I joined an early morning patrons’ tour of Eglon House, an homage to the Maison de Verre in a mews behind the public library in Primrose Hill.   It was until recently an Express Dairy, in the days when there were still cows grazing on the slopes of Primrose Hill, but in the 1960s it was converted into recording studios for the likes of David Bowie.   Six years ago, the site was bought and converted into a grand and fastidiously detailed (curtains by Henry Moore) live-work premises by Chassay Last architects, now on the market for £21 million.   Alan Powers described the history of the original Maison de Verre, designed by Pierre Chareau for Dr. Jean Dalsace, a gynecologist who needed privacy, in a side street on the Left Bank, out of glass, steel and iron. It was first featured in an article in The Architect and Building News in 1934, rediscovered by Kenneth Frampton (and Richard Rogers) in the 1960s, and is now lived in by an American architectural historian:-

I went to the launch last night of the new biography of Whistler’s Mother: Portrait of an Extraordinary Life by Daniel Sutherland and Georgia Toutziari (actually, I was speaking at it). The book contains an account of how Whistler’s picture of his mother was submitted to the annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in April 1872 and very nearly turned down: too unfinished perhaps, too nakedly emotional, too monochrome (these were all comments of the critics when it was first shown). They had already turned down The White Girl, his great portrait of Joanna Hiffernan ten years earlier, now The Symphony in White No. 1, one of the masterpieces of the National Gallery of Washington. Then, Sir William Boxall RA, the Director of the National Gallery, a shy man, who had been a friend of Wordsworth, told Council that he would resign if they did not accept the picture. The picture was grudgingly accepted and is now recognised as one of the greatest pictures of the nineteenth century. We wanted to borrow it for our forthcoming exhibition about the ups and downs of the Summer Exhibition, The Great Spectacle (opens June 12th.), but sadly weren’t able to. I’m sorry because it might have been possible to judge what its impact must have been amidst acres of mediocre subject painting.

Every day more of the façade of Burlington Gardens becomes visible.   Today for the first time, it is possible to appreciate the plinth which marks the junction between the building and the street, looked down on by the newly cleaned statue of John Locke:-

I went to a dinner tonight to honour the bicentenary of Watts’s birth (he was born on 23 February 1817, the son of a pianoforte maker in Bryanston Square).   Hovering over the evening was the question why Watts, who was a pariah of the Bloomsbury Group, has enjoyed a recent reincarnation as a Grand Old Man of Victorian painting. Virginia Woolf described his memorial exhibition in 1905 (at the RA) as ‘atrocious‘ and lampooned him in her play Freshwater. He might have been included in Eminent Victorians if Lytton Strachey had regarded him as remotely interesting.   Part of the answer must lie in the Watts Gallery, which used to be seedily neglected, looked after as a sinecure by Wilfred Blunt, Anthony’s older brother.   Now it has been revivified by Perdita Hunt, a Trustee of the HLF, and Richard Ormond, who was chairman of trustees for a mere 32 years (I think he became a trustee in 1972).   Part of it may lie in the fact that Mary particularly was a good socialist, interested in the practice of pottery in the village.   And part of it is a matter of time – that someone who was such a big figure in his lifetime, the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, is definitely worthy of historical record, if not necessarily artistic admiration.

Since returning to Burlington Gardens, I have become a fan of occasional, therapeutic cream teas at Thomas’s, the café attached to the side entrance of Burberry’s on Vigo Street.   They not only provide information about the provenance of the butter (‘betwixt the Severn and the Wye’) and the jam (Rosebud Farm in North Yorkshire), but also the crockery, which comes from the Muddy Fingers Pottery in Northumberland:-

For those who do not have convenient access to a copy of Ruth Guilding’s Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640-1840 (Yale University Press, 2014), as referred to in the Comments section, this is what it tells one about the genesis of the sculpture collection at Syon. The house was inherited in 1749 by Lady Elizabeth Seymour, the only daughter of Algernon Seymour, 7th. Duke of Somerset, who had been responsible for the landscaping of the grounds of his house at Marlborough, including putting a grotto into the prehistoric Mound. Together with her husband, Hugh Smithson, she took the name of Percy and, in 1766, he became Duke of Northumberland. In 1760, they commissioned James and Robert Adam to do up the house in the latest Roman antique manner, based on Robert’s deep knowledge of Roman antiquity, prompted not so much by his friendship with Winckelmann, who he had never met, as Piranesi, as well as being much influenced by his interest in the archaeological remains of Spalatro (now Split). Since it was not straightforward to acquire original sculptures in Rome, they commissioned replicas, including a cast of the Apollo Belvedere by Joseph Wilton. I’m not sure that this in any way invalidates Mary Beard’s conjunction of Winckelmann, Robert Adam and Syon in her second programme, merely demonstrates that the eighteenth-century passion for antiquity was longstanding and that Robert Adam, like Mary Beard, belonged to the admirers of things Roman, as opposed to Winckelmann, who liked (and idealised) the Greeks.

As it was sunny (briefly), we decided to go to the new Kettle’s Yard for Mothering Sunday.

This is as it was in the 1950s:-

I first went in October 1972, nearly my first weekend in Cambridge, when Jim Ede was still in residence, but only just before moving up to Edinburgh and was available to talk about the precise placement of objects, the combination of art and artfully placed stones – my first introduction to modernism:-

I had forgotten how good Leslie Martin and David Owers’s 1970 addition is with its brick floors and changing levels and use of side lighting:-

Jamie Fobert has now added a sensitive and intelligent couple of contemporary gallery spaces on the ground floor behind the retained façade of the Victorian cottages on Castle Hill, which, with their ample use of polished concrete and steel staircase, make the house into more of an art space:-

Before someone points out that my pedantry about Winckelmann is flawed (possibly Mary Beard), I have realised that Winckelmann first refers to the Apollo Belvedere in his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst which was published in 1755 before he had even arrived in Rome (only 55 copies were printed) and was translated by Henry Fuseli ten years later, in 1765, as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. It was here that Winckelmann first referred to his admiration for ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, demonstrated most obviously not so much in the Apollo as the Laocoon. Then, he published an essay specifically on the Apollo Belvedere in 1759, also translated by Fuseli in 1768. So Robert Adam may have been influenced by him more than I realised (although he did not apparently meet him, or even refer to him, when he was in Rome).

Having now seen the second programme of Civilisations, we have been discussing over breakfast how far Mary Beard’s view is true that it was Winckelmann who was responsible for the idealisation of Greek sculpture, the glorification of the Apollo Belvedere, its enshrinement in Robert Adam’s display at Syon House, and Kenneth Clark’s snooty passing reference to it in one of his programmes as representing ‘a higher state of civilisation’. I know that Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums is regarded as key to any understanding and interpetation of the ideology of neoclassicism. But it was not published till 1764 and translated into French in 1768 (Beard refers to the French translation in Syon Library). The conversion of Syon and creation of its brilliant neoclassical interiors took place during the 1760s, so Winckelmann and Robert Adam were both similarly influenced by the archaeological interests and dsicoveries in Rome during the 1750s. What I’m not sure was adequately conveyed was the extent to which Winckelmann was responsible for a properly historical understanding of classical sculpture and not just a homoerotic idealisation of it.

The necessity of being vaccinated against  yellow fever (but I was told that it was nearly as dangerous to be vaccinated as to catch it) led me to Borough Market for the first time for a while.   I had forgotten how much I like its odd mixture of cathedral, fruit and vegetables;  the ironwork of the railway lines overhead;  and the ability to buy cheese and ceps:-