As I prepare to return to London, my reading for the flight is a volume of essays on the future of London which was published yesterday and in which misty photographs from my blog make a guest appearance.    See http://essays.centreforlondon.org/issues/futures/the-future-of-east-london.   Nice typeface.

I went to tea at the Lewis Walpole library to celebrate the 300th. anniversary of Horace’s birth.   I have been to Farmington before, but had forgotten the scale of the house which Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis bought on graduating from Yale and made the centre of his passionate, if not pathological, reconstruction of all aspects of the life and letters of Horace Walpole.  Lewis added a grand Delano and Aldrich library at the back in 1930 and Yale added a much larger research library in 2007:-

We were allowed especially to see the elaborate cabinet which Walpole had made to house drawings by Lady Diana Beauclerk (acquired by Lewis in 1939):-

I’ve always loved the building of the Yale Center – Louis Kahn’s last masterpiece which he was working on when he was found dead in Grand Central Station:  a set of cool and lucid, daylit spaces, half domestic, half institutional, encouraging dedicated looking.

There’s more sculpture than I remember, including a very beautiful terracotta Rysbrack bust of Peter Tillemans, a fellow Fleming:-

This is Benjamin West in his self-portrait with his family:-

A Self-portrait of Daniel Stringer who was a student in the RA Schools in its early years:-

Barry’s Education of Achilles, shown at the RA in 1772 (he was elected in 1773):-

That was as much as I could see before lunch, other than the grand interior spaces of the building:-

I managed to catch the exhibition Things of Beauty Growing at the Yale Center for British Art before it travels to the Fitzwilliam in March. It’s an exploration of the twentieth-century tradition of studio pottery, beginning with the appreciation of William Staite Murray, Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie and Bernard Leach for Chinese, Japanese and Korean porcelain and stoneware. There’s a tea set designed, but not, I assume, made by Roger Fry (V&A) and a breakfast set – very beautiful – by Lucie Rie from the Crafts Study Centre. The generation from the 1970s are described as a fragmentary group, an odd term for a group, including Alison Britton, Carol McNicoll and Jacqueline Poncelet, who I think of as a cohesive group – friends and allies, art-school trained and supported by Victor Margrie’s Crafts Council in exploring new forms of pottery as fine art. The work looks good in the cool and recently renovated spaces of Louis Kahn. There’s a very fine Phil Eglin jug, which fits oddly uncomfortably, as does Grayson Perry, with this tradition. No photography, except the work of Clare Twomey in the Entrance Court:-

As a tourist, I’m a sucker for Soho:  cobbled streets, old industrial building, a place to buy braces (If);  it’s got everything:-

I went for an early evening stroll south of where I’m staying, into Tribeca.   Past a shop specialising in the sale of Cook Books:-

Down Washington Street:-

I think this is CUNY, described as a megastructure and damaged in 9/11:-

I liked Kaffe 1668, an eccentric coffee shop:-

More signs:-

Everywhere, there was wonderful, surviving, old industrial architecture:-

I ended up buying socks from my friends in Best Made.

One of my readers has kindly alerted me to 65, Bleecker Street, which I might well have passed without paying proper attention and turns out to be a well-preserved work by Louis Sullivan (Frank Lloyd Wright’s lieber meister).   Hard to spot the angels with outstretched arms at the top, added at the behest of Silas Alden Condict, client of the building, after whom it was originally named:-

The details of the façade:-

I had previously approached the new Whitney Museum from the north by way of Chelsea and the Highline.   I hadn’t realised how closely connected it is to the smart streets of Greenwich village with their rows of Federal houses.   

It’s not an easy building to photograph as it it’s right up against the Highline to the east and the highway to the west.

Here it is from the west:-

It certainly makes spectacularly good use of its situation, with decks of outside viewing stations with views south the length of, and across Manhattan:-

After an early breakfast on the Upper West Side, I realised I could take the A train to the Cloisters, which John D. Rockefeller built in the 1930s to house the collection of George Grey Barnard, a collector, dealer and sculptor, who had acquired relics, carvings and indeed whole cloisters from his travels round France and Spain in the 1920s.  René Gimpel said of Barnard that ‘he talks of art as if it were a cabalistic science of which he is the only astrologer…He’s a sort of Rasputin of criticism’.   

This is the building:-

The Cuxa Cloister from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa near Perpignan:-

A Virgin and Child (c.1130) from near Autun:-

A Seated Bishop by Riemenschneider:-

A limewood Virgin and Chikd (c.1510):-

However much I admired many of the individual objects, I found the setting left me cold, apart from the Treasury in the basement which isn’t trying to be something it isn’t and has some very beautiful objects, including this ivory Christ (c.1300):-

I don’t know why the building feels sterile because conceptually it’s not so different from the Musée de Cluny, apart from being the wrong side of the Atlantic.

I feel a bit like a cat, checking out the neighbourhood where I’m staying. There is a prominent new building south in Tribeca, which I’ve discovered is 56, Leonard, a new and playful building of horizontally stacked and projecting apartments (mighty expensive) by Herzog & de Meuron:-

Otherwise, it’s nondescript territory on the edge of Soho, ex-industrial, with a great deal of new building:-