Now and Then

Our photograph is of the High Street, Oxford, photographed this morning with a certain degree of danger... It's nice and sunny, and surprisingly uncrowded in the run-up to Christmas.

There is a specific reason for my taking and showing this shot. My BlipFoto entry for 13 October shows a plaque commemorating the great scientists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. I wanted to use this image in a lecture I was to give in Lismore Castle (Ireland). See my BlipFoto entries for 18 to 22 November. The plaque is on the wall on the left, just about opposite the red telephone box on the right. A memorial to the poet Shelley lies in a special building within University College just behind this wall .

In one of the lectures that preceded mine, Professor Duncan Thorburn Burns gave a talk on Boyle that included a painting by JMW Turner of the High Street in the 1800s. I thought it would be a nice touch to try to reproduce the painting in a modern photograph. One piece of artistic licence is evident, because Turner has straightened the curve of the street so that Carfax Tower can be seen in his painting. I could not find any vantage point that gave the right perspective and allowed me to see the tower at the same time.

I have provided a higher resolution image of my photograph in case anyone wants to make a close comparison.

A description of the painting suggests that it shows The High in 1809 to 1810. The key feature to note here is the building where the wall with the plaque is now. The painting shows workmen pulling down Deep Hall, where Boyle lived between 1655 and 1668. (My cynical eye thought that it detected a dead horse lying in the street at this spot!). Professor Burns has given me an image with detail of this part of the painting.

The webmaster from www.headington.org.uk has kindly pointed me to a link to an interesting video clip about the painting created by the Assistant Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum, which currently displays the work.

My colleague Allan Chapman, who knows a thing or two about Boyle, has told me that the building was demolished in 1808. That being the case, the painting represents a scene from that year and certainly not 1809 or 1810. But perhaps the real message is how little the basic structure of the place has changed in nearly 200 years. There are still gowned figures holding erudite discussions in the middle of the street, and boys are probably still picking up oranges that they have dropped.