I have just given half of a class about cultural governance to the graduate students of the Sciences Po, the elite school of political administration (Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques) which was established in Paris in February 1872 by a group of intellectuals, including Hippolyte Taine, in order to train candidates for the French civil and diplomatic service. What was interesting was how idiosyncratic the British system of corporate governance looks by comparison to the French which was standardised in 1982 to include one third representatives of the state, one third subject experts, and one third representatives of staff, whereas British boards are in theory constituted as independent bodies, but appointed by the Prime Minister, which is fine as long as government chooses not to interfere, but not so fine when it does.

It was as ever a pleasure to be able to wander round the back regions of the Soane Museum where Soane displayed his best antiquities alongside plaster casts in layer upon layer up into the dome, presided over by Francis Chantrey’s bust of himself (as Chantrey wrote on 5 April 1829, ‘Whether the bust…shall be considered like John Soane or Julius Caesar is a point that cannot be determined by either you or me.   I will, however, maintain that as a work of art I have never produced a better’):-

I went last night to the opening of Ferdinand SS’s exhibition on John Soane’s Ark of the Masonic Covenant which is being held in the new Foyle Gallery at the back of the Soane Museum (formerly known as the NEW PICTURE-ROOM).   There was the reconstruction of the Ark itself, resplendent, made by Houghtons of York and with beautifully executed detailing in the three orders at each of the corners and in the scrollwork on top:-

I have been swotting up on the life of Graham Jackson who was responsible for the design of the front entrance hall in Burlington House.

The child of high minded, evangelical parents, he was educated at Brighton College and Wadham, where he got a third in Greats, but a first in Natural Sciences. He then trained as an architect in the office of Giles Gilbert Scott, the prolific Victorian architect and restorer, who encouraged him ‘to bring your Pre-Raffaelitism into architecture’ and then instructed him in the fierce tenets of the Gothic Revival. Jackson set up in independent practice in 1862 and was elected to a prize fellowship at Wadham in 1864, which allowed him a long gestation as an architect before winning the competition to design the New Examination Schools on the High Street in Oxford, a large and rather gloomy building next door to University College, but with very good and serious English Renaissance detailing. He probably won the competition as a graduate of the university and Fellow of Wadham, friend of the reforming faction in the university, and went on to do an immense amount of other work for the colleges, including The New Building and President’s Lodging at Trinity, New Buildings for Corpus, also in Neo-Renaissance style, The Grove Building for Lincoln, most of Hertford, including its chapel, and the façade of Brasenose, next to the University Church, which he was controversially also responsible for repairing. He was not only a prolific architect, but also wrote widely about historic architecture, beginning with the publication of Modern Gothic Architecture in 1873, which signalled his rejection of the Gothic Revival and embrace of what he called a ‘judicious eclecticism’. More unexpectedly, he wrote ghost stories in the style of M.R. James.

Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in January 1892, a full RA in November 1896, and Treasurer in 1901, in 1899 Jackson embarked on ambitious plans for the refurbishment of the the Academy’s front entrance hall, including laying a new marble floor to replace the old red and black encaustic floor put down in 1868 by Sydney Smirke.   The minutes of Council record how ‘It was Resolved that the Entrance Hall should be repaved with black & white marble slabs after the pattern of the old pavement of Burlington House as seen in the Keeper’s House, & the Treasurer was requested to procure estimates for the same’.   The proposal was subsequently approved by General Assembly and in the Annual Report for 1899, it was recorded that ‘Another great improvement which has been successfully carried out is the alteration and decoration of the Entrance Hall’.   The total cost was £2,586 19s. 3d.

This is the new security box:-

And this is Jackson’s design for a letter box:-

It’s been pointed out that it’s a bit pointless for me to post photographs of Romilly’s work at the Goldsmith’s Fair because the exhibition is just about to close, but I’m showing examples of her work nonetheless:-

A day trip to Leicestershire for my cousin’s ninetieth birthday party in a house which is nicely unchanged, first built in 1703 for the Rev. Edward Wells and lived in for many generations by a family of Marriott squarsons – a Queen Anne rectory where the last major changes (apart from the addition of a Victorian nursery and servants’ hall) were made not long after 1759 when the Marriotts first moved in:-

I spent the afternoon going through the collections at Waddesdon more carefully than I have done previously, desperately trying to remember the sequence of Rothschilds who owned the house from 1880 when Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild first moved in to his massive neo-French chateau in what was known apparently as Rothschild-shire (first, Tring, built in 1848 for Lionel, who had a private zoo, then Aston Clinton, built in 1850, Mentmore in 1855 for Baron Mayer de Rothschild, then Waddesdon in 1880). I only took photographs in one room, the Morning Room, at the end of the sequence on the ground floor, and added to the house between 1889 and 1891 (Ferdinand’s architect apparently advised ‘one always builds too small’), because I liked the way that the light fell on the backlit photograph of – I think – Alice, who was Ferdinand’s older sister, who inherited the house on Ferdinand’s death in 1898 and lived until 1922:-

Then, I could scarcely help but admire the immaculate precision with which the Dutch paintings are hung, including the Cuyp:-

And The Pink Boy, companion and, for some reason, less well known than Blue Boy:-

These are taken with the Leica, as I’m not sure that the cameraphone could manage interiors so well.

While on the subject of Bond Street, I should point out that the redevelopment of Cork Street is nearing completion.   This was originally controversial because it involved the eviction of some long-standing small galleries.   But the buildings themselves were of no significance and they have been replaced by Rogers Stirk Harbour in a scheme which is admirably and perhaps surprisingly well mannered, a gentlemanly intervention complete with the first arcade for maybe eighty years.   The question is whether Pollen Estate can attract the big international galleries.   I very much hope so.

Having sat in meetings in recent years as a member of the Bond Street Advisory Board, I’m pleased to see that its policy is bearing fruit in the much wider pavements currently visible in the stretch outside Louis Vuitton, but also being extended southwards towards Piccadilly:-

It encourages one to look upwards and admire the streetscape of grandly ornate, late nineteenth-century, Francophile façades up past Aspreys to Cartier and to the square which is being created by the entrance to Burlington Gardens:-

I walked back from Frieze Masters by way of Gloucester Crescent, partly because it plays such a large part in Claire Tomalin’s autobiography, not to mention the life of Alan Bennett (he lived in no.23), and partly because I’ve never actually seen it in daylight with its fine Italianate detailing:-