodin
With lots of love from Hanako.'

She had never charged Rodin for all the modelling she did for him. The one thing he promised was that he would give her two masks - a Head of Death and a Meditating Woman. But World War I intervened and he died without doing so.

After the war she wrote again and again to his secretary and even to members of the French government and finally received the two busts.

Back in Japan, she lived in a geisha house in Gifu run by one of her younger sisters, where she was rather celebrated. Many famous artists came to visit and admire her masks. She adopted her nephew, Ohta Hideo, who married and had a child, Masako. She spent her last years doting on this granddaughter of hers, who remembers that Hanako was so tiny she had to have clogs specially made for her little feet.

Hanako died on April 2 1945, at the age of 77 - the same age that Rodin had been when he died.


Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

The Rodin exhibition at the Tate Modern in London continues until November 21 2021.

The pictures as indicated are courtesy of Wiki Commons. The other photographs are mine.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick – the Sargon Vase: an enduring story, a fragile vessel

Whenever I go to a museum or exhibition I play a game. What, if I could take one thing home with me that day, would I have? 

What I’ve realised over the years is that it is rarely the most obviously beautiful or valuable item (with some notable exceptions - hello, the Crown Jewels!) that I would choose. Instead I tend to be drawn to the ‘everyday life’ items – the things which produce that moment of sudden, blinding recognition: the people who made this, used this, really lived. Despite the differences of centuries and cultures, they were, in many ways, just like me.

That’s how I felt last week, attending the British Museum’s current blockbuster exhibition I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria. Following the political history of the Assyrian Empire – which at its largest covered the area from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the mountains of western Iran - it covers a huge geographical area and, by providing the background to Ashurbanipal’s rule, several centuries of history. 

Much of the exhibition focuses on the large narrative panels setting out important episodes from the king’s reign. These are beautiful, intricate carvings which do much to illuminate the sophistication of Assyrian courtly life. They show a deep appreciation for nature and beauty, as well as telling exciting stories – primarily Ashurbanipal demonstrating his prowess against the forces of chaos through lion-hunting or by defeating human foes. I was especially taken by poor King Teumman of Elam, who in a battle scene first loses his kingly hat, then manages to get it back, only for the victorious Assyrians to take his head instead. (The curators of the exhibition mixed modern technology and the original objects in a sympathetic and intelligent way to bring out this story.) 

Battle of Til-Tuba. detail. 660-650BC.

©The Trustees of the British Museum

The king’s library, preserved on clay tablets, is also impressive, if largely incomprehensible at first glance to a modern lay audience. There is the occasional more relatable item, such as the tablet which includes both text and a 3-D model of a lung, to act as a teaching aid to three-thousand-year-ago medical students, or the tiny tablet containing royal orders, contained with an equally tiny clay envelope. You can find out more about the Library here: https://blog.britishmuseum.org/a-library-fit-for-a-king/

But it is the smaller, humbler objects which really caught my eye. The nearly three-thousand year old gaming board, with which courtiers may have whiled away their time. Were they simply bored of hanging around at court - waiting for the next lion hunt to start, say - or were they avid gamblers, whose fortunes were won and lost on the progress of the game? They may have played their game seated at tables with feet depicting beautifully realistic deer hooves or lion paws which still survive, long after the main article of furniture has vanished. What of the people who made and used the clam shells, intricately carved and turned into decorative cosmetic containers, the pride of a fashion-conscious beauty’s dressing table?

Decorated shell, probably 630/580 BC

©The Trustees of the British Museum

The final element of the exhibition was, however, the most moving: a section setting out how much of the archaeology of the region, both that in museums and in situ on sites has been destroyed in recent years by Isis/ Daesh. It’s a frightening reminder of how much that we see is but a tiny fraction of the stories that are there to be told, when so much destruction can take place in only a few short years. 

So, what would I take home with me, to take pride of place in my Cabinet of Curiosities? Obviously the answer is - "actually I wouldn’t" - but if I could have one thing, the exquisite Sargon Vase – a tiny glass vessel, made with care and skill in the eighth-century BC and still intact despite nearly three thousand years of warfare, abandonment and yet more destruction, seems a fitting symbol to me.

The Sargon Vase, 721-705BC

©The Trustees of the British Museum

The Michelangelo Trail by Mary Hoffman

The History Girls blog began nearly four years ago, on 1st July 2011, and had its origin in a desire on my part to let the world know I had written a novel about Michelangelo's sculpture of David. The sitehas grown to be so much more than that but it is quite satisfying to come full circle and write about the new suite of educational materials, based on that novel, that I am going to write for an innovative new company called Time Traveler Tours & Tales.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

The book was a historical novelist's joy to write because it offered the perfect opportunity for fiction. So much was known about this famous figure: we have the contract the sculptor was given, the date he made the first chisel cut, the minutes of the committee meeting to decide where the sculpture was to be displayed (where Leonardo da Vinci was present).

And in the middle a great big hole. Who was the model for this, probably the most famous sculpture in the world? Or was there even a model at all? Maybe this David sprang from the imagination of the sculptor, who, it is worth remembering, was twenty-six years old when he asked the Operai del Duomo for the old block of Carrara marble that two previous artists had abandoned and which just lay about for forty years  in a building behind the Duomo in Florence for people to trip over.

My first visit to Florence was at the end of my first year at university, when I spent a month there. It was probably the most influential four weeks of my life, directing my interests and enthusiasms from then on. I already knew I preferred Michelangelo to Leonardo but this sojourn, in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, confirmed it.

In my new project I'll be devising an app to take readers on a tour of the city visiting "hotspots" connected with the sculpture and the sculptor. And it occurred to me that readers of the History Girls blog might like an expanded version of my list - a sort of "print out and keep" guide to which works of art by Michelangelo you can see in the city I have now visited so many times I have  lost count.

Bronze of Michelangelo's head by Daniele di Volterra

• Casa Buonarroti Michelangelo never lived here but it houses two early works: the bas reliefs of The Madonna of the Stairs and The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths.

• The area behind Brunelleschi’s Dome on the Duomo (now the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo). This is where the workshop was where Michelangelo made the David statue. On the day it was moved from there to the Piazza della Signoria the doorway had to be broken down to allow the giant statue to be trundled out. It took three days to move it to its final position.

• Santa Croce church. Michelangelo is buried there (under a hideous tomb by Vasari) and lived near there. His mother is also buried there.

• Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (Oltr’arno). The frescoes by Masaccio (Big Tom). It was here that Michelangelo’s nose was broken by Pietro Torrigiani when they were both teenagers and protégés of Lorenzo de’ Medici and were sent there to sketch the frescoes. (You can see the broken nose quite clearly in Volterra's bronze above.)

• Piazza della Signoria The David statue was here for hundreds of years. Also this is where Savonarola had his Bonfires of the Vanities and where he was executed.Michelangelo and several of his brothers were followers of Savonarola.

• San Marco convent Michelangelo’s older brother Lionardo was a friar there, as was Savonarola. It houses great art by Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio etc.

• The Bargello for Davids by Donatello and Verocchio (Leonardo’s teacher) and Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo, Brutus, Bacchus etc.

Brutus

• Palazzo Medici Riccardi Where Michelangelo lived with Lorenzo de’ Medici.

 

• Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno. Where Michelangelo dissected bodies. His wooden crucifix (the earliest recorded work) is in the Sacristy.

• Piazza Santa Trinita Where Michelangelo had his very public argument with Leonardo. 

• The Medici Chapels behind San Lorenzo church. Michelangelo designed the tombs for two of the de' Medici family. His statues of them are flanked by Dawn and Dusk, Night and Day.

• The Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo. This and the magnificent staircase to it were designed by Michelangelo.

• The Uffizi houses the Sacred Family painting by Michelangelo.

• And of course. The Accademia where the original David now stands. But don't neglect to look at the slaves/prisoners and St. Matthew who line the gallery leading up to David.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

On my first visit to Florence, I and some other students, none of us studying Art, managed to blag our way into the Casa Buonarroti, which was in restauro at the time and saw the two reliefs and the very touching little wooden crucifix, now in Santo Spirito, which was waiting to be authenticated. None of us was in any doubt.

On my last visit, a year ago, Sarah Towle of Time Traveler Tours and Tales and I went to the Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo and looked through the door leading to the underground hiding place that the sculptor used on a visit to the city, long after he had made the David. It is not open to the public but the whitewashed walls are covered with his drawings.

Michelangelo's relationship with Florence was fraught. As a protegé of Lorenzo de' Medici (the "Magnificent"), he was loyal to the family, but after Lorenzo's death became a Republican. Florence itself had an on/off love affair with the powerful de' Medici family, expelling them and welcoming them back more than once.

My relationship with Florence and Michelangelo has undergone no such upheavals. I can't wait to work with Sarah Towle to bring this Renaissance sculpture to life for 21st century children and teenagers. You can read more about the project below.

But in the meantime, if you are going to Florence this summer, do follow the Michelangelo Trail. I'm only sorry I won't be doing it with you!


Time Traveler Tours & Tales Campaign

Lest We Forget... by Clare Mulley

There has been much in the press this month about Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the impressive art installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing one British military casualty during the First world War, that flooded the Tower of London moat earlier this month. For many this was a beautiful and powerful statement of the size of Britain's sacrifice, for others, a mawkish display of nationalism. The wonderful Ring of Remembrance Notre Dame de Lorette, an elliptical structure engraved with the names of the dead of all nationalities in northern France, is another powerful but controversial war memorial. The who, what, how and why may be contentious, but what is generally agreed upon is the importance of remembering.

A while ago I was due to give a talk on the female special agents of the Second World War at Maddingley Hall, near Cambridge. En route I stopped to admire the beautiful stonework outside and bumped into a man doing the same thing. It transpired that he was Harry Gray, the stonemason, now artist, who had carved some of the pieces during restoration works several years ago. We soon discovered a shared interest in the two world wars, and fascination with the very different ways that the dead are remembered and, on occasion, honoured. A few weeks later Harry invited me, and my husband Ian, who is a sculptor, over to his studio for lunch.

Harry explaining that the foliage on Corinthian columns
are acanthus leaves, with leaf from his garden.

It turned out that Harry has worked on a number of war monuments and memorials, among other public art commissions. His first was the much admired frieze for the Animals at War memorial in Park Lane, but my favourite is the stunning Battle of Britain monument at the White Cliffs of Dover.

Approached from the ground, the Battle of Britain monument shows a young pilot, sitting, looking to the skies, calmly waiting for his call to action. Seen from above, however, from a pilot’s perspective, the figure is sitting at the centre of a propeller hewn from the white chalk of the ground. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking design that literally works on several levels, calling into question not just who these men were and what they were fighting for, but how their courage, skill and sacrifice has left a permanent mark on our country.

Pilot from the Battle of Britain monument

Battle of Britain monument from the air

Harry had only heard about the proposal for a Battle of Britain monument when he was commissioned to produce the stone base for the winning piece. Having rather cheekily asked if he could submit his own design, he was delighted to get through to the short list. Lord Tebbit, himself a former RAF pilot, was on the judging panel, and when he saw that Harry’s pilot figure was to be hewn from Forest of Dean sandstone his only comment was that it would weather badly. Harry protested that London pavements are made from sandstone, and ultimately it was Tebbit who backed his design. The Queen Mother unveiled the monument in July 1993. Earlier that day Harry had been checking everything was as it should be when he was surprised to see a woman let through the security cordons to join him at the monument statue. “At last,” she told him, “You’ve made my brother’s grave”. Her brother had fought in one of the Polish squadrons in the Battle of Britain, and had been lost over the channel.

Harry has since won many public commissions, and you can visit his website here. The current piece that speaks most loudly to me is his project for a public artwork to celebrate William ‘Bill’ Tutte’s code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Coded signals intercepted by Bletchey Park were printed as perforated tape, or ‘Baudot’ code. Reflecting this, Harry is producing a sculpture comprising of five steel sheets each of which are perforated like Baudot code.

Baudot code 

Harry's 'coded' metal sheets

When seen from a key viewpoint marked in the paving, the perforations reveal an image of Bill Tutte through the metal sheets. In this way the portrait image itself is encoded, with Baudot in place of DNA, showing people the essence of the man in face and form.

Bill Tutte, reduced to dots as a guide

Three of the six sample sheets for the memorial

I live in Saffron Walden, within walking distance of beautiful Audley End House which was used during the Second World War as a training base by the Cichociemni, the ‘Silent and Unseen’ Polish special forces. It has always amused me that my last biography was of one of the very few Polish-born special agents, Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, who never set foot in Audley End because she was trained and employed directly by the British. Nevertheless I am honoured that over the last few years I have been invited to lay a wreath for both Krystyna and the Cichociemni at our local war memorial on Remembrance Sunday. 

The Cichociemni are commemorated with a stone urn in the grounds of Audley End house, but I have often thought that it would be wonderful to have a more permanent memorial to Krystyna somewhere in Britain. I wonder now if it should be made from Polish soil, or how else to best capture the spirit of this passionate patriot and fighter for freedom. But then, perhaps writing biographies has its similarities with Harry's kind of art, in seeking to capture and present a picture of their subject that is more than skin deep?

I was appalled to hear this month that cuts to the Imperial War Museum budget mean that access to the library and archives, which were hugely important during my research for Krystyna's biography, is now going to be severely restricted if not closed, and the school education packages may be stopped. I find it incredible that, at this time of remembrance in particular, we can even consider risking losing one of the most important repositories of these stories. If you feel the same, please take a moment to sign the petition against these cuts, so that we can continue to remember, honour and consider, in an informed way.