Animal assortment
Hereford's museum is one of many built in the 19th century as the Victorians, rich from the fruits of empire, set about furnishing their cities with monuments and buildings that spoke of culture and education. The burghers of Hereford chose F R Kempson as their architect. Kempson had been working in South Wales and moved to Hereford in the 1870s to build this museum, following it with many other buildings in the city and surrounding area. He seems to have brought some grey Welsh sandstone with him for the building, and designed it in a kind of Venetian Gothic, a homage, as it were, by a great maritime power at its height to another that even then, as Ruskin himself had pointed out in The Stones of Venice, was slipping quietly into its lagoon, its decline a terrible warning to us all.
The ornate parapet, rows of pointed windows, little loggia, and arches on the ground floor are all Venetian Gothic features. Typical of both the Venetians and the Victorians is the rich carving, which here runs to an array of birds and beasts, indicative, no doubt, of the natural history displays that the building originally contained. Some of these creatures sit on the parapet at the very top of the facade, and two of them, a cat and a bird, are enacting a hunting drama that is concluded at a lower level, where we see that the cat has caught its prey.
The cat has suffered a little from time and the elements, and must always have been rather lean and mean. It's also looking as us – shouldn't it be concentrating on its dinner? Or is it rightly keeping a weather eye out in case we interrupt its hunting? Whatever the reason, these characterful carvings by Robert and William Clarke are engaging. If I was a young child, still unsure about what to expect in a museum, they'd draw me in. Come to that, they drew in this more experienced visitor too.
