We went for a walk on the gallops looking southwards across the whole of Hertfordshire towards London and had a lesson in rural estate management: the thinning of the woodland, the replanting of the hedgerows, the benefits of organic grassland, combined with the damage done by the deer population and the ever present litter of plastic balloons, making evident the fragility of a farmland’s ecology:-
The garden was beautifully crisp and clear in the morning light before the clouds assembled:-
We bumbled up the M11 to the flat and nondescript, but unexpectedly unspoilt, landscape of southwest Cambridgeshire, beyond the radio telescopes of the University Observatory, where we stayed the weekend in old parkland once depicted by Kip and Knyff. The statues of the four seasons were bought after the war from Harrods, the gardens used to be tended by seven gardeners, we looked out over ornamental yew trees puffing yellow pollen, and the greenhouses were now decayed:-
As I walked round the Royal Academy Schools last night, I realised that, as work on our major building construction looms and as the casts will have to be moved from the Cast Corridor during the summer, we should document their appearance before it is too late, in order to be able to remember their deep patina, the dust of ages, the eccentric pipework, as the Schools are themselves necessarily and beneficially transformed:-
Every year, the Royal Academy has an event to celebrate the memory of Sidney Hutchison. Not Reynolds, or Chambers or any of the founding fathers. Not Lord Leighton or Francis Chantrey or J.M.W. Turner. Not Hugh Casson or Roger de Grey who helped to reinvent it. Only Sidney Hutchison is routinely commemorated for his fifty two years service, joining as a junior clerk in 1929, apparently thinking it was the Royal Academy of Music, serving in the Royal Navy in the war, returning to the Academy as its librarian in 1949, becoming Exhibitions Secretary in 1955, Secretary from 1968 to 1982, and ending up as Honorary Archivist and Antiquary, publishing its history in the year of its bicentenary in 1968.
Last night I went to a party to celebrate the career of Robert Dalrymple, the Scottish book designer (and reader of this blog). It was held at the Fine Art Society, one of the oldest and best surviving of the Bond Street galleries, patrons of Whistler and the Arts and Crafts Movement, originators of the one-man exhibition (with catalogue) and still in its original premises, which they moved to in October 1876, and had renovated by E.W. Godwin in 1881:-
I have just received news of the announcement of David Freedberg as the new Director of the Warburg Institute, my alma mater. I’m really pleased that he has taken the post: partly because it sees the return to this country of a major scholar, who trained here, but has spent most of his career in New York; partly because it provides an opportunity for the Warburg to solve the problems it has been having over its funding with the University of London; but, most of all, because he is so obviously committed to Warburgian studies, the history of science as well as the history of art, their relationship to the history of ideas, and the development of an understanding of the relationship between the mind and eye.
My eye was caught half way through a meeting yesterday by the way the light was falling on the decorative surrounds of the Burlington House Saloon. Lord Burlington is always associated with a rather puritanical version of neo-Palladianism, as exemplified by the publication of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, whose tercentenary we are celebrating later this year. What struck me is how rich and opulent and essentially neo-baroque Kent’s detailing is, a style which he presumably picked up during his time spent studying at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome:-
I had dinner last night at Grocers’ Hall, the home of the second oldest (or is it the second richest ?) of the city livery companies, which date back to the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond, and are now devoted to good works, with a certain amount of civic ritual. The building is relatively recent, set back from the street just by the Bank of England, and one realises that the guilds and the combination of charity and community stretches back to the middle ages.
Stanley Anderson RA, Self Portrait, 1933 ©Stanley Anderson Estate
I missed the opening of our display of the work of Stanley Anderson in the Tennant Gallery, which shows the extraordinary technical skill of printmakers between the wars. Trained originally as an apprentice engraver, he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art and became a teacher at Goldsmith’s. Travelling the continent and back streets of London, he produced dark and animated line engravings, including tramps in the National Gallery and scenes of agricultural labour, as well as occasional paintings in egg tempera.
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