I’ve been doing a bit of reading about the Burlington Fine Arts Club, which I vaguely knew about, but is not well documented.   The answer is that it was indeed, as it sounds, a gentleman’s club, equivalent to the Arts Club, but for those who were more interested in Old Master painting.   Established in 1866, it grew out of a Fine Arts Club, a group of fine art enthusiasts who met regularly at Marlborough House under the auspices of John Charles Robinson.   For its first three years it occupied three floors of 177, Piccadilly and then moved to 17, Savile Row, where it held annual small-scale and scholarly exhibitions on subjects including Japanese porcelain and German woodcuts and, in 1876, the first scholarly study of the work of William Blake (as well as a centenary exhibition in 1927).   It survived until the outbreak of the second world war and was dissolved in 1952, its assets donated to the National Art-Collections Fund.

My post on John Rogers Herbert seems to have struck a chord.   There is something slightly touching about this super earnest early Victorian with his long red hair ‘very smoothly brushed straight down’, converting to Catholicism and biblical hyper realism, painting scenes from the bible as if he had visited Palestine (maybe he had, but I haven’t found evidence of it), celebrating the fact that, as he described it, ‘the age of splash and dash is nearly over’, being employed to teach in the government schools of design, spending time in France and speaking forever thereafter with a strong French accent, admired by Gladstone, and dying in The Chimes in Kilburn (this is written with acknowledgement to Barbara Bryant’s excellent short life in the NDNB).

So who was J.R. Herbert who was responsible for the big fresco of Moses brining down the Tables of the Law to the Israelites in the so-called Moses Room at the Palace of Westminster ?   The answer is that he was a classic product of the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1820s (he entered the Schools in 1826) who turned his hand to book illustration and then to larger narrative painting before Queen Victoria came to the throne and before the Pre-Raphaelites made it fashionable.   Indeed, one of the aims of the Pre-Raphaelites was, as W.M. Rossetti described it, to ‘out-Herbert Herbert’.   He was also a close friend of A.W.N. Pugin and a fellow convert to Catholicism.   They both had a passionate belief in the historical importance and moral significance of the wall decoration in the Palace of Westminster.   Herbert became an RA in 1846, continued to submit work to the Summer Exhibition after he had gone blind, and was forgotten by the time he was dead.

I have just been on a group tour of the House of Lords with Mervyn Davies, the chairman of the RA Trust, whose enthusiasm for all aspects of the higher democracy is infectious.   We had tea in the dining room, attended the tail end of a debate about beavers, saw the Moses Room with paintings by J.R. Herbert RA, and ended up in the broom cupboard where Emily Davison, the suffragette, hid during the night of the 1911 Census.   It gave the best possible introduction to the pleasures and responsibilities of life as a peer (no photographs are allowed inside):-

The flight back from New York and a quiet day at home meant that I was able to read Ian Bostridge’s new book on Schubert’s Winterreise, Winter Journeys:  Anatomy of an Obsession.   I very much admire the way he writes about music, deeply informed by the experience of performance, but also by his knowledge of the history and culture and intellectual milieu of early nineteenth-century Vienna and of Schubert’s life and attitude to his art.   The book consists of a sequence of meditations on each of the songs in the cycle, some quite brief and some much longer, occasionally technical and including passages on the relationship between Schubert and Thomas Mann, Schubert and Caspar David Friedrich, and the nature of Schubert’s religious faith.