Following the death of I.M. Pei, I have been re-reading the short pamphlet written by Colin Amery about Oare Pavilion, one of his last works which was used as the background of the picture of him advertising the Mandarin Oriental hotels (He’s a Fan). It’s a relatively small, but still very remarkable work, commissioned to mark the millennium and following a visit by its owner to the Miho Museum, high up in the mountains near Kyoto. The pavilion sits beautifully in the midst of the surrounding fields and woods, at the end of a long avenue of lime trees below the Marlborough downs – an ultra-modern, spectral, technically complex version of an eighteenth-century pagoda:-

We had a small event this morning to celebrate Mariana Cook’s Factum Fetishes, a portfolio of photographs of some of the objects and artefacts she found lying about the workshops of Factum Arte in Madrid, including a vest belonging to one of the painters, which looks like a palette, the bottom of a brush with coagulated matter in its bristles, and the sinister rubber gloves which are now a requirement of safety legislation. They looked very good individually framed, but even better in raking daylight when one could appreciate the amazing deep black aquatint printing, giving the images a special intensity:-

The first event in the Charleston Festival was Andrew Motion talking about his newest collection of poems, Essex Clay, about his mother, who he has already written about in In the Blood, and his father, who fought in the war and never read, except half a book by Hammond Innes. He spoke with great and sometimes tremulous intensity, not just about England, but also Baltimore, where he has the pleasure of not being so well known; and about his first girl friend, anonymised, who appears in the poem. And about Trump and climate change, brilliantly.

One of the best things about last night was seeing Roy Strong semi-presiding at dinner as the longest standing representative of British art scholarship, stretching back to The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture which the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, as it was then called, published in a lavish piece of book production in 1969; and, very impressively, about to publish a new investigation of Elizabethan art, The Elizabethan Image, going back to issues of late Tudor visual aesthetics which he first studied under Gombrich and Frances Yates sixty years ago.

There was an event last night to celebrate the long tenure of Amy Meyers as Director of the Yale Center for British Art.

It demonstrated – not that the demonstration was needed – what amazing close links she has maintained with all elements of the British art world: scholars, through her close involvement with the Paul Mellon Centre in London and its programme of publications; museum directors, with whom she has worked on joint exhibitions (the RA did a Paul Mellon exhibition in 2008); and artists, some of whom, like Rebecca Salter, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, and now Eileen Hogan have been better recognised on the other side of the Atlantic than in the UK.

I have been particularly admiring of how she has mounted major scholarly exhibitions on relatively unexpected topics, like the recent exhibition of British Studio Pottery, and how supportive she has been of digital ventures, like the recently launched Watercolour World.

She started in July 2002, so it’s the end of an era.

I don’t think I have ever previously been in to St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Why would I have been ? From outside, it’s a not especially distinguished piece of early Victorian gothic, dated 1843, by Thomas Cundy the Younger who succeeded his father as Surveyor of the Grosvenor estates in 1825 and produced flimsy gothic in a sea of stucco. So, I had no idea that inside there is the most wonderful G.F. Bodley reredos and rood screen, installed in 1892 (screens were back in fashion after Pugin had published his Treatise on Church Screens and Rood Lofts in 1851).

Outside:-

Inside:-

I spent the afternoon at Photo London. The thing I liked best were the photographs of Luigi Gherri, which I’m sure I should have known, but have never consciously seen, so beautifully dead pan, wide angle, slightly surreal, as if life has been drained out of them, views of Versailles from the 1970s. I tried to photograph them, but failed.

Then, I always like exploring the subterranean vaults of Somerset House which show William Chambers backstage, rough hewn, the eighteenth-century city underground:-

I went last night to the dinner celebrating the Ondaatje Prize, now in its fifteenth year: a good prize ‘for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place’, won in the past by Rory Stewart, Adam Nicolson and Edmund de Waal. This year the subjects were mostly global. It was won by Aida Edemariam for her book The Wife’s Tale about her Ethiopian grandmother.

After three days of staying in The Secular Retreat, I have been reading Peter Zumthor’s book Atmospheres, based on a lecture he gave in Wendlinghausen in 2003. It has made me look more closely at the materials and textures with which the house is built: the fall of afternoon light on raw concrete:-