I have been gently chastised by Marina Vaizey for not saying more about the Cecil Beaton exhibition, which does indeed represent the Gallery’s long association with him as a photographer, beginning with Roy Strong making friends with him in the mid-1960s and showing his work in a landmark exhibition at the NPG in 1968, which, as she says, was the first serious exhibition of photography in this country. She thinks there were leaves on the floor, but I see no leaves in the surviving installation shot, which instead shows photographs mounted very densely on screens and Beaton’s large straw hat hanging on the wall. The exhibition was wildly successful, was apparently filled with incense, and was said to have had 250,000 visitors, although it’s hard to imagine how or where they were crammed in.

I forgot to put this in my blog last night because I was busy eating dinner.

Following my posts last year about Nick Coker, the real-life model of the hero (or anti-hero) of the film The Souvenir, I was sent a photograph of a long forgotten event which took place on the lawns of King’s College, Cambridge in the summer of 1975, when Coker arranged what I remember as being a Festival of 1,000 Flutes, but in retrospect I realise could not have been that many (it was apparently 100, not 1000). I didn’t feel able to post the photograph without the permission of Matthew Creighton who took it and I have only just received his permission.

I am posting it for two reasons. The first is as a recollection of a different era, when Cambridge was not as manicured as it has since become. The second is that it shows Coker in his undergraduate phase, standing at the top of the bank wearing a white suit and wearing – I think very uncharacteristically – a boater, when he was still an infinitely glamorous figure, much more so than he is depicted in the film:-

Nice to see the Cecil Beaton exhibition !

Steven Runciman, who I only knew (slightly) as a Grand Old Man was photographed upside down at Wilsford in 1927 when he was already a Fellow of Trinity:-

He had been photographed earlier holding a tulip in 1922:-

And Dadie Rylands as the Duchess of Malfi:-

It was the last of the Portrait Dinners, perhaps the last big gathering for a while, before the gallery closes at the end of June for its refurb. The former Directors were invited – those who were living, at least – including Roy Strong who started work at the NPG in 1959, more than sixty years ago, and was a protegé of Cecil Beaton, whose exhibition is downstairs. After being photographed in front of the Somerset House Conference, as Roy was as a Young Turk in 1967, we trooped downstairs for champagne:-

St Mary Magdalene is a fine church – high gothic, tall and brick, designed by G.E. Street as an outpost of All Saints, Margaret Street, originally surrounded by working class housing, now by tower blocks:-

Inside is high church, with crucifixes shrouded for lent and a reredos by Martin Travers:-

Best of all is the Chapel of St. Sepulchre downstairs, locked up while waiting for restoration, designed by Ninian Comper in memory of Father West:-

It is the last day of the Architecture Foundation’s exhibition of new religious architecture, including the Dow Jones adaptation of St. Mary Magdalene, in whose crypt the exhibition has been held.

There’s a beautiful model of the building Roz Barr has planned for the Augustinians in Hammersmith:-

John Pawson is doing a conversion of St. John-at-Hackney.

There’s a model of a floating church for the canal at Stratford:-

And a very ambitious project by James Gorst for the White Eagle in Hampshire:-

In so far as my blog is a record of my routine preoccupations, which it half is, it would be odd not to make reference to the fact that the whole of the last week has been occupied by anxieties about the consequences of Coronavirus: from early in the week when it seemed odd and a bit discourteous not to shake hands and embrace to the end of the week when the best one could expect was a greeting elbow to elbow, when travelling on the underground meant standing stock still terrified of the first person who might sneeze, and even the Wolseley was half empty for breakfast. It is presumably sensible what we are all doing: making efforts to avoid crowded places; paying attention to the passage of germs; earnest hand washing to rid one of the taint of possible infection. But it is odd how a week can change everything.

I found myself walking the full length of Park Village East, Nash’s early garden Suburb, down towards Euston and a big area of social housing, which, I assume, was in an area which was heavily bombed: an unexpected set of architectural contrasts:-

A session in the archive of the Tate gave me an opportunity to see the exhibition on British Baroque, which I used to regard as my period.

I don’t remember seeing the John Bushnell terracotta bust of Charles II from the Fitzwilliam which shows his intelligence and sensuality:-

The bust by Honoré Pelle is comparatively stylised:-

There’s a sensational Grinling Gibbons font cover from All Hallows by the Tower, commissioned by a parishioner in 1682:-

Jan Siberechts contemporary view of Chatsworth shows its colossal ostentation as it appeared to Siberechts who was there in 1699:-

It’s good to see the Kneller portrait of Prior from Trinity, which shows what a wonderful artist he could be on a good day:-

There’s a picture of the Junto, painted in 1710, only acquired in 2018. It surely should have gone to the NPG. Hard to see as a major contribution to British art:-

The exhibition is good on the martial character of the period and the dominance of the monarchy, but it’s hard to convey its wealth and variety through so many royal portraits, no tomb sculpture, and mostly two dimensions.

It’s always a pleasure to have breakfast in Spitalfields:-