Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, and Manchester

Despite myself having lived in Manchester for 3 years, and Helen having worked there for 4 years, it’d been a very long time since either of us visited either the museum or gallery on Oxford Road, so today we took a trip as tourists.

We set off after breakfast and arrived not long after the gallery opened at 10am, parking next to my old student’s union building and taking a trip down memory lane. Lots of things have changed in the past decade, and I think by the end of the day Helen was bored of hearing phrases like “I had exams in that building” and “I used to go to that pub every week”!

So we arrived at the Whitworth Art Gallery first, it’s a lovely building from the outside, but oddly seemed much smaller on the inside. We were expecting it to open up to grand rooms, but it was surprisingly compact.

The first exhibit on display was named “Four Corners of One Cloth: Textiles from the Islamic World”, a variety of different Islamic prints and embroidery. There wasn’t a huge amount on display, and a lot wasn’t particularly impressive or artistic. From reading the plaques as well, it didn’t seem like all the pieces were authentically hand-made, but there were a couple of very complex, traditionally made pieces that were lovely. The ghabani below was hand-stitched using a tambour hook rather than a needle.

The next exhibition had many more works (100 rather than under a dozen) and was much more interesting as a result, named “Prints of Darkness: Goya and Hogarth in a Time of European Turmoil”, a series of different prints drawn by these two artists all depicting dysfunctional societies. Some of these were light-hearted, but some were very dark. Helen’s favourite here was a sketch of a public disembowelment, my favourites were first a set of 12 small images depicting Roman military punishments.

I also loved this print of Hogarth’s painting of his friend David Garrick, a famous actor of the time (1748) playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. That’s the face I pull when I don’t want my picture taken!

The next exhibition was named “William Kentridge: Thick Time”, a modern art exhibition. We didn’t understand anything here. There were various movies being played, and massive pieces of art that filled the walls of the gallery, but we didn’t like the look of any of it. Because the pieces were so big as well, there were only a few things to look at, and there was barely anything to read about each piece.

Upstairs was an exhibition of more massive pieces of art, just 3 to fill an entire gallery room, but these were really nice. The image below is the “GROUND” part of “GROUND, SEA, and SKY”, and while it looks like a painting, it’s actually a massive piece of embroidery on a basic washed background.

All in all, I don’t think we’d go back there unless there was an exhibition we were particularly interested in, modern art is pretty lost on me, I much prefer classical or industrial art.

From the Whitworth Art Gallery, we walked along Oxford Road (which has now been closed to cars, only bikes and buses are allowed up and down here) to the Manchester Museum. We walked around Whitworth park first, finding a large bronze statue of Edward VII, then passed by the Holy Name Church, a 19th century Victorian gothic Catholic Church, which I said to Helen it looked like they forgot to clean the top half of.

Manchester Museum is attached to Whitworth Hall, where I had my graduation ceremony from university. The museum itself felt very cramped, with far too much crammed in to such a small building. The layout of the museum was also difficult to navigate, with no real “path” through the exhibitions, we ended up back-tracking a lot to get to each area.

The skeleton of Asian elephant Maharajah was on display in the first room, an elephant that was bought from a travelling circus in Edinburgh to Belle Vue Zoo in Gorton, North Manchester. He was supposed to travel by train, but was upset by train journeys, so his keeper walked with him all the way from Edinburgh to Manchester, over 200 miles, taking them 10 days.

In the second room were several sarcophagi and the mummy of Asru, a temple chantress at Karnak, somewhere around 600 BC. This room was packed with artefacts from Egypt and felt very cramped, it was difficult to get a good view of some of the objects on display.

The next section, “Nature’s Library” was full of dozens – if not hundreds – of smaller skeletons and stuffed animals. A fair few children were crying in here, they didn’t seem to like the animals. The area also had a giant skeleton in the middle suspended from the ceiling, but despite walking round it twice, I couldn’t find a plaque saying what it actually was!

After forcing Helen to make friends with some slimy frogs in the vivarium, we made our way downstairs to the fossils exhibition where a big T-Rex skeleton was on show, by far the most impressive part of the museum in my opinion.

After the museum, we got back in the car and drove in to the centre of Manchester to find some food and do a spot of shopping. We got a couple of burgers from a restaurant called Banyan in The Triangle, walked around the city, bought a book, some cosmetics and jewellery (for Helen, not me), then got back in the car and headed out.

On the way home, we stopped in to visit some friends in Cheadle: Nat, Tom and Kim, and their daughter Edie, along with their two very excitable dogs! We caught up over a drink in the local Costa, then grabbed some supplies and headed back home to the cats. We got back shortly before 8pm to some very hungry kitties! All in all, a very enjoyable day, but we can only take so much modern art!