I attended an unexpectedly vehement hatchet job on the writings of John Summerson by Steven Brindle who has been commissioned by Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre to write a successor volume to Summerson’s great and much revised Pelican History of Art on Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, which was kept in print for nearly fifty years. It is probably necessary if commissioned to write a new version of a much loved and admired book to feel strongly about its defects: its tendency to sometimes too sweeping critical judgment and its focus on issues of design and style more than construction and use. But this was the nature of the era from which it sprang: the introduction of Wolfflinian criticism to British architectural history and an attempt to relate changes in British architecture to what was happening in Europe. As Elizabeth McKellar pointed out, who is writing Summerson’s biography, it was probably part of Pevsner’s brief for the Pelican histories that they should be critical surveys, informed by visual judgment, different in style and character from the traditional English archaeological and antiquarian approach.

It was the opening last night of an exhibition at the Garden Museum of the work of ‘Artist-Gardeners 1919-1939’ – a generation of artists who retreated to houses in the countryside not too far from London, where most of them did part-time teaching. They had been trained to observe nature and draw plants and many of them turned to the cultivation of their gardens. Some of this group are well remembered and have already been the subject of scholarly study, including Edward Bawden at Great Bardfield and John Nash at Wormingford. But some deserve the attention which the exhibition gives them, particularly Charles Mahoney, a talented student of William Rothenstein at the Royal College of Art, who moved out to Wrotham in Kent and taught at the Royal Academy Schools where he is remembered for his emphysema (too much smoking) and grumpiness. It was a generation which was displaced by the artists of the 1950s and is now being resurrected deservedly.

I’ve been working away on identifying possible images for my book about post-war museums.   Three things have struck me.   The first is how relatively straightforward it is to identify good quality, and sometimes great, architectural photographs, using Google Images.   The second is that the great images are, perhaps unsurprisingly, by well-known photographers whose work I should have known about, including, for example, Ezra Stoller’s wonderful photographs of the Whitney Museum and Kimbell, Balthazar Korab’s of the Neue Galerie in Berlin, and Kemal Emden’s of the Yale Center for British Art. But then, the third is how expensive they are to reproduce. So, the question is how far it’s possible to maintain the quality of the images. Or does one just debase ?

The sun was out this morning over the fields and down by the river:-

It’s a wintry morning. The river is high, higher than I’ve ever seen, no hope of crossing it as the stepping stones are far below:-

The real reason why I wanted to call in on the NPG was to see Henry VII before he goes out on loan or into cold storage: one of the most fascinating portraits in the collection (NPG 416), documented by its inscription as having been painted by order of Herman Rinck, an agent for Maximilian I in the abortive negotiations round Henry’s possible marriage to Margaret of Austria. I’ve always been fascinated by how much it seems to tell one about Henry’s character – careful, scrupulous, reticent, if one is still allowed to read portraits in relation to character:-

Done by an unknown artist, but so beautifully, one wants to know about the artist as well as the sitter.

His eyes:-

His mouth:-

His left hand:-

Given the imminent closure of the NPG (actually, not until 29 June), I thought I should call in as I was in the area. I was so pleased to see that Leonard McComb’s estate has bequeathed his Self-portrait which in on display on what used to be the Royal landing, together with his very fine portrait of Doris Lessing. His Self-portrait well conveys his personality – earnest and quietly determined, a bit of a loner and a beautiful draftsman. It was done in 2002 when he had stood down as Keeper at the Royal Academy and was living in Brixton; but I don’t remember the moustache:-

It was the publication day today of DixonJones 2, the second volume of the Complete Works of Dixon.Jones, taking the practice from their work on the National Gallery, including the Getty Entrance and Annenberg Court, through their work on the pedestrianisation of Exhibition Road, Jeremy’s beautiful concert hall at King’s Place, Ed’s Villa Jones at Bargemon, to their work on the masterplan for the Chelsea Barracks site and works I know less well like Marlborough Primary School in Chelsea and 35, Marylebone High Street: always well judged, urbane, sympathetic to the surrounding environment, the product of good thinking and design, all of which is beautifully recorded in the book through text, plans, drawings and photographs.