Although I have been watching our Charles I exhibition come together and gradually be installed, it was only last night that I was able to see it in its full glory.

First thoughts.   I didn’t know the full scale of what has been lost.   For example, a bust of Bernini based on the great Van Dyck triple portrait which was lost in the 1698 Whitehall fire.   A Velázquez portrait which he commissioned when he visited Madrid in March 1623.

Second is the staggering quality and generosity of the loans from the Royal Collection. Of course, I know intellectually the quality of the Royal Collection from its published catalogues and exhibitions at the Queen’s Gallery, but even so, this did not prepare me for the number and range and scale of works lent, all of which were sold in 1649 and later recovered at the Restoration.

The third is the quality of the design, done immaculately by a French designer, Cécile Degos, using French paints.

We were taken to see the New Cumnock outdoor swimming pool, an initiative – only one amongst many – of the Dumfries House Trust which has brought new life to the local community by restoring not only the lido (1966), but the Town Hall as well:-

The Town Hall is Scots Renaissance 1888-9:-

Before I leave the subject of Dumfries House, I should say that I was very impressed by the amount of activity and new build on the estate.   After long years when the estate was totally inaccessible, lived in by the Dowager Marchioness of Bute, it has now been opened up with a range of social enterprises in the surrounding park, including a cookery school and public restaurant, an outpost of the Royal Drawing School, a gymnasium and climbing wall, artists in residence, much of the activity contained in new, semi-industrial buildings.

This is the walled garden:-

And the roof of the the bunkhouse:-

Inside is a nearly perfectly preserved set of interiors of the late 1750s, complete with plasterwork ceilings, neoclassical chimneypieces and much Chippendale furniture, whose purchase is documented, including fine Chinoiserie girandoles flanking Lord Dumfries’s portrait in the dining room, a set of elbow chairs and pair of card tables in the Parlour, a desk in the room originally known as ‘My Lords Dressing room’, and, best of all, the padouk bookcase in the Drawing room.   Chippendale had taken on a Scottish partner, James Rannie, in 1754, the year he published the Director.   The furniture was dispatched by boat from London in late May 1759, and, on 29 May, Chippendale wrote a letter to say that ‘we ship’d your goods on board the Dilgence which saild on Sunday morning early…   The contents of each case wt properdirections are given to ye Person who goes to put up the Furniture.   We pay him a Guinea a Week’.   It is an astonishing survival, narrowly saved from sale by Christie’s (the sale catalogues had been published), before the house and estate were bought lock, stock and bookcases by a consortium led by the Duke of Rothesay, following appeals by James Knox and Marcus Binney, in 2007.

I had been looking forward to visiting Dumfries House – a small-scale, mid-eighteenth-century, classical mansion, designed by John Adam, the oldest son and heir of William Adam, and his younger and more talented brother, Robert.

The house was built for William Dalrymple-Crichton, the fifth Earl of Dumfries, who was born in 1699, served in the army, and fought as aide-de-camp to his uncle at the Battle of Dettingen, having inherited the title from his mother the previous year. During the 1750s, following the death of his first wife, he devoted himself to the task of constructing a new house in consultation with friends and a neighbours, a model of the mid-eighteenth-century Scottish and Edinburgh élite (Boswell was brought up on the estate next door).

The first reference to his plan to build a new house appears in a letter the Earl’s lawyer wrote in 1749 to the effect that ‘Mr. Adam who I see now in town will with your Lop whenever you desire’. On 7 June 1750, he wrote, ‘I hope Mr Adam has given your Lordship full satisfaction. Is the house to go or not’. As the Earl’s lawyer, he was anxious about the likely cost: ‘I agree with your Lop that you need a new House, bit would not have your Lop go into an expense that would shorten your living comfortable’.

The process of design took some time and it was not until 19 March 1753 that Lord Dumfries was able to write to his friend, the Earl of Loudoun, that ‘Mr. Adam has at last finished the plans & estimates for the new house, but I have not yet seen them and of consequence have taken no resolution about them’. The drawings that accompanied the second estimate, dated March 1753, were drawn by Robert Adam, who was then acting as draughtsman for his older brother’s architectural practice, and he was co-signatory with his two brothers on the contract design dated 24 April 1754, before setting out on the Grand Tour. Lord Dumfries had already paid in advance for a copy of ‘The RUINS of the Emperor DIOCLESIAN’S Palace a SPALATRO in DALMATIA’.

Unfortunately, it was nearly dark by the time I got to see the south front of the house:-

We went last night to one of Yinka Shonibare’s Friday evening supper clubs to celebrate the life and work of Leonora Carrington, the beautiful daughter of a Lancashire textile manufacturer, brought up in a turreted Victorian mansion reading Lewis Carroll, sent away to be educated by nuns, and studying art at Miss. Penrose’s Academy in Florence.   She returned for her coming out party at the Ritz, but registered first at Chelsea School of Art and then Amédée Ozenfant’s Academy before meeting Max Ernst at a dinner party and eloping to Paris.   Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in 1939 and Carrington had a nervous breakdown which led to her being treated in a lunatic asylum in Spain and her first novel which described the experience, Down Below (1944).   A marriage of convenience took her to Mexico and she began to exhibit her paintings at the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York after the war.

Marina Warner described how as an undergraduate she had first encountered Leonora Carrington’s work visiting the house of Maurice Cardiff, who had got to know Carrington and bought her work while working for the British Council in Mexico.   Warner had visited Carrington in a basement flat in New York in the 1980s, living frugally in spite of owning major works of surrealism in her house in Mexico City, which she travelled to and from by bus.   She was already what Warner described as ‘a secret cult figure’.   We enjoyed an alchemical feast which included butternut squash in paint tubes:-

A meeting this morning in the Tower Room of the Linnean Society high above the entrance arch into the Burlington House courtyard gave me an exceptionally good view of the Burlington House façade, as adapted by Sydney Smirke in the late 1860s.   By chance, the façade has been temporarily cleared of its banners for a light projection this evening, and so I saw it as it was, when first opened, on Monday 3rd. May 1869 (I know the exact date from reading the relevant chapter of Nick Savage’s excellent forthcoming monograph on Burlington House):-

Continuing my series of unexpected night-time views, I’m posting a picture I took from the staircase of Arts Two in Queen Mary University, where one looks out onto the old Sephardic cemetery which survives so oddly in the middle of the campus:-

We often drive up City Road which connects the Old Street roundabout to the Angel, constructed to connect the old New Road, now the Pentonville Road, to the City in 1761.   It’s transformed in the last few years from the home of my accountant into a high-rise boom town with the construction of the Canaletto tower by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio with its swagger curvilinear aluminium strips outlining the windows and now the even more massive 250 City Road by Norman Foster, which I photographed from outside McDonalds:-

I spent the later afternoon at the London Art Fair:  always a pleasure;  pleased to see Art UK prominently represented;  and an early work by Simon Lewty, Boices in the Close Country, out from store and looking as fresh as ever from his fertile middle period:-

An extremely beautiful Euan Uglow Still Life with Onions and Wine Glass (1962):-

And Patrick George, Uglow’s contemporary, but vastly much more affordable:-

I was pleased to see examples of Stephen Farthing’s ambitious series Museums of the World, due to be shown in Chichester in March:-