Innholdsfortegnelse for February 21, 2024 i Country Life

A Lancashire Village by L. S. Lowry ‘I first fell under the spell of Lowry’s paintings as a teenager, when I had to prepare a portfolio for entry to university to study architecture. I remember doing a work in gouache in his style–in retrospect, it was highly derivative. I have since realised that, uniquely, he summed up the gritty urbanity of the industrial North with its factories, back-to-back housing and conspicuous absence of Nature. But these are not the “dark satanic mills” of the new industrial cities invoked by Blake in the words to Jerusalem. On the contrary, there is a dour humour in his stick-like figures, reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti. This painting hangs in our bedroom and is a treasured birthday present from my wife, as a constant reminder…

NO one knows which bloom was the first ever to catch the eye of an artist. Although it withered and died deep in historical times, that flower inspired one of art’s most venerable and joyous genres. It was most likely an anonymous Egyptian artist-artisan, who, walking by the Nile, saw in the lotus flower a plant of pleasing shape and pattern and decided to record it. From that first insight, lotus flowers began to appear on papyrus and wall paintings, ceramics and amulets, clothing and jewellery. By then, the flower, as so many other blossoms were to gain over the centuries, had a symbolic association as well—with the sun, in the case of the lotus, because the flower closes and sinks at dusk and rises and opens again at dawn—so,…

AS part of a project to redecorate a Grade II-listed manor house, not far from Cheltenham, Sims Hilditch senior designer Becca Powis was asked to breathe new life into the kitchen. The owners, a couple with three school-age daughters, had recently bought the house after living in Singapore. ‘They wanted to create an inviting kitchen to enjoy with their children and friends,’ she says. ‘As the layout of the room was practical and the handmade cabinetry in good condition, my task was to reconceive the colour scheme and decorative detail to boost the warmth and personality of the space.’ Selecting a lively green paint for the cabinets was key to creating a fresh backdrop to the room. The shade is Sage by Neptune (01793 934011; www.neptune.com), contrasted with Farrow &…

TO farmers, I’m the weed man,’ declares Donald MacIntyre, founder of Emorsgate Seeds and conservation pioneer. He started collecting wildflowers from east London wastelands in 1980, pinching paper bags from supermarkets to store his coltsfoot. His first growing space was a five-acre plot borrowed from Norfolk County Council, together with snatched corners in council-house gardens across the Fens. ‘Businesses coming into the market focus on easy wins. We focus on increasing variety’ Today, Emorsgate is the UK’s biggest wild-grass and flower-seed company, managing 850 acres across sites in Norfolk and Bath, Somerset. On two contrasting topographies—silty and flat in the East, heavy and hilly in the West—the company grows an extensive range of wild-origin plants. Seed is gathered with permission from Natural England or from landowners, then logged in an…

I DETECT a certain sourness in some of my colleagues’ comments on Plaza Suite at the Savoy. I suspect, however, that they are reacting against the high ticket prices and the traditional nature of an occasion in which both the set and the stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, are greeted with instant applause. What has been overlooked is that Neil Simon’s three 1968 playlets, all set in the same New York hotel suite, offer a ruefully comic portrait of modern marriage. In the first play, a wife discovers on her wedding anniversary the reasons why her marriage has hit the rocks. Miss Parker excellently conveys the brittle sadness of the increasingly disillusioned wife and Mr Broderick the hollow bluster of the unreliable husband. Mr Simon also deserves credit…

THE commission must have been challenging, even for a master of Titian’s calibre. Someone, possibly Philip II of Spain or Venetian sculptor Danese Cattaneo, had asked the Italian artist to paint a portrait of Hürrem (or Roxelana, as she was known in Europe), wife of the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman I. Titian had never set foot in Istanbul, but that wasn’t in itself an issue—he had painted, based only on a medal or a small effigy, several portraits of Suleiman, including one for the Duke of Mantua that the city’s ambassador, Benedetto Agnello, called ‘so similar …that it seems the very Turk alive’. Much trickier was the fact that few people knew what the secluded Hürrem really looked like. Nonetheless, Titian and his workshop, perhaps aided by their imaginations, managed to…

IT’S a pity that Sir Edwin Landseer’s best-known work is his 1851 The Monarch of the Glen. The painting of that mighty stag set in a dramatic fog-swept Highland landscape has adorned countless shortbread tins, but he produced much better stuff. Should you find yourself at the Kennel Club in Mayfair, ask if you can look at the art downstairs—Landseer, I think you’ll agree, was better at dogs. I wasn’t in Mayfair, however. I was in the back of an Argocat winding my way up through Glen Affric, chatting to local deer managers Nicola and Willie. The glen is meant to have inspired The Monarch; the stag is admittedly much bigger than any deer you’d naturally find in Scotland, but the scenery is every bit as striking. We passed black…

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk TAPPING a prompt into an artificial-intelligence image generator to produce a floral view in the style of the latest Damien Hirst or a colourful landscape after David Hockney seems harmless enough, a way for those of us not gifted with the brush to free our imagination. Whether the result of the prompt can be called art or is simply the formulaic remix of infinitesimal fragments from 1,000 different works is debatable. What is not debatable, however, is that AI can only generate pictures because it has been trained on millions of paintings, sculptures, collages, photographs and installations that may have been scraped without the knowledge and consent of the artists who made them. Last month, a…

Red revenue ANOTHER ‘red relic’ are the Chairman Mao stamps that are highly sought after, ranging from the crudely produced stamps of the 1940s as he steadily advanced across China to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ period of the 1960s (Cabinet of curiosities, January 31). The complete Chairman Mao theme of stamps would now cost thousands of pounds, but should his poems particularly appeal, the 1967 set of 14 stamps would cost more than £5,000 alone. David Profumo’s cabinet would be well enhanced in value with these additions. Martin Walters, Buckinghamshire Serving the community WE were pleased to see our West Meon shop’s portrait in 1943 (The way we were, February 7). It’s a bit different now as, at some stage, the frontage was extended. Sadly, the delightful detail of the…

IN the Bible, Noah views the return of a dove as proof that the waters will subside. For us, the first harbinger of spring is a shelduck below the house, seen smudgily through a sepia light, guddling about in a rockpool in what is euphemistically known as ‘nice weather for ducks’. He’s a week early—normally they turn up on Valentine’s Day, after months of absence, for a spot of speed dating before pairing up and heading off to find old rabbit holes to nest in. However, after a couple of hours of the duck equivalent of nonchalantly sitting alone at a bar pretending everything is fine, he acknowledges that he has been stood up, possibly because it’s the wrong day, and pushes off again. (Younger readers may need their dads…

IN the late 1860s, when John Lavery ran away to Glasgow, he was so poor that he scavenged scraps of food from the streets and washed them in fountains. By the age of 32, he had won a gold medal at the Paris Salon and been commissioned to paint Queen Victoria. He would become a Society portraitist of international renown, whose cosmopolitan lifestyle echoed that of his patrons. As Lavery scholar Kenneth McConkey has observed, it seems the artist lived more than one life. This is a theme of the new exhibition Prof McConkey has co-curated. ‘Lavery. On Location’ takes us from Ireland to California, encountering along the way Lavery the French naturalist, the Glasgow Boy, the Orientalist; Lavery the war artist and Irish mediator; Lavery the painter of portraits,…

FOR the next year of the Chinese lunar calendar, we will be seeing a lot more of this maligned and mysterious reptile. We might even have more sightings from Loch Ness, whose most famous resident seems closer to a Chinese dragon than a Scottish monster, judging by its sinuous shape and love of water. There are many differences between China’s dragons and their British cousins. One is a wingless flying creature associated with power, wisdom and water; the other is a winged mountain dweller with an affinity for fire. Personality-wise, one is a benign bringer of sustenance, whereas the other is a ravager of land and young women. Chinese dragons can also be vengeful, however. Rather than incinerating all in their path, they prefer to drown the disrespectful with floods.…

Colour coded The Quintesse kitchen collection from Modern British combines Shaker-style cabinetry with chamfered door profiles and elegant detailing; from £45,000 (0800 038 5245; www.modern-british.com) Light the way Vaughan has introduced the Bentworth lantern, shown in large with a Verdigris finish, £1,695 (020–7349 4600; www.vaughandesigns.com) Bright light Fauna is a new addition to the collection of hand-thrown ceramic table lamps from David Hunt Lighting. It costs £354, including an Ivory pleated shade (01295 672628; www.davidhuntlighting.co.uk) Striking motif A playful reinterpretation of a formal key pattern, the Greek Cane rug, £700 per sq m, features a meandering bamboo-motif border around a solid central ground. Flat woven in sustainable fibres made from recycled water bottles, it is designed by Salvesen Graham in collaboration with Jennifer Manners (020–3903 0687; www.jennifermanners.co.uk) Country scene On…

THE Ancient Britons planted hedges to keep their cattle in, but we plant hedges to keep them out. Thick and thorny plantings were sometimes part of the defence system of an Iron Age hill fort. Later on, hedges were used to define boundaries—not only to keep animals from trampling on their crops, but also to show where ownership begins and ends. They turn up in the Domesday Book and, a little later, were used to create deer parks, which were designed in such a way that, by careful hedging and ditching, deer could get in, but never get out again. And the Enclosure Acts were statements of ownership by the landlords and of dispossession for the peasantry. The history of hedges has much to answer for. Agricultural hedges are always…

ON the west coast of Scotland, facing out across the Firth of Clyde towards the Isle of Arran, there stands a wall of thorns. It is manmade, but otherworldly, like a vision from a Gothic fairy tale. Its dark tangle of barbs reaches up to a height of 30ft and stretches more than 100ft across. Is it an art installation? A giant instrument of torture on the outskirts of Ayr? The correct answer is far simpler: it makes salt. The history of salt production in Scotland dates back almost a millennium. Before the arrival of refrigeration, the mineral gave a vital means of preserving meat and other foodstuffs. Sea salt was, therefore, harvested along both coasts of the country—using salt pans, shallow containers in which seawater could be heated by…

Time and Tide: The Long, Long History of Landscape Fiona Stafford (John Murray, £20) IN our arrogance we consider alterations we make to the face of the earth superior, more permanent, than any effected before. The British variant of the teleology is caught in the title of W. G. Hoskins’s famous 1954 book The Making of the English Landscape, with its hint of end goal achieved, job done. Fiona Stafford’s landscape history of these isles is rather more ‘The making and making again of the countryside’. She is correct. To use a pompous word, landscape is palimpsest, a surface constantly reworked. ‘The only certain tide in the affairs of men is that everything ends in drowning or dust’ Hers is not an exhaustive, academic study, more a personal picaresque one…

WHEN a consignment arrived from Lancashire for the upcoming Irish & International Art sale in late 2019, staff at Whyte’s auctioneers had a nasty surprise. Not because its quality was disappointing—indeed, it was a masterpiece—but because the painting in question, Youth and Age by John Lavery, had been stolen decades earlier from Stonyhurst College, in Clitheroe, Lancashire. The school, explains headmaster John Browne, had received Youth and Age in 1924, the bequest from a long-standing friend of Stonyhurst, Patrick Small. Completed in 1885, the painting marked Lavery’s transition from disciple to master, according to a 1914 review by COUNTRY LIFE: ‘In the beautiful little Youth and Age, he makes a tremendous progress forward and we know he has been worshipping at the tomb of [French painter Jules] Bastien-Lepage,’ wrote Hugh…

Did you know? If you take the cantilevered wooden staircase—The King’s Lodge is on the fifth floor—you’ll spot a portrait of a horse, on each half-turn, facing you as you descend and a portrait of a dog facing you as you ascend. It’s a nod to the hotel’s origins (it described itself as ‘the hotel for the best county families’ in an advert placed inside the December 7, 1901, issue of COUNTRY LIFE), when families staying at The Connaught would expect to leave on horseback and return to a dog SIR ALEC GUINNESS (The Lavender Hill Mob, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) was so fond of The Connaught that the hotel ensured a suite was always at his disposal. From the 1970s until his death in 2000, the actor could…

AFTER a distinguished career spanning almost 50 years, softly spoken Tony Morris-Eyton of Savills in Telford has stepped back from his longstanding role as head of the firm’s West Midlands operations to concentrate on his first love, the sale of prime country houses and estates in his native Shropshire, where he served as High Sheriff of the county in 2021–22. As the scion of one of Shropshire’s oldest families, he knows every nook and cranny of the county’s finest properties, many of which he has sold more than once over the years. A recent success was the sale, last autumn, of Grade II-listed Woodhill Park, a glorious Georgian house set within a ring-fenced, 156-acre estate in unspoilt Shropshire countryside, four miles from Oswestry and 22 miles from Shrewsbury. Previously part…

THE Lakeland poet William Wordsworth didn’t always get it right. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ he wrote. As any resident of Cumberland and Westmorland knows only too well, no cloud in the Lake District is ever lonely. Cumbrian clouds come in battalions, loaded with the rainfall that fills Windermere and Derwentwater. Where the poet was spot on is in his description of the joy engendered by those daffodils that were ‘fluttering and dancing in the breeze’. Snowdrops earn our admiration for their bravery and their modest demeanour in the chilliest late-winter months, but it is the varieties of narcissus that take the crown for breathtaking spring spectacle. Daffodils—the name we give collectively to the large-trumpeted kinds of narcissus—lift our spirits like no other flower, emerging as they do after…

Rhubarb and marmalade meringue roulade Ingredients For the filling 200g rhubarb3tbspn marmalade For the meringue 6 large egg whites275g caster sugar50g flaked almonds400ml double creamIcing sugar Method ▸ Preheat your oven to 180°C fan/200°C/400°F/gas mark 6 and line a Swiss-roll tin of about 20cm by 30cm (8in by 12in) with baking paper. ▸ Cut the rhubarb into bite-sized pieces and toss with the warmed marmalade. Pour into a roasting dish, cover with foil and roast for 20 minutes. Cool in the dish until ready to use. ▸ Whisk the egg whites in a clean, large bowl (any grease will prevent them stiffening) until thick and glossy. Towards the end, add the sugar, a spoonful at time, and then spread in an even layer in the prepared Swiss-roll tin. Sprinkle over…

PHILIP HEWAT-JABOOR, who died almost two years ago, was a truly civilised collector. As he said when interviewed in 2019: ‘I’ve never believed in the difference between contemporary works of art and traditional works of art. To me, objects are either good or bad, beautiful or ugly, whatever their age or origin. Connoisseurship, beauty and taste are really what one should be looking for. I know they’re very old-fashioned words, but they underpin the whole ethos of what we do.’ Connoisseurship was in his family—he learned much from a grandfather who put together a notable collection of Chinese porcelain and from an uncle who had a flair for displaying beautiful things. The uncle was also a friend of Peter Wilson, the transformative chairman of Sotheby’s, who advised Hewat-Jaboor to enrol…

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