I had a quick look at the church, which one sees prominently through the window of the castle, a fourteenth-century collegiate church, dissolved in 1545, and reconstructed on 1607 in pure gothic style, the nave constructed out of the original chancel, and a new chancel added:-
It’s got wall paintings on the stalls:-
The castle looked better in the Sunday morning light, showing off the full extent of the ruin, owing to a fire in 1978 when it was a hotel:-
We went on a pilgrimage to Walsall Art Gallery in order to see it again in advance of its possible shutdown, remembering the hopes which accompanied its opening and the quality of its building by Caruso St. John, full of surprises and unexpected vistas, with leather handrails to the staircase and an exhibition by Eva Rothschild, but surrounded by a sea of car parks and strip malls (‘no cruising in the Black Country’ it announces as one enters the town):-
A Polynesian shell ornament:-
Saturday morning at the Barber Institute. Nobody is here in the beautifully organised and immaculately silent galleries, opened in 1939, with a collection of the highest quality.
Simone Martini, dated 1320 on the frame:-
Botticelli:-
We booked to stay at Astley Castle a couple of years ago. One has to hover near a computer when booking opens and I forgot, so the only time available was a December weekend, when everything is water logged. It’s an amazingly sensitive intervention by Witherford, Watson Mann into the fabric of the small medieval castle, not pretending in any way to be historic, but using robust materials, brick and wood, and adapting the building and the bedrooms to the available spaces:-
Having spent so much of the afternoon and evening listening to speeches by, or about, Antonia Byatt (A.S as she is known to her family), I have inevitably been thinking about, or reminded of, the experience of her writing: first, The Virgin in the Garden, published in 1978, later than I thought, a long, dense, quasi-historical narrative, which starts in the National Portrait Gallery and is about much bigger issues than the domestic dramas which were previously dominant; Possession: A Romance, again later than I thought, published in 1990, part Victorian and winner of the Booker Prize; then Angels and Insects, published in 1992, which was made into a film by Philip Haas. I first met her when I asked her to lecture at the V&A in a series of Artists of the Tudor Court. As she demonstrated today, she is a brilliant, and in some ways theatrical as well as didactic, lecturer.
I was invited to attend the award of this year’s Erasmus Prize to Antonia Byatt, in a line of mainly men, beginning in 1958 with The People of Austria, and including Herbert Read, Henry Moore, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the food writer, Alan Davidson, the historian of science, Simon Schaffer and last year Wikipedia. She spoke very powerfully about the experience of writing fiction – how she compares it to painting (she taught at Central School of Art before joining the Senior Common Room at University College alongside tutors at the Slade) and how she was first inspired by the use of language in the work of Beatrix Potter (‘flopsy’) as well as Shakespeare.
I haven’t got much to report from my latest site visit. It’s making progress, but slowly. We discussed the classicism of the lecture theatre and the extent to which Pennethorne, as well as Chipperfield, was inspired by the Teatro Olimpico; and how far the attitude to conservation in the building is the same as the Neues Museum in Berlin (I think the answer is that it’s comparable in terms of separating the new and the old, but not comparable because we’re not preserving the signs of previous damage).
The entrance staircase:-
The entrance vestibule with the old lift removed:-
Next in the line-up of PRAs is a bust of Gerald Kelly, who was President from 1949 to 1954, succeeding Alfred Munnings after his disastrous speech at the Annual Dinner. Kelly was the son of the vicar of St. Giles, Camberwell and became interested in painting through visiting Dulwich Picture Gallery as a child. He was half educated at Eton and took what is called a poll degree at Cambridge (I assume an unclassified pass). He learned to paint in Paris as a friend of Sargent and Sickert and had a penchant for dancing girls. He painted in a boiler suit and was a connoisseur of fine wines. He only died in 1972 (the bust is by Maurice Lambert):-
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