Recent stories of note:
“New book celebrates William Butterfield, a master of High Victorian Gothic architecture”
Peter Howell, The Art Newspaper
Oxford’s thirty-six constituent colleges run the architectural gamut, from the storied thirteenth-century halls of Univ (University College) to the Danish modernism of Catz (St. Catherine’s). Then there’s the red-brick, white-striped Lasagna College, as it is affectionately called, though its government name is Keble. The distinctive college, founded in 1870, was designed by the English High Victorian Gothic architect William Butterfield, who also designed a striped chapel for Balliol so hated that it was considered for demolition. (The classicist Benjamin Jowett referred to his designs as “un-English styles and fancies,” and John Ruskin is said to have called Keble “a dinosaur in a Fair Isle sweater.”) For those curious about Butterfield’s controversial buildings, a recently released monograph by Nicholas Olsberg, The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times, will do the trick.
“First Impressions”
Robin Simon, Literary Review
Some pairs are so common as to be clichés: peanut butter and jelly, Tom and Jerry, et cetera. The same goes for J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the almost exactly contemporary English landscape painters whose shared inspiration and divergent approaches have led them to be compared over and over. A new book on the artists, however, saves its readers from tedium, writes Robin Simon for the Literary Review. Nicola Moorby’s Turner and Constable thoughtfully illuminates the two painters: their vastly different temperaments, their respective rises to renown, and, of course, their affecting landscape paintings, which New Yorkers are lucky to have at their fingertips in such collections as the Met and the Frick.
“Prehistoric Vehicle Tracks Suggest New Timeline for Human Migration”
Tessa Solomon, ARTnews
Thanks to the invention of the wheel, most of us probably don’t need to know what a travois is. (It’s an A-frame vehicle, made from two poles and drawn by dog, horse, or human to cart heavy loads.) They were primarily used by pre-European North Americans, who were thought to have settled the continent some fifteen thousand years ago. But a team of English archaeologists in New Mexico have discovered travois tracks dated to around twenty thousand years ago, meaning that North America has been populated much longer than was originally believed. The researchers then tested out their own travois back in England to confirm the tracks matched up—reinventing the wheel, indeed!
