I acquired a handsome copy of Geoffrey Fletcher’s City Sights at the weekend, which has made me curious about exactly who he was and his life. The answer is that he studied at the Slade just after the war and was then a Rome Scholar in 1948. The UCL Art Museum has a painting by him dated 1945 entitled The Paying Guest, which already shows his taste for low life. In the 1950s, he contributed drawings to the Manchester Guardian and, in 1958, drawings of London to the Daily Telegraph in a column called ‘London Day by Day’. His reputation as a writer and illustrator was made by the publication of The London Nobody Knows in 1962. I’ve discovered that I’ve got two copies of the paperback, the first, published in 1965 for 6/-. It is an exploration of what he describes as ‘the crummier areas’ of London. ‘This, then, is the obscure, hardly-to-be-thought-of city; the London, very largely, of the hot August pavement and the pleasures of the mean, interminable streets’. I owe him a debt of gratitude because he first introduced me to Limehouse and Stepney Green. The book was made into a film starring James Mason in 1967. What happened to him later in his life is not clear except that there were exhibitions of his work in northern cities, including, Manchester, Oldham and Blackpool and his work is extremely well represented in British public collections. He died in 2004 and his archive is held by Islington Public Library.

I was asked last weekend about the history of the equestrian statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square.   The answer is relatively straightforward.   It’s by Hubert Le Sueur, who came to London in the retinue of Henrietta Maria in 1625. The statue was commissioned by Lord Weston, the Lord Treasurer, who agreed a contract with Le Sueur ‘for the casting of a Horsse in Brasse bigger then a great Horsse by a foot, and the figure of his Maj King Charles proportionable full six foot’. A plate under the horse’s left foot gives the date, 1633. After the execution of the King, it was ordered to be broken up by the brazier, John Rivet, who did a good trade in knives and forks supposedly made from it. But, in fact, he kept it, it was bought by Charles II, and erected in Charing Cross in 1675:-

It’s strange how one can live in a part of London and still not know it.   This morning I walked from the library to the farmer’s market by way of the Clichy estate – a model of the post-war redevelopment of Stepney, still surviving intact.   I was thinking about Gavin Stamp’s late conversion to the welfare state as himself a product of the 1944 Education Act, educated at Dulwich College at the state’s expense (I am quoting Jonathan Meades), and the fact that post-war planners thought that they were constructing the New Jerusalem:-

I was incredibly impressed by the quality of the carving of the capitals on the door surrounds, as well as the delicacy of the fanlights, in Ely Place and found myself photographing one after another, not least because each was so different in character.   The street was laid out in 1768:-

Turning east, one comes into Baggot Street:-

And then into Fitzwilliam Street, the subject of a famous planning enquiry in 1965, chaired by Hugh Casson, which recommended the demolition of a long run of Georgian houses, supported by John Summerson, the author of Georgian London, who famously dismissed the street as ‘simply one damned house after another’, a comment for which some have never forgiven him.   The buildings which replaced the Georgian houses designed by Stephenson Gibney & Associates (Gibney was President of the Royal Hibernian Academy) for the Electricity Supply Board have now themselves been demolished and are to be replaced by a modern version of a Georgian front by Grafton architects.   Sic transit.

Ending in Merrion Square:-

I am not the type normally to take photographs out of the windows of aeroplanes – not least because I could never match the maestro of the genre, Scott Mead, who has an exhibition of his from all over the world at Hamilton’s Gallery.   But this morning I happened to look out of the window as we were flying over Anglesey and there it was so perfectly laid out, so miniaturistically and so complete, that I could hardly resist snapping it:-

In the afternoon, I had no time to linger, only to whip through the Old Master galleries and enjoy a small number of things, including a limewood carving of John the Evangelist by Ligier Richier, a French sculptor:-

The galleries are in remarkably good order after what was apparently a long renovation project (7 years at a cost of c.€30M) overseen by Heneghan Peng.

The reason I was in Dublin is that I was attending a meeting at the Royal Hibernian Academy, our sister Academy across the Irish Sea.   It has a parallel history:  founded on 5 August 1823 as a result of thirty artists petitioning government to obtain a charter of incorporation, it is still more tied into government than the RA – it has to seek government approval for changes to its Laws (it still only has 35 members, plus ten Associates) and its exhibition programme is part funded by the Irish Arts Council (ours isn’t).   It lost its original building, Academy House, in Lower Abbey Street as a result of a fire during the 1916 Easter Uprising.   In 1939, it acquired a grand neo-Tudor house in Ely Place, which was demolished, to be replaced by a new building designed by Raymond McGrath, the Australian architect, who was elected as a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, remodelled ‘Finella’ for Mansfield Forbes, worked with Wells Coates and Serge Chermayeff on the interiors of Broadcasting House, before applying after the war to be Senior Architect in the Office of Irish Public Works.   The Royal Hibernian Academy is his most substantial surviving building, with fine upstairs, daylit galleries, only completed in 1989:-

And a very active set of studios on the top floor, used for life drawing:-

I spent the morning in the National Gallery of Ireland, admiring its fine collection of eighteenth-century paintings and being reminded how many prominent artists working in London were Irish, including George Barret RA, one of the founders of the Royal Academy, James Barry RA, one of only two artists to be expelled, Nathaniel Hone RA, another of the founders, and Francis Wheatley RA.

I admired Reynolds’s early parody of the School of Athens, when he was a student in Rome:-

James Barry’s Temptation of Adam (c.1770), based on Milton, which he painted while in Rome:-

Nathaniel Hone’s Self-Portrait (c.1780):-

And Gainsborough’s Cottage Girl (1785), which looks saccharine in reproduction, but less so when you see the quality of the painting:-

The other thing that I was really impressed by in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Library was the manuscript ‘observing book’ in which William Herschel described his observations of the planets, including the entry on 9th. September 1782 in which he sighted ‘My Planet’, which was Uranus – ‘the Planet extremely ill defined’.   He is the one and only person to have discovered a new planet from his observatory which he had recently moved from Bath to Slough:-

I was invited this afternoon to meet the new Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society, one of our neighbours in the courtyard, and to see some of the books in their library.   I was most struck by the fact that they have inherited books and manuscripts from the library of the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, a group which was established in Spitalfields in 1717 by Joseph Middleton to teach maths to sailors.   It met in a pub, the Monmouth’s Head, until 1725, when it moved to the White Horse in Wheeler Street.   Apparently about half its members were weavers – presumably Huguenot – and the rest were a motley crew of ‘brewers, braziers, bakers, bricklayers’. The Society existed until 1845 when its membership lapsed and was absorbed into that of the Royal Astronomical Society, founded in 1820.