A lovely afternoon in the Fitzwilliam Museum with the RA’s Patrons being taken round by Tim Knox. We began in the entrance portico which has been newly refurbished in honour of the Museum’s forthcoming 200th. birthday next year and before, as Tim said, one of the lotus leaves fell on a French schoolchild:-
We went for a walk on the gallops looking southwards across the whole of Hertfordshire towards London and had a lesson in rural estate management: the thinning of the woodland, the replanting of the hedgerows, the benefits of organic grassland, combined with the damage done by the deer population and the ever present litter of plastic balloons, making evident the fragility of a farmland’s ecology:-
The garden was beautifully crisp and clear in the morning light before the clouds assembled:-
We bumbled up the M11 to the flat and nondescript, but unexpectedly unspoilt, landscape of southwest Cambridgeshire, beyond the radio telescopes of the University Observatory, where we stayed the weekend in old parkland once depicted by Kip and Knyff. The statues of the four seasons were bought after the war from Harrods, the gardens used to be tended by seven gardeners, we looked out over ornamental yew trees puffing yellow pollen, and the greenhouses were now decayed:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 