It was a beautiful day in Perry Green where Henry Moore rented Hoglands in September 1940 to escape the bombing of Hampstead and stayed there for the rest of his life, gradually adding to the property and buying land on which to display his sculpture, now with a large public facility (closed in winter) next door:-

This is the house, not exactly what one expects of a world-famous artist, with its 1960s extension from which to survey work in the garden:-

Double Oval:-

Three Piece Reclining Figure Draped:-

Large Figure in Shelter:-

Yellow Brick Studio:-

Plastic Studio:-

Maquette Studio:-

Large Reclining Figure:-

Every so often over the last three weeks, I have taken photographs out of the window of our medlar tree in the blaze of late autumn, now nearly at an end:-

For those interested in learning more about what is planned for St. Anne’s, Limehouse, the current state of the masterplan as drawn up by Thomas Ford and Partners has been published on the Care for St. Anne’s website (https://www.careforstannes.org/restoration), but the point of the consultation yesterday was, as I understood it, to consider the best balance of future use between the church and the community; and how best to raise the sums required to match a potential grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Following a presentation yesterday by the conservation architects and others on what is planned for the future of St. Anne’s, Limehouse, noble as ever, I spent a bit of time trying to find out what the interiors had looked like in the past and came across the attached photograph which is presumably from the 1880s or 1890s – it is not labelled where it appears in ‘The Londonist’:

This presumably postdates its restoration in the early 1850s by Philip Hardwick. Maybe it postdates a further restoration in 1891 by Sir Arthur Blomfield, who was a pupil of Hardwick for three years after graduating from Trinity, Cambridge and before setting up in private practice. It shows Blomfield’s pulpit and altar.

The question which hovered over the discussion is whether it should remain in any way an ecclesiastical space or whether, instead, and perhaps more realistically, it becomes a flexible community space. It would be interesting to hear more about the experience of St. George’s, Bloomsbury which underwent a radical restoration in 2008 under the auspices of the World Monuments Fund.

I was walking across Bedford Square when I happened to notice the posters advertising an exhibition about the work of M.J. Long. I recommend it – small, but very well displayed, centring around the doll’s house she designed for her daughter and including recordings from National Life Stories.

https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/portraits-of-a-practice-the-life-and-work-of-mj-long

It has taken me longer than it should to read Laura Freeman’s totally admirable and beautifully written book about Jim Ede – Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. She does not pretend that Ede was better than he was: a bit disorganised, but totally passionate about art of his time in contrast to the Tate as it was in the 1920s and 1930s when he tried so hard and totally failed to persuade them to collect the artists he was having to supper in his Hampstead house in Elm Row (it surely ought to have a blue plaque). He was obviously charming, sometimes a bit wilfully naive and absolutely determined as a collector and organiser of his domestic environment. She conveys all this so clearly, no word misplaced.

Oh, and by the way, the book is very beautifully produced, as it should be, but it doesn’t say who designed it.

I enjoyed the film about Napoleon, but it seems odd that so much of it is shot in the UK. Boughton makes sense because it was designed in the style of a French château in the 1680s; Blenheim which is used for so many of the interiors comes across as much more French than I would have expected – more spacious too; it seems particularly odd that a version of the north façade of Blenheim is used to represent Moscow before it is burnt down. Then I thought there was quite a lot of use of the Painted Hall at Greenwich, as well as a glimpse of the long walkway by the William III Court. So, late seventeenth-century British architecture is used as a simulacrum of post-Revolutionary France.

The one I couldn’t figure out was the Château de Malmaison which had a lovely English landscape garden.

I have been digesting last night’s wonderful performance of Jephtha, its last night. I hadn’t realised that Handel lost the sight of his left eye, whilst he was composing the opera, writing on the manuscript (in German), ‘Reached here on 13 February 1751, unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye’. Maybe this helps to explain the extraordinary intensity of the third act, which doesn’t feel characteristic of Handel, nor of the mid-eighteenth century. By the summer when he completed the opera, he had completely lost the sight of his left eye and two years later he was blind.

I was able to visit the two exhibitions today in which Romilly has work.

The first is in the Sarah Myerscough Gallery in New Row, where the New Craftsman used to be – walking distance from Marble Arch.  A beautiful space.  The exhibition has been curated by Corinne Julius round the theme of memory.  See The Green Green Grass of Home and Brachiopod Treehandle-

The second is in Flow Gallery in Needham Road just off Westbourne Grove, in display cases together with the jewellers with whom she works:-

Ages ago, I went to an event to celebrate the opening of the new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland. By chance, I found myself waiting for the minibus with Niall McLaughlin which helped inform my analysis of it, as below:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2023/keeping-the-faith/