British Museum makes Roman army life fun for all ages

As the daughter of an art historian, it never occurred to me that museums weren't standard territory for childhood fun until my own contemporaries started having kids. Only then did it begin to dawn on me that most people didn’t put culture at the top of their family outing options, and that many children considered the idea of spending time in museums both a chore and … gasp! … boring. Why had I never felt this way?

Quite simply: my mother had a unique talent for bringing art and culture to life for children. Trailing along in her wake, I never realised that she was the one turning places like The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty Villa and the Victoria and Albert Museum into worlds of fantasy and wonder.

Thankfully, her superpower is no longer unique. Many are reinterpreting their collections and adding hands-on experiences to bring the past to life for children of all ages. The British Museum’s new Legion: Life in the Roman Army exhibition is a gloriously entertaining example. The curators have teamed up with Terry Deary, writer of the Horrible Histories series, to create an alternative path through the show for the young, and young at heart. Legion has received rave reviews across the board for its gorgeous design, exceptional artefacts and meaningful insights, but it’s this outreach to young people that impressed me the most.

You’re greeted by a cartoon rat named Claudius Terratus who’s decided to join the army to see the world, gain his citizenship and reap a juicy pension at the end of his service. He pops up throughout your visit to highlight the difficulties and pleasures of the life he’s selected, often accompanied by things to touch and do. You can see if you’re tall enough to make it into the legion, and see how you compare to the tallest-ever Roman. You can lift weights equivalent to the average pack of a soldier to see how you might fare on a march. You can play with knuckle bone dice. You can even put on a helmet and grab a shield.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many children in a major exhibition, much less having so much fun. Curators around the world need to take note.

Sceptical academics, meanwhile, needn’t fear. The children’s track sits beside a serious deep-dive into this fascinating topic. My friends and family who’ve seen the show include army veterans, military historians and specialists in the Eastern Roman empire. All were impressed.

There are things of great beauty here, from a bronze head of Augustus to ceremonial helmets to one of my British Museum favourites … the Molossian dog that usually sits in a gallery that is too often closed to the public. It’s good to see him taking pride of place. There is, as you would expect, a lot of evidence of war, from the best-preserved Roman shield in the world to swords to horse armour. There’s a lot of evidence of everyday life, from letters home to an almost perfectly-preserved legionaries’ sock.

Poignant touches throughout make this the story not just of an empire or an army, but of people. The tombstones of the soldiers who never made it to that retirement; especially one shown with his grieving father. The armour of a man who died in the famous massacre of Varus’ legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The skeleton of a soldier who died trying to help the citizens of Herculaneum survive Vesuvius’ eruption.

There is something for everyone in this exhibition. Happily, that includes small people who might think museums are boring. Make some time to introduce them to a Roman rat and his horrible adventures, and you might just open a door to a world of fantasy and wonder they can enjoy for the rest of their life.

Legion: Life in the Roman Army is on at the British Museum until 23 June.

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Joanlee’s Playbook
Want to get your kids to museums but don’t have something as cool as the British Museum’s take on the Romans to help you through? Here are three of my mother’s best tactics for getting young people involved.

Go treasure hunting
Pick one thing … dogs, crowns, swords, etc. … and set children out on a treasure hunt to find as many of that object as possible. This is particularly effective if you have two or more kids on your hands, especially if you offer a small amount of cash to be spent by the winner in the museum gift shop at the end of the visit. The hunt makes them actually pay attention to what’s in each room.

Be a time traveller 

Tell your young people they have access to a time machine for a one-way journey. Because of some kindof impending disaster (make it nasty, kids love that), you need to move to some other time in history. The kids are using the museum to do some research. Where are you going to go and why? What is life going to be like? What are you going to bring with you? What type of people will you set yourself up as when you go? Why not book a meal out after your museum visit and let the kids report back on their decisions over the food?

Go shopping
The kids have just won an enormous lottery and everything in the museum is on sale. They can buy three things. What would they buy for their palatial home and why? Where would they put it, or how would they use it? If they had to put the things in order, from what they’d pay most for to least, what would their order be? A variation on this, particularly useful in traditional art museums full of paintings, is to tell them that they can bring one artist back to life to paint their portrait. Who will they resurrect and why? What surroundings will they be painted in and what things will they have painted with them?

These days, almost all museums have education teams specifically dedicated to bringing their collections to life for young people. They’ll produce guides, games and videos that are often free. For many more ideas, seek them out and use them. Many are downloadable before your visit, so you can do some preparation as a family and turn your day out into a special event.

Fashion, social aspiration and pure loveliness combine in the Tate's "Sargent and Fashion" show

It’s one of history’s great ironies that after going to all that trouble to get rid of monarchy and aristocracy, modern Americans are utterly captivated by them back in the Mother Country. My university friends stateside, for example, are far more engaged in watching and speculating over the Princess of Wales’ sick leave than any of my British colleagues.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Americans might have declared political independence but they still looked to Britain as an arbiter of style and culture from their earliest days. American money chose to build mansions that reflected English country houses. They vied to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy. The campus architecture at many top American universities apes Oxford and Cambridge; my sorority quadrangle in Evanston, Illinois, was designed to look like a Cotswolds village.

The height of this Anglo worship must surely have been the late 19th century, when vast amounts of American new money was trying to look old and believed that all things English offered the best fast track to becoming establishment.

Artist John Singer Sargent is one of the greatest representatives of this age, and one of the most artistically significant American expats to sink his roots in England. Those old v new, American v. England stories are lusciously represented in Tate Britain’s new show. It gives us both the artist as an example of the expat-gone-native, and lots of Americans keen to let the Sargent fairy dust polish off some of their New World edges. There are plenty of Brits here, too, but they tend to be the edgier, artsy ones. Even at the top of his game, Sargent’s American-ness would have put him slightly on the outside of the establishment. Such is the fate of the American cousin as immigrant, no matter how long he or she lives here.

This is not the focus of the show, however. It's a perspective I bring to it as an American who’s spent half her life in England. The curator’s objective … and a fabulous one it is … is to get you paying attention to Sargent and Fashion.

Portraits are always carefully composed to make a statement, but the late 19th century took this to extremes. Society was changing, people were leaping up ladders and, for some, power and wealth were growing exponentially. People wanted to show off, and Sargent was the man to help them do that. The show introduces us to an artist who worked much as a modern stylist does today, taking total control of someone’s clothes, accessories, and how they moved to convey a particular message.

Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck did the exact same thing, of course, which I’ve written about in reviews of previous exhibitions celebrating both men. But Sargent is so much closer to us in history that we have far more descriptions of what it was actually like sitting for him. We also, gloriously, have some of the clothes. 

The first gallery lays down the premise in pink glory. Here is Sargent’s magnificent portrait of Aline Rothschild Sassoon, a socialite, artist and intellectual who draws you in with her kind eyes and warm smile. She’s enveloped in a black cloak with a pink lining that gapes open on the diagonal to create a pink slash across the painting. That slash makes the image. It’s somewhere between salmon and Barbie pink, and it jumps out vividly from the blacks of her cloak. This portrait is in a private collection and I’ve only ever seen photos of it; they simply can’t convey how magnificent that pink lining is. Even more magnificent is the fact that the actual cloak stands in a case next to the portrait, so you can compare the reality to what Sargent created. It’s obvious that he twisted and pinned the garment into shapes it never would have taken on its own to get his vision across.  

This sets the mood for the rest of the show. (And will probably leave you weak with desire for a black, hooded opera cloak with a pink lining.) 

We meet Mrs. Fiske Warren, who wanted to be painted in a favourite green dress but was cajoled (or bullied, one suspects) into a light pink number borrowed from someone else while her daughter leans against her enveloped in a wrap of a darker shade. Sergeant has chosen a background of medieval antiques, deep greens and burgundies, out of which the two women shine like candle flames in the darkness. It’s the same trick as the pink slash in the opera cloak, but bigger. 

Then there’s Mrs. Sears, who adored bright colours. One of her Worth gowns is on display here, a sumptuous design but in an unnatural greenish yellow it would take a supremely confident woman to wear even today. It would certainly grab all the attention in the room. Sargent dissuaded her from colour and painted her in a white gown, bringing all of our attention to her personality.  

It’s a real treat to see the famous portrait of Ellen Terry playing Lady Macbeth next to the actual costume. Its bodice was knitted to mimic chain mail, then had green beetle wings attached all over it to give sparkle with a throbbing, Slytherin-esque menace. 

Any fan of fashion will love the clothes on display here, many from the iconic House of Worth. The design details and tailoring are breathtaking. As the corsetry must have been. Everything designed for the women looks painful to wear.  

Not so the men, of course, who look dashing and more than a bit rakish. One small but interesting

diversion you can listen to on your phone while exploring the show is speculation about the sexuality of both Sargent and some of his sitters. The commentator suggests they felt emboldened to express more of themselves in portraiture than they ever did in their public lives.  

If W. Graham Robertson’s portrait isn’t a gay icon, it should be. Despite the summer heat at the time of painting, Sargent made the young artist, writer, collector and friend of Oscar Wilde wear a long, black overcoat a size too small for comfort. Who knew anyone could be so sexy swathed in that much wool. For the ultimate in male sex appeal, however, look a few pictures to the left where Parisian doctor Samuel-Jean Pozzi was talked out of his standard black suits and into a full length red dressing gown and Turkish slippers. He is beguiling. 

Beyond all those wonderful clothes and personalities there’s much to admire here about Sargent’s painterly mechanics. He was a contemporary of the impressionists, and indeed close friends with Monet. You can see similarities to their style in the way his seemingly rushed, almost abstract dabs of paint melt into the perfect impression of lace, jewellery or other fine detailing when seen from a distance. But when it comes to faces he’s almost photo-realistic, given us dynamism and personality that’s obviously very specific to the sitter.  

This show has divided reviewers, with a horrified Guardian giving it just one star while the Evening Standard gushed with five. How you feel about it tends to correspond with how much of an artistic purist you are, and if you consider fashion worthy enough to be categorised as art. Call me frivolous, but I’m all for the frocks and the fabulousness. And I think Sargent would be, too. 

Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain until 7 July. And if this sounds good you should probably check out Diva at the V&A, which I suspect has a similar vibe. It’s next on my list.

Much-maligned Milton Keynes deserves more credit, both for modern living and heritage

Poor Milton Keynes. It is the butt of endless jokes. Friends from there say the typical reaction when they

tell people where they live is “oh, I’m sorry”. In a country that considers an important indicator of class to be inheriting one's furniture rather than buying it, and where a poky little cottage that’s charming and historic sells for twice its new-build alternative, a characterless “new town” created from nothing in the ‘60s will always have quite the reputational battle on its hands.

News Flash: Milton Keynes isn’t that bad. 

I recently spent a week there and discovered a metropolitan area that’s well-designed, threaded through with abundant parkland, is served by excellent and mostly pothole-free roads, and has more EV charging points than anywhere else I’ve visited in the UK. I’m not the only one to notice: the town has just made The Sunday Times’ “Best Place to Live” list for the first time ever.

OK, I admit, the town centre is a featureless, soulless collection of modern blocks and vast parking lots. There are few people visible because everything is designed to park and come indoors.  It is the most American place I've ever encountered in England and, as such, is very odd. 

That bit, however, is just a few square blocks within a sprawling and salubrious metropolitan area. The housing spreading out from the centre seems to offer something for everyone, from sleek modern apartment blocks to cozy developments that reproduce historic architectural styles. Everything I saw was clearly designed to integrate green space and was threaded through with walking paths.

The best part, from my resolutely old-world, charm-seeking perspective, is that there are gems of historic England threaded into the outskirts if you know where to look. One of my friends, for example, lives less than two miles from the town centre in an early-Victorian worker’s cottage across from fields still bordered by buildings that belonged to an ancient abbey. 

Just a little further out I discovered Great Linford Park (picture above), a collection of historic buildings, gardens, ponds and meadows around a Georgian manor house. The  Grand Union Canal stretches along one side, with festively-painted canal boats now used as holiday homes adding to the scene. Everything in and around the park is beautifully maintained, has plenty of parking and sits beside a historic village high street complete with a proper thatched pub called The Nag’s Head. We're only 50 miles north of London but interaction with people seems different than in the southeast. Strangers make eye contact and chat happily.

A little bit further along the canal, sitting beside Wolverton Road, you’ll find The Black Horse. It’s another historic pub, but much larger and solidly in the gastropub category. We had a fabulous dinner here. The weather was dire but it’s easy to imagine how wonderful it would be to sprawl in their canal-side gardens once the sun returns.

Like any part of heritage-packed England, Milton Keynes can lay claim to historic blockbusters on its doorstep.

My first port of call would have been Woburn Abbey, just 20 minutes away. The Palladian pile is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Bedford. It markets itself, along with places like Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, as one of the Treasure Houses of England and has an art collection that would make many museums weep with envy. A dining room filled with an obscene number of Canalettos is a highlight. And the gardens are smashing, too. At least from what I remember on my last visit, probably 25 years ago. My memories weren’t to be refreshed, however, as the whole place is closed for a multi-year renovation.

England’s greatest landscape garden
My second choice, 25 minutes in the other direction, was Stowe Landscape Gardens. It was not only open, but the ideal place to take one’s canine companion. It’s a pity the weather has been so wet, windy and grey, but the place is spectacular in all circumstances and they provide a handy dog washing area before you return to your car to ensure you won’t be taking their mud home with you.

Stowe took shape across the 18th century and those involved were the design superstars of the age: Charles Bridgeman, Capability Brown, William Kent, etc. Most people are content with one or two garden follies. The Temple family wanted more. Around the house a whole classical world of temples, monuments and grottos appeared. Wandering here is like stumbling through a Poussin landscape, minus the people in togas. There are multiple temples (a play on the family name). A Palladian bridge. Commemorative arches and columns. Stick a few amusement park rides in and you could rebrand the place RomanEmpireWorld. Thankfully, nobody went for that moneymaking scheme so you’re left to wander through an idyllic landscape of peace and quiet.

Well, mostly quiet. The house at the centre of all of this is now a school and the Silverstone racetrack is too close for comfort. Both result in unwelcome noise occasionally cutting through your pastoral idyll.

History and politics nerds will enjoy an extra layer of interest as they wander around Stowe. The Temple family were heavyweights in the Whig party: aristocratic, liberal, enlightenment thinkers who faced off against the Tories for much of the 18th century. American readers, if they dig back into their memories of the Revolution, will remember that the Whigs tended to be pro-American and might have prevented the conflict had they been in charge. Instead it was a Whig prime minister who negotiated the peace treaty to end the war.

In the decades before that cataclysm, the Temples arranged their garden follies to reflect their political beliefs. There’s a path of virtue and a path of vice, with architecture and planting giving you clues as to which you’re on. Unsurprisingly, vice features a lot more confusing twists and turns through deep woodland, where virtue offers up long, gentle views and nicely curated paths. Back then, even the choice of column capital style or decorative scheme said something about your political beliefs. If you’re in any doubt, it’s made clear in the Temple of the British Worthies. 

This arcade of portrait busts features obvious people everyone could agree to endorse, like William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I. They sit, however, which people like John Locke … radical philosopher whose writings are credited with sparking both the American and French Revolutions … and John Barnard, who pushed through a law making stock jobbing illegal in the wake of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. The bubble was basically a Ponzi Scheme that saw its early investors (mostly Tories, and particularly the prime minister at the time) get very rich while many others were ruined. Given that few people today know the ins and outs of Georgian politics, all this stuff can seem quite arcane, but if you take a guided tour all will be revealed. Stowe certainly makes one hunger for a more gracious age when people used gardening rather than social media vitriol to define their beliefs.

A lesser-known Elizabethan jewel
My greatest discovery of this visit was Canons Ashby. The Elizabethan manor house is in the same direction from Milton Keynes as Stowe, but another 20-30 minutes on, and is also a National Trust property. If you didn’t want to linger, you could easily do both in a day. Canons Ashby is one of those

charming spots that, thanks to a combination of family neglect and lack of cash, didn’t get overly “improved” by successive owners. While there were modernising touches throughout the ages they're small, and the overall feel is of a time capsule back to the 17th century or earlier. 

The “canon” in the name comes from the officials of the Augustinian priory that was once here. The house you see today is typical of so many that sprung from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Up-and-coming families with lots of cash bought shuttered religious establishments off the government, used the old buildings as a quarry for their new house and built something fresh to proclaim that they’ve arrived. In this case they left part of the old church but turned it into a private chapel a stone's throw from the house. It's now a strangely oversized and beautiful medieval relic on a quiet country lane.

The house feels more medieval than Elizabethan as you enter it through a courtyard and into an old-style great hall. Things get much grander as you move on to a stolid Jacobean staircase and panelled reception rooms. The blockbuster sites are on the next floor, however, when what’s otherwise a relatively modest house yields up a sitting room with a preposterously over-the-top vaulted ceiling dripping with ornate Jacobean plasterwork. This complements a two-story chimney breast festooned with columns, crests and swags, still retaining its Elizabethan paint. The grandeur is so unexpected I gasped out loud when I entered. The guide told me it’s not an unusual reaction.

Beyond that is a bedroom that has original Elizabethan wall paintings. These were discovered by accident, when problems with the roof forced workers to take down the panelling in the room and revealed what had been covered beneath. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. 

Those two rooms alone are worth popping into the house, but there’s plenty more of interest. That includes a sitting room downstairs with faux marble columns painted by Elizabeth Creed, a Regency-era artist and cousin to the owners. Creed’s paintings behind the altar in the church are worth walking up the lane for, and a surprisingly elegant servants dining hall is another highlight as it's leant dignity by painted panelling moved here in some long-ago renovation. 

Outside, the terraced gardens aren’t large but they offer pleasant walks and dogs are allowed throughout. The views are lovely because the house and gardens are on the crest of a hill, so the gardens “borrow” the landscape sweeping away into the distance.  

And more to come 

My list of Milton Keynes-anchored sightseeing would have been longer had we been later in the year and had I done my planning a bit better. Sulgrave Manor, ancestral home to one George Washington, is only open Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Something I discovered on the Wednesday. Boughton House, one of the best examples of the English Baroque, wasn’t yet open for the season. Rockingham Castle is one of a constellation of heritage properties orbiting nearby Northampton and was the setting for the BBC’s adaptation of By the Sword Divided in the 1980s. 

That show that kindled my infatuation with the Civil War and Restoration period and, arguably, stoked the passions that eventually led to me moving here. So while others may be dismissive about Milton Keynes, I'm already looking forward to my next visit. I have a lot of territory left to cover, and some excellent pubs to recover from sightseeing within.

Angelica Kauffmann gave us strong heroines and a female take on history 200 years early

The run up to International Women’s Day is a poignant time for the Royal Academy to unveil its Angelika Kauffmann show. While the global day of celebration naturally focuses on the rights and achievements of contemporary women, it also tends to prompt the re-discovery of those whose achievements have been forgotten, or severely downplayed, in a history mostly written by men. 

Kauffmann is a perfect example. 

In her lifetime, she was a superstar of the art world. The great and the good sought her out for their portraits. Her epic history paintings graced the finest buildings. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy in London, and her studio in Rome became an essential stop for aristocrats on the grand tour. In her time, her name would have been regularly grouped with Gainsborough and Reynolds. These days, most people know them … but not her. This show aims to redress that balance.

It is a luscious exhibition full of people and landscapes that are easy on the eye. If you are someone who loves Bridgerton for feel-good entertainment that wraps you in a cosy bubble of rich, attractive people, you will be very happy in these galleries. Everyone sports a flawless complexion, pale as cream except for delicate pink blushes and rosy lips. Gorgeous clothes fold, cascade and drape around fit bodies. Most critically, eyes sparkle. Kauffmann doesn’t quite come up to the mastery of the smile that made last year’s Frans Hals show such a joy, but she is world class at painting eyes that radiate merriment, intelligence and jollity. Look at the scandalous but exquisite Emma Hamilton (above), or the charismatic thespian David Garrick (below). These are rooms full of people you’d follow on Instagram and pay dearly to party with.

Serious pundits of the art world will take my Bridgerton reference as a criticism. It’s not. In fact, it’s why Kauffmann represents her age so well.

In many ways, we are closer to the Georgians than to the buttoned-up, etiquette-obsessed Victorians and Edwardians who are nearer to us in time. Georgian London was an age of celebrity, often criticised for style over substance. Women were a long way from even, but there were famous female names in the arts, politics, and literature. Sexual mores were loser than they were to become. Artists searching for their truth didn’t typically plunge into disturbing depths, but rather looked for a composite of positives to give us a person’s best self, a landscape’s ideal look or a building’s most perfect iteration. Think social media airbrushing apps for an earlier age.

This isn’t just all about beautiful people, however. In her time, Kauffmann was particularly famous … and deeply unusual … for being a woman who embraced epic history painting. These, not portraits or landscapes, were considered the highest form of art by the Georgians. By their nature they were exclusive and male-oriented. They often focused on battles or warriors, generally full of thrusting, semi-naked men who it wouldn’t be considered appropriate for women to paint. More significantly, history paintings tended to explore nuances of ancient civilisations or classical myth that you had to be extremely well-educated to grasp. 

Your average shopkeeper was unlikely to look at a scene and instantly understand “those must be the Horatii boys taking their oath,” much less discuss the relevance of the story to modern politics over their port.  Women ... even rich ones ... tended not to get the educations that opened that world to them either. Nor were they allowed in to life drawing classes to master capturing male form. Emphasising that point is a fascinating group portrait in the show depicting all the founding members of the Royal Academy. It’s set in a life drawing classroom, which Kauffmann and her fellow female founder Mary Moser couldn’t enter, so they’re included as portraits on the wall. 

Kauffmann worked around that reality. The Swiss-born daughter of an established painter drank in both history and art at his knee and was quickly acclaimed a child prodigy. So it’s not surprising she took on history painting. But she did it with a difference. She gives us the great stories from a woman’s point of view. It’s still history, but an inversion of the familiar. My favourite in the show gives us the young Edward III on crusade before he became king. You can imagine the battlefield fun the men would have had with this. All that blood! All those exotic arms and armour! Kauffmann chooses instead a tale of the soon-to-be-queen Eleanor saving her husband’s life by sucking poison out of the cut of an assassin’s blade. 

Eleanor and Edward were one of the monarchy’s greatest love stories. London’s Charing Cross is the last of a series of memorials a heartbroken Edward built to commemorate every place her coffin rested en route from her death to her funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey. Here, they are young lovers. Kauffman’s feminine perspective still gives us bravery and nobility, those staples of history painting, but we get a quiet moment of tender intimacy, Eleanor’s lips pressed gently to her husband’s arm. Eleanor looks calm and determined, the maids behind her impressed, the future king awestruck by this demonstration of love. 

Think of the trend in Hollywood over the past 20 years to give us stories with stronger heroines, or to rework familiar tales from the woman’s perspective, and you’ll grasp what Kauffmann was doing 250 years ago. There are only a handful of her history paintings here. I would have liked more.  

In fact, I would have liked to have seen more of everything. Three galleries in the attic doesn’t seem enough to me for a woman of such significance, who left behind an enormous body of work. That includes contributions to architecture they could have shown off with models or projections. We do get the panels she painted for the ceilings of the new Royal Academy, but there’s nothing else of the contributions she made to Palladian country houses. She was a favourite of Robert Adam, and spent some time working in houses in Ireland that were following his style. I first encountered her work as a series of decorative pendants in the crumbling but still-magnificent Castletown House. 

I would also have liked more on her life, relationships and opinions. She was both phenomenally talented and exceptionally shrewd at business. An early self-portrait shows her torn between the muses of art and music. As a young woman she was as talented a singer as she was an artist, but the family priest warned her of the moral dangers of going down the operatic route.

Her travels with her father, the way she built her brand before she arrived in England so she stepped into a market ready to embrace her, an intriguing first marriage to a fraudster who pretended aristocracy and was presumably after her money, her role in the RA, her eventual establishment in Rome. It’s all here, but in brief. This show gives us a pencil sketch, and I wanted a fully realised history painting. 

Don’t let that put you off from going, however. In a world of art history dominated by men and masculine stories, Kauffmann provides a refreshing counterpoint and reminds us that there were a lot more women doing interesting things in 18th century Europe than we tend to remember.

Angelica Kauffmann is in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, until 30 June 2024.