I have now got hold of a copy of please do not touch (and other things you could not do at the design store that changed design) by Murray Moss and his partner, Franklin Getchell.   It’s a funny, fascinating and beautifully illustrated account of Murray’s decision to open a design store on Greene Street in SoHo which disobeyed all the normal rules of retail:  it displayed objects as if they were works of art in a museum;  they were behind glass;  they had provenance,  and you had to be brave, as well as rich, to buy them.   I used to visit whenever I was in New York, admiring the introduction of new designers, the sense of display, and the wonderful impracticality of it.   It makes a good story.

I was asked at Hay what was the earliest diploma work in the RA’s Collection. The answer was that I didn’t know. Depositing a work of art was a requirement of the original Instrument of Foundation, according to which no-one was to receive their Letter of Admission ’till he hath deposited in the Royal Academy, to remain there, a Picture, Bas-Relief, or other Specimen of his Abilities, approved of by the then sitting Council of the Academy’. The requirement was reiterated in 1771 – ‘That it is proper for present Academicians to give a picture or some other specimen of their abilities to remain in the Academy’ – which suggests that the early Academicians were ignoring it. It transpires that the first person to give a diploma work was Edward Burch, a very skilled gem engraver, who resigned from the Society of Artists in 1769 to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools, was made an ARA on 27 August 1770, and a full RA on 11 February 1771. He presented a small, framed gemstone, engraved with a neoclassical figure of Neptune, goddess of the Sea, as his diploma work on 11 June 1771, presumably as a token of his gratitude to his fellow Academicians.

The BBC arranged for a special screening of The Private Life of the Royal Academy at the Hay Festival, prefaced by a discussion chaired by Mark Bell, the BBC’s Commissioning Editor for Arts Programmes.   When I first saw the programme, I wasn’t sure what the response was, but it has become increasingly clear to me that people appreciate its honesty and warmth, that it is not trying to whitewash the institution, nor necessarily to promote it, but to depict it in depth and with humanity.   It was a long way to go, but worth it, if only for lunch at the other River Café:-

I went last night to the opening of the exhibition of Howard Hodgkin’s last paintings at Gagosian, an unexpectedly moving occasion of works when he was old and increasingly infirm, but still capable of painting emotionally vivid paintings with no more than a few strokes of the brush, an impeccable colourist, summoning up mood, place and atmosphere with extreme minimalism of expression, including the paintings he was working on in India at the time of his death in March 2017.

Last night the Paul Mellon Centre published an online account of the history of the Summer Exhibition year-by-year with a description of the artists who entered, the key works, and, where possible, the press and public response, each year written by a different author (https://chronicle250.com). It is going to be an absolutely invaluable resource, not just for the history of the Royal Academy, but for the study of changing fashions in British art as a whole, starting with a description by Mark Hallett, the Mellon Centre’s Director, of a portrait of William and Penelope Welby by Francis Cotes which appeared in the first exhibition which opened on 26 April 1769 in Lambe’s Auction Rooms on Pall Mall. I wrote the entries for 1949 because I was interested to find out what works were exhibited in the year that Alfred Munnings gave his memorably bigoted speech (https://chronicle250.com/1949) and for 2008, the first year that I attended Summer Exhibition committee meetings (https://chronicle250.com/2008). Today is Varnishing Day, as we embark on the opening arrangements for the 250th. Summer Exhibition and, this year only, The Great Spectacle, a survey of the whole history of the exhibition, beginning with a history painting, Hector Taking Leave of Andromache by Angelica Kauffmann, exhibited alongside three others by her in 1769.

Whilst in Barking, we went to admire the curious brick folly designed by muf in Barking Town Square to soften the effect of a large new development by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris alongside the 1930s Scandinavian-style town hall.   Muf erected a pure brick folly at the back of the Iceland store to give Barking a sense of its history, which it should have anyway, given that it’s the site of an Anglo- Saxon nunnery founded in 666 by the Bishop of London, with a lunatic asylum attached which apparently gave rise to the phrase ‘Barking mad’:-

My birthday treat was to go on a trip to Barking, to see the allotments alongside Barking Park, all impeccably neat and full of people out tending their flowers on Bank Holiday Monday:-

On the way back to London, we called in on Perch Hill Farm (not open to the public) in order to admire the cutting garden:-

I had wanted to walk along the old coach road from Firle to Charleston, remembering the first time that I visited the house in the early 1980s when it had just begun to be restored, walking along the track under Firle Beacon.

I started by walking across the fields from Charleston:-

Looking out across Firle Estate:-

No tea available in Beanstalk Cottage:-

Then back along the track to Tilton:-

At lunchtime I saw the progress that has been made on the renovation of the Charleston Barns, which are looking good.

The eighteenth-century barn which had a fire in the 1990s and was then rebuilt:-

And the beautiful new daylit gallery spaces in the part added by Jamie Fobert:-

Due to open in September.