Tag Archives: London

St. Chad, Dunloe Street

I failed to post photographs of St. Chad’s, a large barn-like church designed by James Brooks on a street just behind Haggerston School.   Brooks became a student in the Royal Academy Schools, and set up in practice as an architect in Bloomsbury Square.   In 1862, he moved to a house he designed for himself in Clissold Crescent in Stoke Newington.   Commissions for east end churches, including St. Chad’s, came from fellow parishioners at St. Matthias’s, Stoke Newington who established the Haggerston Church Scheme.   St. Chad’s is a good example of Brooks’s austere and muscular red brick Gothic, entirely appropriate to bring Anglo-Catholicism to Haggerston:-

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War Art

We went to a preview of a television film that Margy Kinmonth has made with Eddie Redmayne on the impact of the first world war on art.   He comes across incredibly well – knowledgeable and unself-important, with an interest in the subject based on reading art history at Cambridge.   The Royal Academy appears because of the memorial outside to the Artists’ Rifle Brigade and because the female students in the RA Schools were employed to paint the dazzle camouflage on the ships employing the pictorial devices of cubism.   We were so inspired by the number of pictures shown in the storerooms of the Imperial War Museum – works by Nevinson, Bomberg, Sargent and both Nashes – that we set off to see them.

We found the dazzle boats which were apparently found in a store in Duxford:-

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Haggerston

Our trip to Cambridge was cancelled, so I spent the morning trying to make sense of Haggerston instead.   I had never been to Albion Square, laid out in the 1840s by Islip Odell, a brick-maker, and was surprised and impressed by its stateliness, its sense of municipal improvement, with drinking fountains and public gardens:-

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The Grafton Galleries

We went to the exhibition Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery last night.   I hadn’t realised how key to a knowledge of Impressionism in London was the comprehensive exhibition held by Paul Durand-Ruel and Sons in the Grafton Galleries in 1905, when Roger Fry became an advisor;  nor how large and spacious the Grafton Galleries were, with top-lit exhibition galleries as grand as the galleries at the Royal Academy.   Originally in Grafton Street, it is said to have moved to Bond Street, although there is a picture of its grand premises, described as being in Bond Street, in Building News on 6 May 1892 and it is still listed as being in Grafton Street in 1899.   It held miscellaneous exhibitions, including Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910.

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COLLECT

We went to COLLECT at the Saatchi Gallery, as we do every year.   I have spent the week puzzling about where the boundary lies between the Crafts and Luxury Goods.   It’s true the demarcation lines are being blurred as the Crafts go upmarket, are more expensive, are used for purposes of display, and lose the puritan and utilitarian tradition.   It’s probably because there are high charges to exhibit, but I miss a gallery like Cold Press in Holt, which would introduce a touch of desirable austerity.   We liked the work of a Japanese jeweller called Kimiaki Kageyama, represented by SO Gallery in Brick Lane:-

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Colnaghi’s

I was asked by a friend where he could best see, and possibly buy, Old Master drawings.   I thought the best place would be Colnaghi’s, one of the oldest established dealers.   I hadn’t realised that it goes back to 1760, when Giovanni Battista Torre opened a shop in Paris which sold books and prints alongside barometers and fireworks.   His son Anthony opened a print shop in London in 1767, just before the Royal Academy was founded.   It was acquired by Paul Colnaghi in 1788.   Originally based at 132, Pall Mall (in the eighteenth century the art trade was based round Waterloo Place and only moved north of Piccadilly when the RA opened in 1868), Colnaghi moved to Cockspur Street in 1799, where he held three o’clock levées for the world of fashion.   In 1911, the firm moved to 144/6 New Bond Street when Otto Gutekunst was making a fortune, working with Berenson in supplying paintings to the great American collectors.   They are still in Bond Street, but now upstairs.

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Garrick Club

I was walking past the Garrick Club last week and stopped to admire the grandeur of its façade, now that it is no longer covered in soot and grime.   It was no wonder that I could not identify its architect, a man named Frederick Marrable, a pupil of Blore.   He was architect of the Metropolitan Board of Works, responsible for settling claims, laying out Burdett Road and the design of Holborn Viaduct.   The Garrick is a more than halfway decent piece of Clubland classicism, with its high entrance, its dining room remote from the street and surprisingly good stone detailing:-

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Lincoln’s Inn

I had dinner last night in the Lincoln’s Inn Great Hall with the upper echelons of the legal profession in white tie and decorations.   I have sometimes walked through Lincoln’s Inn with its mowed lawns and atmosphere of academic seclusion, but had never penetrated the Great Hall, which makes Oxbridge dining halls look small-scale and has a huge and not wholly successful fresco by G.F. Watts depicting A Hemicycle of Lawgivers, including Moses, Confucius and King Alfred, as well as Tennyson impersonating Minos.

This morning I went to check out the architecture of the Stone Buildings with their grand neoclassical façade, designed by Sir Robert Taylor:-

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Abercrombie and Fitch

My eye was caught this morning by the façade of Abercrombie and Fitch which looked fleetingly like the American Embassy, flying the American flag in the morning sun.   Once upon a time it was Queensberry House, the town house of Charles Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, although it was originally designed in 1721 for John Bligh, an Irish peer, by the Venetian architect, Giacomo Leoni.   According to Leoni, he showed the design to Lord Burlington who ‘gave leave to the person who executed it, to set the Front towards his own garden’.   Constructed by a Chelsea bricklayer, John Witt, it was later remodelled by John Vardy for the Earl of Uxbridge.   In the nineteenth century it became a branch of the Bank of England.   So it is perhaps not surprising that it looks more like an Embassy than a fashion store:-

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The Back Road

I have always thought that the back road which runs alongside the Royal Academy, behind the Society of Antiquaries, is one of the more mysterious spaces of central London, a phantom space unused for most of the year, like Down Street, the forgotten stop of the Piccadilly Line.   But the road is opened once a year to allow for the delivery of sculpture to the Summer Exhibition, so tonight there was a view down what may be the longest unadorned wall in Europe to the gate which was open onto Piccadilly:-

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