It’s been a day of remembering Leonard McComb, or Len as most people called him and McComb like a comb, not a coombe.  

There was a Requiem Mass at Westminster Cathedral where he did two mosaics in small apses on either side of the entrance – St. Francis preaching to the Birds:-

And St. Anthony to the Fishes:-

His father was a commercial artist in Manchester and he started out driving a milk van, although he hadn’t learned to drive.

He was Keeper of the RA Schools from 1995 to 1998 and I realise that many of the characteristics of the Life Room, including the boxes containing casts up the west wall, were not an inheritance from the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, but a creation of Len’s.

We had our annual Whitebait dinner which is normally a raffish occasion with memories of Tuner and his friends going downriver to consume fresh whitebait in a pub in Greenwich, but this year was held in Fishmonger’s Hall, so the boat ride from Westminster to the Tower was short:-

I have been asked whether or not the conversation between Antony Gormley and Rowan Williams last week was recorded.   It was.   This is the link:-

I’m extremely sad to hear of the death of Peter Carrington, a great survivor who was in some obscure way which I do not understand a distant cousin.

I first got to know him, but not at all well, when he was chairman of the V&A, touring the departments as he had the Empire. He was co-chair of the fund-raising committee at the National Portrait Gallery together with the late Drue Heinz. This only involved asking for money from Sir Christopher Ondaatje, which he did very effectively over a memorable lunch. He was Secretary for Foreign Correspondence at the Royal Academy and an Emeritus Trustee.

When I was appointed Secretary, he lifted me up by the lapels and told me I was completely mad, but he did this, as he did everything, with charm and humour.

I don’t pay much attention (as readers may have noticed) to current affairs, so did not react when I was told last week that Boris Johnson was about to resign because he needed more money to support his families.   At the time, I thought it was mere scuttlebutt.   But now that he has actually resigned, I wonder.

In the second day of the Garden Museum Literary Festival, Mary Keen gave a charming talk about her education as a gardener: reacting against her grandmother’s garden designed by Harold Peto; reading Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes; much influenced by painters, including Hogarth’s Line of Beauty, Samuel Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden, Klimt and, most of all, Paul Nash; admiring Lutyens’s work at Lambay Island off the coast of Ireland and Lady Salisbury’s garden at Cranborne; introducing informality, stones as well as rough grasses and not too much planting, the picturesque aesthetic of the sharawadgi, to the gardens of the rich, as well as her own former garden in Duntisbourne Rous; and supporting the work of younger gardeners like Dan Pearson and Pip Morrison.

I forgot to say yesterday that we had lunch in the Garden Café, the ridiculously delicious café attached to, and indeed run by, the Garden Museum.   The orthodoxy is that museums cannot, and should not, run their own catering operations.   The Garden Museum transgresses this orthodoxy with style and profit (I am not going to pretend that it is cheap).   I have seldom had six such delicious starters – and ale – more than enough for three and a half of us to eat.

Alison Wilding’s 70th. birthday was celebrated last night with a spectacular display of fireworks bursting over Stepney Green:-

Rachel Whiteread gave a speech in which she reminisced about what Alison was like as a teacher at Brighton Polytechnic, her time as a studio assistant (unmentioned in the recent monograph about Alison’s work) and the importance of Alison’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1985, alongside another by Louise Bourgeois.

I am posting in her honour a photograph of the very beautiful small sculpture which we have on temporary loan:-

We spent most of the day of boiling heat at the Garden Museum, listening to speakers talk about urban gardens:  Allan Jenkins about the pleasures of going to his allotment in the early hours of the morning;  Luke Dixon about putting beehives into Princess Margaret’s garden at Kensington Palace;  Iain Sinclair on finding a mulberry tree planted by John Evelyn;  and Will Ashon on Epping Forest.

The Museum itself was a nice, cool mix of plants and tombs:-

In the discussion between Antony Gormley and Rowan Williams, and particularly their response to the occasional timidity of the church in its commissions, I thought of Leonard McComb’s Portrait of a Young Man Standing, which, as has been referred to in his obituaries, was created an an image of mankind at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, modelled on one of his students at the West of England School of Art in Bristol. In 1990, it was exhibited in Lincoln Cathedral as part of an exhibition called The Journey, but the then Dean was so upset by the statue’s nudity that he had its genitals covered in a skirt and then the sculpture was removed altogether from the nave. McComb was so upset that he decided that it should not be exhibited and it now belongs to the Tate.