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Simply..the wrong mindset....

27/3/2019

10 Comments

 
 I forgot to be enchanted the other day! Imagine that. (Enchantment is my word for 2019.)

As I stood next to the Golden Gates in the Botanic Gardens my mind was on the controversy over the cost of the restoration, the fact that it was too dark to get a good photograph, and how some of the gilding was (already?) coming off. Questions over the ethics of how Duncan made his money lurked uncharitably in the back of my mind.  It was only after I got home that I began to think of the story of their making and about the incongruity of the setting as rather a romantic idea.

They were commissioned by merchant, philanthropist and art collector James Duncan, who unusually for the time the guidebook tells me, opened his art collection to the public. The wrought iron gates were made in Berlin and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1878, as were some of his large  art collection which included work by Caravaggio, Corot, Boudin, Rousseau, Renoir and the Impressionists.

I wonder what gave him the idea. The place is quite remote, the landscape dramatic and somewhat bleak in an Arthur Rackham kind of a way. (Duncan also had a house in London.) The telephone had just been patented, the phonograph invented and electric street lighting was being installed in London.  The Bicycle Touring Club was established in England. It was the time of Ruskin and Ibsen, Zola, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens,

Apart from the obvious status of golden gates in the wild wood I wonder if there was also a touch of fantasy, whimsy and romance about the decision to have them made and installed. Benmore House itself has something of the fairy tale about it with turrets and pinnacles..

Next time I visit I will look with a less jaundiced view! I was after all supposed to be out to enjoy myself...


10 Comments
Lucille link
27/3/2019 01:54:09 am

Yes there is so much background noise that can overwhelm our spontaneous feelings. I suppose that is why children can be so easily enchanted - they simply haven’t acquired all the intellectual clutter.

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Freda
27/3/2019 02:03:24 am

'Intellectual Clutter Clearing' would be quite some task wouldn't it!!

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Linda
27/3/2019 02:12:24 am

I admire his thinking in opening his collection to the local public. Having lived in a rural area all my life, I can easily understand that people would never have seen the wonders in art and crafts that we now take for granted.

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Freda
27/3/2019 02:20:49 pm

Yes he was a bit of a pioneer in that respect.

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Mary
27/3/2019 04:41:45 am

I like Lucille's observation and her intellectual clutter term. So true.

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Freda
27/3/2019 02:22:22 pm

Very true, as is her point about children.

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cath
27/3/2019 10:59:30 am

What I found on Wikipedia makes me think Duncan apart from being a philanthropist was a man with heart for his workforce, improving the work conditions and housing. Basicly a good man with his share of hardship too.
Now I wonder about his happiness, did those golden gates make him happy you think? Did they give entrance to his personal paradise?

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Freda
27/3/2019 02:26:11 pm

There is very little known about his private life - no letters or papers. I'd love to know more....He invited people to holiday there and built a convalescent home nearby. And of course when the market for sugar beet collapsed he lost it all.

Reply
julia
27/3/2019 02:34:20 pm

what a great reminder to notice our thoughts, freda! i have found myself silently "critiquing", while i am supposedly on a lovely morning walk...i wonder if it is our natural "vigilance" that we talked about a few weeks ago...our need to feel safe..and to notice anything that seems wrong to us...boy, my mind is excellent at doing that! now if only the entire world would work the way i think it should, my mind could be a lot more enchanted too!

Reply
Freda
27/3/2019 03:04:47 pm

It seems to be easy to be hyper-vigilant when we don't need to be. Exhausting and counterproductive - as you say we need to nitice!

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