To London

 Yesterday I entrained for the Metropolis to meet and lunch with An Old Friend (my best old friend). In the afternoon we visited the Royal Academy exhibition 'Impressionists on Paper' (hurry hurry, ends 10 March). It's a crowd-pulling title for an exhibition of works mostly by post-impressionists (Degas, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec) or never-impressionists (Odilon Redon, for heaven's sake). Also, while I'm being pedantic, not all the works are on paper. A more accurate title would have been 'Works, Chiefly Drawings and Pastels, from Late Nineteenth-Century France' – that would have had the punters queuing round the block. 
  Anyway, quibbles aside, this smallish exhibition (three rooms) includes half a dozen stunning pastels by Degas, a handful of lovely watercolour studies by Cézanne, and a couple of brilliant Toulouse-Lautrecs, and these alone would be worth the visit. As would the picture that dominates the first room, and is indeed facing you, unignorably, when you walk through the door – a study of a yawning dancer, drawn on a background of shocking acid green, a green you have to see to believe. This, and other works of his on show, confirm Kenneth Clark's judgment, if it needed confirming, that Degas was indeed 'the greatest draughtsman since the high renaissance'. 
  On my way towards lunch, I took a turn around Soho Square, and noticed a feature that I had somehow missed, or forgotten, until now – the statue of Charles II by Caius Gabriel Cibber. It is much battered, mutilated and restored, but still has considerable presence. Originally the centrepiece of a grand Baroque fountain, it ended up at Grim's Dyke near Harrow Weald, the home of W.S. Gilbert, whose widow, long after Gilbert's death, returned it to Soho Square. I have written about Cibber before, e.g. here, and indeed his wonderful Sackville monument at Withyham is featured in This Book...