I have just been listening to Peter Hennessy talk about the loss of Lisa Jardine on the Today programme. I saw her for the last time on Friday. It was unspeakably sad to see someone who was always so wonderfully and life enhancingly funny and ebullient with the life nearly completely drained away. I sat with her and thought of all the many times I had seen her over the years: how furious she was with me when she was not made a Trustee of the National Gallery; how helpful she was when I was thinking of leaving the National Gallery; sitting in the garden at home and her talking about her father. Thinking also about her contributions to scholarship, her work on Francis Bacon, her biography of Wren and the Royal Society, on Anglo-Dutch cultural relations. She was a force of nature.
Thank you, Charles : a wonderful obituary comment. She was, like her father, a truly remarkable person. She had been a friend since Cambridge where it was immediately clear that she would soar. Yet she was never pleased with herself and was always interested in other people’s ideas and responses. Do you rememberer we last saw her together, a year ago, at the show that Romilly shared with Edmund de Waal, when she appeared to have come through all her cancer scares ? She leaves a gaping hole in the Arts.
Yes, I had forgotten that she had come, but entirely characteristic that she would make the journey to see the work of friends. Charles