I walked into the courtyard of the RA this morning to be confronted by G.F. Watts’s great equestrian statue titled Physical Energy, a gesso model of which survives at the Watts Gallery and a full-scale bronze on display (but not much noticed) in Kensington Gardens.   A version was also displayed in 1904 in the courtyard of the RA and it is to mark this and draw attention to the work of the Watts Gallery that a new cast made by Pangolin is being shown again:-

We were kindly sent a copy of the book East End Vernacular:  Artists who painted London’ East End Streets in the 20th. century which the Gentle Author has produced about artists who have depicted East London.   They were mostly locals, trained in the art classes held at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute, members of the East London Group, and exhibiting at the East London Art Club or the Whitechapel Gallery (during the 1930s, it had an East End Academy).   The style is mostly one of painstaking topographical precision, showing the streets as they were when still much more densely built.   But the book includes, for example, the work of Lawrence Gowing RA who, although the son of a draper on Mare Street, was sent away to boarding school and studied painting at the Euston Road School under William Coldstream;  Anthony Eyton RA who was educated at Canford and studied painting at Reading before the war and Camberwell after;  and Jock McFadyen RA, who has created his own vision of industrial dereliction round Salmon Lane and beyond.   I was surprised that more space wasn’t devoted to the work of Adam Dant, whose graphic views of Spitalfields the Gentle Author has rightly promoted.   But he includes several good discoveries, including the work of Pericles Parkes, who was born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, trained at the Slade, and later lived in Stepney and painted atmospheric big city, as well as back garden, views.

I walked back through the cemetery and took what I thought were beautiful photographs of it in autumn light.   But they didn’t really come out, so I have doctored them, which I don’t really approve of:-

We walked up the Limehouse Cut today to its junction with the River Lea where there is an area of still industrial wasteland, looking across to the gasholders and north under the railway viaduct to Three Mills:-

I have now finished reading Maryam Eisler’s study of the East London creative community in her book Voices (actually, it could be called Vices) which studies the range of different creative types who have inhabited East London over the last three decades.   What I realised and is obvious is the extent of inward settlement and migration, all of which has given vitality to the area.   But what I also began to notice is how little the existing community is referred to.   Doreen Golding, a Pearly Queen, describes how ‘Most of the old white English, the Pearlies, moved out to Essex, Basildon and Southend’.   Colin Rothbatt describes how one of his neighbours threw a brick over the wall during one of his all night parties.   And Jack Leigh, a retired gangster, describes how ‘The ’60s and ’70s were wonderful.   The Krays were in Bethnal Green and we were in Roman Road…There was a sense of belonging because we loved one another and relied on each other’.   It would be interesting to know a bit more of the views of those who have been displaced.

I have been reading John Russell’s book about Shakespeare’s Country, which I had not known existed:  his first book, published in Spring 1942, when he was only 23, having recently graduated from Oxford and was working as an unpaid assistant for the Tate, which had been evacuated to Eastington Hall in Worcestershire.   It belongs to an odd genre of countryside writing much promoted by Batsford – not a guidebook, because, as I learn from the Preface, publishing a guidebook during wartime was illegal;  nor was Russell a very obvious person to have written the book, as he had been brought up not in Worcestershire or Warwickshire, but in Strawberry Hill in London.   In fact, the text is as much literary as architectural.   The first chapter is devoted to a life of Shakespeare (one of the illustrations is of the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, a magnificent castellated structure, looking as if it belonged in south Germany).   In later chapters, he is most enthusiastic about places with literary associations, like Hagley, admired by William Shenstone, and Sion Hill, the birthplace of the typographer, John Baskerville.   I like the description of Cheltenham:  ‘to coast through is crescents, promenade, and acacia-shaded avenues is to hear an old, thin, bony music, as if someone in an empty house were to play upon a wooden-framed piano, a sonata of Weber’.   The qualities of Russell’s writing were much admired by John Piper, who became a lifelong friend, and Logan Pearsall Smith, who encouraged him to be a full-time writer.

I’ve just got my copy of the winter edition of The London Library Magazine, which includes an article I wrote about the discovery of what I thought was a first edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan on the open shelves and the fact that, in the early 1980s, it was possible to borrow it.   The article only half conveys my gratitude to the library during that period of my life, when I was a solitary Ph.D. student, trying to teach myself about late seventeenth-century intellectual thought in order to understand the cultural milieu of Castle Howard.   It was in what is now regarded as the bad old days when Ph.D. students were given almost complete freedom to read round their subject with no pressure whatsoever to complete the research, let alone to publish it (actually, I only remember the opposite).   The London Library was like a constantly open dish of pleasure.

I was a bit early for the dentist so walked in Hyde Park.   It was hard not to be enchanted:-

I had not expected to be so affected by the memorial event in the local Ecology Pavilion for a local friend and neighbour, Lizzie Treip, who died of MS, aged 58.   It was not as if I knew her so well.   I used to meet her on Saturday mornings at the local farmer’s market and sometimes at social events, which she or we had arranged.   It was partly the unspeakable cruelty of the disease, both spoken and unspoken, which influenced her life profoundly, but not her love of music and literature and friends;  the fragility of her life before the disease struck and her resilience mostly in confronting it;  and partly the memory of her life beforehand, its ordinariness, the pictures of her on holiday, when she was small and her children were small.  

I have just refreshed my memory about Sir Herbert Cook who owned Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi unawares for most of the twentieth century.   It was his grandfather Francis, a wealthy textile merchant, who must have bought it in 1900 from the connoisseur John Charles Robinson and then bequeathed it to his son Frederick who in turn left it to his son Herbert on his death in 1920.   Herbert had helped establish the Burlington Magazine and was one of the founders of the Natiinal Art-Collections Fund, so his collection would have been well known to art connoisseurs of the time.   But although he was a Trustee of the National Gallery during the 1920s, his collection, left to his two sons, was dispersed after his death.