Time Travel
Presenting a market town’s heritage in an appealing way is always so refreshing. Join me this week in exploring the new galleries at the Amersham Museum.
People define a place. It’s their shaping of a landscape through the change and new connections they bring that determines the character and sense of place.
Just as a market town is more than a jumble of streets, chalk streams and pretty houses. It is a place whose inhabitants have been drawn to for shelter, refuge even, commerce, farming or because they put their finger on a map to decide where they were going to live.
In 1938, Vienna-born artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906 - 1996) and her mother fled persecution in Austria and settled in rural Buckinghamshire via Amsterdam and London because of a finger on a map! The stakes were high, but they chose well, settling with other émigrés, including the future Nobel prize-winning author Elias Canetti (1905-94), and the composer Francesco Ticciati (1893-1949).
Amersham was Marie-Louise’s introduction to a foreign country that was to become her home. They settled into no.86 Chestnut Lane and although she worked in West Hampstead, Marie-Louise often returned to paint from her studio at Cornerways.
Mary-Louise in Amersham
It’s a logical choice for the Amersham Museum to chose as the focus of their new temporary exhibition, ‘Marie-Louise in Amersham’. This wonderful exhibition explores her time in the town with her family and community on Chestnut Lane that helps us understand the wartime community through her eyes, her experience of exile, and the impact this had on her art.
Her UK artistic breakthrough came with a major solo exhibition in 1985 at the Goethe-Institut in London. By the time the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna, held a retrospective exhibition 1994, the artist had already established her reputation as an important Austrian painter of the twentieth century.
Time Travel
And if that’s not enough, the museum has reimagined their Amersham timeline that begins 97 million years ago with a devils toenail and fossilised sponges from the warm tropical sea that once covered southern England. They have highlighted all sort of gems and social history: did you know that a version of the famous Armada portrait of Queen Elizabeth I hung at Shardeloes, the ancestral home of the Drake family to commemorate the Queen’s visit in 1591? Amersham also has a long history of dissent: not least the Lollards martyred for their religious beliefs in the early 1500s, and the strong community of suffrage supporters in the early 1900s, including Margaret MacDonald, wife of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924.
And so much more, including the wonderful Metroland Embroideries by Richard Herbert 1915 - 1932. The Metroland thing deserves its own feature, but suffice to say Amersham is its epicentre.
The timeline has been co-curated with local people, particularly the museum’s Young Curators group with colourful illustrations by local artist Elly Bazigos.
All these images are subject to copyright and may not be used without prior permission.
Links you may need
The museum is open from Wednesday to Sunday, and Bank Holiday Mondays from 12 noon to 4:30pm. How to get there and more.
You can also keep the locals happy with a back scratch and a tummy tickle at nearby Kew Little Pigs Farm.
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