We walked up the Rocky steps to the East Entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as fine and confident a statement of beaux arts neoclassicism as it is possible to imagine.   The Museum was founded in 1876, the year of the Centennial, the new building first planned in 1907, construction beginning in 1919, and opened on 26 March 1928:-

Back to the Barnes, including the de Chirico portrait of him (1926):-

A very beautiful Cézanne (1892-4):-

Seurat’s Poseuses (1886):-

Cézanne’s Bathers at Rest(1876-7):-

Monet’s Girl with Dog (1873):-

A tiny, little Picasso set of Three Figures (c.1922):-

A very beautiful early Renoir Luncheon(1875):-

Upstairs, beautiful Picasso drawings:-

Toulouse-Lautrec (1886):-

A strangely, but attractively idiosyncratic collection, full of smaller works, and less well known because they haven’t been lent.

I have been trying to get a feel for the geography of downtown Philadelphia, staying as we are on Broad Street, south of the monster City Hall.

I like the local pharmacy on Chestnut Street, designed in 1903 by William L. Price with Arts and Crafts detailing and much admired by Charles Ashbee:-

Nearly opposite is 1515 Chestnut (I can’t find the name of its architect):-

Along the street is an odd, tall, thin building with immensely elongated columns and an inscription A. POMERANTZ & CO, designed by Edward P. Simon and David B. Bassett for Amen Pomerantz’s office outfitting company:-

1606, Chestnut (as you can see):-

The source of the story about Bernini’s comments about the physiognomy of Charles I has now been solved, thanks to Per Rumberg.   Long before Evelyn’s Numismata was published, Edmund Ludlow, a parliamentarian MP and regicide, wrote an autobiography, called A voyce from the watch tower, in which he described how the King ‘was very desirous to have his statue cut in stone by that famous ingraver Barnardino at Rome, had sent severall pieces drawne by choice hands, as Vandike and others, for his better direction therein, the said Barnardino delayd the dispatch thereof till, upon letters from England complayning thereof, he was pressed thereunto by the Pope and Cardinall Barbarino, who was entituled the Protector of the English.   And when, upon much importunity, he gave an account to those who had set him on worke that he had finished it, hee said, There are so many cross-angles in the physiognomy of him for whom it’s cut, that he would come to some ill end’.   Ludlow adds that when the statue arrived in the Queen’s House in Greenwich, a bird flew through the window and blood ran down the King’s face.

My concentration on Bernini made me forget to mention that I went to see the Eddie Peake exhibition at White Cube last night, braving the cold winds of Bermondsey to see the way in which he has colonised one of the large galleries with a set of works under the title Concrete Pitch, including a set of steel tables (they look medical, but apparently come from a garden centre) which hold the detritus of his childhood on Stroud Green Road (not quite as pink as they look in the photograph):-

In order to complete this run of posts about Englishmen who were in Rome in October 1638, I need to say something about Thomas Baker, the wealthy country gentleman from Whittingham Hall in Suffolk, who is presumed to have been the person who brought Van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I with him for Bernini to make his lost bust.   He was on the continent at least intermittently from 1634, signing the visitor’s book at the English College in Rome on 16 November 1636, and seeing Bernini at the same time as Nicholas Stone.   He was so impressed by the quality of Bernini’s work that he ‘wooed him a long time to make his effigies in marble’.   Money was no object and he paid him 6,000 scudi, well over the going rate, to undertake his bust, now in the V&A, in spite of the fact that Bernini was under the strictest possible papal orders not to undertake new commissions.