The Last Day in the Old Home

 The painting above, The Last Day in the Old Home by Robert Braithwaite Martineau, was hugely popular with the Victorian public, who liked a picture that not only told a story but punched home a barrage of strong moral lessons. 
Chez Nige, I'm glad to say things don't look much like the scene depicted by Martineau, but today is indeed the last day in the old home before it's all packed up and carted away, mostly into storage. Mrs N and I will follow in due course and by Wednesday will have waved farewell to the suburban demiparadise and settled in the delightful 'city of philosophers', Lichfield, from where I shall resume my dispatches. Hasta la vista.

Coleridge Unveiled

 Today, on the 250th anniversary of his birth, a statue of Samuel Taylor Coleridge was unveiled outside the (magnificent) church in his natal town of Ottery St Mary, Devon. The statue is by Nicholas Dimbleby, son of broadcasting legend Richard and brother of David and Jonathan (he is, by all accounts, the 'quiet one' of the three). This picture of the statue in the studio, before casting, shows it to better advantage, I think...

It shows the young poet and outdoor man, full of energy and promise and idealism (and sometimes touched by genius), rather than the bloated old windbag he became. (Seriously, has Biographia Literaria ever given anyone an iota of reading pleasure?). It's good to know there are figurative sculptors at work who can create convincing full-length public portrait sculpture of this quality. Why, one wonders, do those who clearly lack the ability get so many big commissions? The Diana statue?! The Lovers at St Pancras...?!
Never mind. Here is another by Dimbleby, his statue of Whistler on Chelsea embankment. 

Joan Carlile

'There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.' The best-known image of Sir Thomas Browne (born on this day in 1605) is taken from this double portrait of Lady Dorothy and Sir Thomas, painted by one Joan Carlile, who has the distinction of being one of the first British women to paint professionally. She was married to Lodowick  Carlile (or Carlell), a playwright and courtier, who under Charles I was Gentleman of the Bows and Groom to the King and Queen's Privy Chamber, and maintained the post of Keeper of the Great Forest at Richmond Park through the Commonwealth period, and with it the handsome residence of Petersham Lodge. The Carliles had three children, and are buried in Petersham churchyard. Of Joan Carlile's paintings, rather few survive, mostly portraits. As the Browne double portrait shows, her style borders on the naive, but is lively and charming. She was capable of working on a much larger scale, and the grandest of her surviving paintings, combining landscape with portraiture, shows The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park. Sir Justinian was a scholar and Royalist politician, and the painting hangs at his family seat, Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire. Joan Carlile is thought to be the figure at the far left. 

'I think they should be discouraged'

 

Here is that fine poet Elizabeth Bishop, in a Paris Review interview in 1978: 'When I went to Vassar I took sixteenth-century, seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literature, and then a course in the novel. The kind of courses where you have to do a lot of reading. I don't think I believe in writing courses at all. There weren't any when I was there. ...The word "creative" drives me crazy. I don't like to regard it as therapy. I was in the hospital several years ago and somebody gave me Kenneth Koch's book Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?* And It's true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged. From everything I've read and heard, the number of students in English departments taking literature courses has been falling off enormously. But at the same time the number of people who want to get in the writing classes seems to get bigger and bigger.' I'm sure the situation she describes in the universities is the same, only more so, today. The overvaluing of 'creativity' and the undervaluing of reading, specifically as an essential bedrock for any attempt at creative writing, has had dire effects both on writing (especially poetry) and on education. While I wouldn't quite go along with actively discouraging children from writing (though there are plenty of adults who should be firmly discouraged), I certainly think teaching them to read books and learn from their reading should take precedence over any encouragement of creative writing. The playwright Tennessee Williams also took a dim view of creative writing classes, and had kept and reread Bishop's interview. In an interview with James Grissom in 1982, Williams gave his formula for learning to be a writer:

'Read. Read a lot. Go home. Be quiet. Write. Write some more. It will soon be discovered if you are a writer. Classes are not for discovery; they are for stipends.' * In which Koch seeks to show how great poetry can be taught in such a way as to help children write poetry of their own. Koch also co-edited a beautiful illustrated anthology of 'poems for young people', Talking to the Sun. The illustrations are all of paintings and other treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the choice of poems is wide and wonderful.

No Humans Standing

 I feel I really ought to say something about recent events in the corridors of power (as they once were, before the financial markets and the media took command). But what is there left to say? Perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all is that it seems to have left no humans standing. Hunt, Sunak and Starmer – and indeed La Truss – are clearly CGI simulations, as are most of those around them. I have a suspicion Kwarteng might possibly be a human (at least he was a classicist rather than yet another PPE product), but now we'll never know. It could well be that Boris Johnson, for all his only too evident faults, was the last human in British politics. Which is why his lot were elected with such a thumping majority, and why they'll lose next time, and why no one really cares any more...
Maybe it really is time for the resurgent SDP (the party Rod Liddle's always on about) to sweep to power?

On a happier note, today is the birthday of the great illustrator and bringer of joy Edward Ardizzone (born 1900), who gets mentioned quite often on this blog. I have fond memories of this exhibition from six years ago. 

Another Big One

 Today was one of the year's big cultural anniversaries – the 150th of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, born on this day in 1872 in the village of Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where his father (who died two years later) was the vicar. I have opined on this blog that, for me, he was the greatest English composer since Purcell, and I don't see myself changing that opinion. Here, to mark the great day, is one of my favourites, Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, which does wonderful things with the folk tune to which RVW also set the hymn 'I heard the voice of Jesus say' – 

'I learned a lot about anatomy but didn't find the book'

 'When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.'
These wise words were spoken (in an interview) by erstwhile hard-living, hell-raising wild man of rock Keith Richards. He is well known to be a bibliophile with an extensive personal library (extending across several of his homes), and in 1998 he hit the headlines when he fell off his library steps (I like to imagine him wearing a smoking jacket and cap when this happened). Richards broke three ribs and punctured a lung in the fall, and afterwards remarked, 'I was looking for Leonardo da Vinci's book on anatomy. I learned a lot about anatomy but didn't find the book.'
At one time Richards decided to get his burgeoning library properly organised, and seriously considered taking a professional course in the mysteries of the Dewey decimal system, but he gave up the idea in favour of organised chaos, the default position of most bookmen. I wonder if he has a copy of that indispensable vade mecum My Duties As My Own Librarian by Arthur H. Jenn and Edward P. Gray...