I’ve always liked the Fondation Beyeler – the beautiful, suburban building designed by Renzo Piano between the road and fields on the outskirts of Basel, with spaces which are all daylit, looking out through large windows onto fields, but, at the same time, well judged, well proportioned, and providing the best possible conditions for the viewing of art.

The Foundation was established in 1982 by Ernst Beyeler and Hilda Kunz.   They showed their collection at the Reina Sofia in 1989, at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1993, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1997.   The building opened on 18 October 1997.

I walked round the outside to get a better sense of the ways that it connects to nature and the surrounding countryside:-

I took the no.6 tram out to the Fondation Beyeler in the posh suburbs of Basel to see their exhibition Bacon Giacometti, a compare and contrast of two of the major figures of the 1950s, both extremists and established outsiders, who met one another twice in London in 1962 and 1965.

Giacometti:-

Meets Bacon:-

They go well together: both examples of post-war angst, hovering between figuration and fragmentation.

Early Bacon (Head III 1949):-

Early Giacometti (The Nose 1947-9):-

I went tonight to the announcement of the winner of this year’s BP Portrait Award.   It turned out that it was the 29th. year that the award has been sponsored by BP, which must be one of the longest and most consistent examples of corporate support, now worth £35,000 to the winner, as well as a portrait commission, which makes it one of the biggest prizes in the country.   Before BP, it was the John Player Portrait Award, established in 1980, and one of the early examples of title sponsorship in the arts.   The winner was Miriam Escofet, a Spanish artist in her fifties, who has painted her mother:  a demonstration of the way that the BP Portrait Award keeps alive the tradition of serious and life-like portraiture as a legitimate practice in the arts.

Since so many people have written to congratulate me, including many readers of the blog, it might seem mildly perverse not to mention that I appeared in yesterday’s honours.   The truth is that the system requires one not to say anything for quite a long time, at least in the age of rapid media, so that I had slightly bottled it up and not told anyone, including Romilly;  and we spent the day in rural mid-Staffordshire, driving through areas of deep farmland in amongst the power stations, visiting churches far away from any newspaper.  But, thank you !  It, and all the messages, are really appreciated.

I first visited Bodley’s church of the Holy Angels in Hoar Cross in the mid-1970s.   It made a great impression on me for its solidity and seriousness and sense of high Victorian conviction.   It did so again today:  big, like an abbey church, with no money spared by the widow, Emily Meynell Ingram, on its ornament and decoration.

We had plenty of time to admire the outside as there was a wedding going on:-

Good gargoyles:-

And a wonderful, richly ornamented, grand interior:-

Ingestre Church is said to be by Wren, but, as far as I can see, without much evidence apart from the fact that Walter Chetwynd, the then owner of Ingestre Hall, was an FRS as well as MP for Stafford, interested in antiquities and natural history, and regarded by Gregory King as ‘a great ornament of his country’.   So, it’s possible that he asked Wren for a design.   It’s quite simple outside, more ornamented, particularly in its plasterwork inside:-

There’s a good monument to the Eighteenth Earl of Shrewbury:-

And two busts said to be by Thomas Kirk, an Irish sculptor:-

We stopped off at Lichfield Cathedral which bizarrely we have never been to: much of it medieval, but more of it the result of highly sensitive Victorian restoration, begun by Sydney Smirke and continued by Gilbert Scott and his son, John Oldrid.

The west front looks as it did in an engraving by Britton, but the statues by the portico are by Mary Grant and the rest by a local nineteenth-century workshop:-

There is a wonderful Victorian screen designed by Gilbert Scott and executed by Francis Skidmore of Coventry between 1859 and 1863:-

More good Victorian statues in the choir:-

Good Minton tiles in the choir:-

And a reredos with more Victorian carving, this time by John Birnie Philip:-

We are staying the weekend in the middle of deep woods in Ingestre Pavilion, a small folly on an estate in mid-Staffordshire, where Capability Brown landscaped the park for the second Viscount Chetwynd, MP for Stafford and an Irish peer.   The pavilion itself was apparently constructed by Charles Trubshaw, a local mason-architect who was undertaking work at Ingestre in 1752.   By 1802, everything behind it had been demolished, so it was left to Philip Jebb, a Catholic and a Kingsman, to add an octagonal room behind:-

I am devoting a second post to Lichfield Cathedral’s tombs.

A commemorative bust of Samuel Johnson was done by Westmacott in 1793:-

So was the monument to Andrew Newton, with standing woman and accompanying children:-

Also in the South Transept is a commemorative monument to the Officers of the 80th. Regiment of Foot by Peter Hollins:-

In the South Choir Aisle is an early monument by Francis Chantrey (1814) to the daughters of Canon Robinson:-

And in the north Choir Aisle a powerful Epstein memorial to the evangelical Bishop Woods who was a great tennis player and used to walk round his diocese:-

We went to the new opera house at West Horsley last night.   I am incredibly admiring of Wasfi Kani’s astonishing achievement in raising the money and constructing a large-scale opera house from scratch in the green fields of rural Surrey and am glad to see that this year the exterior is not breeze blocks, but decorated brickwork to match (or at least emulate) the amazing brickwork on the façade of the house:-