Every home should have one

Or: Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in IKEA anymore

Further down this newsletter I’ll be announcing the release of a new print, but first I’m rather excited to tell you about a new addition to our home: oh you know, just your normal everyday Renaissance masterpiece. To explain how it got there, I need to start with a short trip 155 years into the past. (Imagine your screen going wibble wobble to indicate going back in time).

The story begins in the 19th century, when draughtsman Christian Schultz supervised the production by celebrated lithographer Etienne Isidore Hangard-Maugé of a reproduction of the Ghent Altarpiece, also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. The resulting polyptych chromolithograph was published by the Arundel Society in 1868.

Let us then fast forward about ninety years, to when the newly arrived incumbent of a small Sussex parish (my dad) found a framed print from that first edition abandoned in the cellar of the vicarage. It was brought up into the house and hung on the wall. It was huge and very heavy, but the solid walls of an 18th century vicarage were up to the challenge. At first it was thought the side panels depicting Adam and Eve had been lost, but then it was discovered that the couple were still there under the glass, their nakedness having at some point been covered with brown paper, presumably to spare the blushes of pearl-clutching visitors.

I didn’t arrive in the world until a few years after this discovery and so as a child I thought it was perfectly normal to have a massive Van Eyck painting (and nude people) hanging on your wall. The intriguing and detailed narrative images absorbed me and kept me quiet in the same way Sesame Street did with my own children 30 years later.

Now we come forward six decades from that cellar rescue and the print arrives in my home. And then another three years pass as we work out where the heck to put it and also HOW to hang it, as our house dates from the 1990s when houses were mostly built of cardboard and optimism. But finally last week, with the help and advice of my architectural restoration brother who was visiting, we (by which I mean mostly my husband) got it up securely on the landing wall. And now it’s there it looks like it was designed for the spot. A perfect fit. I could not be happier and it makes me smile every morning when I see it.

This does mean we can’t move house now as we would have to take the wall with us
- rather like removing a Banksy mural.

Here it is in place; isn’t it glorious?

And here are the rear panels, which I rarely saw as a child because I couldn’t reach to fold them shut.

Some historians think that the original frame of the altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral (the frame was destroyed during the Reformation, while the painting itself was hidden and saved) would not only have been elaborately carved but would have opened and shut with a clockwork mechanism, including music. Now there’s an idea….

Any suggestions for appropriate music? How about the musical box opening at the start of Camberwick Green? Or it could swing open really REALLY slowly to ‘Zadok the Priest’. What a build up that would be.

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‘Lush’

The print whose creation I documented over the series of five ‘The story of a reduction linoprint’ posts is now available to buy.

‘Lush’
Limited edition of 10 prints
Reduction linoprint in 8 layers plus additional hand-added details
Image size 20 x 30 cm
Oil based inks on 26 x 36 cm Somerset Satin printmaking paper
£105
(delivery to UK only, sorry)

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Threads

It’s been a week now since the launch of the new social media app, Threads, so if you are into that sort of thing you will know all about it and I don’t need explain it to you, and if you’re not then you won’t be interested and I don’t need to explain it to you.
Anyway, as I already had an Instagram account and a Facebook business page I figured I had already sold my soul and data to Meta and had nothing to lose by signing up. I am there as @stoneflowerjane, the same name I use on Instagram and Twitter.

That’s it for this week. I’m starting a new linoprint so with any luck will have some progress to show you in my next newsletter. I also have some gallery trips planned over the next few weeks and at some point I’ll report back with recommendations for things to see. Thanks for reading.

Jane