Jo Admires an Old Brand of Britishness
By Jeffrey Taylor, The Sunday Express,
12.07.09
JO BRAND talks to Jeffery Taylor about her love of classical
paintings and her local gallery in Dulwich. Her routines may not
always be family-friendly but comedian Jo Brand is very much a
national treasure. Over the years she has plundered a rich vein of
the traditional British hunger for the freak show; in the trailer
for her BBC Four comedy, Getting On, she plays Nurse Kim Wilde, a
uniformed dirigible with greasy hair, wondering what to do with a
very explicitly soiled dressing.
Could that cosily rotund lady, smiling dreamily at one of the
country’s most famous 18th-century paintings, really be the same
risqué maverick ? The picture, Mrs Elizabeth Moody and her sons
Samuel and Thomas, by Thomas Gainsborough, is a highlight of the
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s midsummer show, Best of British. Jo is a
dedicated fan.
“I love it because I’m a mum,” says the mother of two daughters,
Maisie, eight, and Eliza, six. “Mrs Moody died of consumption aged
26 and the two kids were painted in later. She’s not beautiful in
the accepted sense but she’s interesting; I suppose she looks
tragic because she died so young.”
What is she thinking of, this left-winger drooling over
upper-class chocolate-box prettiness? “There’s too much snobbery
surrounding art today,” Jo hits back.
“It’s good that a newspaper like the Sunday Express is spreading
the word. the public perception that art is the preserve of the
broadsheets is wrong; it’s for everyone. This veneer of
respectability that hangs around art galleries is really
paper-thin. Look at Edward Alleyn, founder of this place; he made
his money in Shakespeare’s day from brothels and bear pits.
“I’m distinctly working class, one of those ‘I know what I like’
people. My fans are sophisticated enough to think: ‘great, she
likes art; I do too.’ So what if someone buys a CD called 100 Best
TV Advert Themes and it’s all snatches of classical music, that’s
one way into it.” .
Dulwich Picture Gallery is part of the Tudor architectural glory
of Dulwich College, established by 17th-century jobbing actor and
avid collector of paintings, Edward Alleyn. Its founding in 1811 is
no less romantic. In 1794 the last Polish King, Stanislaus
Augustus, commissioned London art dealers Noel Desenfans and Sir
Francis Bourgeois RA to put together a suitably prestigious
collection for his country’s, and his own, glory.
Unfortunately his former girlfriend, Russia’s Catherine the Great,
lost patience with her erstwhile toyboy’s intrigues and partitioned
his country, wiping the name Poland off the map for years. Left
holding an expensive baby, Desenfans and Bourgeois eventually
offloaded their treasures on another artistically ambitious nation,
England.
“I’ve lived within a five-mile radius of this place for the past 25
years,” says Jo. “I’ve always wandered in from time to time; I
think galleries like this are perfect places for kids to come and
absorb the art world while having a good time.”
Dulwich greets children with open arms and has many events for
them. “Children under 18 get in free,” says gallery director Ian
Dejardin. “We receive no public funding, so our main income is from
our endowment which, with daily takings from our admission fees
makes up a third of our £2.6million annual turnover. The rest is
raised through sponsorship.
“Our positioning in the market is dictated by scale, not artistic
status,” insists Dejardin . “Tate Britain needs 80,000 visitors
when they plan an exhibition or they won’t touch it, while the
National Gallery has three quarters more wall space than we do. Our
admission last year was 150,000 visitors, the National Gallery
nearly half a million.”
To put the comparative capacities further in perspective, Dulwich’s
recent hugely successful show, Sickert in Venice, attracted 58,000
people over 12 weeks. Poor pickings for the nationals but 750
visitors a day is “really more than these poor walls can cope
with,” says Dejardin. “We had queues to get in, and were nearly
swamped. Our kind of exhibition can be more incisive and
scholarly.”
Jo agrees. “All the West End hoo-ha can put people off. It’s not
intimidating like that here. If the kids get bored here they can
run about in the garden. They put on workshops and events for local
schools and they’ve built up a real community feeling.”
The concept of Britishness is currently a contentious issue so is
there not a danger that a collection of portraits of white,
upper-class toffs called Best of British might at least appear
unattractive, at worst divisive?
“Not at all,” says Jo. “The name will probably unite us around
here. This is about historical Britishness, they are paintings of
white people because that is what it was like then. Britishness for
me today means living in a mixed society of black, white and Asian.
These fascinating portraits of real human beings in their
historical settings are wonderful to me.”
The Best of British is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until
September 27