We celebrated my birthday with a dinner in the courtyard of Factum Arte in a remote suburb of Madrid. It began with a tour of the work they are undertaking: a reproduction of the Assyrian winged lions from the British Museum; a faded replica of Leonardo’s Last Supper; a reproduction of Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill. What they do mainly is make works for artists which require some particular specialist skill. Then, they also do detailed digital reproduction of works of art at risk, as well as works which have for some reason been destroyed. It’s a factory of ideas – three quarters craft and one quarter technology:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
You must have met Adam Lowe then? Director of Factum Arte? I worked with him in c. 1997 on an exhibition at the RPS in Bath on new printing technologies & earlier, on 1930s photographer Madame Yevonde. Such a joy to work with him as a brain that moved far faster than anyone else’s. He was dizzying company.
Yes, he’s doing astonishing things with new techniques of photographic printing for a Cuban photographer as well as everything else. Charles