Two Butterfly Lives

As anticipated, that handsome volume The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors has proved good bedtime reading to get me through the lepidopteral close season. Like Gaul, it is divided into three parts - a history of the British butterfly fancy, a biographical dictionary of notable butterfly men and women, and essays on some of the more historically interesting of our butterflies. Lately I've been browsing in the biographies, which is where I found the chap with the zebra cart above - Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild of Tring, who sounds like a delightfull fellow. Temperamentally unsuited for the normal occupations of the world, he devoted himself entirely to building up the largest collection of animals ever assembled by one man - everything from starfish to gorillas and giant tortoises (144 of them), with butterflies and moths to the number of 100,000 species, with the greatest range of variants ever seen ('I have no duplicates,' he declared). As a student at Cambridge, he kept a much-loved flock of kiwis, and kangaroos, ostriches and, of course, zebras roamed free in his grounds at Tring. He once rode a zebra carriage and four through Piccadilly to Buckingham Palace. Such exhibitionism is often a product of shyness, and Rothschild was cripplingly shy. He was also apparently unable to control his voice, which alternated quite unpredictably between a low stammer and a loud bellow. He grew very stout, tipping the scales at 22 stone, his vast 6ft 3in body balanced on tiny feet, giving the effect, when he bowled around his mansion, of (in his niece Miriam's words) 'a grand piano on castors'. His younger brother, Charles, was also a collector (and a pioneer of nature conservation) but his main interest was in fleas, on which he became - like his daughter Miriam - a world authority.
Here's another brief life - of a fat, genial chap, bearded and jug-eared, who is photographed reclining on one elbow in a meadow, looking more like a farm worker enjoying a break than the successful tax accountant, first-class shot and fly fisherman and eminent butterfly collector that he was. This is Robert 'Porker' Watson (1916-84), who began life selling rabbits, running a paper round, then a milk round, and winning wrestling prizes at fairs. How he made the transition from milkman to tax accountant is not clear, and his love life too hints at mysteries, including as it did four marriages and a remarriage. He named the house he built 'Porcorum'. In his butterfly collecting, he aimed for a collection of perfect specimens, and 'his setting was described as a miracle of perfection, despite his being virtually blind in one eye'. It is a wonderful world, the world of the butterfly fanciers, and The Aurelian Legacy is an endlessly rewarding guide to it.

Accidental Birth of the Haikette

Inspired by the unprecedented response (hem hem) to my sawn-off haiku encapsulating the Noughties, I've decided to regularise the form and give it a name. It shall be called the Haikette (with grateful acknowledgment to the Sage of Tiverton, whom God preserve), and it shall consist of 13 syllables, arranged thus:
4
6
3
That's enough syllables for anyone. Here's an example:

Gulls on the ice.
Seared rushes fringe the lake.
My breath, smoke.

(It should be centred, rather than ranged left, but I can't work out how to do it on Blogger.)
That's a memory of yesterday, when I walked out in quest of waxwings, not really expecting to find any - and I didn't. That magical sighting from a passing train will stand alone in my memory (albeit with a butterfly relative). I did, however, get a good look at another beautiful tree sparrow, and thought of my daughter, now back in New Zealand...

A Waxwing Winter?

It's not only redwings and fieldfares that are invading in vast numbers this icy winter (in Kent yesterday I saw an orchard entirely filled with a mixed flock of these, perching on every branch of every tree), it looks as if it might also be a waxwing winter. This unmistakable visitor from the forests of eastern Europe is extremely partial to the berries of the rowan, as well as pyracantha, cotoneaster and their like - just the kind of sturdy vegetation favoured by the planners of car parks and shopping centres. This means that when waxwings are around, you might well see them in such unexpected places - and, being unused to humans, they're surprisingly tame and tend to carry on feeding regardless. Cut to this morning, and there I was on my usual Sunday morning train in to work, gazing drowsily out of the window (it had been quite a day down in Kent) before getting down to a book, when I saw it - my first waxwing! The train was past it in a second, but there was no mistaking what it was, especially as it was feeding greedily on a rowan right by the track and seemed untroubled by the passing train. If waxwings have reached my part of south London/Surrey, this must surely be a waxwing winter! Tomorrow I intend to go out searching, in the hope of getting a much longer look at this extraordinary bird.

Any Excuse for a Saucy Painting...

The excuse is the birthday of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, born on this day in 1836 (that's his innocently titled painting The Tepidarium). And the question you ask yourself is - how did those Victorians get away with it? Alma-Tadema, a Dutchman who became a giant of the high Victorian art scene, features largely in Victorian Olympus, part of William Gaunt's trilogy on Victorian painters(The Pre-Raphaelite Dream and The Aesthetic Adventure are the other two), which is one of the most readable and entertaining art histories ever written. Even in his day, Alma-Tadema was characterised, wildly, by Ruskin as 'the worst painter of the 19th century', and his reputation plunged in the 20th century to such a nadir that in 1960 the Newman Gallery found it impossible even to give away, let alone sell, The Finding of Moses, one of his most famous paintings. In 1995, it sold for £1.75 million. What had happened in the interim? The catalyst for the Alma-Tadema revival was one Allen Funt, the creator of the TV show Candid Camera, whose accountant stole all his money, leaving him obliged to sell his large collection of Alma-Tademas, bought while the artist's reputation was at rock bottom. The ensuing sale at Christie's in 1973 sparked new interest in the artist, and he has remained one of the highest-priced Victorians ever since. It's not hard to see why - that flesh, that marble, those skies... Not a great artist, but certainly not 'the worst painter of the 19th century' - for that honour there is an awful lot of competition.

You Can't Budge a Carp

The farcical Hoon-Hewitt coup that wasn't provided much amusement yesterday. When will these people realise there's no budging Broon? The man has the uncannily prehensile feet and 'almost imperceptible arches' of the young Augustus Carp (and the capacity for moral humbug and self-delusion of the adult Augustus Carp Esq).

Compensations

Ah well, this wintry weather has its compensations. There's the cheering beauty of untrodden snow, of course - and of hoarfrost, which was spectacular when I was in Oxfordshire the other day: every twig of every tree white with it, every green leaf fringed with fine silver whiskers... And there are the welcome unfamiliar birds that fly in with the cold. On Monday in the park I saw a couple of bramblings, a pretty kind of winter chaffinch with an air of the pine forest about it - a while since I saw any in my locality. And on Saturday I had my binoculars trained for a long time on a solitary fieldfare (so beautifully marked in grey, chestnut and black). As for the redwings, they are so numerous down my way this year that they're second only to the crows and gulls (make that third then) - a sure sign of a hard winter. If the Met Office had occupied itself looking out for redwings, it might not have issued its confident forecast of a 'mild winter'.

Epiphanius

Not a name you often hear these days - but a glorious one, and apt for today (Epiphany). Church crawlers will know it as that of one of the finest and most mysterious monumental sculptors of his time (a very few years after Shakespeare's), Epiphanius Evesham. Little is known of his life - not much more than this really - and his works are few and far between (and mostly attributed), but nearly all are of quite extraordinary quality, elegantly and truthfully done. (The picture shows a monument - attributed - in St Bartholomew, Quorn.) My old English master, whom I've mentioned many a time before, was mildly obsessed with the enigmatic figure of Evesham, and would make a special journey to an out-of-the-way church just to see one of his works, however uncertainly attributed. A writer in the Peter Ackroyd line could probably make something of the Evesham mystery; the title's ready-made - Epiphanius.