Posts by venue: Collections & Objects

JMW Turner’s ‘Dunstanburgh Castle’: poetry, imagination and reality

Not so long ago, I went out to Dunstanburgh, near Alnwick, to see how much of the landscape I could recognise in our watercolour by JMW Turner. Turner was only 22 when he visited in 1797, as part of a… Read more

Discovery Museum welcomes home World War One objects

At the end of a discussion with Mr Richardson and his wife at Discovery Museum today I found myself quite emotional! We had spoken a few times on the phone to arrange this meeting. For years Mr Richardson had been… Read more

Divine Bodies: Old Masters given New Meanings

   As the leaves turn brown and the nights draw in, summer 2013 may seem a lifetime away. In gallery terms, however, only a couple of exhibitions separate September gloom from summer sunshine. Arranging an exhibition, I am learning, involves… Read more

The Fatal Beam…

This has just landed on my desk:- It’s a small, irregularly shaped lump of iron fixed to a wooden base.  They say every object tells a story, but this one has come to me straight from the Mouth of Hell.… Read more

Recent discoveries and challenges on the Sunderland Shipbuilding Archives Project

For the past month I’ve been busy cataloguing the ships photographs of several Sunderland shipyards, including those for Sir James Laing & Sons Ltd and J.L. Thompson & Sons Ltd. There are thousands of fantastic images of ships launches and… Read more