The jury of the Eighth Ancient and Modern prize for original research submitted its votes last weekend. We are pleased to announce that the winner of the £1000 Ancient & Modern award is Dr Peter Andrews (76), doyen of Asian tent studies, with Harriet Rix (23) taking the £500 Godfrey Goodwin prize.
Dreamt up by the art historian, sculptor and author John Carswell a decade ago, the prizes are awarded to scholars under 25 or over 60 (John Carswell tells the story in his article ‘Smashing the Age Barrier’). Cornucopia, Halı Magazine and three distinguished London auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams all contribute to the prize.
This year's winner, Peter Andrews (76), is pictured with his wife, Mügül Ataç, in a photograph taken appropriately at the first Yurt-Makers’ Conference in the Ardeche, with a children’s structure by Bill Coperthwaite (died 2013) in the background, ‘which we helped to build there’ (photo: Spirits of Intent). The Andrews have, as he writes, ‘spent much of our lives studying nomadic and urban tents from Morocco to Mongolia’. Trained an architect, his survey of tents began in 1966, prompted by a remark by the pioneering Persian art expert Arthur Upham Pope: ‘no one has ever considered tents seriously as architecture’.
The award will support a project to examine and record two tents ‘of unique importance’: the tent of Tipu Sultan (1725–50) at the National Trust's Powis Castle in Wales and the 1535 Tienda de Campaña in Toledo – ‘the first is the only complete tent attributable to a major Indian ruler, and the second as probably the oldest surviving Indian tent in the world… No technical details of either have been published. They should be documented in their entirity, and placed in context. Most Indian tents survive only as panels dispersed in collections.’
The data will be published in part 2 of Peter Andrews’ comparative study of historic Indian tents, initiated by the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad – the first phase, the tents in the museum itself, is now in press. It is illustrated with colour plates and the beautiful drawings executed by his wife, a granddaughter of Atatürk's famous finance minister. Part 2 will be devoted to tents outside the museum. The fieldwork is nearly complete.
This drawing by Mügül Ataç is of a ceiling panel of the Shah Jahan tent at the Calico Museum of Textiles, Ahmedabad (inv. CMT 654).
Harriet Rix (23), winner of the Godfrey Goodwin Prize, set up in memory of the great Ottoman architectural historian, one of the prize’s early judges, has just graduated from Oxford, where she read Biochemistry. She will set out in the ‘obscure and ill-fated footsteps of Francis Vernon’, a 17th-century Levantine traveller, who made his way across the Ottoman Empire c1676: ‘I intend to sail where Vernon sailed, and to ride a horse for the rest of the time, as Vernon did – one or other of these, however, may have to be replaced by its more practical (though less picturesque) modern equivalent.’
The winners of the two prizes emerged from a scintilating field of 29 entries, each worthy of a book, an exhibition or a film, or perhaps all three. We hope they will all find their way into the pages of Cornucopia or Halı Magazine in the coming years. The closing date for the Ninth Ancient & Modern award is April 2015. All entries and enquiries to Julie Witford, the award’s secretary: secretary@ancientandmodern.co.uk