Stonehenge

Some time ago I was asked over the breakfast table if I’d like to visit Stonehenge at dawn.   Of course, I accepted.   So it was that I found myself drinking claret in the Holiday Inn in Solstice Park, part of the horrible detritus which has accumulated beside the A30 on the other side of the roundabout from Stonehenge.   In the morning, we were driven to the new visitor centre designed by Australian architects, Denton Corker and Marshall, a clever piece of unobtrusive design more than a mile away from Stonehenge itself:

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We were then taken to admire the full landscape with its barrows and the so-called cursus, no doubt invisible in the photograph:

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Sir Richard MacCormac (1)

I have just been to the launch of a book that Richard MacCormac (RA) has produced about the house he has lived in in Heneage Street, Spitalfields, and, more importantly, the house next door where Jocasta Innes, his partner for the last three decades, lived.   It’s called Two Houses in Spitalfields.   She bought no.5, which had been built for a brewer, in the late 1970s.   Her daughter, Tabitha, evoked the heroic days of Spitalfields preservation, when their house had few amenities but electric light, Brick Lane had only curry houses, and much of the area was faced by demolition.   The neighbours met one another in a nearby pub and Richard’s house could apparently be reached from Jocasta’s via a secret door made out of a fireplace.   Jocasta died in April 2013.   Her house is now up for sale.   The book is a photographic record.

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Catherine Goodman (15)

The first sight of my portrait is by j-peg.   Catherine has sent me a digital image to inspect.   What’s the verdict ?  First off, it’s a bit of a shock.   She said my brow had been getting higher and higher.   But the Mekon ?  Then I remember that the sitter is the least good judge of a portrait, being familiar only with the image in the mirror in the morning and photographs, which always lie.   It’s as much an interpretation of character as it is a strict likeness.   It’s good on the physicality of a head, its three-dimensionality.   Besides, it’s quite wrong to judge it without seeing it.   The verdict at home is that it’s particularly good on the eyes and eyebrows:

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Pipes in the Peaks

The highlight of the festival was an evening at the local garage.   I had been to it in the morning to try and buy a paper.   Nothing had indicated that it contained a huge array of mechanical organs, including one called Pipes in the Peaks which had originally been installed in the ABC cinema in Derby and was acquired by the garage in 1999:

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Dovedale (2)

In the intervals of listening to Matthew Parris and John Carey, we escaped to the local hamlet of Stanshope, where there is a good Georgian front to an earlier house:

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Poppies in the gardens:

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Dovedale (1)

We first came to Dovedale about five years ago.   We were amazed how well preserved it is, a pocket of deep countryside, stone walls, steep wooded valleys and old field systems, the first of the National parks, with no postwar buildings.   Since then, we have been coming regularly to the Dovedale Arts Festival, which was held four years ago in a barn and two years ago in a local hotel.   This year, it is again being held in a barn in open country north of Ilam.   We arrived as the sun was going down:

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Catherine Goodman (14)

It’s finished !  At least, she says it’s finished.   This morning there was more inspection from afar, more pursed lips and slight narrowing of the eyes.   Half way through, I was told ‘it’s nearly there’, then that my chin had been resolved, then that there were at least five portraits on top of one another, then, just before time, I was told it was all over and I was released into the outside world.   No more sittings.   But I still haven’t been allowed to see the final result.   I have to wait.

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Catherine Goodman (13)

I thought my portrait was finished.   It isn’t.   I was called back for another sitting yesterday, as has Hannah Rothschild.   There was a great deal of inspection of the nearly finished portrait from near, from afar and as seen in the large mirror behind the easel, which enables me nearly to see a reflection of the portrait, but not quite.   The back tape round its edge was gradually stripped off.   I asked why.   She said that she’ll tell me one day.   At one point, she applied a large dab of bright yellow pigment which looked dangerous and wholly unnecessary.   I had thought that my very severe haircut might be a disadvantage, as had she.   It’s not long now that the invisible college of her sitters – the dealer, the gardener, the film director and literary agent, but not the Duchess of Cornwall – will be revealed on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery.   We might finally all meet.

Here is what the artist looks like from the viewpoint of the sitter:

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The Foundling Hospital

I don’t go to the Foundling Hospital as often as I ought to.   I was invited to a so-called VIP evening, but after the third person asked me who I was and what I was doing there, I thought that perhaps I had been invited in error.   Anyway, it enabled me to revisit the Court Room, which is more or less all that survives of the original Jacobsen building and to see and admire the wonderful terracotta bust of Handel by Roubiliac, done in preparation for his full-length statue in Vauxhall Gardens:

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Summer Exhibition Preview Party

The purpose of the party is mainly to encourage people to buy the works.   But it has the ancillary benefits of a performance by the Kaiser Chiefs, oceans of champagne, a parade of long-legged models, and assorted celebrities.   There are at least six television crews and hundreds of photographers, so any additional photographs are redundant:

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