National Museums Liverpool Blog - Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Here's a few progress images from work on the International Slavery Museum which will open in August. The other images are on our Flickr page and include the Igbo compound in the west gallery.

the outer wall of the Middle Passage immersive

This image shows the Middle Passage immersive in the middle gallery. You can see its curved outer wall - there are two walls which form almost a peanut-shape which you go inside. The text on the wall,  in case you can't read it, says:

My hopes of returning home again were all over.
Cuguana, 1787

dis poem
shall speak of the wretched sea
that washed ships to these shores
of mothers cryin for their
young swallowed up by the sea.
Mutabaruka, 1985

Museum of Liverpool curator Kay Docherty has turned roving reporter and celebrity photographer after attending a special event last Friday. It's all in the name of work of course, as she explains.

On Friday Yoko Ono was at John Lennon Airport to cut the ribbon for a special ceremony to mark the departure of the first scheduled airline service from Liverpool John Lennon Airport to New York. As you can see from from the Flickr slideshow of photos from the airport, the aircraft on this route have been specially painted with the famous self portrait drawing by John Lennon and the strapline “above us only sky”. The aircraft has also been named 'Across the Universe', following a suggestion by Yoko. This new flight is the first airlink with New York from Liverpool and it took off almost 100 years to the day that the first passenger sea link departed from Liverpool.
 
Many thousands of people have travelled between New York and Liverpool through the many years of maritime trade and emigration between these two great cities.

Dinky Toy model of Cunard White Star Liner, Queen Mary, set number 52. Lid on left, background of New York skyline behind model inside the box. Accession number MMM.1990.13.24

This Dinky Toy of the Queen Mary in the collections of the Museum of Liverpool, complete with a New York skyline and Statue of Liberty, highlights one of the many strong and historic connections between Liverpool and New York.

The Flickr slideshow of photos from Friday also includes an image of Harry Goodwin, photographer for Top of the Pops 1964 to 1973, next to one of his famous photographs of John Lennon which he took only a few weeks before John was killed in 1980. Harry's new exhibition 'Legends' was also unveiled at Liverpool John Lennon Airport on the same day. The exhibition features many stars from the world of pop, showbiz and sports including Jimi Hendrix, George Best and Muhammed Ali.
 
As part of the Museum of Liverpool on the Road project, passengers at Liverpool John Lennon Airport will soon be able to see a Bayko model of Speke Airport from our collections on display - watch this space for further details.

Clare Hamilton's Sunday programme came from the newly-reopened Sudley House. You can catch it on BBC Radio Merseyside's 'listen again' facility. Featured are decorative arts curator Robin Emmerson, talking about the history of the house and the Merchant Palaces exhibition, and George Holt (aka Paul O'Keefe) taking about his life and collection.

The story of the Imperator seems to me, Stephen Guy, to be one of the great ironies of the First World War. The Imperator was built by Germany in an attempt to create the ultimate luxury liner but she ended up as the flagship of Britain’s Cunard fleet. This symbol of the prestige of the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II – complete with a huge bronze Imperial eagle figurehead on her bows – was launched just five weeks after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. As a result, changes were made to both her hull design and the equipment on board to increase safety.

The Berengaria undergoing conservation work. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

Imperator was the last word in luxury and comfort  - for the First Class passengers, at least. The 52,226 ton, 919 ft long leviathan – the biggest ship in the world at the time (and larger than Titanic) – boasted incredible attractions. Its public rooms included a relaxing Palm Court, a smoking room in the style of a Bavarian hunting lodge and huge Pompeian marble baths befitting a Roman emperor.

Her maiden voyage was on 20 June 1913 and she worked on the Germany to New York run until just before the outbreak of the First World War. Anxious not to loose such a valuable ship, officials of the German Imperial Navy ordered her to stay in port. Imperator spent the war moored to a pier on the River Elbe. After Germany’s defeat she was handed over to Britain as part of war reparations – compensation for losses such as the Lusitania, sunk by a German submarine.

Imperator was acquired by Cunard and first sailed under its colours – without the eagle - in June 1920 following a refit in Liverpool. Her name was later changed to Berengaria after the wife of Richard the Lionheart, England’s crusader king. Berengaria regularly sailed between Southampton and New York and is still the largest liner ever to enter Liverpool docks.  She worked largely without incident on the transatlantic run for many years until she was withdrawn in 1938.

There is a stunning model of the Berengaria in Merseyside Maritime Museum (shown above). It is 19 ft long and can be viewed from all angles, making a memorable opening exhibit in the Lifelines gallery focusing on Britain’s Merchant Navy. Also in the museum collections are six photographs of the ship’s luxurious public rooms filled with fittings of the highest quality. There is an early publicity brochure published when she was the Imperator in 1913 which proclaimed: “The world’s largest ship embodying maximum comfort and safety for all”.

You can see more on the model of Berengaria on our main site.

A new Maritime Tale appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo.

I haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve busily working on the web pages for our forthcoming exhibition, Out of this World: The Art of Josh Kirby  before I go off on maternity leave. The pages aren’t ready yet – but in the spirit of the current Star Wars 30th anniversary celebrations I thought it would be good to share this spectacular artwork. Many of you will know Josh for his work on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, but did you know that in 1983 he also created the original artwork for a ‘quad’ format poster for the British release of Return of the Jedi?

Return of the Jedi. Finished artwork for quad poster, 1983. Used with the permission of the Trustees of the Josh Kirby Estate.

Now I’m no expert, although like many of my generation, the Star Wars theme still brings a nostalgic tear to my eye. But I'm reliably informed that this particular image is pretty special, as it is one of very few that features the Royal Guards (red gowns, upper right), Boushh (masked, lower right) and Boba Fett (masked, firing weapon, far left). The poster was painted for Feref from an Eddie Paul design to promote the film in Britain.

Josh Kirby also has one or two other surprises up his sleeve (do the names Monty Python or Alfred Hitcock mean anything to you?) so don’t forget to check back  when the exhibition opens on 15 June or bob along to the Walker Art Gallery for a closer look.
 

The Sawfly

Guy Knight at World Museum Liverpool has sent me more photos from the fieldwork the entomology team are conducting at Smardale Gill National Nature Reserve in Yorkshire. You can see them all on our Flickr page. One of the more exciting finds so far has been the sawfly Macrophya albipuncta (left), known from few localities outside Scotland. There's a bit more on the research in this previous post.

Guy also thought like-minded people might be interested in the Tullie House Museum virtual fauna website.  There is a new area of the site linking the museum's collections with the wildlife records database, so you can examine their insect collections, with details of over 25,000 specimens available so far.

Helmet worn by a hoplite soldier

Well, we might as well be honest about it! Apparently there's a football match of some sort tonight - I wouldn't know, I only have eyes for Everton - and curator Ashley Cooke thought it appropriate to wheel out something vaguely Athens-related for the occassion, so here goes. Actually, we do have a pretty substantial Greek collection so this post isn't entirely without its merits.

This helmet is bronze and dates from around 460BC. It was beaten from a single piece of metal into a pretty distinctive style, and would have been worn into battle by a heavily-armed solider, known as a hoplite soldier. This hoplite soldier was from Corinth, a city state nestled between Athens and Sparta. During the fifth century BC the city states of Sparta and Athens were at war with each other and Corinth fought with Sparta against Athens, so there's a good chance this helmet was worn in a battle against Athenians. 

 

How could anyone leave this cute little chap behind?

As the popular exhibition Shipwrecked closed last weekend, I've had a look at the statistics for the survival game from the exhibition website.

Designed to test people's survival instincts, the game asks you to choose which 5 items from a possible 20 you would take with you had to leave a sinking ship to swim to the safety of a desert island. Some of the items are extremely practical for surviving in the wild, but we also tugged at your heartstrings by including Fluffy the hamster on the list. Surely (or so we thought) nobody who looked into his big dark eyes could bear to leave him behind?

We obviously didn't count on how cold hearted and practical people could be in a survival situation. Out of 23,146 votes cast, only 2% of people voted to save poor Fluffy.

Pet lovers can take comfort in the fact that he wasn't the least popular item to save - only 1% of people voted to take the sweets, MP3 player, credit card, plastic bin bags, plastic bowl, the complete works of Shakespeare and the wristwatch. Some of those items are considerably more useful than a hamster on a desert island!

The exhibition may be closed, but you can still do the online activities, including the survival game, and learning semaphore on the Shipwrecked website. See if you can resist the hamster's charms.

Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais

Recently saw this Guardian article on Millais and a new Tate exhibition. Reading it I felt quite sorry for Millais and I'm a bit puzzled about his work needing rescuing. A lot of people like 'Bubbles', which is on long loan at the Lady Lever Art Gallery and will be returning there once the Tate exhibition is over. Ok, it might seem a bit sugary and sentimental to our modern eyes but that's a lot of people's cup of tea and fair play to them.

In case you don't know Millais didn't paint 'Bubbles' to advertise soap; instead he intended the bubbles and the innocence of the child to represent the fragility of life, and the painting as a whole is meant to encourage us to ponder the brevity of our existence. Some people think that Millais wasn't best pleased when it was used to advertise Pear's soap, but he'd sold the copyright so there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it. Others suggest that he was happy with the sale as long as the reproduction was of a suitable quality

'Bubbles' actually fits in quite well at the Lady Lever, partly because we've a good few Millais's in the collection (you can explore them in this Millais online feature), but also because of the gallery's history and links to the soap industry. Lord Leverhulme began buying art, not just Millais's work, in the late 1880s to use in advertising for his 'Sunlight Soap' brand. Pieces like The Wedding Morning, Girl With Dogs, Besieged, His Turn Next, A Dress Rehearsal and The Centre of Attraction were purchased to promote soap, and many a home still has a print, postcard, jigsaw or tea tray depicting one of them.

So, if 'Bubbles' is your cup of tea you can read more about it here or listen to a gallery talk on our main site.

Curator of Egyptology, Ashley Cooke, tells us about a student project he's working on.

Carolyn (antiquities curator) and myself have been working with three students as part of a museum work experience the department offers to archaeology and Egyptology students. Rebecca Cessford, Nicola Davies, and Michael Fairclough are students in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool University. As part of their degree course they need to gain some experience of museum work and have been working on a variety of projects including help piece together hundreds of pottery sherds.

Group of sherds showing hieroglyphs including the ankh (sign meaning 'life')

Painting on Egyptian pottery is not very common before the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC), but appears often in the late 18th Dynasty. Painted vessels can be colourfully decorated with floral motifs using cobalt blue and other mineral pigments mined from the deserts of Egypt. These vessels were not your everyday containers and would originally have contained luxury liquids such as wine.  This blue-decorated pottery was first recognised on a bigger scale at the palace of king Amenhotep III (1388-1351/50 BC). The painted pottery in the Liverpool collection comes from the palace site at Tell el-Amarna, built by Amenhotep III’s son, king Akenaten.

The museum has an extensive collection from Tell el-Amarna – ranging from gold rings from royalty to reed sandals worn by residents of the town.  Like many large museums, World Museum Liverpool gave financial support to British archaeologists working in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum sponsored excavations at Tell el-Amarna in the 1930s and in return, the museum received a share of the artefacts that were found.

More photos of the sherds can be found on our Flickr page (the last three images).