I had the pleasure of meeting representatives of Burlington Arcade’s not-so-new owners today (it was sold in 2010).   Not surprisingly, I’m interested in its history, built as it was alongside Burlington House, as well as its future, since it’s such a prominent part of the local neighbourhood.   It opened in 1819, the original shopping arcade and was progenitor of all those grand arcades in Brussels, Paris, Milan and St. Petersburg.   The architect was Samuel Ware, former student of the Royal Academy Schools, who was also responsible for the new main staircase in Burlington House for its then owner, Lord George Cavendish.   Part of the purpose of the arcade was to stop people throwing rubbish, particularly oyster shells, over the garden wall into the courtyard of Burlington House.   The front entrance was added by Professor Beresford Pite, designer of the cathedral in Kampala, in 1931:

Occasionally in the morning I allow my eye to wander down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace.   In writing a recent article about royal patronage for the forthcoming art issue of Vanity Fair, I found to my embarrassment that I couldn’t remember who was the architect of the main façade.   I guessed correctly that it was by Aston Webb, but got it wrong that it was done in the reign of Edward VII.   It was done in 1913, just before the first world war, as a setting for ceremonial duties for George V to replace the much more Germanic, mid-Victorian front by Edward Blore.   People always think of the twentieth-century monarchy as low key, but it doesn’t look low key to me:

After Honor Clerk had done an exhibition on the Sitwells at the NPG, she planned to do an exhibition on the Nicholsons as a family, including Kit, who was Ben’s younger brother.   Now Dulwich Picture Gallery, in conjunction with Kettle’s Yard, have done an exemplary small exhibition, showing how Ben and Winifred Nicholson reacted to one another:  to the same subjects, developing together, living in Cumberland on Hadrian’s Wall (Howard country), painting the same hillside and the same farm;  befriending William Staite Murray and Christopher Wood;  and then moving down to St. Ives where they were very obviously influenced by the naive style of the self-taught Alfred Wallis.   He was better at still lives, she at portraits.   She comes out of it strongly, not least in the move to Paris and abstraction in the early 1930s.   The exhibition demonstrates very clearly that she was at least as important as Barbara Hepworth in the formation of his art.

I’ve always loved the way that the mausoleum for Sir Francis Bourgeois and Noel Desenfans is integrated into, and central to, the experience of their picture gallery, so that one breaks off from looking at Claude and Poussin and steps into the amber gloom of their burial place.   Soane was already a friend of Bourgeois when Bourgeois died in 1811.   They had both been opponents of Benjamin West as President of the Royal Academy and both were ardent freemasons.   So, the design of the picture gallery and mausoleum was a labour of love, making use of Soane’s deep knowledge and love of Roman funerary buildings: