angustrumble

Charlotte Klonk has written the first of what will surely be a brace of obituaries for the late John Gage, whose death occurred last Friday, February 10, at the age of seventy-three. He was one of the kindest, gentlest, most unassuming but distinguished, encouraging, stimulating, delightful, and good-mannered historians of art that I have ever had the good fortune to meet and get to know. It was a matter, also, of much pride to many of my compatriots and me that in the last decades of his... Read Full Story

The Republic of the Maldives consists of a string of twenty-six coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, roughly two thousand little islands spread over an immense area of 35,000 square miles, running roughly from north to south, starting not too far (approximately 250 miles) southwest of the southern tip of India. In the past week the country’s political troubles have been in the news, but what has not been widely reported until this morning is the destruction of a very large proportion of the... Read Full Story

Lately I have been adopted by an owl. This beguiling creature has for the past nearly two weeks hooted subtly but assertively from the branch of a tree not too far from my bedroom window, usually between the hours of three and dawn, but occasionally all night long. The call is penetrating enough to rouse me from my slumber, and, although I find it delightful to have such an unusual guest, at times he can be a little too persistent. Mark Aronson tells me that my owl is seeking a mate, and that... Read Full Story

I have been thinking a little more lately about portraiture. One especially interesting sub-category of the genre is portraits of artists by their friends, indeed these have much to say about friendship itself—as does the exquisite double concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra in A minor by Johannes Brahms (opus 102), the composition of which was prompted by the reconciliation of two friends temporarily estranged due to taking sides in a messy divorce, but that is an entirely different... Read Full Story

Lately an excellent colleague of mine, an enormously learned young man, has directed my attention to Mrs. Piozzi [Hester, previously Mrs. Thrale], specifically to her diary entry for March 29, 1794 (ii. 874f.), in which she coined the term “finger-twirler,” not one that I had previously come across. “[Ann,] Mrs. [Bertie] Greatheed & I call those Fellows Finger-twirlers,” wrote Mrs. Piozzi, “meaning a decent word for Sodomites: Old Sir Horace Mann [first baronet] & Mr. [George] James the... Read Full Story

The following day we approached the chalk cliffs between Seaford and Beachy Head. The most extraordinary aspect of this stretch of south coast is that cuddly old rural England just rolls picturesquely along, up hill and down, peacefully navigating soft rises and little gullies, until.... Straight down into the sea, a sheer and entirely unimpeded drop. It’s eroding steadily, of course, which means that sometimes important listed farmhouses of inconceivable antiquity that just happen to find... Read Full Story

Last weekend we stayed in a little cottage on the South Downs, hard by the ancient smuggling village of Alfriston, East Sussex. Two places, barely fifty miles apart, attest to the extraordinary variety of the English landscape. Dungeness (above), where we went on Saturday, is a flat promontory composed entirely of shingle, one of the largest such aggregations in existence. Here all things are in a state of gradual reclamation: metal, driftwood, stone. The elemental powers simply grind them... Read Full Story

Among the assortment of old gramophone records that lived in Dad’s study at number 18 Denham Place was “Callas à Paris,” a collection of French operatic arias sung by Maria Callas, and conducted by the youthful Georges Prêtre. Thank God I listened to that record a lot as a teenager, but it took me a long time to discover the early recordings made by Callas when she was at the height of her vocal powers, and in every respect in her prime. Among those the one I now listen to most is the 1953... Read Full Story

This rather beautiful drawing by Dame Laura Knight is coming up for sale late this month at Lawrences in Dorset, for next to no money. It shows Princess Marie Louise as a rather wistful old lady, having just completed her very engaging volume of memoirs, My Memories of Six Reigns . The lot contains two further drawings by Knight, showing the hands of the sitter and sheets of writing (“To all those whose friendship and affection have made my long life so full of interest and happiness―Marie... Read Full Story

Ronald Searle has died at the great age of 91. By all accounts he felt oppressed by his enduring association with the Belles of St. Trinian’s, with Molesworth, and with all the other broadly revealing postwar English stereotypes which decades ago he skewered so exactly with his pen. His reportage and more serious later work he felt were consistently underappreciated at home; he settled in France. Yet those early, writhing symphonies of line were the works with which I grew up, and in early... Read Full Story