Like many other people – friends and art historians – I have spent the day mourning the death of Howard Hodgkin, a great, if enigmatic painter, who refused to talk about his painting much (except in somewhat cryptic utterances) or to allow anyone to witness him in the act of painting.   This evening, I have found it consoling to read a volume of writings about his work by writers (Writers on Howard Hodgkin), which I borrowed from the London Library and includes an essay by Colm Tóibín, which was criticised as being too lush, but which I like as being inquisitive as to how Hodgkin’s interest and attitude to art was first formed.   The book also includes the reprint of an essay by Bruce Chatwin which tells the story of the horoscope which was prepared for him by his grandmother.   ‘For Leos’, she prophesied, ‘colour is life’.

I was intrigued by the comment on my post about St. Pancras Station that John Summerson told John Betjeman that he found it ‘nauseating’.   Summerson is, of course, of the generation who might be expected to be hostile to Victorian architecture, but by the late 1960s he was working on his Bampton lectures which were published in 1970 by Columbia University Press as Victorian Architecture:  Four Studies in Evaluation;  he later published The Architecture of Victorian London, a sequel to his much better known book on Georgian London;  and I remember being told that he loved H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston.   The answer is contained in Simon Bradley’s excellent short monograph on St. Pancras:  that Summerson, as he explained in a lecture at Columbia in 1968, couldn’t bear the disjunction between the hotel and the train shed – ‘the disintegration of architecture and engineering:  the total separation between functional and “artistic” criteria, in separate heads and hands’.

This may be my last post from our building project in Burlington Gardens because I discovered this morning that we are about to introduce a blanket ban on photography pending its completion, still some way off.

Luckily, it was sunny, so it all looked do-able:-

I was slightly early for lunch at Central St. Martin’s yesterday, so stopped to admire the façade of the old Midland Hotel, designed by George Gilbert Scott as the front to St. Pancras Station, which I normally only see from a traffic jam.   It was the result of a separate competition, organised by the Midland Railway Company in 1865 and won coincidentally by Scott with the design for a building which was vastly much more palatial than its specifications, with 300 rooms, hydraulic lifts and no bathrooms.   It closed in 1935 as too expensive to maintain, became offices for British Rail, and great efforts were made in the 1960s to demolish it.   It was only saved thanks to the efforts of ‘the furious Mrs. Fawcett’ and her colleagues at the Victorian Society.   She was a former debutante who worked in Hut 6 at Bletchley and only died last year.   We owe her a lot:-

I was asked to give a talk this morning to an all-staff meeting held in the RA Schools.   I found myself admiring the cast of a horse which half dominates the space in an unobtrusive manner and wondering about its history.   The students in the Schools were required to draw from the antique.   Hence the presence of large numbers of casts of statues from the antique.   Then they graduated to drawing from the living model.   I don’t know if they were also expected, like Stubbs, to know and understand the anatomy of a horse.   And I haven’t been able to find out much about the history of the horse, apart from the fact that it is sometimes thought – presumably wrongly – to be a cast of Copenhagen, Wellington’s horse at Waterloo;  and that it was given to the Schools in 1919 by F.W. Calderon, who ran a School of Animal Painting:-

I have been holding back a post on the Royal Academy’s Michelangelo Tondo because of an embargo pending the announcement of its loan – very exceptionally – to the National Gallery for its exhibition Michelangelo Sebastiano in its north galleries.   

The exhibition looks at the friendship of the two artists after Sebastiano arrived in Rome from Venice in 1511, and includes the Tondo, which was donated to the Royal Academy by George Beaumont, a key person behind the foundation of the National Gallery and gave his collection to it.

The Tondo was commissioned by Taddeo Taddei, a patron of Raphael, who lived in Florence, was keen on contemporary art, and died of the plague in 1528.   Vasari records how Michelangelo ‘blocked out (without ever finishing) two roundels of marble, one for Taddeo Taddei (which is to be found in his house today)…’ and he probably stopped work on it when he left Florence for Rome in 1505.   It remained in Florence in the hands of Taddei’s family until it was bought in 1812 by  Jean-Baptiste Wicar, one of Napoleon’s commissars, sent to Italy to loot the country on behalf of the Louvre.   Not only did he acquire the tondo, but also a big collection of Michelangelo’s private papers and drawings from Corsica.   It was then bought by Beaumont on his visit to Rome in 1822.   He wrote to Thomas Lawrence PRA, ‘I have been fortunate enough to gain possession of an undoubted work of M. Angelo !!…You may be sure I was made to pay for this, & but for the assistance of our excellent friend Canova probably I should not have succeeded’.   He boasted to Wordsworth how much he looked forward to him seeing it once it was installed in his house, 34, Grosvenor Square.   It was seen and enjoyed over dinner parties by a generation of artists, before being bequeathed to the Royal Academy on Beaumont’s death in 1827;  and it will now be seen and enjoyed by the many visitors to the exhibition:-

I went to a conversation tonight between the PRA and Christian Levett, the hedge fund trader and collector of antiquities.   Levett talked more openly and more engagingly than anyone I have heard about the psychology of collecting:  how he started as a child collecting Roman coins and modern medals in his home town of Southend;  moved into becoming a commodities trader in the City in the early 1990s and then an early hedge fund manager;  he mentioned casually that he would earn fees of 20% on deals worth over £1 billion, which left quite a bit of money to invest in antiquities;  he realised from auction catalogues that it was possible to buy antiquities relatively cheaply;  and amassed so many that he opened his own museum in Mougins in the south of France.   What he made clear was how the psychology was the same in the two fields:  a knowledge of the market;  a certain steely determination (he refused to buy works which were overpriced);  and decisions which were motivated by passion and instinct as much as calculation.

I have nothing to post today apart from two views of the garden walls which I took in the brief intervals of the afternoon spring showers:-

I was interviewed this morning for a German website about collecting.   The result has been that I have spent the rest of the day remembering things that I should have mentioned.   One of the artists we knew in the late 1970s was Philip Core, an extravagant and in many ways remarkable American artist, who arrived in London in the mid-1970s and lived in a flat in what was known as the Kennington triangle (not the Elephant and Castle as it says in Wikipedia) which he painted completely black.  I remembered that he made his name on a television quiz show about art on which he appeared jointly with Maggi Hambling and George Melly.   But I completely forgot to mention that one of the first works of art which we acquired (at considerable expense) was a large picture by Core entitled The Double Triangle which he had exhibited in an exhibition shown by Francis Kyle framed in rope and which I had to walk across the Elephant and Castle in a high wind.   I hope it’s rolled up in the attic.

I called in on the Roger Mayne exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery because I was interested in seeing his very influential street photography of the 1950s, including the photographs he took on Southam Street (now under the Trellick Tower) which were exhibited at the ICA in June 1956.   They look like the visual equivalents of Willmott and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London, published in 1957, which demonstrates the same sense of discovery that there is an abundance of life in the slums.   This is hardly surprising as Mayne worked with Peter and Iona Opie when they were undertaking research for their Language and Lore of Schoolchildren (1959) and provided the cover photograph for Peter Willmott’s Pelican Special on Adolescent Boys of East London (1966).   I was also interested in the exchange of letters with Kenneth Clark (whose name is mis-spelt in the caption), acknowledging the fact that Clark had lectured at the Royal Photographic Society  on the artistic merits of nineteenth-century photography and lamenting the fact that the Arts Council wouldn’t do photographic exhibitions.