thomas m wilson

In the last week or so in Stockholm I’ve explored Drottingholm Palace, a royal residence west of the city. In walking around the island I found a section of wild forest near the palace and remembered the splendours of wild ecosystems in the Scandinavian northern forests – mossy green boulders, beds of pine needles, birch and oak and cool air, and silence.  It felt like some kind of spiritual and emotional renewal just to have that little time by myself in that forest.  The palace, like most palaces, felt bombastic and lacked charm.  As if it wanted to be Versailles, and was trying hard. But still a place that one does feel enlarged and at least a bit elevated compared to the muddle of modern architecture – the formal gardens with their huge fountain and water side location to the main building are at least worth seeing. 

Also visited the National Museum – the sculpture courtyard was remarkable.  A well of limpid light falling from a glass ceiling high above onto the arrayed marbles below, life size and larger than life size, created a beautiful and entrancing experience.  A huge sculpture of a shirtless, long haired Adonis with, casual, nonchalant and powerful frame, arms and hands open to the world, communicated something accepting and positive. 

Another day I went to a tour of the City Hall – loved the carved granite in the banqueting hall for the Nobel prize ceremony – and the glittering gold mosaics in the golden hall.  The mosaic representation of Stockholm shows her personification as a maiden in the centre of the world, with all the West to the left (Eiffel tower, NYC, etc), and the Orient to the right (minuets of Instanbul, camel of the Arabs, etc).  Every city in the world lives under the illusion that its at the centre doesn’t it? 

Then I went and walked around the Medelhavsmuseet, which houses Sweden’s most important archaeological collections of ancient and historical relics from the Mediterranean countries.  The place is in a gorgeous bank from 1905, full of marble and light.  If you ever want a cafe in Stockhom please think Bagdad Café – it is the best café I have been to, with views over Strömmen (the stream), the Royal Palace and the Opera, and the chance to sip coffee among real Greek and Roman antiquities. 

Yesterday I went to see the main library in Stockholm – an old building but the reading room felt poorly ventilated and uninspiring.  But outside in the adjoining park a tall bronze statue of Carl Linneaus stood.  I looked up at his figure, and thought about John Fowles’s reflection in his book The Tree that so much our modern way of seeing nature comes from this old man’s reductive, analytic gaze, parsing complexity to the binomal species name, growing, budding complexity strangely hidden and ‘owned’ by attaching a two part Latin name to it.  And yet by caring and being attentive enough to parse the green tangle of a forest into species identifications one is at least looking.  One is at least paying attention.  The scientific gaze has its drawbacks, a loss of holistic and affective understanding, and a loss of mystery, but at least it is a better fate than the total oblivion of human neglect. 

I’m in Stockholm, staying in an apartment on Sodermalm, an island neighbourhood full of hipster cafes and vegan t-shirt shops in the centre of the city.  In 35 minutes bike ride I can get to a national reserve outside the city, and I love the granite covered in mixed forest alongside lakes and rivers full of fresh water. The Swedes are found swimming in this city even when it is only 20 degrees and grey outside.  The other morning I was walking into town along the water front. In the grey light of the cool morning I noticed the head of an elderly woman bobbing through the water to my right. Only in Stockholm…

My favourite building here is the city hall.  The hall and tower has a design influenced by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, but the columns are a massive, heavy carved granite, speaking of the rugged strength of the cold North.  The city in general has clean air and no tourist crush.  The place feels civilised, and has some beauty in its water side location on 14 islands connected by 50 bridges.  The side of the island I am on is brushed by fresh water, which is a relief after being accustomed to only ever swimming in salt water where I live in Perth.

I went to see the Vasa the other morning.  Arrived early to be sure that there were not many people.  The ship rears out of the dimness like a black ghost ship in a fog, complete with grinning lions carved in the ancient timbers, slack shrouds on the decks, and a 600 tons of oak ship of the line from another century and another world.  This is one of the most impressive objects you can see in any museum in the world. A war ship from the 1600s, almost entirely intact and complete. Walking around the hull and looking up the intricacy and inventiveness of the dark oak carvings is a pleasure.  I walked to the back of the ship and looked up, imagined bobbing in a little row boat on the water as the Vasa, in 1628, moments before she sank to the bottom of Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage, moved past me. I thought of how much the viewer would have been over-awed by the majesty of this royal ship of the line and her ornate carvings on her stern and taffrail: Nordic wildmen, roman emperors, snarling lions, and open jawed monsters, light glistening off the 700 carvings of the ship as she headed for the sea.  Or another image: imagine scuba diving on the wreck before it was raised in 1961 to a crowd of thousands, and seeing the grinning skull of a sailor in the dimness and grime of the darkened gun deck, submerged in 30 metres of fresh water.  As I say, this easily one of the most impressive objects in any museum on earth.  The Vasa, the world’s most complete ship wreck from the 1600s, has become a symbol of the low gone glory of Sweden’s seventeenth century empire around the Baltic. 

The next day I was in London.  First the Wallace Collection.  A good collection of Canelettos and other views of Venice.  Wonderful setting for a gallery in one of London’s grandest town houses.  Then onwards southwards, to look at hats at Locke and Co., the place where the king buys his headwear.  This shop was started in the same place it is now in the late 1600s. Then to the gates of Buckingham Palace, ground zero for many people’s vision of London.  I hadn’t taken in the majesty of the statue of Queen Victoria outside the front of the palace, and the great bronze statues around it.  Then onwards for a walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where refreshments were enjoyed in its wonderful indoors café full of mosaics and shimmering light.  I saw the Bed of Ware, perhaps the most interesting bit of English furniture, a great early modern wooden four poster bed, covered in superb carvings.  Then outside to enjoy the carvings on the Albert Memorial in front of the Royal Albert Hall.  The representations of Asia and Africa are my favourite bits here – such majesty and confidence. 

Onwards through Kensington gardens, to the Speke monument.  The Speke Monument is a red granite statue dedicated to John Hanning Speke – the first European to discover Lake Victoria and lead expeditions to locate the source of the Nile.  What a great man he was, dying soon after in what may have been suicide or an accident after getting back to England from discovering the source of the Nile in the nineteenth century.  I suspect many people who pass the Speke memorial have no idea who he was, and what wonders he witnessed in the wilds of Africa, and that is a shame. 

The next day I was in Oxford.  I wandered around the Ashmolean museum and enjoyed the top floor where the nineteenth century English painters are shown.  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by a group of young painters who intended to restore to English art a freshness and close study of nature. Home from the Sea by Arthur Hughes (1862) is of a boy on the soft turf at his mother’s grave

And then there is A Study in March by John William Inchbold (1855). The first flowers in March in an English wood come out amongst the hard features of the season… This painting by Inchbold was inspired by the lines from Wordsworth: “When the primrose peeped out to give an earnest of the spring…” Young lambs and a hard blue sky above. The fragility of new life in a harsh world. Ruskin thought this painting exceedingly beautiful.

These were mostly images I knew, but I had never seen the original paintings up close.  It was more of the England I love. 

Later still in Oxford, walking through New College, I noticed these gates. The motto of the founder of the college but perhaps also of the idea of the English gentleman…

Later walking around the Pitts River Museum collection of anthropological artefacts I was reminded how as an 18 year old I had walked here and been inspired to study Anthropology at the Australian National University.  The artefacts here also reminded me of that side of the English character that is the intrepid explorer, from Speke and Burton to Thesiger and Robert Byron.  The plucky and learned traveller who probes far distant tribal societies and their unique view of the cosmos, and brings back the evidence to the ordered world of English gentlemen waiting in their London clubs.  England has for a very long time had this strain of deeply cosmopolitan perspective, unfortunately usually just among the expensively educated.

The next day I was in a village north of Oxford, and then on bicycles off through the villages and fields to visit Rousham Gardens.  These gardens are attached to a country house, and were designed by William Kent in the 1730s, and maintain the basic pattern he laid out then.  They have never looked better than today.  The owner is 87 and not terribly bothered to make the whole thing into a tourist money making machine, so it is low key and not all that famous.  However the section that is classic English landscape garden is gorgeous, particularly that part where a stone temple and two great stone urns, look down on a sinuous bend in the river Cherwell below, and out over tree tops to a green field on the other side of the river.  What a spot to sit and reflect and contemplate the world and one’s life.