I normally walk across St. James’s Park in the early morning. How different it looks in the evening sun:
Tag Archives: England
David Remfry
When I saw David Remfry’s work in this year’s summer exhibition, I asked him if he ever undertakes commissions. He said ‘not if possible’. So I was slightly surprised to be invited not long afterwards to a thé dansant at Fortnum and Mason to celebrate the completion of watercolour sketches by him for its fourth floor restaurant. There was not much dansant. But the sketches are beautifully observed and gently humorous scenes from the life of the shop:
Pitt the Younger
In walking through Hanover Square recently, my eye was caught by the stately statue of William Pitt looking south towards St. George’s. I should have guessed (or known) without reading the inscription on the side0 that it’s the work of Francis Chantrey, who made a fortune from this form of commemorative work and left his estate to the Royal Academy for the purchase of paintings for the National collection. It was one of the first works to be cast in Chantrey’s own foundry close to his studio in Eccleston Place. It’s a different view of Pitt from the well known bust by Nollekens: more heroic, showing him as a great statesman and belonging to the vocabulary of national celebration in the years after Waterloo. Efforts were made to destroy it the day after it was installed in 1831 by a mob campaigning for the Reform Bill. It’s hard to imagine this statue of Pitt inspiring such wrath:
Sketch
Following the opening of our Hopper exhibition, we were invited to Sketch to celebrate. It’s a while since I have been there. I hadn’t seen the new back room designed by David Shrigley and gilded by Christian de Falbe. Before the war, it was the headquarters of the RIBA. After the war, it was the workshop for Christian Dior. Now it is a pink palace:
Nor had I seen the room of spaceship lavatories designed ten years ago by Mourad Mazouz, the owner of Sketch:
Dennis Hopper
We opened Dennis Hopper tonight: vintage prints in a display which replicates an exhibition of his photographs shown in Fort Worth in 1970. I find it almost unbearably nostalgic, all those hippies, flower power, the smoking, Jasper Johns, Hells Angels, love ins, Andy Warhol in the factory, Timothy Leary and the short clip from Easy Rider which shows them on their motorbikes riding through the desert. It’s pure sixties, undiluted and beautifully framed.
Peter Rosengard
I’ve just had breakfast with Peter Rosengard, a genial insurance salesman who transacts all his business from a corner table at Claridge’s. A few years ago, he had the idea of commemorating 9/11 by exhibiting one of the twisted steel girders from the Twin Towers. For a while, it was displayed in Battersea Park. Then, it was destined for Potter’s Fields south of the river. Currently, it is being stored in a farmyard in Cambridgeshire. The plan is that it should find a permanent home in Olympic Park.
Catherine Goodman (17)
For the sake of completeness, I feel that I should record that tonight was the night of the formal opening of Catherine’s exhibition by the Duchess of Cornwall; and that seeing my portrait now for the third time, it improves each time I see it and I am beginning to think that it might look like me. I suspect that this may be a standard sitter’s response: that one gradually adapts to someone else’s image of what one looks like. Ivor Braka and I swapped anecdotes about the experience of being painted. I like his portrait. He’s got a good head of hair. He said his housemaster at Oundle had let him grow it long and he’s kept it ever since. The portrait which I didn’t pay attention to last time was the Self-portrait by Catherine herself. It’s unexpectedly self-glamorising:
Dirty Burger
In documenting the rapid gentrification of Stepney, a landmark is clearly the opening of Dirty Burger on the Mile End Road. It occupies a grand Edwardian building next to the Trinity Almshouses. Run by Soho House, it is an instant 1950s saloon, complete with light industrial styling, where you can have flagons of Crate ale and superior, but not expensive burgers:
Architecture and Boats
All the architects I know are passionate about boats. Nick Grimshaw sails off the coast of North Norfolk. Michael Hopkins has a sailing boat on the River Alde. Richard MacCormac had a clinker built boat which he’d sail up the Essex coast. What is it about the relationship between designing buildings and messing about in boats ? It’s partly the modernist dream of practical form, where form and function meet in the use of wood, sailcloth and rope. It’s partly the fact that architects want a practical side to their life, being in charge of the rudder. Maybe there’s a distant memory of the design of Noah’s Ark.
I was due to go sailing this morning in the Hopkins-designed Windflower (named after Elgar’s mistress), but there was no wind on the estuary, so we just went out on the motor instead. The skipper was Michael Hopkins:
The crew were Charles Jencks, dressed for Ascot:
Suffolk
I travelled by the branch line from Ipswich, past the boatyards of Woodbridge, water-locked fields and piggeries to Saxmundham, where the weekend commuters got off. In the morning, the tide was high. I looked across to the church at Iken and walked along the path by the river:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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