I went to an event organised by Art UK at Two, Temple Place, the amazingly opulent Astor palace where the Bulldog Trust now organises exhibitions of work from regional collections. I wasn’t, for obvious reasons, allowed to take photographs of the work in their current exhibition, only installation shots, beginning with a display case which shows the marble coffer commissioned by Ezra Pound from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska as a gift for Wilfred Scawen Blunt:-
Then, two garden rollers, one of which was given by Eric Gill to Ethel Mairet after she had split from Ananda Cooraraswamy (the other was carved by David Kindersley):-
Finally, a trio of works, one by Duncan Grant, two by Vanessa Bell, including her Self Portrait, which normally lives at Charleston:-
What I really wanted to photograph was Eric Gill’s 1919 pamphlet on Birth Control.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Hello, what a lovely surprise to see the Gill garden roller. I thought I knew most of his work and this was a treat to see. In the 1970s, I lived with Joan and Rene Hague in their home in Shanagarry, Ireland. I was young and thought I was escaping home.
Johanna was Gill’s youngest daughter and Rene had been the printer for the Golden Cockerel Press. They rented me a small cottage overlooking the sea for a pound a week on the condition I paid in person every Friday and stayed for dinner and the night. There was a room under the stair of their Georgian Home with a monk’s cot. Rene had calligrapied on the tall, whitewashed walls, floor to ceiling, in four-inch high letters, in Latin, the death of Hector. I fell asleep listening to the clash of their swords, and scuffling feet.
Dear Robert, You’ve had an exciting life ! Charles
Delightful comment by Robert Perkins.
I’m so glad that you, Charles, have been to this exhibition – Gill and I are going tomorrow. It’s an excellent initiative and Sussex has some outstanding 20th century work.
It’s a delighttul exhibition – upstairs & down – & the first time I had seen inside Two Temple Place. An extraordinary building, starting from the with lamp posts outside with putti holding a telephone & winding a hand generator for electric light.
Yes, extraordinary and faintly bizarre, more American in style than British. It is getting a new life through its exhibitions. Charles
What did you think of the exhibition? I seem to hear more feedback about the building than the exhibition. I wonder how many links can be successfully drawn between diverse modernist groups in Sussex who did not really talk to eachother?
I only had time to browse, but I liked what I saw precisely because it is a slightly unexpected, but intriguing linkage between Bloomsbury and Ditchling, not to mention the haut luxe of Edward James. Charles