I knew about Joseph Comyns Carr by name, but not the story of his life:  barrister turned drama critic, friend of Rossetti and passionate advocate of the Pre-Raphaelites and the work of Blake, he was co-director of the Grosvenor Gallery, where he exhibited the work of Whistler (who called him Jo), Rossetti and Burne-Jones as a way of challenging ‘the sleepy complacency of the dwellers in Burlington House’.   He left in 1888 to establish the New Gallery on Regent Street, where he remained a Director till 1908.   He was apparently a brilliant after-dinner speaker and an expert fly-fisherman.

I went to a lecture organised by the Association of Pall Mall Libraries on the subject of great libraries of the world.   It was by James Campbell, a Cambridge architect turned architectural historian, who published a book, The Library: a world history, last year.   It’s a wonderful subject, beginning with the early chained libraries like Trinity Hall, and going on to the more grandly architectural libraries, including Wren’s great library for Trinity, the Radcliffe Camera and the Codrington.   Some I knew, like Asplund’s Stockholm City Library.   Many I didn’t, including Jože Plečnik’s National Library of Slovenia.   What I hadn’t anticipated was the extraordinarily strong showing of American libraries, including the George Peabody Library in Baltimore, the reading room of the New York public library, a library designed by Frank Furness for the University of Pennsylvania (now the Fisher Fine Arts Library) and, most extraordinary of all, the library of Phillips Academy in Exeter, with individual carrels for every pupil, designed by Louis Kahn.

In walking along Vigo Street towards Soho, I remembered being told that the new branch of Burberry on the corner of Vigo Street and Regent Street had previously been a cinema and that the Crown Estate, who are the landlords, had insisted on the cinema being preserved.   I was sceptical of this, but discovered, to my surprise, that the heart of the shop, which was once upon a time the New Gallery, founded by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé in 1888, was indeed converted in 1913 into the New Gallery Kinema, was altered and enlarged in 1925, and remained a cinema until 1953, when it was converted into a Seventh-Day Adventist church, complete with Wurlitzer organ.   This is what gives the store its Busby Berkeley feeling:

I started the day by attending a discussion between Anselm Kiefer and David Chipperfield (mediated by Tim Marlow) about their attitudes and responses to architecture.   Sitting in a gallery dominated by an image of Albert Speer’s Berlin Chancellery in monumental, but picturesque, decay, it was obvious how much Kiefer’s art is preoccupied by the architecture of the past, including pyramids and ziggurats, and how much, as an artist, he is free to invent buildings which don’t necessarily work as buildings, towers which are piled up and do not, and never will, pass the tests of engineers;  whereas the poor architect – even one as great and inventive as David Chipperfield – is never accorded the time and the space for such freedom of invention, except at the Neues Museum in Berlin which mixes history and memory in a Kiefer-ish way.   I particularly liked the comment which was apparently made by Norman Foster about the German percent for art scheme that it was ‘lipstick on the gorilla’.

I assumed that Gerald Wellesley, who was responsible for the interiors of the Italian Embassy, must have been a member of the Magnasco Society which was founded by the Sitwells in 1924, the year of the publication of Sacheverell Sitwell’s Southern Baroque Art, to promote their love of Italian painting.   Indeed, he was.   He was its first President, taking the chair at their first annual dinner, held in a private room at the Savoy Hotel, when Walter Sickert was the speaker;  and he arranged the loan of paintings from the collection of his brother, the Duke of Wellington, as well as lending paintings himself, for their first exhibition, held at Agnews in November 1924.   It was organised ‘for the purpose of furthering the study and appreciation of what, for the lack of a more precise term, we may call Baroque Painting’.   There were annual exhibitions thereafter, ending with a Canaletto exhibition at Spink in June 1929.

I have been doing some background reading on St. James’s Palace, partly because I pass it every day and partly because it was where the Royal Academy celebrated its foundation on 10 December 1768.   Vanbrugh drew up grandiose plans for its reconstruction early in George I’s reign, but these were not implemented.   The only alterations were made to accommodate the King’s tailor, his Turkish servants and dwarf and, in the next reign, the creation of a library for Queen Caroline. Meanwhile, there was an endless litany of complaints as to its inadequacy, particularly when compared to the state palaces of Europe.   Defoe described it as ‘really mean, in comparison of the rich furniture within’.  Baron Bielfeld, the Prussian ambassador, described it in 1741 as a ‘lodging-hous;  crazy, smoky and dirty’ and ‘to the last degree spiritless’.   But when his letters were translated in 1768, William Hooper, the translator, provided a footnote in which he described how ‘the glory of a British monarch consists, not in a handful of tinsel courtiers, or in expensive and pompous festivals;  but in…the freedom, the dignity and happiness of its people’.   Today, it’s the same:  modest and old-fashioned outside;  but with rooms for the court indoors.

I went to an event this afternoon at the Prince’s Drawing School at which the Prince of Wales announced its change of name to the Royal Drawing School.   I found it an unexpectedly impressive event.   First, because of the quality of work by former students on display.   Second, because of the recognition that a personal project of the Prince to support the teaching of drawing is now being converted into a long-term and permanent fixture of art teaching.   And third, because it is now no longer a fringe experiment, but a mature project with obvious benefits and broad support.

A church of great dignity and parish church to Vogue House, St. George’s, Hanover Square is both architecturally strong and oddly unobtrusive, except in eighteenth-century views of the street.   It’s one of the churches built under the New Churches in London and Westminster Act of 1710, begun in 1721, opened in 1724, and intended as much to enhance the authority of the monarch as of God (the portico was originally planned to accommodate a statue of George I).   It was the church where Handel worshipped and he is said to have advised on its organ.

There was much discussion last night about the militant perfectionism of Maria Björnson, the great opera designer who died in the bath in her house on Hammersmith Mall on Friday 13th. December, 2002, aged 53.   We got to know her on holiday in a villa near a racing track north of Florence in (I think) 1982, when she was still poor and obsessive, living in a basement flat with her mother off the Brompton Road (her mother used to do the research for her designs in the V&A library).   I remember the moment when she asked whether it was sensible to take on working on a musical based in the Opéra in Paris.   I advised against, because she wanted to remain faithful to what she regarded as the high art of theatre and opera and thought that she would be ostracised for designing a musical.   She ignored the advice and took on the design of Phantom of the Opera which made her belatedly rich.   Her obituary implies that she was shy and neurotic, but I remember her as magnificent, funny and confident (if a bit neurotic), and a genius as a designer.

On Friday I went to a party at the Italian Embassy on Grosvenor Square.   I was asked if I knew its history.   I didn’t.   Then, serendipitously, in leafing through the latest issue of the RA Magazine, I discovered that the Friends are going on a tour of it and, also, that there is a chapter on it in James Stourton’s Great Houses of London.   The style of the house is Italianate Victorian, as required by the Grosvenor Estate, but its character is due to the fact that it was redecorated by Gerald Wellesley after Italy had been granted a 200-year lease in 1931.   Wellesley, after serving as a diplomat in Rome, where he filled ‘sacks with shining porphyry, verde antico, giallo antico, and so on’, was apprenticed to Goodhart-Rendel after the first world war.   John Betjeman maliciously said that he was the only architect to have a style named after him (‘jerry-built’), but the Embassy is an accomplished and appropriately opulent exercise in 30s classicism, informed by Wellesley’s taste for collecting.