What’s the origin of the Whitebait Dinner ? The RA has always had a social aspect ever since the foundation of an informal dining club called the Friday Nights Club, first held at the Turk’s Head Tavern on 5 October 1770. In the nineteenth century, it was known as the Academy Club and met on the opening day of the exhibition at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich (there are menus from the 1869s in the Museum of London) and later in the summer somewhere in the countryside. Turner loved the Whitebait dinners and it is thought to be during the trip downriver in 1838 that he saw the Téméraire being dragged off to Deptford to be broken up as scrap.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
China and the RA
Yesterday I was asked by Sir David Tang to speak at his new China Exchange about the nature of the relationship between the Royal Academy and China in the light of our forthcoming Ai Weiwei exhibition. The short answer is that it goes back a long way to the time of the foundation of the RA when William Chambers at least had a good knowledge of Chinese architecture from his three visits during the 1740s with the Swedish East India Company and when the modeller, Tan-Che-Qua, was included in the background of Zoffany’s early portrait of the Academicians. There have also been a number of major exhibitions of Chinese art, beginning with the Great China exhibition in 1935/6 and including the Genius of China in 1973/4 and China: The Three Emperors in 2005/6.
Whitebait Dinner (2)
This year’s Whitebait Dinner was held at Trinity Buoy Wharf, far downriver beyond the baroque magnificence of the Royal Naval College, past the Trafalgar Tavern where the Academy Club first held its whitebait dinners on the first Monday in May, past the curious mixture of new development and old style industrial dereliction on Greenwich Reach, past the Dome and Richard Wilson’s A Slice of Reality, underneath Wilkinson Eyre’s grand cable car, until we docked alongside the Trinity Buoy Wharf, with its lighthouse built in 1864 and its mixture of industrial architecture, shipping containers and art installations.
The Dome from the river:-
Rame Peninsula
We stayed the weekend on the Rame Peninsula looking out onto the estuary of the River Lynher, a view which changed according to the light:-
Antony House
On Sunday morning, we went round Antony, admiring portraits of generations of Carews, Pole Carews and Carew Poles, beginning with Richard Carew, the historian of Cornwall, and including Alexander Carew, the regicide, and Sir William Carew, the builder of the house, up to Sir Richard Carew Pole whose portrait was painted in the mid-1990s by the PRA.
The house is a perfect size, not too large and perfectly proportioned, built of Pentewan ashlar between 1718 and 1724 by a local builder John Moyle, who agreed to build the house ‘according to a Draught agreed upon in a good and workmanlike manner and to the satisfaction of Sir William Carew’. Inside, it’s darkly panelled, its atmosphere more that of the generation before the 1720s than Palladian.
The south front:-
The garden front:-
St. Germans
Of the great priory church of St. Germans, seat of the bishop until the construction of Truro cathedral, we saw no more than the great west door surrounded by Norman ornament:-
Port Eliot
After lunch we went to walk along the banks of the River Lynher in the parkland of Port Eliot, drained by Edward Eliot some time after he succeeded in 1748 and then planted by Humphrey Repton following the production of a Red Book in 1793:-
The gardens at Antony
The weather was perfect for walking round the gardens at Antony: not too hot, luminously clear, with puffed clouds. The original gardens were laid out when the house was built in 1724, then modernised to an extent, but incompletely, by Humphrey Repton (the Red Book survives in the house) and the hedges and many of the trees were planted in the 1890s and later.
We started in the courtyard in front of the house, looking up to the gates on the horizon:-
Durslade Farm
We stopped off at Hauser and Wirth in Somerset to enjoy venison sausages and ginger beer at the Roth Bar and Grill. After almost exactly a year, the place has settled into the Somerset landscape even with no exhibition.
These are the organic venison sausages (very filling):-
This is where we sat out under the canvas awning:-
Edinburgh
I love Edinburgh, the blackened houses, the classical street plan, the New Town, the fact that there is so little new development, the back streets behind the façades and the views out towards the Kingdom of Fife. Walking across the city from end to end in the early night, not a car, let alone a taxi, in sight, I was struck by how extraordinarily coherent it is, not a wrong note, as I went from Broughton Street in the east, through streets named in honour of Nelson’s victories, as each generation added street after street according to a consistent vocabulary, right through to the 1840s, and all miraculously preserved by a conservative Edinburgh establishment who have not allowed high rise:-
You must be logged in to post a comment.