Connections/Letters

My name is Ashley Williams. I work for the Museum's Director, Tom Campbell. I'm going to be talking about "Letters."

Letter writing is somewhat forgotten these days because of email and Blackberry and the ease of communication now.

I went to boarding school in England but I grew up in France, and so a lot of the communication with my family, with my friends

was done through letters. The only time we actually had email was in my last years; up until that point everything had been done by hand.

Penmanship is taken incredibly seriously over there. You actually learn how to write with a fountain pen, which is really hard when you're five or six.

Mine used to be beautiful and now it's getting very scrawly. I like the cuneiform tablets because something that was actually a fairly mundane document has become a part of our collection as a work of art.

The signature of Süleyman the Magnificent, just to think of taking such care over the calligraphy of how your name is represented. Now you have an email signature and it's just something terribly bland. I mean mine is anyway. So

when I was younger I was a big collector of pens and all that sort of thing. There's a slight nostalgia about it

all. You know, things used to be made so beautifully.

Writing desks that were specifically made for that reason

or for a certain person.

Monograms and all sorts of things worked into the writing desk, and you can just imagine Louis XIV

barking out orders and writing letters. Most people

have Ikea furniture and you know, things that are a bit less visually appealing.

This mechanical table, if you close it up completely, it's a table or a writing desk.

And then you open up one layer and it becomes a games table or a card table. In

fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy there were a lot of betrothal chests, which had all kinds of things in them, including tokens of love and those could take the form of these little cases with writing tools inside them. I like the idea of something being portable, you know I mean I think there's always a sense of, at any moment you could want to jot something down, whether that's some information that you need to give someone or whether it's to write a note to a friend or to a loved one.

There is a kind of secrecy about letter writing. You're writing a story to a certain person, and you don't necessarily want to share it with someone else.

I like the aspect of someone trying to snoop over her shoulder as she's writing.

There are these terribly serious portraits of men at their desks writing letters, presidential portraits. Real gravitas there. But

then you have others where women are sort of part of the scene as well but they're obviously a real distraction.

Not really welcome in the environment of business letters.

Paintings can convey the narrative of a letter. The painter is obviously trying to express emotion.

They can bring such wonderful news and it's a joyful thing, but I think also there'll always be

letters of sort of disappointment. I have a couple of people that I pretty much only keep in touch with via

letter. I sort of reluctantly email them. I very much rather write them a letter than email. That's just how we keep in touch, I think by force of habit, 'cause that's just how we

used to when we were younger.