An unknown V&A Cabinet - some thoughts

I'm on the cusp of handing in my dissertation and to both my delight and dismay, I'm still finding potentially relevant interesting additions. As I explained to the lovely assistant curator at the V&A last week, it's as if the bench has provided the key to many doors and I'm being invited in to explore. Two items have come to light this week and I wanted to  quickly get some thoughts down on paper. The first is related to my V&A visit, and the second is a Jost Amman woodcut which I have just discovered. I will be focusing on the first below.

On Thursday afternoon we went down to the old post office which serves as the storage for one of the most interesting museum collections in London. As we were issued security passes, the AC was there waiting to escort us upstairs to a massive lumber room with the most interesting rolling shelves contents I've ever seen. As she identified the right shelf, we looked around us, taking in the stag horn mirror, a golden bed stead, 1950s sofas, and various interesting shapes covered in white dust sheets. Like an attic of sleeping beauties, waiting for a visit from someone who knows where to find them.

Thoughts on ​Art, Funding and Conflict

Storm clouds gathering

Apparently some small world events have broken out whilst I've been studying. Thankfully my work enables me retain some semblance of a connection with the news, through reading the papers and having vaguely intelligent conversations with colleagues.

One of these colleagues is an interesting outspoken individual with some strong views. A lawyer, with strong views? Yes I know, most strive to be beyond bland but there are some out there willing to stick their neck out.

We disagree on many things. Our most recent putting the world to wrongs is the Palestine/Israel conflict, about which we profoundly clash. He has familial, emotional, and I guess, client ties to Israel; whereas I am merely a relatively well informed onlooker with horrified and baffled sense of unease about the whole bloody conflict. In my view, the forces on neither side are particularly pleasant, and I feel that there are powers working behind the scenes to prolong the agony of the average person on the war torn streets.

Hunting and the Wire Drawing Bench

First half of the panel

The Ore Mountains were not only central to Saxony because of their seams of wealth, but they also provided a hunting environment rich in game, fowl and fish. Scholars are unanimous in their commentary that for the highest echelons of society, hunting, hawking and angling as sports were an integral part of European culture, and was for some, a consuming obsession.[1] If Charles Bergman is to be believed, hunting played a part in the creation of nations; ‘royalty asserted their rights to the ownership of the forests of their countries and the hunt was closely associated with the assertion of national control by European monarchs over their lands and people’.[2] 

Jost Amman and the Wire Drawing Bench

You know when you're racing against the clock and you can see a deadline waving a chequered flag? Of course this is the time that I'm having some seriously interesting conversations with experts, as well as trying to piece together a totally wild iconographic programme. However I wanted to get this on here because it raises some points which I should probably investigate but I'm scared of venturing too far off the landscape point.

It's also entirely the work of one of the people who knows the bench best, Stephanie Deprouw. Although we have not yet met, we have had some wonderful exchanges, so any mistakes are mine, because of my terrible French.