What a relief ! Some have said that Biden didn’t fight a very powerful campaign, but it shows that someone honorable, decent and extremely experienced can defeat a noisy, arrogant, inflammatory, duplicitous, opinionated bigot, a good lesson for us all.

While we have all been glued to the news reports of the American election, Christopher Woodward, the director of the Garden Museum, has been swimming in the cold Atlantic from Newlyn to the Scilly Isles to raise money for the Garden Museum. He has just sent a clip of what it’s like out in the Atlantic:-

In a short intermission from never-ending Zoom meetings, I walked out into the back yard and witnessed this unusual and beautiful cloud formation, which seemed suitably expressive of the uncertainty of the world:-

A little while ago, we went round the British Museum and were impressed by the work which had been done during the first lockdown to address the battleground of provenance, with new labelling and some new displays, including taking the bust of Hans Sloane off its pedestal and putting it in a prominent cabinet, surrounded by information about his tacit complicity in slavery. Far from being shocked by this, as some critics have been, I thought it was an entirely sensible, and probably long overdue, acknowledgment of the deep public interest in how, when and where historic artefacts and antiquities were acquired:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2020/opening-up-the-british-museum/

As we approach a second lockdown, I realise that an increasing amount of our life and intellectual stimulus is migrating back online, not necessarily unpleasantly, because tonight we were able to watch Sue Stuart-Smith talking to Edmund de Waal about her book, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature which is an appropriate topic for lockdown: the therapeutic characteristics of gardens, their sense of psychological enclosure, which she is able to convey very effectively as a highly empathetic psychiatrist and psychotherapist.

I keep remembering that, by chance, I was in the States four years ago on Election Day, having supper in a small Iranian restaurant on Beacon Hill. We pretty well knew what the result was going to be by the time we left the restaurant at 10.30 from intermittently watching the results come in state by state on a small television screen behind the bar; but not in any way how cataclysmic the result would be for America’s standing in the world. That weekend I drove through rural Pennsylvania from Cleveland to Falling Water and remember all the Trump signs by the road. I wonder what those rural communities will be voting today.

I was part of a discussion organised by TEFAF and Apollo about whether or not Old Master paintings look better in traditional settings, as, for example, in the Frick Collection, where they are surrounded by fabric, furniture and decorative arts, a setting of traditional haut luxe, or whether they look at least as good, and possibly even better, in a more neutral, museum environment, as is the orthodoxy in plenty of European museums, as, for example, in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, designed in the 1930s by Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Christ, and the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, where the displays were overseen by Franca Albini who had pioneered a more abstract, ahistorical style of display in the Palazzzo Bianco in Genoa. The discussion was prompted by the issue as to how the Frick’s very choice collection of Old Master paintings will look in Marcel Breuer’s old Whitney Building on Madison Avenue, which is not just ahistorical, but powerfully so, a tough, in some ways combative environment for paintings. We will see.

So sad to hear of the death of David Scrase, an admirable, knowledgeable and thoughtful Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings, then Keeper and later Assistant Director of the Fitzwilliam from 1976, the year I graduated, till 2013 when he retired. He was always so supportive in a quiet way. A passionate balletomane.

https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/news/david-scrase-15-march-1949-31-october-2020

As we go into a second lockdown at 12.01 on Thursday morning, I have realised that my blog fodder will remain very thin, so am posting a picture of the medlar tree in our front garden in its full autumn glory in what remained of the sun on Saturday morning, before probably pretty much disappearing for another month, apart from the occasional shopping:-