It’s a very beautiful exhibition open tomorrow and Saturday 12 to 6.  Unit 3, 1-7, Ernest Avenue, SE27 0DQ.  Train or bus to West Norwood.  It’s next door to the bus depot.

Hard to locate even with Google.  Look out for the sign which says LONDON SIGNS and then press a square white button on door number 3, which doesn’t look like a door bell but is.

Then, there is a magical white exhibition space:-

It’s set-up day for Romilly’s exhibition in Edmund de Waal’s beautiful workshop/studio in Studio 3, 1-7, Ernest Avenue, West Norwood, SE27 0DQ (it’s an easy walk up the hill from West Norwood station on a line straight from Victoria).

The light in the studio is very beautiful, particularly in the space which is double-height and top-lit, like a sanctuary:-

Open from 12-6 on Friday and Saturday.

En route to Claremont, I stopped at St. George’s, Esher, the small, curiously rustic, old village church, where Thomas Pelham-Holles apparently asked Vanbrugh to install a family pew – not just any old pew, but a private side chapel from which the Duke would have found it hard to see anything except the Vicar in his fine double-decker pulpit.  You might have thought that he could have afforded to build a new church.

The church – charming and very unusual:-

The Newcastle Pew from outside:-

The interior of the church:-

And the Newcastle Pew, very correct in its architecture and so not very obviously Vanbrugh.  Maybe he was becoming more correct in his old age:-

I have been planning to go to Claremont for ages.  What I hadn’t realised is that by far the best of the surviving buildings – Vanbrugh’s brick belvedere – is not actually part of the landscape gardens looked after by the National Trust, but part of the estate of Claremont Fan Court School which now occupies the Capability Brown/Henry Holland house which replaced Vanbrugh’s original palatial mansion after it had been demolished by Lord Clive. So, you can only see it from a distance (the telephoto is deceptive).

Built in 1717, it maybe marks the beginning of Vanbrugh’s half-serious, half-playful medievalism which led him to design Vanbrugh Castle for himself two years later.  It is perhaps not surprising that Jonathan Swift likened Vanbrugh’s design style to a child’s because he uses very simple brick forms in a highly imaginative way.  Swift intended it as an insult, but Vanbrugh may have taken it as a compliment:-

I spent a wonderful day at Grimsthorpe today – a great Vanbrugh house and surprisingly easy to get to from London (twenty miles or so north of Stamford, Lincs), but hard to photograph because it faces north (the other façades were never built):-

I have been encouraged to share my article on the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand.  Well worth a visit.  They are showing an exhibition of work by Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto from September 27th.

Following Ivan Gaskell’s comment on my post about Perry Rathbone, describing what it was like when he went as the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator to the Fogg in 1991, I freely confess that part of my interest in Rathbone’s diary was that it described a milieu that I discovered and hadn’t expected when I went to the Fogg as a Henry Fellow in 1976.

John Coolidge, who had been Director of the Fogg from 1948 to 1972 – a brahmin if ever there was one – was still teaching a course based on the research he had published in 1942 on Lowell, Massachusetts.  To this day, I wish I had taken it as the field trips might have given me a better knowledge of Massachusetts architecture.

And I was invited to celebrate Thanksgiving with Cornelius and Emily Vermeule.  Cornelius Vermeule III had been a curator of Classical Art at the MFA since 1957.

I realise now it was brahmin-land.  At the time, it seemed a bit unreal.

I have been sent a PDF of the diary of Perry Rathbone, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1960s, which has been published by his daughter, Belinda. It gives a good sense of the life of a museum director – hectic, torn between travel, seeking acquisitions, visiting exhibitions and cultivating donors, without much time for self-reflection, or even writing a diary, except for the occasional set pieces as when Kennedy is shot.

It is picture of upper crust Boston as it used to be – a lot of time entertaining, dressing for dinner, going to clubs. Much of it is routine sociability about people now forgotten, but there are occasional moments which make one sit up. I had not realised that Josep Lluís Sert, the Catalan architect, was Dean of Architecture at Harvard and responsible for some of the big buildings in Harvard Yard as well as the Fondation Maeght. There is quite a bit about historic preservation, and while Rathbone is interested and knowledgeable about contemporary art, he hates Corbusier’s Carpenter Center next door to the Fogg. He is contemptuous of poor old W.G. Constable, the first Director of the Courtauld Institute who went to be Keeper of the Paintings Department in Boston and who he keeps meeting at parties. He was also uncomplimentary about Bernard Berenson, quoting Meyer Schapiro who wrote that ‘Business was the concealed plumbing in Berenson’s house of life’. There is an interesting comment as he packs up their holiday cottage on Cape Cod that ‘The Cape changes – how swiftly ! I see a complete surrender of the holdings of the old Yankee higher order and a ruination of the ‘Old Cape’ we have loved’.

Rathbone was a product of Paul Sachs’s course at Harvard on ‘Museum Work and Museum Problems’. What comes across is that the requirements are not so much connoisseurship as stamina in maintaining a hyper-active social life, staying each summer with Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and Henry P. McIlhenny in his castle in Ireland, waiting for rich people to die in the hope that they might bequeath their collection to the MFA.