Time, It Was...

...and what a time it was...

I promised something more about yesterday's visit to Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire, so here we are. The house itself is an imposing Palladian edifice, designed by Thomas Paine and built in 1733 for the Winn family, on the site of a medieval priory. In the ownership of The National Trust since 1953, it houses a fine collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture, a substantial library and some artworks of note; two of which were pointed out to me by Steve on our visit there and are of particular interest to me personally. The first is "The Procession to Calvary", by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which, though difficult to see in the now customary - and necessary, from a conservation point of view - stygian gloom, is nevertheless magnificent.

The second, however, is far more accessible, in terms of access, scale and lighting: "Sir Thomas More & His Family" [pictured above], a 1592 copy of a lost painting from 1527 by Hans Holbein the Younger, by Rowland Lockey. Commissioned copy or not, this painting is utterly exquisite in its execution, and its beauty can be observed - so rarely, for a painting of this quality and period - right up close, without intervention of either electronic alarm or liveried goon. I have seen quite a few artworks that have left me spellbound in whole or in part, and this one is no exception: in particular, the passage of painting that is the group of three woman to the fore-right of the composition; More's daughters, Cecily and Margaret, and his wife, Alice. These three figures are outstandingly rendered: luminous in comparison with all the others featured, and the fabrics of whose clothing are detailed in such a way as to rival Holbein's own works; in the particular of the fur trimming to the top of Alice's bodice, which, even under the closest scrutiny, is almost photo-real in detail; the brushstrokes that elicit the quality of the material just melting away behind the illusion of the real. I have to say I was truly transfixed and frankly blown away by it.

Oh, I should just mention an artefact housed at Nostell of - on the face of it - a much humbler and more prosaic nature: a long-case clock, whose movement is almost entirely made of wood. So how, one might hazard, in comparison with such fine, and much older, artefacts as these paintings, can a such an apparently commonplace timepiece matter? Well, it can, and it does; when the timepiece in question was made by John Harrison, the man who eventually [see Dava Sobell's excellent book "Longitude"] sorted out how to build a chronometer accurate enough to make sailing the high seas a safer and more predictable exercise than hitherto. The apparently simple clock on display was one of the stepping-stones on Harrison's long, painful and, much-travailed against by the establishment and authorities [who effectively shafted this man of working-class origins over a period of half a century or so], journey to establishing maritime temporal norms and founding modern horology in so doing. A true genius, and a hero of mine, on so many levels...