One of the best things we saw yesterday was the so-called Othery Cope, a late fifteenth-century cope which was discovered in 1897, wrapped up in tarred cloth under the pulpit at St. Mary’s, Othery, north of Langport, and embroidered with symbols of the Virgin:-
We drove to Glastonbury Abbey across the marshes to admire its late Romanesque portal showing the Life of Mary, beginning with the Annunciation, through the Visitation, with a bestiary in the outer voussoir. It was constructed after a fire in 1184, overseen by Henry II’s chamberlain, Ralph Fitzstephen ‘building it of squared stones of the most beautiful workmanship’ (Adam of Domerham):-
It was impossible to find anywhere for lunch for eleven people in Wells, so we went out into the country to The Sheppey Inn in Godney – a remarkable, remote village inn which I highly recommend:-
We had a return visit to Wells Cathedral for a tour with Emily Guerry who knows it inside out. Begun in 1175, it’s an astonishingly ornate example of Early English Gothic with an excessively sculptural façade, with quatrefoils copying Rheims Cathedral, maybe by French masons who came on from Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral had burnt down in 1174):-
The reference to E.K. Waterhouse in the Comments section has reminded me that I have been meaning to find out more about his time at the Barber Institute. He was a Marlburian, a contemporary of John Betjeman and a year above Anthony Blunt. I don’t think there was much love lost between them. When I was at school, I was asked to look up a poem by John Betjeman in the school magazine which was said to have the acrostic EKWATERHOUSEISASHIT, but it didn’t exist (at least the additional ISASHIT was a false memory). After New College, Oxford, he went on a Harkness Fellowship to Princeton, where he studied El Greco, which was fairly pioneering for the time, and then returned to work, but rather briefly, for the National Gallery, which he apparently regarded as hopelessly amateurish (it was before the days of the Courtauld Institute). After the war, he was – all rather briefly – Editor of the Burlington Magazine, a Reader in Manchester and Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, before settling as Director of the Barber Institute in 1952. The quality of his acquisitions must have derived from an ample acquisitions fund, a detailed knowledge of the art market and independence of taste, partly derived from his time as Librarian of the British School of Rome in the 1930s, writing his book on Baroque Painting in Rome (1937). He also, which I didn’t know, worked on the British Art section for the Royal Academy’s big survey exhibition of seventeenth-century art, held in 1938, which led to his scholarly study of British painting.
Hauser and Wirth has a beautiful exhibition of late work by Louise Bourgeois – very free, fluid and organic etchings, done at the end of her life, which look wonderful in the empty space of the galleries. We particularly liked a bronze half statuette combined with vegetal top:-
We came to see the gardens at Stourhead, which I have only ever seen in the summer and autumn, never in the pale light of winter. We dashed round, past the grotto and Pantheon and up to the Temple of Apollo.
The nymph of the grot:-
A river god:-
We have escaped pre-Christmas to stay in Durslade Farmhouse, the eighteenth-century house which Iwan and Manuela Wirth bought five years ago and have restored as a masterpiece of shabby chic:-
In the morning, I walked briskly across the nearby fields, up a hill, to Redlynch, which has an unexpected mid-eighteenth-century church, designed by Nathaniel Ireson and advertising a carol service on Thursday:-
The door to the Trinity Almshouses unusually was open, so I was able to have a closer look, ahead of the day when a tower block looms over it above Whitechapel Station (I realised there is already a postwar block of flats visible directly behind the seventeenth-century chapel). The land was donated by Captain Henry Mudd of Ratcliffe and the almshouses built for retired sailors (‘decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships’), designed by a man called William Ogbourne, a master carpenter who was knighted in 1727. They were charged 12 shillings a month:-
I walked for a change up the Limehouse Cut, the stretch of water which was cut between the Thames and the River Lea, following an Act of Parliament in June 1767. Much of it is nondescript, semi-industrial wasteland, now being developed for new housing (it is hard to believe that we have a housing crisis when you see the scale and extent of new housing development in Bromley-by-Bow).
This is where the Cut begins:-
Past The Mission:-
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