Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: Montague Place

Head and upper body of pink/grey granite monumental statue of Ramses II (one of a pair placed before the door of the Ramesseum) wearing nemes head-cloth and circlet of uraei (about half now lost), the sculptor has exploited the bichrome nature of the stone to emphasize the division between body and face; the dorsal pillar is inscribed with vertical registers of hieroglyphs giving the name and titles of the king and part of a dedication to Amun-Ra. In 1817 it was noted that there were traces of colour upon the statue and it may have, therefore, been painted red in antiquity.

The Reading Room stands at the heart of the Museum, in the centre of the Great Court. Completed in 1857, it was hailed as one of the great sights of London and became a world famous centre of learning. By the early 1850s the British Museum Library badly needed a larger reading room. Antonio Panizzi, the Keeper of Printed Books (1837–56), had the idea of constructing a round room in the empty central courtyard of the Museum building. With a design by Sydney Smirke (1798–1877), work on the Reading Room began in 1854. Three years later it was completed. Using cast iron, concrete, glass and the latest heating and ventilation systems, it was a masterpiece of mid-nineteenth century technology. The room had a diameter of 140 feet (approximately 42.6m) and was inspired by the domed Pantheon in Rome. However, it is not a free standing dome in the technical sense. It has been constructed in segments on a cast iron framework. The ceiling is suspended on cast iron struts hanging down from the frame and is made out of papier mache. A number of bookstacks were built surrounding the new Reading Room. They were made of iron to take the weight of the books and protect them against fire. In all they contained three miles (4.8 kilometres) of bookcases and twenty-five miles (forty kilometres) of shelves. The Reading Room opened on 2 May 1857. Between 8–16 May, the library was opened up for a special one-off public viewing. Over 62,000 visitors came to marvel at the new building. Those wanting to use it had to apply in writing and were issued a reader’s ticket by the Principal Librarian. Among those granted tickets were: Karl Marx, Lenin (who signed in under the name Jacob Richter) and novelists such as Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Reading Room is currently closed.

The Kayung totem pole is a 12-metre (39 ft) totem pole made by the Haida people. Carved and originally located in the village of Kayung on Graham Island in British Columbia, it dates from around 1850. Before being sold to collectors, the pole was located in a village called Kayung on Graham Island in British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii archipelago. Kayung had been an important village for the Haida before European contact. After the population was decimated by successive smallpox epidemics in the late 1800s, Henry Wiah, the town chief, encouraged the remaining population to move to nearby Masset.

Designed by Foster and Partners, the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court transformed the Museum’s inner courtyard into the largest covered public square in Europe. It is a two-acre space enclosed by a spectacular glass roof with the world-famous Reading Room at its centre. In the original Robert Smirke design the courtyard was meant to be a garden. However, in 1852–7 the Reading Room and a number of bookstacks were built in the courtyard to house the library department of the Museum and the space was lost. In 1997, the Museum’s library department was relocated to the new British Library building in St Pancras and there was an opportunity to re-open the space to public. The Great Court was opened on 6 December 2000 by Her Majesty the Queen. The design of the Great Court was loosely based on Foster’s concept for the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany. A key aspect of the design was that with every step in the Great Court the vista changed and allowed the visitor a new view on their surroundings. Work on the Great Court's magnificent glass and steel roof began in September 1999. It was constructed out of 3,312 panes of glass, no two of which are the same. At two acres, the Great Court increased public space in the Museum by forty per cent, allowing visitors to move freely around the main floor for the first time in 150 years.

Pedro Linares (1906-1992) was the original creator of a bestiary of mythical, dragon-like beasts made from reeds or wire, paper, paint and an inspired imagination. It is said that Pedro Linares had an amazing dream whilst recovering from an illness in which these fantastical creatures appeared. They called these creatures "Alebrijes." Popular artists such as the Linares in Mexico are known as " cartoneros." Pedro Linares created and subsequent generations now create alebrijes which include fantastical dragons, beasts and winged fish on legs, floral decorated skulls, devils and skeleton figures. Although many other Mexican craft shops sell items described as "Alebrijes" it is the Linares families and further generations thereof who produce the true "alebrijes". Pedro’s sons and grandsons now continue the tradition and their works are widely collected. The "alebrijes" are still made with the same method to this day. The process is quite simple : an armature is made from reed or wire in the shape of the final body. To build up certain areas newspaper can be taped on when dry before adding the glued layers. A home made paste is produced using flour heated up in boiling water. Sheets of plain brown paper or newspaper are added in layers to cover the frame until it is firm. This may take some time as some of these creatures are extremely large. The figure then has to dry thoroughly. In Mexico, the sunny weather speeds up this process. All sorts of wondrous extremities are then added including wings, horns, tails, fierce teeth, bulgy eyes and a whole host of other creative additions. The final figure is painted white. Then is the time for the colourful painting. The Linares use brushes of cat hair to achieve the fine lines. Colours which would normally clash are painted side by side in intricate patterns and produce stunning results. The attention to detail is quite amazing with a series of repeated scales, and intricate patterns including tear drops wiggly lines and series of dots. A steady hand and eye is a must to produce such a carefully detailed vision of colour. These "alebrijes" are now transported all over the world and the bigger ones may be made in sections that fit together to aid transport. In 1990 the Mexican Government awarded Pedro Linares the National Prize for Popular Arts and Traditions (Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes en la Rama VI, Artes y Tradiciones Populares). The work of the Linares is now being avidly collected by European and American museums and collectors. In London, at the Museum of Mankind, papier mâché figures by Felipe and Leonardo were included in the exhibition "The Skeleton and the Feast: the Day of the Dead in Mexico" (1991-1993). This included a huge installation entitled "The Atomic Apocalypse: Will Death Die?" showing the figures of Famine, War, Pestilence and Death presiding over a selection of scenes depicting the evils of the modern world.

This is one of the two stone lions, sculpted in 1914 by Sir George Frampton RA, imperiously guarding the less-well-known northern entrance to the British Museum, on Montague Place. The vast majority of visitors use the main entrance on Great Russell Street, so sadly miss these glorious examples of New Sculpture. The term "New Sculpture" was coined by the first historian of the movement, the critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote a four-part series for The Art Journal in 1894. After a protracted period of a stylized neoclassicism, sculpture in the last quarter of the century began to explore a greater degree of naturalism and wider range of subject matter. The French sculptor Jules Dalou, in his eight-year English exile after the Paris Commune events in 1871, taught modelling at the South Kensington School of Art, and then at the Lambeth School of Art. He profoundly influenced a new generation of British sculptors, helping to usher in a new approach to the medium. The catalyst for this development is usually understood to be the exhibition, in 1877, of Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python. This was Leighton’s first major sculpture, and he intended it as a challenge to the prevailing styles of sculpture. It reflected his interest in a more dynamic and vibrant representation of the human body and a shift from easily legible and didactic subject matter. Many sculptors looked to the Athlete and created responses to it in the following years. The New Sculpture represents an alternate formulation of a new direction for sculpture at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas the major French alternative to mid-19th-century sculpture, Auguste Rodin, increasingly left the accurate representation of the human body behind, the New Sculptors by and large chose to grapple with issues arising from the naturalistic representation of the body and the detailed rendering of its surface variations. The New Sculpture does not represent one singular style, but rather a range of options developed to make sculpture more vital and lifelike.