London

   My next planned post was to have been on the visit the bf and I made to Houghton Hall.  However on Wednesday I went up to town to meet my brother.  One of the things he wanted to see was the Wallace Collection.  And I was so impressed with what I saw I decided on the train home to alter my plans.

    One of the themes of this blog has been the 'Schatzkammer', or treasury.  A place of concentrated wonder.  Enlarging on that theme this blog has also turned out to be about the enchantment, or rather re-enchantment, with the world.  A position, I suppose, against what Max Webber termed 'entzauberung' or dis-enchantment with the world in the state of Modernity.  The Wallace Collection more than satisfied both categories for inclusion in this blog.  Such was its richness that it was almost overwhelming, and we left sated after an hour or so without seeing it all.
   Anyway we met up outside Baker Street tube and walked down Marylebone High St., popping into the Conran Shop, the lovely Daunt Books, and St James, Spanish Place, a little known Gothic Revival church built by Edward Goldie and has a very good interior - lofty and vaulted.  It was a part of London that George did not know at all and I hadn't visited for years.

Daunt Books

   The Wallace Collection is housed in Hertford House one of London's remaining aristocratic town houses.  It occupies an island site on the north side of Manchester Square, just north of Oxford St.. It became the town house of the Hertfords in 1795, and is a somewhat unprepossessing building to house such a spectacular collection.  Like that of Viscount FitzWilliam, that became the core of the Fitzwilliam Museum, The Wallace Collection is an aristocratic creation - the work of three generations: the 3rd & 4th Marquesses of Hertford and Richard Wallace the latter's illegitimate son.
   At the heart of Wallace's collection is the fine and applied art of France, particularly from what is is termed 'Le Grande Siecle'.  It is the 4th Marquess that is responsible for this part of the collection, indeed he was one of the great collectors of the 19th century.  There is marble, bronze, ormolu and boulle aplenty, and the craftsmanship on display is at times quite breathtaking.  Cabinets too of French porcelain and enamel ware, and then there is a whole host of exquisite miniatures. There are rooms of Watteau and Fragonard and Boucher - not really my taste but in conjunction with the applied art in each room the effect is staggering. In fact the Wallace Collection contains a number of famous paintings: Watteau's 'The Swing', Reynold's 'Portrait of Nelly O'Brien', Poussin's 'Dance to the Music of Time' and Hals' 'Laughing Cavalier'.  There is a hefty haul of Flemish art to keep the cavalier company including work by Rubens, Rembrandt and van Dyck.  There is too a gallery of Venetian Veduta paintings by Canaletto and Guardi - the latter was a discovery: much more painterly and atmospheric than Canaletto.  Other discoveries were a series of beautiful little landscapes by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803-1860), work by Richard Parkes Bonnington (1802-1828) and a group of painterly sketches by Rubens.  The paintings on the whole tended towards portraiture, and the rhetorical - religious, mythological and narrative.  The domestic was not so prevalent except in the Flemish galleries.  There was none, as far as I can remember, of the intimate, everyday subjects as you find in Chadrin and Oudry.  It was Sir Richard Wallace who bought the collection over from Paris in 1870, where he and the 4th Marquess before him made their home, and it was his widow, Lady Wallace, who left the collection to the nation.  Hertford House opened to the public in 1900.  We missed the rooms of Oriental and European armour and the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, but as I've already said we were feeling pretty sated after an hour or so.  It is possible to have too much of a good thing! Finally as a result of a major, decade long, refurbishment the gallery walls are hung with wonderful silks in a number of bold and striking colours and patterns, not only do they make the paintings sing but add a depth and intensity to the whole gallery going experience.     In all superlative.  I'm already thinking about making a return visit.

   Lunch was taken in Paul Rothe and Son, a really lovely deli, just around the corner from The Wallace Collection in Marylebone Lane; early dinner in an old favourite of mine Polpo at Bird & Ape in Cambridge Circus.

London: the British Museum and Wilton's Music Hall

     The bf and I went up to London yesterday.  It was a beautiful spring day when we arrived in the capital and we strolled down from King's Cross station to Lamb's Conduit St, which has a great selection of independent retailers and places to eat.  After lunch we popped into my friend Ben Pentreath's shop 'Pentreath and Hall' which he runs, (alongside an architectural and interior design practice) with his business partner Bridie Hall.  It's always a visual treat and a good place for ideas.
     From there we went to the British Museum and the exhibition:  'Defining Beauty: the Body in Ancient Greek Art'.  The museum was impossibly crowded, but the exhibition calm.  In fact there was an almost religious air such is the place, the reverence indeed, that these sculptures have in the Western Canon.  They are foundational.  And I have to admit the experience was quite moving at times; these statues seemed to exist simultaneously in two planes: the physical and, well, the spiritual.  It was as though they were caught up in their own thoughts, (the contemplation of their own existence), and their presence in our three dimensions was merely incidental.  A lot has been said about the 'humanism of the Greeks' but there was definitely something religious about much of this art.  It mustn't be forgotten that this art was produced in a pre-modern civilization and hence drenched in the religious.  This other-worldly, even transcendent, quality, may however be the consequence of the loss of the original colour, but I'd like to think that this was not the case.  It would be a mistake to believe that this representative art is merely a copy of life: it is not there is something definitely 'artistic', something transformative, in the work.
     And before you think that this exhibition was solely about monumental depiction of the divine there was a lot of other work: some of it funny and grotesque, some of it domestic.  I will point you in the direction of the small and exquisite bronzes that dot the exhibition, easily missed in the midst of all that monumental white marble.  What unites them all is the amazing quality of the work.  There was example after example of the most sublime technical virtuosity.  I find it almost incomprehensible that Greek cities were just filled with this stuff; incomprehensible too the cultural explosion that produced this work.  Work that is almost out of time - and hence 'Classical'.
     The final room of the exhibition was a slightly strange affair.  All too diffuse.  In one corner a map (the same map as the beginning of the exhibition) showing the extent of Greek civilisation and cultural influence.  This was by no means detailed enough.  By it were two sculptures; a beautiful head of Alexander the Great and a Buddha from Gandhara.  Neither was quite enough, but the culture of the Greeks in Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent is perhaps another, and exciting, exhibition.  The centre of the space was however, occupied with a dialogue between two great Antique sculptures the 'Belvedere Torso' (on loan from the Vatican) and one of the reclining Gods from one of the two pediments of the Parthenon. Both statues have suffered from the effects of time and that is what I took with me.

     We went to 'Polpo at Bird and Ape' for an early dinner.  As a loyal reader of this blog may now realise Polpo is a bit of a favourite of mine.  It was the bf's first visit.  We started with Chopped Chicken Liver crostini, and then shared a Fritto Misto, Pork and fennel polpetti, and really delicious salad of Zucchini, Parmesan and Basil.  We going to have a go tonight in re-creating the latter.

     Our evening was spent at Wilton's Music Hall in the East End.  I have wanted to visit the place for some time, and it really, really did not disappoint.  A small Victorian building tucked away in a side street, it has been restored in a particularly atmospheric manner. The hall itself is magnificent, rather as you might imagine Vanbrugh or Hawksmoor having a go at designing and not, thankfully, over restored.  In fact it seems, again thankfully, they have done merely that which is necessary to protect the structure - the walls, for example, have been stripped to the original surface but not repainted.  The lighting is perfect: trails of tiny lights hanging from the central ceiling rose like a bell tent.  Quite breathtaking.  The reason for our visit was an evening of early silent comedies bought to us by the Lucky Dog Picture House, the people 'dedicated to recreating the original cinema experience'.  It was a fantastic evening. A brilliant job they did of it: five musicians playing witty, clever original music. There were six films in all; 'Undressing Extraordinary' (1901), 'Mary Jane's Mishap' (1903), 'The (?) Motorist' 1904, 'A Dog's Life' (1918) and after the interval: 'The Lucky Dog' (1921), and 'Liberty' (1921).  The last was the funniest: Laurel and Hardy in a broad, physical farce that culminated in a literally breath taking scene on the top of a skyscraper.  I have to confess that thanks to watching Laurel and Hardy films as a child on television I have not had a great liking for this sort of stuff, but it is a completely different experience seeing these films with live music and an audience.  As I have said on this blog before, do not hesitate, if you have the chance, to watch these films in the manner in which they meant to see.  It is wonderful thing to do.

Moroni at the RA

   A day in London.  The main reason was the exhibition of the work of the little known Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520 - 1578) at the Royal Academy.  It was a complete revelation; Moroni's portraiture is of a technical brilliance that is accompanied by a intense spiritual and emotive power. There a number of religious works too, but the more monumental ones on display - the altarpieces are, with two important exceptions, rather empty.  Perhaps that is Moroni's weakness; his strength perhaps lays in the more intimate, or should one say, more focused.  One feels in his most brilliant work he has truly come to terms with his subject.  In many the background is almost eliminated, in others a simplified schema of architecture is used - the focus is the sitter.  Somehow in the larger work - the altarpieces - that schema does not work so well, for instance: 'St Gotthard enthroned with St Lawrence and St Catherine'.  I desire more (architectural) detail in those paintings.  After all they do serve a different purpose, though I do understand the reasoning, which perhaps reflects the new emphasis of the Counter Reformation Spirituality.  But that is a minor quibble.  Moroni is a great master.

  The highlights for me were - actually it would be pointless to attempt to list them because there are so many; but if on pain of death I would have to chose one then that would be 'Portrait of an Elderly Man seated with a book'.  It is superb.  Truly superb.
   Without looking yet at the catalogue I would think he was an influenced by, and an influence on, Northern Renaissance art.  Looking at all those sumptuously painted fabrics I can see an echo of Moroni in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture. And perhaps it is the influence of Northern Europe (Morini was a northern Italian) that makes me like his art so much. Judging by the work on show Moroni is due a major re-evaluation by art historians; he should be among the greats of Western portraiture - he would be a very worthy addition to the canon.
A revelation too the work of Moretto, Moroni's teacher, whose work is represented by a small number of canvasses including 'Madonna and Child on a Throne between Saints Eusebia, Andrew Domneone and Domno' (1536-37), where the aged St Andrew and the Christ Child exchange a look of such melting tenderness and love.  Praise indeed as I don't usually like the sort of art that followed on from the 'High Renaissance'.  Very good too the more intimate of Moretto's religious work in the exhibition.
   Really I cannot praise this exhibition highly enough....GO!  You have until Jan 25th.

   Afterwards some seasonal shopping and a long lunch at Polpo, Cambridge Circus, with a friend: Pig's Head Crostini; Cauliflower and Fontina; Octopus, Treviso and Barlotti beans, Pork and fennel meatballs.  I then polished off a lovely squidgy Tiramisu.  I'm such a pig!