My post on John Rogers Herbert seems to have struck a chord.   There is something slightly touching about this super earnest early Victorian with his long red hair ‘very smoothly brushed straight down’, converting to Catholicism and biblical hyper realism, painting scenes from the bible as if he had visited Palestine (maybe he had, but I haven’t found evidence of it), celebrating the fact that, as he described it, ‘the age of splash and dash is nearly over’, being employed to teach in the government schools of design, spending time in France and speaking forever thereafter with a strong French accent, admired by Gladstone, and dying in The Chimes in Kilburn (this is written with acknowledgement to Barbara Bryant’s excellent short life in the NDNB).

So who was J.R. Herbert who was responsible for the big fresco of Moses brining down the Tables of the Law to the Israelites in the so-called Moses Room at the Palace of Westminster ?   The answer is that he was a classic product of the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1820s (he entered the Schools in 1826) who turned his hand to book illustration and then to larger narrative painting before Queen Victoria came to the throne and before the Pre-Raphaelites made it fashionable.   Indeed, one of the aims of the Pre-Raphaelites was, as W.M. Rossetti described it, to ‘out-Herbert Herbert’.   He was also a close friend of A.W.N. Pugin and a fellow convert to Catholicism.   They both had a passionate belief in the historical importance and moral significance of the wall decoration in the Palace of Westminster.   Herbert became an RA in 1846, continued to submit work to the Summer Exhibition after he had gone blind, and was forgotten by the time he was dead.

I have just been on a group tour of the House of Lords with Mervyn Davies, the chairman of the RA Trust, whose enthusiasm for all aspects of the higher democracy is infectious.   We had tea in the dining room, attended the tail end of a debate about beavers, saw the Moses Room with paintings by J.R. Herbert RA, and ended up in the broom cupboard where Emily Davison, the suffragette, hid during the night of the 1911 Census.   It gave the best possible introduction to the pleasures and responsibilities of life as a peer (no photographs are allowed inside):-

The flight back from New York and a quiet day at home meant that I was able to read Ian Bostridge’s new book on Schubert’s Winterreise, Winter Journeys:  Anatomy of an Obsession.   I very much admire the way he writes about music, deeply informed by the experience of performance, but also by his knowledge of the history and culture and intellectual milieu of early nineteenth-century Vienna and of Schubert’s life and attitude to his art.   The book consists of a sequence of meditations on each of the songs in the cycle, some quite brief and some much longer, occasionally technical and including passages on the relationship between Schubert and Thomas Mann, Schubert and Caspar David Friedrich, and the nature of Schubert’s religious faith.

I realise that the photograph below is a cliché and might just as well be a tourist postcard, but I still like the image of the junction of Park and 82nd. which for some reason known only to the New York authorities has a funnel releasing a thick jet of steam into the cold winter air:-

I ended the evening last night (well, not literally) in Bemelmans Bar alongside the Carlyle Hotel, which manages to escape the normal American taboo against bars, perhaps because of its long-standing association with Jackie Kennedy who helped preserve the murals and much else in Manhattan.   Of course, in the evening one cannot really appreciate them in the raucous atmosphere of 6 o’clock drinking (Americans start everything early), but in the morning I was able to snap them for the record:-

I have been intrigued on this visit, as on my last, by the appearance of a pencil-thin, tall skyscraper which has emerged in the skyline on 59th. Street, at least as high as the Empire State Building and, to my eyes, as different to the aesthetic of the classic skyscraper as the AT&T Building was in 1984.   I was struck that no-one mentions it, no-one comments, no-one looks up as they walk past on the street below.   The answer is that it is the new tallest building in the western world, designed by Rafael Viñoly, and required no planning permission because it breaches no planning laws, just rising one storey at a time for 84 stories, changing the skyline of New York forever:-

I woke myself up with a brisk – very brisk – walk in Central Park, which was covered in snow and dog walkers and where it is surprisingly easy to have the delusion of rurality, apart from the distant skyscrapers:-