Talk to Audlem History Society

A Review of January's talk to Audlem History Society

On Thursday evening, Les Pickford, retired Head of Art at Shavington High School, and now
"artist in residence" at Nantwich Museum, gave a talk to Audlem History Society on the subject of

"Illustrating History".

As you would expect, Les' talk was richly illustrated by copious slides, and he began by pointing out that images are far better remembered than hearing or reading about actual events. He posed the question, "What is History?" and explained that in the era before photography, accuracy was not as important as afterwards.

He pointed out that images can be a mixture of the memorable, the persuasive, the powerful, the ambiguous, the unreliable, the distorted, and that they cannot always be trusted, for example, in the images of "heroic" rulers. To illustrate this, we were shown a selection of various depictions of the battle of Agincourt, 1415, ranging from the contemporary to paintings from 1490, 1864, 1915, and the Second World War (in the case of film publicity), indicating the contrast in emphasis of the event, from celebration of war, to realism and later propaganda purposes.

When photography arrived on the scene, the assumption was at first that art was no longer needed, but soon Victorian industrialists began to commission artists to portray their visualisation of a new age of idealism and influence.

Les ended his talk by giving us examples of illustrated historical events which are just "plain wrong", such as certain scenes in the Bayeux Tapestry concerning the death of Harold.

The evening left the audience with much food for thought, after a very entertaining and informative talk.

Brenda Smethurst.