I have been reading with the utmost interest an article written by Adam Gopnik about the current issues surrounding the Warburg Institute (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/in-the-memory-ward). He quotes liberally from a conversation held over our dinner table in the autumn. The thing which I had only half known was the extent to which Kenneth Clark was influenced by Aby Warburg. I knew that Clark had attended a lecture given by Aby Warburg at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome on 19 January 1929, because it is referred to (with the wrong year) in his autobiography. I knew that his book, The Nude, is very evidently influenced by Warburgian ideas. I also knew, which Gopnik does not refer to, that it was always said that, on his one and only visit to the Warburg, Clark was turned away because he did not have a reader’s ticket. What I did not know, and have never seen referred to, is that Clark gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford in 1961/2 on the subject of ‘Motives’, that these lectures still survive in the Tate archive where Gopnik was able to read them, and that they are, as one would expect from the title, an exposition of Warburgian beliefs.

As I walked round the Royal Academy Schools last night, I realised that, as work on our major building construction looms and as the casts will have to be moved from the Cast Corridor during the summer, we should document their appearance before it is too late, in order to be able to remember their deep patina, the dust of ages, the eccentric pipework, as the Schools are themselves necessarily and beneficially transformed:-

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Every year, the Royal Academy has an event to celebrate the memory of Sidney Hutchison.   Not Reynolds, or Chambers or any of the founding fathers.   Not Lord Leighton or Francis Chantrey or J.M.W. Turner.   Not Hugh Casson or Roger de Grey who helped to reinvent it.   Only Sidney Hutchison is routinely commemorated for his fifty two years service, joining as a junior clerk in 1929, apparently thinking it was the Royal Academy of Music, serving in the Royal Navy in the war, returning to the Academy as its librarian in 1949, becoming Exhibitions Secretary in 1955, Secretary from 1968 to 1982, and ending up as Honorary Archivist and Antiquary, publishing its history in the year of its bicentenary in 1968.

Last night I went to a party to celebrate the career of Robert Dalrymple, the Scottish book designer (and reader of this blog).   It was held at the Fine Art Society, one of the oldest and best surviving of the Bond Street galleries, patrons of Whistler and the Arts and Crafts Movement, originators of the one-man exhibition (with catalogue) and still in its original premises, which they moved to in October 1876, and had renovated by E.W. Godwin in 1881:-

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My eye was caught half way through a meeting yesterday by the way the light was falling on the decorative surrounds of the Burlington House Saloon.   Lord Burlington is always associated with a rather puritanical version of neo-Palladianism, as exemplified by the publication of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, whose tercentenary we are celebrating later this year.   What struck me is how rich and opulent and essentially neo-baroque Kent’s detailing is, a style which he presumably picked up during his time spent studying at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome:-

I had dinner last night at Grocers’ Hall, the home of the second oldest (or is it the second richest ?) of the city livery companies, which date back to the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond, and are now devoted to good works, with a certain amount of civic ritual.   The building is relatively recent, set back from the street just by the Bank of England, and one realises that the guilds and the combination of charity and community stretches back to the middle ages.

Stanley Anderson RA, Self Portrait, 1933 ©Stanley Anderson Estate

I missed the opening of our display of the work of Stanley Anderson in the Tennant Gallery, which shows the extraordinary technical skill of printmakers between the wars.   Trained originally as an apprentice engraver, he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art and became a teacher at Goldsmith’s.   Travelling the continent and back streets of London, he produced dark and animated line engravings, including tramps in the National Gallery and scenes of agricultural labour, as well as occasional paintings in egg tempera.

An Abiding Standard: The Prints of Stanley Anderson RA

We parked this afternoon outside a shop in Kensington Church Street which sold ornamental canes:-

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We spent the late afternoon in the gardens of Kensington Palace, admiring the planting of the parterres by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and the dark smooth brickwork of the original Wren building, including the long range of the Queen’s Gallery added to the north, and the brighter, but still immaculately smooth brickwork of the Orangery, thought to be by Hawksmoor when he was Clerk of Works, with possible ornamental flourishes by Vanbrugh:-

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Everyone was out in force on the towpath this morning – walkers, runners, more barges than usual – all enjoying the first tincture of spring:-

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