We loved the new display of busts drawn from the Royal Academy’s stores and put together with intelligent irreverence by Cathie Pilkington and Alison Wilding. They are nearly all male ancestors in an immortal General Assembly.

It’s the death mask of Constable in the foreground:-

Although one is meant to view it as a ensemble, I found it hard not to try and identify some of the individual busts.

Sir Francis Grant was PRA in the 1860s and oversaw the move to Burlington House. His bust was done by his niece, Mary Grant:-

This is what he looked like in an accompanying photograph:-

Edward Armitage RA was a history painter. His bust (the one on the left) is by Sir Joseph Boehm Bt.:-

Sir Alfred Gilbert’s very recognisable bust of G.F Watts:-

Isabel Cholmeley, another female sculptor about whom nothing is apparently known, did a bust of John Gibson RA:-

The display is dominated by Dame Elisabeth Frink’s Goggle Head, the only work on loan;-

I called in this morning at The New Craftsman which opened its exhibition last night of work by a group of Orcadians, including the last person to make chair backs from straw, baskets by Mary Butcher and carved slate by Frances Pelly:-

Nice jewellery, too, by a non-Orcadian:-

One of the pleasures of being involved with the Royal Drawing School at this juncture is that, jointly with Thames & Hudson, it has just published a book, Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, which includes a host of short essays by artists who have been involved with teaching at the School encapsulating their various ideas, beliefs and attitudes, and illustrated by a multiplicity of drawings by ex-students (plus works from the Royal Collection):-

My first act as the new chairman of the Royal Drawing School was to celebrate and congratulate the 139 Young Artists whose work is on display in the Drawing School’s gallery in Charlotte Road. They are mostly between the age of 15 and 18 and attend classes not just in Shoreditch, but also Trinity Buoy Wharf, the National Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, Norwich and New Cumnock Town Hall. It’s an amazing programme, developing skills of expression, concentration and observation, which are valuable whether or not the students go on to art school:-

It was a pleasure to re-visit Dumfries House, the fifth Earl of Dumfries’s smart new house, designed for him by John Adam, the oldest of the three brothers Adam, who took over their father’s successful architectural practice after their father’s death in June 1748, with the possible additional involvement of his younger brother, Robert, who was in Italy for much of the time that the house was being designed, but who was named as party to the alterations to the final design agreed in February 1754. Maybe he tweaked the final design.

John was originally given the task in November 1748, was paid £22 1s. on 4 June 1750, and the first set of plans were submitted to Lord Burlington for his approbation in April 1751. On 19 March 1753, Lord Dumfries wrote to the Earl of Loudoun that ‘Mr. Adam has at last finished the plans and estimates for the new house’ and he bought two volumes of ‘Paladios Architecture’ on 19 July 1753. The contract for construction was signed on 19 May 1754.

I can maybe take a break from politics for a bit and return to architectural details. The policy seems clear: silence parliament; and then swamp the media with state-funded propaganda, promoted by H.M Treasury, singing the praises of cheap booze under No Deal. Unfortunately, the policy may work given the recent history of using social media to target swing voters, emphasising how horrid life under Corbyn is going to be. But, as I understand the psephology, it requires those people who remain passionately in favour of Brexit, whatever the consequences, to vote in favour of a Conservative/Brexit party coalition and swing from the benefits of a close relationship with Europe to preferring an American-style low wage, free market economy, regardless of long years of Austerity. As plenty of people have pointed out, one can’t disregard the possibility of this happening. But will all those traditional Labour voters in the north really swing to the Conservatives, irrespective of tribal loyalties, whilst much of the rest of the country, including many old-style, traditional tories, alienated by the extremism of what was their party, move across to the liberals and the Scots to the Scottish nationalists ? It will no doubt require more dirty money.

A footnote to my post about Dominic Grieve. Am I alone is seeing a certain irony in that Sonia Khan was unceremoniously and illegally fired by Dominic Cummings on the basis of a single, apparently incriminating (but never revealed) private text message, whereas now 10, Downing Street and Geoffrey Cox are arguing that text messages are private and should not be made available to the House of Commons ? I would say it is an obvious case of double standards, except that everyone seems to have forgotten that there are, or were, Standards in Public Life which MPs, government ministers and civil servants are required to adhere to.

I am increasingly admiring of Dominic Grieve, not least in the way that he is now tackling with such careful and forensic zeal why and when it was that the government chose to prorogue parliament and getting the evidence out in the open, as it is supposed to be and clearly is not, because of the increasing tendency of special advisors to conduct much government business on WhatsApp, precisely so that they are not accountable, as required by the civil service code (Cummings thinks he does not have to abide by the civil service code). We now know from the WhatsApp comments by government ministers over the weekend just how ignorant, childish and jejune they can be, so I will be interested what further comments are revealed if – as now seems unlikely – the government complies with the demand.

It seems to be the season for books about Lucian Freud because I went last week to the launch of the first volume of William Feaver’s massive and magnificently detailed biography of Freud, which he was banned from publishing during Freud’s lifetime on the grounds that it was all fiction, which it is only to the extent that all biography involves an element of invention and Freud no doubt felt, as all artists do, that what was important was not the life, however meticulously documented, but the art.

What comes across in what I have read so far is the importance of Freud’s upbringing in Berlin, part of the 1920s Berlin elite, living next door to the Ullsteins, and how early his talent was recognised, Stephen Spender inviting himself to stay in the cottage where Freud went to paint in Snowdonia as a seventeen-year old and regarded by the critic John Russell as like Tadzio in Death in Venice.

We had an event in the gallery tonight to celebrate the publication of Giovanni Aloi’s new book about Lucian Freud’s very beautiful and surprisingly numerous paintings, drawings and etchings of plant life, which are not so familiar as part of his oeuvre because they are seldom exhibited. The event was made the more interesting in that he was in conversation with Annie Freud, Lucian’s oldest daughter, who read from her own poetry, including one inspired by inheriting from her father a Biedermeier chest-of-drawers, and spoke of the experience of sitting for her portrait and her father’s deep knowledge and love of poetry, particularly some of the nonsense verse included in W.H. Auden’s anthology, The Poet’s Tongue.