I have just been asked my opinion (on Sky News) on the sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi for $450 million (including commission).   It is indeed a staggering price, particularly given that it was sold in 1958 from the Cook Collection in Richmond for £45.   It was then heavily overpainted and regarded by experts as a copy after Boltraffio.   It surfaced in the United States in 2005 and was apparently sold for $10,000.   It was only once it had been cleaned and restored by a consortium of dealers that it was accepted by scholars as authentic and shown as such in the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition in 2012.   The estimate this time round was $100 million, which itself was more than any other Old Master painting has previously sold at auction.

Marina Vaizey has rightly reminded me that, at the same sale that Charles Holmes failed to acquire Degas’s Combing the Hair, but did acquire three works by Ingres, including Monsieur de Norvins, and fragments of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, so Maynard Keynes who had negotiated the special grant of £20,000 from the Treasury was also, and more officially, a member of the International Financial Mission led by Austen Chamberlain, also attended the sale, and himself acquired a study by Ingres, two paintings by Delacroix and a Cézanne Still life with apples (now owned by King’s College, Cambridge and on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum) which he had wanted Holmes to acquire for the National Gallery.   Both Keynes and Vanessa Bell were scornful of Holmes’s aesthetic myopia (the description used by Quentin Bell), but I have always been rather admiring of the fact that Holmes managed to acquire some great pictures while Big Bertha was booming in the distance.   The story of Keynes’s trip and of him leaving the Cézanne in a hedge at the bottom of the Charleston drive was told by Quentin Bell in A Cézanne in the Hedge and other memories of Bloomsbury and Charleston.

I had not heard (or had forgotten) the story behind the acquisition of the National Gallery’s great Combing the Hair:  that it was on the list of the paintings that Charles Holmes wanted to buy when he travelled to Paris with the International Financial Mission at the end of the first world war to buy pictures at the auction of Degas’s studio effects;  but that Lord Ribblesdale, one of the stupider and more arrogant of the Gallery’s Trustees, crossed it off the list on the grounds that it was unfinished.   It was acquired instead by Matisse and later sold by his son Pierre in New York, where it was acquired by Kenneth Clark for the National Gallery in 1937:  a story which does not appear in my history of the National Gallery, nor in James Stourton’s recent history of Kenneth Clark, nor, oddly (assuming that it’s true) on the National Gallery’s website.

I have been mourning the death of Jeremy Hutchinson, the RA’s Emeritus Professor of Law, who was a last relic of old Bloomsbury, the son of Mary Hutchinson, who was Clive Bell’s mistress, and taught to tie a bow tie by Lytton Strachey.   I remember him for his amazing sardonic performance not so long ago at the Charleston literary festival when he was already 100 demonstrating how Mary Whitehouse wasn’t able to tell the difference between a penis and a thumb.

We had the very intense experience of seeing the Degas exhibition Drawn in Colour at the National Gallery with Julien Domercq, its curator.   It assembles the Degas works from the Burrell collection, acquired by Sir William Burrell, the Glasgow shipping magnate, from 1900 onwards from his dealer, Alexander Reid.   Many of them have not previously been displayed and so are scarcely known to Degas scholarship.   It’s an amazing opportunity to see the paintings next to pastels and compare the flatness and experimentation of his technique, the freedom of his composition, and his obsessional observation of the privacy of female form.   The label for Dancer adjusting her Shoulder Strap adduces this to Degas’s putative misogyny, but the tenderness and fascination of the observation doesn’t suggest misogyny.

I have just got my copy of Maryam Eisler’s new book about East London, called Voices, which, like mine, is published by Thames and Hudson.   Hers is a different East London from mine:  about people more than places;  much more punky funky;  about music venues and motorbike shops and street art;  nightclubs and digital start-ups;  flamenco dancers and pearly queens;  opening with a hymn (or a prayer) to the area by Gilbert and George.   There’s a serious aspect to it as well because in attempting to describe and record the characteristics of the modernday east end through interviews with the people who live and work there, it demonstrates the odd mixture of characteristics which makes for a creative neighbourhood and the risk of it becoming antiseptic through the current process of radical urban development.   I appear towards the end – sitting in the garden ruminating and eating breakfast in the recently defunct Foxcroft & Ginger.   Her excellent photographs will appear above my blog once they have been reformatted.

I like the aesthetic of empty houses which show off the quality of their architectural spaces, particularly if they have fragments of sculptural magnificence:-

I was asked by Matthew Flowers to call in on Nicola Hicks’s latest exhibition Keep Dark.   I’ve admired her work ever since she was commissioned (by Derry Irvine) to do a portrait bust of Tony Blair (I’ve always assumed, without evidence, that it was scuppered by Alastair Campbell).   She’s good at modelling.   Upstairs is a display case with two portrait busts:  Epicurius:-

And Family Portrait:-

The rest is much darker – a room full of her animal sculptures emerging out of straw:-

I preferred the work upstairs which is less portentous:-

I left out of my previous post about Antwerp some views of houses and street fronts which help to create the atmosphere of dense medievalism in the centre of the city.   I am posting them now as a supplement on my return.

Two gables in Korte Nieuwstraat:-

The details of two façades in Melkmarkt:-

And an opulent baroque doorway as I was walking up the Nieuwstraat to Sint-Jacobskerk:-

Having spent so much of the day touring Axel Vervoordt’s empire, I have become intrigued as to how he has built up not just a big commercial operation, but international authority in the exercise of taste.

He was born in 1947.   His father was a successful horse trader and his mother bought a series of houses in the Vlaeykensgang, close to the cathedral in Antwerp:-

He started dealing in English furniture which he bought in bulk from impoverished landowners, combining his shop with his living arrangements and thereby creating a distinctive aesthetic based on eclecticism, combining old and new, and valuing the patina of age and use.   He became well known in terms of the trade when he invested so heavily in the ceramics which emerged from.the wreck of the Geldermalsen in 1984, but more so when he began making a series of exhibitions at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice in 2007, including hanging an El Anatsui off its façade.

We can learn more from his autobiography, published by Flammarion next month:-