We have been spending the weekend at Durslade Farmhouse which is attached to, and run by, Hauser and Wirth in Somerset. It’s an old and previously rundown farmhouse which has been restored under the supervision of Luis Laplace, an Argentinian architect, trained in Buenos Aires, who is now based in Paris and is adept at combining the rusticity of a Somerset farmhouse with an atmosphere of art luxe:-
I was pleased to have Edward Chaney’s scholarly comments on my blog about York House. I knew about Balthazar Gerbier’s possible involvement in its design as he described the impatience of the Duke of Buckingham to get going on the renovation of York House in his Discourse concerning the…Principles of Magnificent Building and may well have been an eminence grise in its design, as Summerson long ago suggested. But I didn’t know that the attribution of the Watergate to Stone was made not by his son Nicholas, another sculptor, but by his nephew Charles Stoakes (or, according to George Vertue, his grand nephew), a jobbing builder who inherited his uncle’s business books and listed ‘Some of the most Eminentt Workes that my Uncle Mr Nikcolas Stone did in England in Holland in Scotland’ which included the attribution of the Watergate. Since the list was made long after Stone’s death, I can see that inaccuracies may have crept in.
I was a bit early for drinks in Cadogan Square so found a park bench to sit on in the middle of Lennox Gardens as someone had accidentally left the gate open. It’s not my normal patch – I’ve barely been to Cadogan Square since the death of Denis Mahon – but I could not help but be impressed by the calm and the greenness of a square laid out between 1882 and 1886 on a site previously occupied by a cricket ground and before that Cattleugh’s nursery, which specialised in the sale of pines:-
It was such a beautiful, crisp early summer morning that I walked from Blackfriars to Piccadilly by way of Embankment Gardens. I realised that I have never known the history of the York Watergate, a curiously unobtrusive memento of Caroline London half buried in the gardens close to Charing Cross station. It marks where the banks of the Thames originally were before the construction of Victoria Embankment by Joseph Bazalgette and was the entrance to the original York House, one of the great Thames-side mansions, called York House because it was owned by the Archbishops of York. York House was acquired by the Duke of Buckingham in 1624 and the Watergate was added two years later. Its attribution is disputed, but a list made by Nicholas Stone’s nephew Charles Stoakes of ‘Some of the Eminent Workes’ undertaken by his uncle includes ‘The water Gate att Yorke House (which) hee desined and built’. This seems perfectly plausible as an attribution, as it looks more like the work of a sophisticated artisan following continental models than a work by Inigo Jones himself:-
We had an All Staff Meeting this afternoon on the eighth floor of Unilever House which is normally closed to all but Unilever staff. There was a small spiral staircase up onto the roof, which, like many London rooftop views, gives one a different view of the city. Even the Walkie Talkie looked faintly interesting extending out of the potted shrubs:-
And Herzog and de Meuron’s brick ziggurat made sense seen from a distance as if growing mesolithically out of Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station:-
We had a debate yesterday about the nature of the relationship between luxury and culture chaired by Will Gompertz. There can be no doubt that companies dealing in luxury goods are increasingly involved in the world of art. One only has to think of the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Fondation Cartier and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Luxury brands use many of the techniques of fine art to promote their goods in order to enhance the association, including works designed by artists and the aestheticisation of display. Equally, there is a good case to be made that big name artists are behaving increasingly like brands, with their own shops and easily identifiable and replicable products. So the question was:- where do the boundaries lie ? Is it a question of intent, whereby artists seldom, if ever, think purely in terms of commercial aims and objectives, whereas luxury brands always must ? Is it to do with the different arenas of display as between the big shop and the gallery/museum ? Should one resist the commodification of art ?
What does seem paradoxical is that the world of luxury is able and willing to use the vocabulary of art, taste, aesthetics, judgment, quality in a way that the art world won’t.
I managed – annoyingly – to miss the private view of Tate Britain’s exhibition Painting with Light last night, but managed to catch up with it this morning. I hadn’t realised that David Hill of Hill and Adamson was Secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy, so brought a painter’s sensibility to the composition of their panoramic views of Edinburgh seen from the Castle or Calton Hill. Their work was admired by Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the Director of the National Gallery (and PRA), as showing ‘no attempt to idealise a rather rugged style of physiognomy…we felt that the spirit of Rembrandt had revived’ and by William Etty who felt that Adamson’s photographs were ‘revivals of Rembrandt, Titian and Spagnoletto’. There are also wonderful photographs by Roger Fenton who was ‘photographer to the British Museum’.
I walked yesterday through unfamiliar bits of Bethnal Green in an attempt to take a half way decent photograph of the Brady Street Cemetery, which can only be done by poking a telephone through the gate and hoping that the lens is pointing on the right direction.
I started through the Collingwood Estate, which in most weathers would be a bit grim – big, standardised, neo-Georgian blocks laid out in the 1920s and 1930s by the LCC under G. Topham Forrest. But it looked pretty good in the sun:-
Then the cemetery itself:-
I’m not sure that I have ever done a post about Cleeve Workshops, a group of sixteen worker’s units in a yard at the back of Cleeve House on Calvert Avenue. They were built in 1895 as one of the first parts of what became the Boundary Estate, planned by the Housing of the Working Classes Branch of the LCC Architects’ Department and designed by Reginald Minton Taylor. They now house small cafés and fashion studios, including S.E.H. Kelly:-
I like the idea that Bosch depicted himself as half hooded man, half crustacean monster in the bottom right hand corner of the altarpiece that he painted for the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the guild of which he himself was a ‘sworn brother’ in 1487 and hosted its annual banquet in the summer of 1488. It shows exactly the sort of respectable, bespectacled, thoughtful and earnest man one would expect him to have been as recorded by the church archives, but whose mind was nevertheless teeming with half crazy and fantastic visions of paradise and hell, populated by sarcastic images of his fellow citizens, the evidence for which is in the pictures themselves.
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