I’ve been to Dumfries House before, but only as part of an official visit, never able to wander freely as I have this morning. It’s impressive how much has been done since I last came, or maybe I just didn’t see it.

The Rothesay Garden, an Anglo-Chinoiserie ornamental garden with an impressive carpentry bridge, as if from an eighteenth-century pattern book, but done with freedom:-

A column ornamented with antlers, again a free interpretation of pattern-book design:-

The dovecote, or doocot as it’s called, which long antedates the house – 1671 according to a date carved into a door:-

The Chinese bridge, based on a design by Robert Weir Schultz who worked so closely with the then Marquis of Bute:-

And a little pagoda at the centre of the maze:-

It feels very convincingly eighteenth century in its range of cultural references and sense of seeing the world in a pocket handkerchief.

My friend, Richard Bram, a street photographer, took a characteristically lively photograph of John Wonnacott alongside his powerful Self-Portrait which I reproduce as a memento of a marathon, three-day book launch:-

Because the light is good this morning, John’s seascapes look good – scenes of the harbour-side at Leigh-on-Sea where he has been painting for sixty five years, so knows it all intimately.

These are details:-

I have been living with John Wonnacott and his pictures for the last couple of days, as a way of celebrating the publication of my book (https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/john-wonnacott).

I have found it an interesting experience, partly because it is such a pleasure to live with pictures and get to know them better, the test of a good picture being how far and in what way it survives prolonged scrutiny – and I can’t help but notice how some people spend a long time in the room figuring out the quality and character of the paint surface, particularly with his largest and most ambitious recent work, Self Portrait with Grünewald and Two Geese, which has layers of complexity in terms of his depiction of the geese, his use of mirrors, and the relationship of sitter to his surroundings.

This is a not very good reproduction:-

This a close-up of his head:-

I have given up bread and cheese to the great benefit of my waistline – I have lost a stone in four months – but to the infinite deprivation of one of the great pleasures of life. So, a trip to Neil’s Yard in Borough Market this morning was a form of torture: the citadel of lovers of the best and rarest of English cheese, as I am. Now I can only enjoy it vicariously and in tiny slivers which I was offered illicitly over the counter like the rarest contraband:-

Today is publication day for my book on John Wonnacott. For anyone who is interested in acquiring it, Lund Humphries are offering a discount this month.

Special Offer: 20% off + free UK postage
Visit http://www.lundhumphries.com and use offer code WONNACOTT20 at the checkout to apply
the discount. Valid until 30 September 2022

I have been enjoying the essays in London Feeds Itself, the book produced to coincide with this year’s Open House. In some ways the best of the essays – because it provides an overview to the volume as a whole – is the Introduction by Jonathan Nunn, reproduced below. The book is a sociology of eating in London, concentrating on the huge variety of places to eat outside the centre, including the history of the Chinese restaurants of Limehouse and a lot about the ecology of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi restaurants in Whitechapel, including Lahore One off the Commercial Road, Dhaka Biryani and Kolapata in the Mile End Road (they don’t give addresses) and, to my surprise, the culture of the PFCs, the chicken shops (Perfect Fried Chicken) which line the Mile End Road.

https://mailchi.mp/openhouseworldwide/free-extract-from-london-feeds-itself?e=6b32f5aa49

I have been really enjoying Andrew Wilson’s memoir, Confessions, which arrived through the post on Monday: a very entertaining, but also sometimes darker description of his upbringing and early marriage, including a lot of introspection and gossip. The thing I found by far the most shocking was the date of his birth in 1950 because when I first met him – it must have been in 1971 – he was already married, living in a little terrace house in Jericho and wearing a three-piece suit, having been kitted out by his father at a tailor in South Wales and because – I never knew this – wearing a sports jacket was regarded as the garb of an undergraduate.

There’s a particularly good short chapter on Wedgwood where his father was a successful managing director during the 1950s – ex-army, deeply inculcated with belief in the potteries, extremely knowledgeable and quite adventurous in the choice of artists who were commissioned – and how in 1962, when the firm went public, he was fired and Wedgwood then gobbled up all the other smaller potteries, effectively destroying Stoke-on-Trent as a centre of manufacture. There is a lesson here (he tells it) about how Britain excelled in traditional craft skills and that it may not have been as inevitable as we have been encouraged to think that these industries were all axed – not least because the idea of the smaller specialist company focussed round design and skill has been maintained in Germany.

Thank goodness Greg Clark has called in the so-called Slab for a planning inquiry.

It will be a test case for the system. Let’s hope the Inspector finds good reason to reject such a monstrous, out-of-scale, ill-placed development which would dwarf the National Theatre nearly next door and Somerset House opposite. Please can it be built on the Isle of Dogs, not in such a prominent site on the curve of the river ?

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/government-calls-in-makes-south-bank-tower-for-inquiry

For anyone who has access to The Literary Review, there is the first review of my book about John Wonnacott. I have only been able to read the first two paragraphs, but greatly admire Frances’s recent book The Real and the Romantic: Art between Two World Wars which does for the 1920s and 1930s a version of what I am interested in for the 1980s: that is, providing a broader and more plural narrative of the development of art which admits that some of the more conservative artists should be looked at undogmatically.

I’m grateful to her for reviewing it.

https://literaryreview.co.uk/life-study