I’ve always been a touch sceptical of the widespread influence of Daniel Marot, the Huguenot designer, who left France for Holland and came to London to work at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace. But less so when one sees the set of panels which Ralph Montagu commissioned for Montagu House in Bloomsbury and which have been kept in store in the attics of Boughton:-
It was cold and slightly bleak at Boughton where we went to see the Huguenot exhibition, but still wonderful as one comes out of the roads and villages of Northamptonshire into the secret grandeur of the estate with its great, architecturally cool, French house:-
Chris Wilkinson is not the sort of architect who one would necessarily expect to use drawing as intensively as he does as he belongs to a generation who view architecture as about technology and problem-solving as much as about pure design. But, it’s obvious from the small exhibition he’s just installed in the RA’s Tennant Gallery that he uses drawings at least as much for pleasure, sketching the characteristics of medieval buildings on holiday in Lucca and the view out of the window of his hotel room in New York, as he does for purposes of conception, design and presentation.
These are some details, arbitrarily selected:-
Magna in Rotherham which won the Stirling Prize:-
I found the train journey to Lincoln interesting. It’s so long. Less than an hour to Peterborough and then nearly two hours across long, endlessly flat agricultural land. Past Spalding, the town of the Gentlemen of Spalding, one of the oldest of those groups of local antiquaries, who met in a coffee house to discuss the latest issue of The Tatler and included Isaac Newton and William Stukeley. Through Sleaford with its grand but decayed Victorian Maltings. I didn’t know we had our own prairies:-
A visit to Lincoln to attend the 85th. birthday party of John Roberts, one of the RA’s most loyal supporters, has given me a chance to see Lincoln Cathedral which I haven’t done in a long while. I saw it empty just before evensong.
Its wonderful romanesque detailing on the west front:-
Today was my first chance to see Daniel Maclise’s great Waterloo Cartoon, which has been restored over the course of the last year, was shown at the Royal Armouries during the summer, and now goes on display in the RA’s Large Weston Room for the autumn, as our way of marking the bicentenary of the Battle. It’s quite an amazing work, on a vast scale, ostensibly celebratory as it shows the moment when Wellington greets Field Marshal von Blücher outside what had been Napoleon’s headquarters, but also full of the travails of war, the fallen soldiers. In all, a celebration of grim heroism.
Having visited Leonard Rosoman’s studio yesterday and since the weather has been so foul today, I have been trying to find out more about him. I feel I should have met him as he was a long-standing RA, but he was already in his nineties when I arrived and I don’t remember him coming in to meetings. At the NPG, I was very familiar with his delightful and angular portrait of John Summerson, which used to hang on the ground floor, and his group portrait of all the RAs in the early days of Casson’s Presidency. But I hadn’t realised that he had been a student of the Royal Academy Schools in the 1930s, nor the quality of his war work for the Auxiliary Fire Service, nor the fact that he had been such a long-standing teacher at the RCA with Peter Blake and David Hockney amongst his pupils.
We managed to make it to the tail end of the Eric Ravilious exhibition at Dulwich having been told how wonderful it is and castigated for nearly missing it. We did indeed enjoy it and were impressed by the abstract qualities of his watercolours and drawings, the touches of surrealism, the quality of the work he did as a war artist and the quality of his depiction of the Sussex Downs near Firle. We were speculating on the use of barrage balloons, when someone kindly explained that they were used as a form of defence from low-flying aircraft in wartime, but why then do I remember barrage ballons flying over the local heath in my youth ?
I’m very delighted to see that our local hostelry in Anglesey, the Marram Grass, has made it into the Good Food Guide. It’s the café on the local campsite and does pig roast on Saturday evening with music which floats across the fields. I would love to say how much we enjoyed it this year except that the only time we arrived for supper at about 7.30 one evening it was absolutely packed with happy and noisy diners and we were looked at as completely mad expecting to have dinner without booking. So, I can only recommend their excellent cooked breakfast, including Eggs Benedict, and the fact that one can sit out on the porch and feel that one might be in Wyoming.
We have spent a happy afternoon on the last day of my holiday leafing through Sally Clarke’s new book, 30 Ingredients, which is in every way a beautiful book – beautifully written, so expressive of her perfectionism, her love of California and the Luberon, of fresh ingredients and the freshest fruits and vegetables, above all her devotion to the philosophy of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse; but also, beautifully photographed by Tessa Traeger who grew the pumpkins in her own garden in Devon; and a beautiful piece of book production by Toby Treves and Simon Rendall. So, that solves what to give for Christmas.
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