Glynn Boyd Harte was born in Rochdale in 1948. He met his wife Caroline Bullock (herself an artist and historian) in the foyer of  the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1968, when he was a 21 year old student at St. Martin’s : she was wearing a crinoline, he fell in love with her at first sight. They married in 1971 (and later had two sons, Lucian and Caspar); after this they were very good at everything they turned their hands to, and didn’t bother at all with anything they did not care about. Above all, Glynn’s object was always to have fun, to amuse and to be amused, and in this he generally excelled.

An Eric Ravilious ‘Alphabet’ mug by GBH, in a lithograph which will be sold by Neil Jennings in a mixed sale of artwork to be held at the Artworkers Guild, 6 Queens Square London WC1 N3AT, from March 3rd 2015. [For more information contact Neil Jennings, neil@jenningsfineart.co.uk 07812 994558].

The Boyd Harte’s as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Soanie’, described by Alexandra Artley and John Martin Robinson in Harpers and Queen’s  New Georgian Handbook published in 1985. ‘Like all British thinkers, they run for months on ginger nuts and tea.’ A tiny Ravilious Alphabet mug is in everyday use on the floorboards. The GBH’s were part of the Young Fogey gang of coevals who moved into and restored derelict eighteenth housing stock in formerly slummy parts of London, that included the architectural historian Gavin Stamp, his wife Alexandra Artley and Dan Cruikshank among others.

GBH illustrated many books, but the very best were those that he conceived of and wrote himself. These is the title page from his very first publication, ‘Murderer’s Cottages,’ (Warren Editions 1976), published by that fellow perfectionist Jonathan Gili and now a rare item. Note the Pop Art lettertype. It is in chapbook style measuring approximately 3 x 5 inches, each plate depicting a Staffordshire china souvenir of  a notorious murderer’s cottage. Peter Blake, GBH’s tutor at the RCA, would have appreciated it. Only 500 copies were printed. Glynn’s friend and collaborator as one of the Freres Perverts, Ian Beck, has published all the other plates here.

The house in which George Frederick Manning helped his wife Marie de Roux to murder her lover in 1839, and then to bury his body in quicklime under the kitchen flagstones. Both were hanged for their crime. Charles Dickens would later model the character of Hortense in his novel Bleak House on Marie Manning, and Marie appeared as a waxwork in Madame Tussard’s Chamber of Horrors. The murder was remembered as the ‘Bermondsey Horror,’ and so the Mannings’ house was immortalised in glazed ceramic for the popular Victorian market.

GBH played the piano soulfully and set the Poet Laureate John Betjeman’s prose poem  script for the television programme Metro-land to music;  Glynn, a cast of his friends and the poet performed it together with cardboard megaphone and train noises in two locations, sometimes forgetting their lines. This is taken from his deluxe artist’s book of 1977. His lithographs were and still are reproduced by the Curwen Press.

Glynn and Carrie dressed beautifully and fantastically, she in print dresses and tea gowns and he in ‘bags,’ waistcoats and two-tone, co-respondent shoes. But despite his rather fin de siecle good looks he enjoyed telling a joke against himself in which a third party, possibly the late James Lees-Milne,  had referred to him as ‘rather plain.’ A fulsome thank you letter from the 1990s describing sybaritic holidays in Cornwall and France –  lobsters eaten, glorious sunsets, church crawls and ‘Proust’s bedroom at the Carnavalet’ –  ended with the plaint, ‘The question is, had I been less plain, would I have been able to enjoy myself so much?’  Another anecdote involved being spotted by a member of the public buying his little sons an ice cream, taken for a child-molester and detained by the police. It ended with a car chase through the streets of Bloomsbury as the uncertain coppers drove him hither and tither, doubting that he was the marrying kind but searching at his insistence  for the woman whom he claimed was his wife, and whom he had helpfully described to them as, ‘a Bloomsbury bat in a Fauvist frock, Officer!’

Glynn’s father was a commercial artist and art teacher and his grandfather owned a lithographic printing works. The front garden path of his childhood home was paved with old litho stones. At the RCA, Bawden – who taught him – and Ravilious were his artistic heroes long before they came back into vogue, but his earliest works also shared traits with those of his near contemporary David Hockney. His first works were in crayon but in the early 1980s he changed medium for watercolour, and later, egg tempera, without ever falling below his own self-imposed standard of perfection. He was a genius at depicting the perfectly arranged tablescape, sometimes as the illustration to a cookery book or newspaper column in the Times or Telegraph, sometimes for his own delectation. This is my favourite amongst those that were translated into lithograph, “Mr Dodd’s Auricula’ (1979). Barbara Jones’s genius King Penguin Guide to the Isle of Wight can be seen in the top right corner. Mr Dodd’s house has featured on the bobt here and here.

Table-scape at Charlecote House in Warwickshire.

GBH in the the Georgian house at no 29, Percy Street, to which they moved in the mid 80s, where the wallpapers were either meticulously hand painted or designed by him and some were reproduced for for his Dolphin Studio design company. Cynthia Kee described her first meeting, finding him up a ladder painting wallpaper on to the bare plaster there, ‘ the stripes were uncompromisingly in period, magenta, with a thinner line alongside and another of gold dots. Glynn was working on the dots.’ This clipping and the following one from The Times, October 1990.

Here in Fitzrovia GBH felt entirely spiritually at home, in a house so dilapidated when he found it that the electrical wiring had been gnawed by rats. No matter, for in his imagination the Vorticists were still in the Eiffel Tower restaurant a stone’s throw away, ‘being very avant-garde and angular in black and magenta, Augustus John swishing his coat and beard, Ronald Firbank manfully grappling with a pea. Nina Hamnett, of course – always the perfect lady – was being sick into her handbag over the road at the Fitzroy Tavern.’ What is missing here, is a proper photographic record of  the exquisite rooms that Glynn and Carrie contrived here and earlier, at Cloudesley Square. Glynn’s  lithograph below goes some way to supply this.

Chimmneypiece at Percy Street.

GBH at Cloudesley Square, Islington, the Boyd Harte’s first marital home in the 1970s . The architectural historian John Martin Robinson described meeting Glynn and Carrie for the first time, being asked to supper and then  arriving at an ‘uninhabitable Georgian wreck’ where they removed a bit of rusty corrugated iron, climbed in and then ate a picnic together off the floor.Its finished interiors featured period decorative treatments and especially wood-graining, about which the GBH’s were evangelical in an age of universally stripped pine. They had often rushed into a junk dealer’s workshop to rescue some sweetly grained bedroom chest of drawers from the stripper’s chemical tank.

Ravilious bowl, lithograph. The Eric Ravilious ‘Boatrace’ bowl for Wedgwood, standing on a burr walnut table in Cloudesley Square..

Foodie books. A labour of love. In 1986 GBH illustrated The Entertaining Book co-authored by Teresa and Auberon Waugh – she provided the seasonal recipes, he wrote about the best wine to drink with them. Glynn went down to Combe Florey House in Somerset, where Bron’s father the celebrated author Evelyn Waugh had lived before him, and drew the kitchen table set with their lunch  as the book’s cover design, ate it, and then drew the table with dirty plates, empty glasses and chairs pushed back afterwards as the back cover.

For Teresa’s  introduction he chose to illustrate the sentence,’ My children’s generation has been brought up on a mixture of Camembert, junk food and avocado pears – such things would have been unheard of in a post-war nursery,’ ( as the daughter of the 6th earl of Onslow, Teresa’s childhood was passed at Clandon Park, their country seat). She was fascinated when he drew these objects just as they were including the 1980s Tesco price tag, executed with great verisimilitude.

Asparagus watercolour. Glynn was particularly fond of the grid, trellis or graph pattern as a background matrix.

Carnations and brushes lithograph.

The album of five musical compositions which he composed, illustrated and dedicated to his wife Carrie.

‘Tea at Farringdon,’ Lord Berners, Penelope Betjeman and her Arab mare, Moti. For the original watercolour, featured in an earlier post, see here.

The plangent musical score. ‘The?  Lait?  One-Lump-or-Two? Un Cheval ! Un Cheval Rose !! Encore du The?’

‘The Pyramids.’ Also utilised as the ‘Carte Postale,’ in a dramatic routine performed by les Freres Perverts.

‘Les Mains de Ravel.’

GBH as artist in residence during the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

The Pansy fabric designed by GBH for Dolphin Studios.

GBH’s watercolour, ‘Johnnie Scraping his boot,’ (2000), painted at Charlecote,  the Warwickshire country house of his art school coeval and old friend, Sir Edmund Fairfax Lucy.

A.N. Wilson and ex-Battersea Dogs Home cocker spaniel ‘Percy,’ in an infamous incident recorded by GBH in strip-cartoon narrative in memoriam, after Percy died prematurely.

Early sketch towards an unrealised painting that was to have been titled, ‘Mr and Mrs. Wilson and Percy,’ after Hockney’s semi-eponymous double portrait of Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in the Tate. Glynn was an obelisk fetishist with an admirable collection; ‘poor man’s obelisks’ referred to my less desirable shelf full of minature lighthouses manufactured from Cornish Serpentine on the Lizard peninsula.

All missives, programmes, envelopes and invitations were opportunities for more jokes, wildly embellished gossip and ancient running jokes of long-standing. During his final illness, a friend described a dinner at her house at which GBH and another dinner guest who was a dress designer laughed themselves silly as they discussed couture shrouds – ‘a shroud to die for.’ After he collapsed in a hospital waiting room his jacket, ripped by the resuscitation team, was exhibited like a toreador’s cloak to visitors at his house in Gower Street.

Glynn, Lucian, Caspar and Carrie Boyd Harte drawn by an ailing GBH shortly before his death. As Carrie points out, ‘He got all the shoes exactly right.’ GBH is remembered as an enthusiastic Brother and Past Master (in 1996) of the Art Worker’s Guild. When the Guild ‘Revels’ were revived he directed several full-dress pantomimes, which oscillated between ‘farcical under-rehearsal and total professionalism’ ( as one of his collaborators, Alan Powers, recalled in his obituary for the Independent) and were performed to sell-out audiences. As Powers also wrote, ‘The listing of individual achievements fails to convey the totality of Glynn Boyd Harte’s life, which, like Oscar Wilde’s, was the vehicle of genius. It extended to his taste in decoration and collecting, his circles of friends and enemies ( irreversibly and often unreasonably transferred from the first category into the second) and not least, the warmth of the family life that surrounded him.’
To say that his achievements should be better known would be quite true, to say that he is greatly missed is an understatement.
All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste / the estate of Glynn Boyd Harte.
Excerpts and links can be used providing that full and clear credit to bibleofbritishtaste is given along with direction back to the original content.

The Old Laundry in Somerset. This is the house that Prue Piper and her husband Edward found in the 1960s. Built from the local oolite limestone, it was once the laundry for a large country house. a place where not only washing but also drying was accomplished in a high-ceilinged space inside with three long windows, or out on the windy slope it stands above. Food is growing now where linen sheets once flapped and tugged at their pegs. Prue Piper and her sculptor son Henry, his wife Janine who is also a ceramicist and their young children all live and work here. They are self-sufficient in sheep, wind-power and fruit and vegetables.

This is a corner of Prue’s ceramics studio.

Prue’s late husband Edward Piper was born in 1938, the eldest son of the artist John Piper (one of the greatest neo-Romantic painters of the C20th) and his wife the critic and librettist Myfanwy Piper. He and Prudence MacKillop were married in 1961 soon after he graduated from the Slade School of Art, and just as she was embarking on her Ph.D as a Biochemist. They bought this house for £4050 at the end of  a long search for a place with land that they could afford, cashing in some shares given to Edward by his aunt ; Edward died at home here in 1990. The living and work spaces here have evolved gradually to suit all their changing needs. Now it is a combination of the simple, practical and very beautiful. This is the kitchen and dining room, the principle downstairs space.

The dresser is stacked with a mixture of the French crockery and the ceramics that Prue has been making here for thirty years.Above is a continuous frieze of female nudes painted on rice paper by Edward and a photograph of a medieval gargoyle.

Prue with her Mermaid jug.

Corner of the kitchen-and-living room, note the two-tier ceramic snow drop ‘theatre’ by Prue on the table.

Kitchen-cum-living room, rear wall with paintings by Edward Piper and a ceramic mask by Prue.

Edward Piper made his name as a painter and a photographer. As well as the highly distinctive and idiosyncratic black and white landscape and architectural images taken for the Shell County Guides he made hundreds of paintings and photographs of the female nude, of which more later.

Garden-gargolyle, Henry’s squirrel-proof bird feeder behind..

A C17th carved wooden figure of a bare-breasted woman from Stokesay Castle gatehouse and a pair of ‘Normans’ around the stone font in the church at Armitage in Staffordshire, both by Edward Piper, photographed for the still unsurpassed Shell County Guides that he worked on with his father John Piper, and that Piper had begun with John Betjeman.

Sources for Prue Piper’s meticulous sketches towards ideas for new ceramic forms.The Beano is  lurking somewhere at the bottom of the pile.

2009 Green Man birthday card painted for his mother Prue by her elder son the artist Luke Piper, and redolent of John Piper’s Foliate Heads prints  and tapestries that also referenced the ‘Green Men’ found in the architecture of medieval church buildings.

Prue’s studio in the bleachingly bright January sun, contrived from two small stores for the coal that fueled the Victorian laundry here once, and that were first used as the Piper children’s bedrooms.

A turquoise-glazed Madeline Toby Jug amongst other pieces on an upper shelf. Being highly practical, with a doctorate in Biochemistry, Prue learned to pot at classes in Frome and then taught herself the rest. Equipped with the (now defunct) kiln from John Piper’s Fawley Bottom studio, she invented Staffordshire-style figurines of the Celtic deity Cernunnos and these Green Man plates and jugs, impressing haloes of oak leaves into their wet clay which are burnt off in the first firing.

A Green Man plate just seen on a lower shelf, prices from £75.00.

Adam and Eve, a pair of Green Man jugs and a ‘Bearded King’ jug. Prices from £75 to £150/200 for her most elaborate pieces.

An army of ceramic frogs ( available to buy individually from Prue).

Studio shelf, more gargoyle photographs, a Pig and Acorn lidded jug or creamer (prices at £75), and another ceramic mask. Some of her patterns come from Owen Jones’s Victorian Grammar of Ornament, some are smothered in a livery of cross-hatched and dotted pattern raised in multi-coloured slip, bright as the boiled sweets in a confectioner’s shop.

The courtyard.

Henry Piper’s ‘Daffodil’ outdoor light blooms in the hedge. Before the Old Laundry was was built here, this site was a kennel yard for the Earl of Cork and Orrery’s staghounds.

A wind mobile and garden sculpture by Henry Piper, temporarily flattened by winter gales. I hope to show you a picture of it upright again soon, in a future piece about his work.

Looking at Henry Piper’s wind mobile and Moon sculpture. in the field by the lake which they dug out decades earlier.

In 2000 Prue published a book of her late husband’s experimental art photography, Nudes by Edward Piper, in a limited edition of only 1000 copies, price £19.95. (My copy is numbered 378, and there are still a few available for sale : contact Prue Piper : pruepiper@btinternet.com ) Prue was his favourite model, others were ‘friends of ours, or local girls who liked to show off.’

Edward and Prue in the 1970s

Prue exhibits with Messums. Her ceramics are unshackled by rules of taste or design, free to be as funny, archaic or kitsch as she wants them to be.

With many thanks to Prue and Henry Piper. Contact details for Prue Piper : pruepiper@btinternet.com .  Her cermaics range in price from £60 to £200, please contact her if you are interested in individual pieces shown here. All images copyright Prue Piper and/or bibleofbritishtaste. Full and accurate links and references to this site and authorship/copyright must be supplied when excerpts are used.

Peepholes set at intervals up and down this long wall tiled with paper will give you glimpses  – tiny vignettes of designs photographs and artefacts linked to projects that Adam Richards Architects is currently working on.

One is for Simon Costin, whose Museum of British Folkore used to travel the country in a caravan. Now the caravan is up on blocks and the museum is parked on the web : Museum of British Folklore . It works well there but Simon and Adam Richards have been drawing up designs for a more permanent home, of which more below.  You may remember this giant optician’s sign which belongs to Simon, last on show as part of the apparatus of the life of Barbara Jones, whose keen eye was celebrated in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition Black Eyes and Lemonade.

Behind peephole number 29 you will see ‘A short film of English Dance’ (the Morris).

Model of London House currently under construction, seen through peephole.

Interior View of Proposed Phase 2 of London apartment, seen through peephole.

Punch puppet from the Museum of British Folklore, seen through peephole no 31.

Adam Richards won the competition to design Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in 2008, and the museum reopened in their new and part rebuilt old buildings a year ago.The artist and sculptor Eric Gill moved to Ditchling in Sussex with his family in 1907 and established an artists colony there. Printer Hilary Pepler  soon followed, writing to the calligrapher Edward Johnston who was one of Gill’s pupils, ‘Can you think of any work I can do in Ditchling? We want an excuse to follow the prophet (you) into the wilderness.’ The museum continues to use a customised version of Gill’s typefaces, seen here on the title page of the illustrated book describing the commission for Ditchling, just published by Adam Richards Architects.

The new museum building is both shrine and wunderkammer. Exhibits in this anteroom introduce the collection, the village and its history. Adam Richards Architects designed the exhibition spaces too with Ditchling Museum’s then director Hilary Williams .

John Piper’s photograph of the Nave floor in Whitchurch, Buckinghamshire, is set opposite a photograph of the old village Cart Lodge at Ditchling, now the entrance hall to the new museum with a new slate floor.

The new main building is clad with black zinc,  the ghost of agricultural buildings that once occupied this site.

Eric Gill’s typefaces.

Adam Richards.

A detail of the drawing for a proposed Museum of British Folklore, with pylons and Maypole dancers in a glade. Simon Costin’s red caravan that toured the original museum around the country marks the compass points. Adam Richards says : This is the design we produced for Simon Costin. There’s no site for the museum yet, so this is kind of ideal museum.’

This museum will be a living, contemporary, cultural thing. It might have different buildings for different seasons and in its central courtyard there is a wood. Its elements are drawn from fortified architecture and ancient hill forts, C18th designs for ideal buildings and cities, the rational and the phantasmagorical, surrounded by a landscape of pylons, wasteland and fields.

Hurry hurry, the exhibition is open for just 2 days this weekend.

You can buy the beautiful book there, too. Adam Richard Architects  www.adamrichards.co.uk

A dozen times a year I drive down the A303 to Cornwall. Just before Launceston, when I am thinking of stopping for a cup of tea, I flash past a brown tourist sign that reads ‘Dingles Fairground Attractions’  but I had never turned off. Then one day I wandered into Malcolm Glickstein’s junk shop in the diaspora around St Pancras Station. Minutes later, I was handing over the first down payment on a battered double-seater Victorian ‘galloper,’ My merry-go-round horse was made in Burton on Trent by the chief carver of the firm of Orton and Spooner, the veritable C.J. Spooner, and had been painted and repainted dozens of times during its working life. Michael specialised in these wonderful things, and it was from him that I first heard of Dingles Fairgound Heritage Centre (as it is now more tastefully called).

Next time I headed west, I turned off for Dingles and drove down a mile of minor country roads to find it, a cluster of former agricultural buildings and one modern industrial hangar . My first visit was on a bleak wintry day and I had the place entirely to myself. Nothing had prepared me for the bliss that followed. Were you ever taken to the fair for a special treat? Did you long to win a goldfish, were you allowed candyfloss, did you prefer the dodgems or the octopus, were you too scared for the ghost train and did you end up feeling terribly sick? I was always lucky with goldfish but rides on the merry-go-round were my personal ecstasy.

At Dingles there are two collections, this one of older fairground attractions in the museum shed  and a much larger hangar full of working fairground rides. My first pictures are taken in the museum, where the spinning crocodile-fish will tell your fortune. The noble horses under tarpaulins are from a huge merry go round known as Edwards Golden Gallopers built by Savages of Kings Lynn, a firm that was world famous for their galloping horse roundabouts. No less an artist than Barbara Jones made a point of drawing their workshop for the Second World War propaganda commission, ‘Recording Britain,’ and you will find an honourable mention of  her endeavours here.

The racing car drivers were painted by Edwin Hall for the fascia boards of a dodgem ride commissioned by Sam Crow in 1938. The ride passed from father to son and was traveled around the north-east of England until the 1970s.

Entrance to the Hall of Mirrors, me.

This children’s roundabout dates from before the First World War. It was built in Sowerby Bridge In Yorkshire, and traveled by Arthur Swift who probably built the space rocket and the liner (named Queen Elizabeth) himself. Arthur and his ride retired in the 1970s.

The blissful thing about these dodgems built by Orton, Sons and Spooner, is that they are still running. For  modest fee you can go on all the rides in the big hangar. Each one plays a different hurdy-gurdy tune and the sweet throbbing cacophony of organ and wurlitzer when you arrive inside makes the hairs stand up beautifully on the back of your neck.

This is Edwards’ Supersonic Lightening Skid, one of the last ‘thrill’ rides built in the 1930s.

Sultry Material Girl, already consigned to the museum shed.

On my second visit a party of nostalgia-and-fun loving senior citizens were thrilling to the Super Chariot Racer, a white knuckle ride built over seventy years ago.

Dingles is almost entirely run by a knowledgeable band of volunteers, enthusiasts and trustees. The President of the Showmans Guild of Great Britain describes it as ‘ our life and our heritage,’ for the rides here were used and operated by ‘our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers.’ Together they spent years fundraising at rallies to buy, rebuild and restore everything here and to set up the educational trust that runs Dingles now.

A story printed in yesterdays Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine describes fairground art as folk art that is now highly collectable. Baby bankers, hedge funders and their dealers are scrabbling to buy up the jolliest pieces to install in their drawing rooms as talking pieces; battered condition and flaky paintwork is ‘not a problem.’  Visit’ Dingles Fairground Attractions ! and give thanks for all those un-monied, non-mercenary enthusiasts who built and run this wonderful place. All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste.

Belinda carving in a grotto that she designed and built in Spain. Her earliest grottoes were encrusted  with limpets, clams, oysters, mussels, and cockles and glittering black anthracite, gathered from the embankments of disused railway lines.

Side door.

Still life of kitchen sink with array of hanging pot and bottle scourers

Log box.

Hearth in the long room, once the  principle room in the Elizabethan house, now mainly for dogs and ping pong.

Ruby the rescue greyhound drowsing.

Marble sculpture by Cornwall-based artist William Peers, exhibited at Rosie Pearson’s biennial Asthall Manor stone sculpture show

Paneled Drawing Room.

Biscuit coloured linen curtains.

Guest bedroom, the most comfortable bed

And hanging next to it her glorious shell pier glass with blue mussel shells and a limpit shell embellished table lamp

Belinda in shell tiara, styled for a Vogue photo shoot in the 90s by the late Isabella Blow, from a tattered magazine cutting.

William Morris Willow pattern in the second guest bedroom.

Telescopic feather duster in the spine corridor.

This is the ‘sister’ urn  of another that was one of four garden pieces carved with Virgilian texts, made by Belinda for Christopher Bradley-Hole’s ‘ Best in Show’ Gold Medal winning Chelsea Garden in 1997. The Latin inscription reads Inter peritura vivimus  (We live among things which will perish).

The topiary yew hedge sunk garden that Belinda and Patrick designed and laid out below the house. They are both very good gardeners.

The walled kitchen garden designed and built about eight years ago. Totem pole by artist and garden designer Tom Wood of Kalnoky Wood Garden Design. Tom’s other website is here.

December marigolds.

Galvanised zinc and corrugated iron corner of the kitchen garden.

Memorial stone carved by Belinda to her family pet killed by a fox, the rabbit ‘Curious Brown,’ d.2002.

The designs for a shell temple on Belinda’s desk.

Belinda in the grotto that she built over a year of Sundays, in the back garden of her west London house in c.1990, from The Sunday Telegraph, April 28, 1991. The materials  – fossilised limestone and thousands of shells supported on a wood and metal armature – had taken years to collect, and later the grotto-work was extended into the laundry room at the back of the house. In those days she collected all the shells herself, gleaning along the Devon coast for oysters and the east coast of Scotland for mussels and picking up grey and white flints in the fields of Hertfordshire. We all contributed too, giving her exotic Nautilus and spiky Murex lifted down from dusty bathroom shelves and bags of native specimens that we had picked up while beachcombing. The deep blue of mussels shells and the nacreous insides made some of the most beautiful shell work of all as well as good eating. The fly-speckled moon shells which made up the central arches of this grotto were served up to Belinda for lunch on a bicycle holiday in Normandy, and carried back, reeking of garlic.

The slate stone given to me by Belinda in memoriam for my Battersea dogs home cocker spaniel, buried at the foot of this wall in my back garden.

Above and below, two more of the Virgilian inscriptions carved for Christopher Bradley Hole’s 1997 Chelsea garden.

Thirty years ago this old house, built in the 1740s and set back behind a high wall on a main thoroughfare in London’s East End, was a wreck, sans joinery, window frames or fireplaces, its basement filled with debris and 200 cubic yards of rubble. It was restored as a place of domestic habitation and a fabulous, unique house museum by Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Todd Longstaffe Gowan, garden designer and historian. The house’s front steps, landing and railings were finally  reinstated just a few months ago in 2015.

Top floor bedroom; see below.

The house alomgside its left-hand neighbour,
now home to Romilly and Charles Saumarez Smith.

The Spitalfields Trust had bought both houses to prevent their demolition; the one on the right was then sold on to Tim Knox, and Todd Logstaffe Gowan who took the black and white picture showing the old shopfronts  and a tyre and exhaust fitting workshop on the left in 1998, shortly before they were swept away and the long task of restoration began. These crayon portraits of Todd and Tim drawn  in his Hockney manner by Glynn Boyd Harte in 1991 hang under a shelf supporting ‘twig ware’ baskets and vases.

I have been lucky enough to know Tim and Todd since about 1989 when we met across a friend’s supper table in Hampstead. I was so smitten by them that soon afterwards I acquired a bear-like taxidermised dog of indeterminate breed from a specialist dealer in Portabello Market at their eager urging. In the intervening years their friends have watched with mingled admiration and incredulity as a collection of taxidermy and religious statuary begun with Tim’s sure and curious eye was gradually enlarged by their all-consuming combing of markets and auction houses all over England and beyond. The first major find was a museum quality bust of Sir Walter Scott by the neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, Todd has gone on to buy hundreds of Old Master paintings, drawings and objects of Virtu; there are many more stuffed animals particularly dogs, ethnography, an elephant’s skull and a pair of servants livery coats, rare survivals and examples of needlework of the highest order fished from a Portabello stall by Tim. Changing all the time, their collection is arranged as a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities and a series of aesthetically beautiful and romantic roomscapes.  After living here for  a few years, Tim and Todd commissioned this ‘biographical’ overmantle to fill a gaping hole in the chimney breast of the ground floor front reception room. Plaster portrait medallions sculpted by Christopher Hobbs in Xmas 2002 ( set designer for the films of Derek Jarman and Ken Russell) are its defining elements. It includes the likenesses of their two dachshunds Tiger and Sponge, garden implements and architectural devices and an ancient human skull (excavated in the early 1970s in the site of the YMCA in Tottenham Court Rd).

Light switches of painted tulip wood in the entrance hall copied from those in an upstairs room were part of the first wave of building work undertaken in 1998. The notice is a postcard reproduction of one at Stratfield Saye, the Duke of Wellington’s Hampshire seat.

Romantic Interior in the manner of Abbotsford. The marble tondo relief on the left is a portrait of the Duke of Albany, son of Queen Victoria, prototype for one on his funeral monument in Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight.

Their restoration and fitting up of the house has been both imaginative and conservative. In the basement kitchen, a stoneware sink decorated with Vitruvian scroll pattern was retrieved from a skip.

Although bits of the original kitchen overmantle were discovered amongst rubble and debris excavated from this room, it was only partially reconstructed; a stuffed dogfish sits on top of the kitchen range. It was bought at Lord St Levan’s sale at St Michael’s Mount in West Cornwall.

During the last decade Todd has begun collecting twentieth century British art. Four Modern Movement paintings by Thomas Frederick Stalker Miller (1912-2006) surround Robert Medley’s painting of a woman mourning over a dying Minotaur. Medley (1905-94) was a schoolfriend and sometime lover of W.H. Auden, friend of Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Elizabeth Frink. A plaster death mask of Napoleon sits upon the chair.

This is the Sarcophagus Room. Christopher Hobbs’s fantastic overmantel is bookmarked by giant atlantes of an African and an American Indian, symbolic of the lands in which Tim and Todd spent their respective childhoods.
In the foreground a carved table from northern Europe carries the remains of a 2nd century marble statue excavated by Charles, 8th Lord Kinnaird in Italy in the 1820s. An enormous Dogon ‘spirit’ ladder from Mali leans against the pillar,

In the Nun’s Parlour a marble bust by Scheemakers once in the Temple of Friendship at Stowe and a gilded Viennese porta-busto guard a marble topped table carved with a mask of Hercules draped in the skin of the Nemean Lion, based on an C18th original by Matthias Lock. The presiding bust which stands upon it is an antique Homer from Wilton House, once in Cardinal Mazarin’s Collection.

On the opposite wall of the Nun’s Parlour is a huge painting from a cycle depicting the story of Actaeon, found by Todd in a Melbourne auction house; Actaeon’s muscled torso is modeled from the antique Laocoon group’s central figure. The William IV frame which fits it exactly was bought at the Lacy Gallery in Westbourne Grove. Upon the bombe chest lies the highly realistic sacrificial lamb, carved by Joseph Wilton for the 2nd Earl of Bessborough to adorn a Roman marble altar in a temple at his house in Roehampton.

The Hopton Brothers, attributed to Van Dyck – Sir Arthur Hopton was an ambassador in the reign of Charles I – bought in blackened condition at the Barmingham Rectory sale in Norfolk. Propped against the base of the scagliola pedestal is c15th Pegu glazed terracotta panel from Burma bearing two horned deities.

Propped on the table is the fragment of a painting by Rubens: Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, cut out of the original canvas in c.1647. It first belonged to Rubens’s friend the painter and writer Joachim von Sandrart, and was bought at a sale in Salisbury. Above, the head of a water buffalo from an Irish country house.

The upstairs lavatory, a shrine to all things pontifical, is painted in a colour called ‘anti-fly blue’.

The Cabinet, or Museum in the Museum : A tortoise shell and a brain coral along with many exotic shells, some collected by Dr Knox and Dr Longstaffe Gowan during their far flung childhoods ( Todd’s in Chile, Dominica, Barbados, Panama and Canada, Tim’s in Tanzania, Nigeria and Fiji), fossils, dried and preserved bird specimens, skeletons, lapidary treasures and ethnographic curiosities. On the wall behind, the giant engraving made up of nine plates is, The Mocking of Christ, after Van Dyck.

The ‘Idol Cabinet’ in the Museum Room.

A fire-gilt bronze statuette of John the Baptist found at Portabello Market is attributed to Susini, after a lost original by the early Renaissance Florentine sculptor Michelozzo di Bartolommeo. Acquisitions like these are not ‘lucky finds,’ but the fruits of vast knowledge and meticulous research. The overmantel is a C18th Prussian overdoor carving, flanked by shell sconces made by Belinda Eade.

The devotional painting of a Penitent Magdalene after the original by Guido Reni is the first large oil that Todd bought, found at Christies in c.1988. The largest canvas is a portrait of Miss Markham of Wardour, and was one of a pair of ancestral portraits painted for the house in the 1770s.

A seventeenth century portrait of Cicely Arundel in a frame by James Moore; on her right is Adrien Carpentier’s portrait of Dr. Ruby, who was afflicted with a hare lip. The elaborately carved and gilded table was formerly in the collection of the Getty family in Los Angeles
The taxidermy goat beneath it came from shop window in Kelvedon in Essex, and was found in the Criterion Auction House in Islington.

A garniture of Chinese porcelain on the chimneypiece in Tim’s first floor study, photographed in raking winter sunshine.

Small busts, porcelain, translucent alabaster and obelisks lined up in Tim’s study

Looking from the Green Room into the study, sphinx parked on the floor.

A pair of state liveries encrusted with armourials, made for the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham in 1829, and bought by Tim at Portobello Market, flank a bust by Christopher Moore of Robert Holmes – ‘Father of the Irish Bar’. Tim & Todd have been trawling the market together for almost 30 years.

A seventeenth century Flemish cabinet given by Christopher Hobbs is married up with a sturdy Victorian Pussy Oak table

The Trophy Hall and staircase; some of these specimens come from the collection at Eton College

Tim’s mother’s Sanderson-fabric-covered armchair in the huge bathroom, memorials to the Victorian dead.

Tim’s first stuffed dog, rescued from a skip in his early youth. On the right the wooden case housed a hand pump that once raised water to the top floor of the house.

The fire escape leading to the uncertain safety of the roof, relic of the print workshop and typewriter rental company that operated from the lower floors here in the twentieth century.

A statue of St Aloysius Loyola, garnished by Chinese ceramics.The seventeenth century paneling
behind was reused by the speculative developer Thomas Andrews who built two houses on the site of an older mansion which he demolished.

Behind the paneling was once a night closet or dry closet (not a water closet); a small section of paneling was removed in the C18th for ventilation.

The four poster from the manor house is Buckingham is hung with Spanish and oriental antique fabrics.

Tim’s window sill cactus theatre.

The bust of St James is an eighteenth century devotional object from a pilgrimage church in northern Spain, made of lead over a wooden core, bought in Westbourne Grove.

A nineteenth century plaster bust of Christ and a made-up bird skeleton composed, inter alia, of chicken bones in Todd’s top floor study.

In the top floor back bedroom, a landscape by John Nash, and David Bomberg’s self portrait.

New Zealand tree fern forest by Todd in the garden to the rear.

‘Imagines de vestir’, a pair of religious statues or lay figures, finished with real human hair, originally devotional figures that were dressed in the appropriate robes or vestments according to the liturgical calendar, found at Portobello. Malplaquet House’s role as the most distinguished private house museum in London, second only to Sir John Soane’s Museum (of which Tim was recently Director), is now at an end. The packing cases and boxes here signal its recent dismantling .

A trio of John de Pauley’s small stone sculptures on the hearthstone.

Equine plaster by John de Pauley.

The sitting room doubling up as a leather finishing workshop.

Tablescape in the corner of the sitting room, something like one of David Hicks’s but less knowing.

John de Pauley’s small cast metal sculpture.

Inside the front door

New uses for a silver pepper pot

Aidan in the hall, Jim Dandy belt

Georgia de Pauley, Bamboo.

Guardian horse figurine and horseshoe around the sitting room door lintel

Julia’s worksheet

The dining room with sheets drying

and an old wooden tea caddy bought that morning at Bridport market

Julia, drying linen and their dog Rocky, a handsome old Pointer cross who died on September 21st, after a slow sad decline.

Kitchen cupboard, Greek Key design cups by Susie Cooper for Wedgwood.

Tea ceremony. Julia likes gold cups, I think most of hers are by Royal Worcester. I covert the peculiar but charming Staffordshire dog milk jug.

Charlie McCormick, florist, gardener and dealer in antiques, did the kind favour of standing in as model at the Old Parsonage, in shooting trews, old Harris tweed and his ‘Jim Dandy.’

Archaeological lion belt.

Julia has been working on these things ever since I’ve known her.  They are part of her very exquisite aesthetic, intrinsic to the way that she lives.   rapsondepauley.com

All photos copyright Julia de Pauley and bibleofbritishtaste.com

A top floor bedroom.

The hall.

Domenica’s father, the artists Harry More Gordon (b.1928) who died last year, taught at the Edinburgh College of Art. The painted hall floor was executed by two of his students. Bobs, one of two family dogs, the cheerful mongrel bitch whom he befriended on holiday in Greece.

Harry’s choice. An early Hockney poster, The Rake’s Progress.

Harry’s painting of Domenica, garden flowers.

The house,a few miles north of Edinburgh towards the sea, austere, sandstone, dated 1748 in the pediment, built for Archibald Shiells. Domenica’s parents Harry and Marianne, bought it in run-down state in the 1960s when she was three years old. They found its furnishings in local auctions and junkyards.

And the back, with dog, semi-couchant.

Dining Room. Marianne More Gordon’s textile hangings made with a local community sewing group for Remembrance Sunday 2015 appliqued with doves and poppies, the work in progress on the table.

Harry More Gordon, lively, outspoken, ‘the best dancer ever, and unlike most fathers, never embarrassing’, one time picture and layout editor at Vogue.

Francis Kyle exhibition poster, another family portrait. Domenica in bed and James Holloway, director of the Scottish Portrait Gallery at the time and a keen biker, on the sofa.Watch out for this four poster bed later on.

Domenica’s younger sister Zillah, ill in bed. Harry More Gordon loved painting pattern and oriental fabric.

The first floor spine corridor, icons, Staffordshire porcelain and two Chinese portraits that Zillah gave to her parents.

View into the Drawing Room.’Dad’s taste was much more flamboyant, more twentieth century, whereas Mum would be much more eighteenth century, most of what is here is Mum’s. This house  is all about Mum and family and roots’.

House plants, one in a chamber pot planter.

End wall of the Drawing Room, the next photograph is a detail of the watercolour by Harry More Gordon hanging on the right.

Domenica, Zillah and tigerskin rug painted on the same spot.

Seat cushion and 3D textile (detail below) by Marianne More Gordon [nee Thompson-McCauseland], who trained at the Central School of Art. This house with its aqueous colour and pattern is another of her works of art.

Marianne’s bedroom.

Ditto, with ironing board.

Harry and Marianne painted in 3 poses by their friend, Patrick Procktor, who inspired Harry to use watercolour without any preliminary pencil drawing thereafter.

The crimson bed in that poster, hung by Marianne with a document linen bought at a local junk yard that she painstakingly washed and restored.

Harry More Gordon designed textiles and scarves for Libertys, this is one of his designs, hung in an upper corridor above the jugs that were often props in his paintings.

Top floor lavatory painting, the gift of one of his students.

[My] guest bedroom.

View from the back of the house across open fields, a scattering of wee raindrops.

Another guest bedroom.

Exquisite antique textiles and linens collected by Marianne, who was responsible for decorating and arranging the house’s many rooms.Tulip paintings by Rory McEwan.

My favourite portrait.

Zillah by Harry More Gordon, post-school, with home made badge, ‘Piss Off.’

The top floor spine corridor, with eighteenth century mural of country pursuits, commissioned by the house’s builder and first owner, Mr. Shiells. Dolls house at the end of the enfilade, outside Charlie’s writing room.

Charlie’s writing room, with another of Harry More Gordon’s designs for Libertys, and a landscape oil painted by an illustrator for the ‘Ladybird’ book series, bought for £5 in the fabled local junk yard. Here he wrote his compelling stories of British folklore and the supernatural, the mesmerising Stoneheart trilogy for children and now The Oversight, his darkly atmospheric adult novels set in Victorian London.

How to decorate a bathroom.

When Charlie, Domenica and their two children came back from living in LA, they moved into the house’s generously proportioned raised basement. This is one corner of their long room, both sitting room and kitchen. Orkney chair with one of Domenica’s dog cushions designed for Chelsea Textiles.

Tablescape.

Window-seat.

Paper tree birthday card made by Domenica.

Lunch and garden flowers in the little vase that Domenica found on our trip to the mythical junk yard.

Sitting room overmantle.

Late still life by Harry More Gordon. Objets trouves, the ceramics, feathers and the things picked up around the house that habitually made up his compositions.

A jolly nice bath.

And the bathroom corner cupboard. Euthymol toothpaste.

Domenica’s studio in an old stone pavilion building in a corner of the courtyard.

At last! The dogs. Sculpted from felted wool, conceived and hand made by Domenica.

Domenica’s worktable. If you see the same things in two different places it is because these pictures were taken on two visits made about seven months apart.

Sharp pencils.

Archie is a beloved, elderly black and tan Lakeland Fell terrier, the family pet for many years now. He was Domenica’s principal muse and model, and then became the hero of her books written and illustrated for children.

Hand knits, tartan, Fair Isle and roller skates. Note the minute elastic striped belt.

Bride dog, work in progress, seen in autumn 2015.

Domenica’s eye for costume detail is immaculate, She cuts and tailors and sources everything herself. Back on the Hebrides one summer we took 2 Calmac ferries to the island of Barra, where in the local history museum she pored over old photographs of crofters and their children in homespun jumpers, hand -me-downs and Harris tweed. All this knowledge percolates through.

Braces.

Bride dog resplendent.

Now Domenica has taken her menagerie much further back in history, creating a troupe of characters who enact the narrative of eighteenth century Grand Tourists, and writing and illustrating the story of their travels in watercolour. You can see some of her work on her instagram feed here.

Cobblers workbench with minute eighteenth-century shoes being made in all sizes.

‘I chose dogs because they are such good channels of emotion, ideal for capturing that childhood intense connection with an object.  [They] are usually with me in my studio and I have to be careful to keep my work out of their reach as I have found some of my wool dogs in a fairly battered state in their dog baskets.  I take it as a compliment and feel that I have achieved a certain level of intense connection… Actually, I think it’s the smell of the wool…’

Studies of ceramics.

Vignettes and character sketches for the new book.

These dogs have a sweet, toy-like quality, the smallest fit into the palm of your hand. Domenica’s next exhibition, Noble Dogs, is at Arts and Sciences in Kyoto from 18 November 2016. Or you can buy your own felting kit and make a dog of your own. Domenicamoregordon.com

‘I really do like growing vegetables very much.’

Beneath the large topographical print of a country house in the hall is a more modest painting of a house in the border country  by Charles Oakley(d.2008).

Looking from the hall into the garden, orange watering can hand bag on table.

Pat Albeck’s little picture of her young son Matthew Rice, painted on holiday in Nassau, and more two cat paintings: the first an Xmas card from Julian Trevelyan, the second of swimming cats a ‘Collins’ from Mary Fedden thanking for the invitation to the first night of one of Peter Rice’s productions.  Apples just picked from the abundant garden.

Kitchen work top and kitchen table beyond. Above the table hang two student works, prints by Matthew Rice executed at the Central School of Art.

One of Pat’s rag dolls, a pyjama case.

Jug collection, two mackerel on a plate by Richard Bawden, and our morning coffee. ‘These flowers are from what I call the Glyndebourne border.Whenever I’ve moved house I’ve always had a Glyndebourne border. Peter’s first job was at Glyndebourne and I’d never been aware of how wonderful gardens could be.’

‘In my life I’ve always felt different from everyone else.I was very upset when I was about 10 that everybody in the area had pale green or maroon stair carpets, and we had some most extraordinary ones that my father had had woven at Libertys or something.’ Her father, a Polish emigre, was a furrier and an anarchist. In 1933 he had built his ‘Dream House’ at Anlaby, just outside Hull.
 
‘It was Art Deco inside, with a “Stockbroker Tudor” exterior. The house was built in the grounds of Tranby Croft. Our front garden was part of their woods. Tranby Croft was known for the famous Baccarat scandle in 1890 involving the future King Edward VII… I had a stained glass surround to an electric fire in my bedroom. It represented Little Red Riding Hood and was designed and made by students at the Hull Art School.’
 
At the age of 16 she began four happy years of study at the College of Arts and Crafts in Hull.  ‘ The ambition of all art students at the time was to go on to The Royal College of Art. It was the idea of living in London and working with the best students from all over the country that made the thought so exciting. Well, I made it, and so starts the 50’s.’

In the large sitting room an architectural print by Edward Bawden, a poster designed by fellow RCA student David Gentleman  a small portrait of Pat aged 21 by Alan Price and over the chimneypiece, Envelope by Joe Tilson R.A.

Sculpture bought from a student degree show at the RCA, Flower painting by Mary Fedden. ‘I lived opposite Mary Fedden in Hammersmith. Her cousin Robin who was a director of the National Trust had asked her who could design a tea towel for them and she recommended me, they got onto me and I designed for them for over 30 years!’ The little cat sitting on the frame was made by Mary too, ‘they were presents that she gave to children.’

Above the Empire bureau hangs Fern Garden at East Ruston, a large early paper collage by Pat Albeck of the hellebore wood in Norfolk at her previous house, ‘a wonderful garden, my favourite place in the world.’ On the left, two family portraits painted by her witty friend the artist Harry More Gordon, whose house appears here in an earlier blog highlighting the work of his artist daugher, Domenica More Gordon.

A table lamp by Cressida Bell and behind it a seaside scene by Julian Trevelyan. More Mary Fedden cats.

Landscapes in pen and  watercolour by Matthew Rice made at the age of c.15, the result of a private commission to paint Venetian scenes hang in the yellow bedroom.

A tour de force still life by Pat Albeck, ‘when I started painting instead of designing, and had a show at the Chelsea Arts Club.’

‘My life used to be completely full of cats and if I had my life again I would make sure that I got my cat situation better organised.’ Cats by William Chappell, ‘who was a friend.’

A crop of works in progress from her new style of ‘cut paper paintings’ on Pat’s drawing board.

All done directly from life, from flowers and onions growing in the garden,

Part of her archive of textile designs (more of her design archive is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum). ‘My first job in the 50s was working for Jimmy Cleveland Bell. Peter [Rice] was working in the theatre and I was in fashion. My boss was quite unusual, he let me do anything I wanted. He said, ‘You’ve just been to Venice on holiday. So I designed a pattern inspired by the fish market there.”
 
‘I had too much work towards the end of the decade. I decided then to have an assistant to work with me. This was the start of a series of amazing girls who worked for me, each staying with me for about a year. My first assistant was Susan Collier who later created the textile company Collier Campbell. Most of my assistants came straight from their degree course at art school. They have nearly all gone on to greater things.’

‘I have designed two or three hundred tea towels.’

‘Before, tea towels in England were plain, except occasionally when they were designed for advertising, eg Colman’s mustard, or they had “Glass Cloth” woven in a primary colour stripe down the middle. There were all these new products waiting to be decorated.’ (This picture copyright:Back to the Drawing Board/ Keele University.)

Dining Room. Large collage by painter–poet  Sophie Herxheimer, bought by Pat Albeck, ‘because I liked it so much.’

‘A friend of mine discovered an old 50s Horrockses skirt of mine on ebay. I did it in ’55. It cost me £70 to buy on ebay.’ The Venetian fish market-inspired pattern. For more of her wonderful patterns from the 50s click the link here :

‘When I was at Horrockses there was an exhibition of a stage designed called Sophie Fedorovitch at the V and A, she had just died. I was commissioned to design some fabrics based on her costumes, I rather enjoyed it, they were done on arithmetic [graph] paper in the mid 50s, Madame Butterfly.’

‘These belong to Lanhydrock, my range of earthenware ceramics made by Portmeirion for the National Trust in the 1980s. They turned out looking very modern. It’s my very, very favourite design that I’ve ever done and that I still use, based on a border of tiles in the kitchens at Lanhydrock.’

Wrapping paper and wall paper designs by Pat Albeck. ‘Domenica More Gordon worked for me briefly after art college. I asked her to design wrapping paper, she didn’t know what I meant, ‘We always use newspaper,’ she said!’

‘Two tea towels were designed by Peter [Rice] for the National Trust, they wanted something architectural, that was one, the other is the story of wool. Pansy is one of my furnishing fabrics for  John Lewis. When felt tips came out I fell madly in love with them, ‘tho everyone was very superior about them.’

National Trust tea towels from the 1970s. ‘I used acorns, oak leaves and oak apples to design this Tea Towel for The National Trust. The acorn is The National Trust’s emblem. I was designing things that people might be tempted to buy at the end of a visit to a National Trust house or garden. This influened my style. I was using line drawing as my work became more representational and my colour became more muted, to go with the historic houses. Also it meant that I really had to learn to draw buildings accurately. Many of my designs were for specific properties, which I always visited, so I got to know a lot about the English countryside.’

Pat Albeck’s cut paper pictures, a selling show held in 2016.

Flowers in a Greek key jug. Cut paper picture by Pat Albeck, 2016.

Keele University’s forthcoming exhibition program will feature Peter Rice, Matthew Rice and Emma Bridgewater.
 
Pat Albeck’s next selling show ‘A Cut Above,’ will be held at Colefax and Fowler’s new showrooms, opening on the 22nd of May to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show.

On the borders of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, Shulbrede Priory is the surviving corner of the rather obscure religious house of Wlenchmere, founded at the end of the twelfth century and suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s.

The cloister in an old photograph. Since this was taken part of the tree fell on the house and had to be cut down.

The present entrance front was originally the southwest corner of a much larger monastic building complex. Once the Augustinian canons were turned out dilapidation began to set in, but what survives has been altered and restored very little. The priory became home to Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby in 1902; their granddaughter Catherine and her husband Ian Russell have lived here since the 1970s.

The uncapped north corner of the present house; a further range of cellerage (demolished for building stone long ago by Shulbrede’s yeoman farmer tenants) would once have run from this corner, where the building ends abruptly now.

A garden bench, cushioned with moss. Catherine’s sister Laura Ponsonby, who was an expert field botanist. used to say that there were enough different species colonising this seat to teach a complete course of mosses and liverworts. Laura who worked at Kew Gardens and died in 2016, lectured on fungi, liverworts and lichens, and once helped the police in a murder case, identifying deadly nightshade baked in a pie.

An ancient stone coffin lid excavated by Arthur Ponsonby and set with a mosaic of other archaeological fragments in the garden wall. Arthur (a radical Liberal MP who later defected to the Labour party) and Dorothea Ponsonby were a rather intellectual and bohemian couple who came upon Shulbrede as a tumbledown agricultural dwelling, moved in and gardened and restored and furnished it on antiquarian principles, following the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Medieval encaustic tiles excavated at Shulbrede by Arthur Ponsonby and displayed on a table top in the hall.

The Priory painted for Arthur and Dorothea by their friend Jack Strachey.

The crypt was in service as a dairy when the Ponsonbys came to Shulbrede. Arthur Ponsonby made this cool dim room into his study and wrote his comprehensive History of Shulbrede here, published in 1920.

On the deep window sill a small museum of archaeological fragments disinterred at Shulbrede during excavations that took place here between the wars. Their labels originally written by Arthur Ponsonby were recopied by his granddaughter Laura.

The dining room was once part of the canon’s refectory, the Ponsonbys furnished it with an oak refectory table, Morris chintzes and rush seated chairs. Their decorating style could be called ‘intellectual socialist,’ says Ian Russell. A manorial court – a local law court trying cases relating to land holdings etc – was regularly convened here or the Prior’s Chamber upstairs until the 1920s.

Buffet in the dining room with pieces of blue and white striped ‘Sussex ware.’

This dolls house originally belonged to Arthur and Dolly’s daughter Elizabeth Ponsonby who was one of the leaders of the Bright Young Things, said to have been the model for that poignant character Agatha Runcible in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Vile Bodies. Waugh described the BYT’s pass-times as, Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…
‘We don’t treat it as an antique, it’s definitely a working doll’s house.’

The long range seen from the garden, the single story extension on the far left houses the old kitchen. Ian Russell has used his considerable professional expertise as a structural engineer to bring the house’s roofs and chimneys back into good order, following the SPAB’s principles.

Outside, a confluence of roofs

and inside, the old kitchen range chimney from c.1902. Now this is a store for second-hand books sold for charity on open days.

An exuberant hang on the ‘new’ kitchen wall, with Joanna Russell’s schoolgirl staircase painting in the middle and her artist-author sister Harriet Russell’s Partridge and Pear, top right. Peacocks belong to the poultry farm opposite the priory, but spend much of their time and shed their feathers here. This is part of the extension comprising a housekeeper’s room and second kitchen built on by the Ponsonbys in 1914.

Walter, the – sometimes malevolent – rescue cat who is prone to lash out at mealtimes, Magpie (not seen) is far more adventurous and emollient. ‘We don’t know their early history, they both came from the cat rescue by the A3. We think that he had rather a difficult childhood.’ (Moments after this photo, he attacked.) The cupboards and dresser are painted a glorious deep blue gloss.

The larder is a landscape all of its own

Catherine Ponsonby painted with her hair tucked behind her ear by  fellow Goldsmith’s student Robert Stewart in the 1960s,

Landscape near Shulbrede, pastel by Catherine Ponsonby, 1960s.

And her lino print of a thieving fox slipping away through the grass at Shulbrede. My favourite thing in the house.

The Prior’s Chamber, with the grand piano that Hubert Parry, Dorothea Ponsonby’s father, bought as a student standing near the window. Sir Hubert Parry set the words of William Blake’s great poem Jerusalem to the stirring tune that we still sing today, his statuette stands on top of the piano. He composed the Shulbrede Tunes here, each one named for a member of his daughter’s family. A rare colony of Long Eared bats, a species protected by law, roosts in the rafters above.

In the sixteenth century this dividing wall was inserted into the Prior’s Chamber and covered with wall paintings illustrating the folk legend in which the animals receive the power of speech on Christmas Eve to announce their Saviour’s birth. A cockerel announces ‘Christus natus est,‘ a duck squawks, ‘Quando, Quando?’, a Raven answers, ‘In hac nocte,’ a bull bellows ‘Ubi, ubi?’and a lamb bleats, ‘In Bethlehem’ (In Be-e-e-eth-le-he-e-em).

The arms of King James 1 were superimposed over one section of the wall painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

A tureen, part of a dinner service. ‘Now that is a bit of Roger Fry for the Omega Workshop. I have memories of the food congealing on these plates.’

The Bloomsbury artist and critic Roger Fry was a frequent guest at Shulbrede, encouraging Arthur Ponsonby’s painting and drawing.

‘When our children were tiny, every time we got some stickers, we put them all over the tiled wall.’

Bathroom painting by Joanna Russell, done when she was at school.

Laura Ponsonby’s room.

 Possibly the satin shoes worn by young Arthur Ponsonby as a page to the elderly Queen Victoria. His father Sir Henry Ponsonby was a courtier and the queen’s Private Secretary.

The huge yew hedges – more like walls or bastions – in the south garden

and the same topiary at Shulbrede by Joe Ruddy, family friend and colleague of Laura Ponsonby at Kew Gardens, mixed media,

‘That’s by Harriet, its a print from a series of pictures for a joint exhibition of blue images, its got the famous Hokusai Great Wave. Blue Escapes painting, screenprint by Harriet Russell.

Harriet is a freelance author and illustrator, whose work has been commissioned by Hermes, the New York Times, Penguin and many others. Envelopes published by Random House in 2005, was her challenge to the Royal Mail. As a student at Glasgow Art College she designed, drew, stamped and posted dozens of envelopes to herself, concealing her address within cartoons and diagrams, thickets of typescript, collages, a crossword puzzle, a menu and a musical score. You can buy a copy of this funny and ingenious book when you visit Shulbrede Priory, or, here. Of the 130 envelopes she sent, 120 arrived and her triumphant postmen started writing ‘solved by Glasgow mail center’ on the backs.’The UK postal system has certainly exceeded my expectations.’

You can find Harriet’s online shop here.

and her blog here.

and contact her here.

Shulbrede’s flock of geese congregating by the outdoor bookstall

provoked

The cloister…

The cloister with photographer Antony Crolla, teeing up for his shot.

Shulbrede Priory opens to the public on certain days from May to September each year and small groups can visit by appointment. Contact Ian Russell by email: ian@russellconsult.co.uk
 
All photographs copyright Ian and Catherine Russell and bibleofbritishtaste.

David Bridgwater wrote to me a few weeks ago. He had read the art book that I published with Yale, Owning the Past, about the English collectors who scoured Italy, Greece and Turkey for antique sculptures in the eighteenth century and brought them back to furnish their country houses. He said that he had quite a nice house in Bath, and a special interest in eighteenth century English portrait sculpture. He suggested that I might like to visit. Three weeks ago I did.

David is a historian cum dealer, who buys beautiful things whenever he finds them, to keep or to sell. But like me, he has a prodigious interest in the provenance of every object that he finds. A lot of his  time is spent reading, researching and traveling in order to build up a backstory or identify the artist-creator connected with what he finds, and what he knows is published on his two blogs, one about eighteenth century portrait sculpture: http://english18thcenturyportraitsculpture.blogspot.co.uk   and the other about the architects who built the houses and streets where he lives  – http://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.co.uk/   This is the entrance hall of his townhouse in Bath.

David and his wife Sarah came to live here 8 years ago, moving from a slightly older house a few streets away ( their two children are both grown up). This house, dated 1792 and designed by Thomas Baldwin as part of the Pulteney Estate, ranks among the finest of Bath’s very elegant Georgian housing stock. According to a bronze plaque on the facade it was home to William Pitt the Younger in 1806 – the longest-nosed of all the English Prime ministers by far. Here is their fabulous high-ceilinged kitchen.

The house’s previous use had been as offices.  ‘When we came here all this was smothered with two centuries of paint, it was three years on and off putting it back together. Nothing could have been done without my wife Sarah. There were strip lights like these everywhere. We left these ones. You can see what you’re looking for!’  (You can see one reflected in the looking glass)

Industrial double sink unit with the dog bed belonging to their small hairy Griffon Bruxelloise Lulu, who is keeping well out of shot

Lulu, at bay,

This kitchen is gloriously big.

Each piece of furniture stands about 10 feet apart from the others.

‘When we lived in a 1760s house in Walcot Street the kitchen was in the basement, so I stripped off all the old wallpaper and there was the silhouette of the original kitchen dresser marked on the wall. So I had this dresser made to measure, specifically for that wall.’ Now it does service in the Dining Room.

The Dining Room, plaster bust of William Pitt the Younger on the left.

Now for something really special, David’s ground floor study.

The chimney piece has a garniture of Wedgwood flower vases, the two-handled urn shape favoured by Constance Spry.The big one on the far left is not by Wedgwood tho. I particularly liked it, David didn’t.

These fabulous garden chairs, now heavily weathered, are actually copies of an antique original. They were sold long ago from the famous Clifton Nurseries in London’s Little Venice, where self-styled ‘Master Plaster Caster’ Peter Hone managed the business dealing in fabulous sculpture and garden antiques. (David Bridgwater ‘got into gardens back in the 80s’ too.) There are a few of Peter’s plaster casts here amongst much older things. Peter says  he’s taken more casts than a ‘Pea podder has podded peas in a pea podding factory’. You can buy his casts from Pentreath and Hall, and see their ‘Hone Museum’ of casts filling the back wall of the Rugby Street shop.

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Old metal plant labels arranged along the dado rail.

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A fabulous piece of  eighteenth century Bidriware from India in the middle of the table, the base of a hookah pipe, inlaid with a silvered design of poppy heads.

One of those old fashioned push-along machines for marking out white lines on a grass tennis court. I used one of these as a child to mark to paint white lines  onto the lawn in the garden at home but my badminton game remains sub-average.

écorché figure, top right, modeled for artists, showing the muscles of the body as if revealed under the skin.

 very high quality frame of uncertain date or origin

And a small but very fine Renaissance-era portrait tondo

One of my favourite things, Damascus-style folding chair, one of a very beautiful pair.

The first floor drawing room.”All the paint is from a company called Johnsons, they will copy any colour you like.’

Indian dowry coffer

Household gods. A marble statuette of our first Hanoverian monarch, King George I, small marble bust (sans socle) of Alexander Pope, Ganesha the lucky Elephant god and a bust of Athena. ‘ I bought my first bust of Pope back in 2000. I went to the V and A they said,  Oh its C19th, there’s hundreds of them. I found an engraving of it from 1788, it couldn’t have been any other bust. It was by Roubilliac.’

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More busts, Napoleon in the middle.

Torchere.

‘An architect’s stand up desk from around about 1760. My favourite thing, found in a warehouse in Newark, it had been there for quite a long time.’

‘It’s a very ingenious thing, beautifully made, a two-man desk, the top tilts. Hidden drawers pull out.’

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Around the corner, the very best room of all, a genuine cabinet of curiosities ( that over-used term).

The walls are unrestored with bare plasterwork in places. The object on the floor is an ancient, lethal. two-man hedge trimmer.

Back in the 70s I used to go to France and fill a lorry – bring stoves back, and I’ve got one or two souvenirs left from that time.’

The textile wall hanging is Nigerian, it was £3, I found it in a car boot sale. They look like aliens! I’m going to put it in that frame, it’s French C17th, I like that dynamic, to put a bit of Africa in it’

This cross-piece from an overmantle is decorated in papier mache with a scene from a hunt, hounds chasing a fox in pursuit of a hare ‘Unfortunately someone had a go at it with paint stripper. I picked the rest of the paint off it but the elegant face of the fox is gone.’

The fire surround is Scottish.

‘I took off the paint – it was so thick with paint – but left a bit here, to show what it was like when I got it.’ The figures at the two ends are Bacchus and Ceres. Perhaps it was made for a Dining Room? The china swan was a wedding present from a friend.

‘The bookcases are made of piled up apple boxes  – you could buy crate loads of them at one time.’

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‘The staircase didn’t look like this when we moved here – it was festooned with wires and covered with industrial carpet.’

View from the master bedroom to the dressing room

Bedroom with Bombay Blackwood carved chair

Bedroom

Dressing room. The leather upholstered button back chair is French. Wall of mirrors.

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little Venetian looking glass

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Fabulous ‘artist’s palette’ roccoco looking glass

Bathroom

‘This shower  – a friend of mine had it for his house and didn’t want it.’

David told me there was something particularly good about this light fitting but I’ve forgotten what, alas

‘Ive always like dealing with dealers,’ David told me. ‘I tried to anticipate fashion. That’s why I got into gardens back in the 80s, that last area of the great house that hadn’t been fully exploited.’ He showed me a koftgari ware box – damacened with a fine pattern of gold inlaid into steel – a very beautiful thing, made to hold a maharaja’s cigars, perhaps. Where did all the good stuff that there used to be – in every junk shop and street market  – go? I wondered. ‘I think it all went to America,’ he says.’

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Did you collect things when you were little?  ‘Birds eggs, cigarette cards, chewing gum cards, that sort of stuff  – and of course I swopped them.’

Just inside the front door, a very handsome hall stand.

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Very many thanks to David and his wife Sarah. David is on instagram too. He is a huge source of interesting knowledge and enthusiasms and so I offer this a as a sort of pictorial encomium to all that he knows.

On the borders of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, Shulbrede Priory is the surviving corner of the rather obscure religious house of Wlenchmere, founded at the end of the twelfth century and suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s.

The cloister in an old photograph. Since this was taken part of the tree fell on the house and it had to be cut down.

The present entrance front was originally the southwest corner of a much larger monastic building complex. Once the Augustinian canons were turned out demolitions and dilapidation set in, but what remains has been altered and restored very little. In 1902 the priory became home to Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby; they loved the place so much that they bought it, and their granddaughter Catherine and her husband Ian Russell have lived here since the 1970s.

The uncapped north corner of the present house; a further range of cellerage (demolished for building stone long ago by Shulbrede’s yeoman farmer tenants) once ran from this corner, where the building ends abruptly now.

A garden bench, cushioned with moss. Catherine’s sister Laura Ponsonby, an expert field botanist who worked at Kew Gardens (and died in 2016), lectured on fungi, liverworts and lichens, and once helped the police in a case of murder by poisoning, identifying some deadly nightshade baked in a pie. She used to say that there were ‘enough different species colonising this seat to teach a complete course of mosses and liverworts.’

An ancient stone coffin lid excavated by Arthur Ponsonby and set with a mosaic of other archaeological fragments in the garden wall. Arthur (a radical Liberal MP who later defected to the Labour party) and Dorothea Ponsonby were a rather intellectual and bohemian couple who came upon Shulbrede as a tumbledown agricultural dwelling, moved in and gardened and restored and furnished it on antiquarian principles according to the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Medieval encaustic tiles excavated at Shulbrede by Arthur Ponsonby and displayed on a table top in the hall.

The Priory painted for Arthur and Dorothea by their friend Jack Strachey.

The crypt was in service as a dairy when the Ponsonbys came to Shulbrede. Arthur Ponsonby made this cool dim room into his study and wrote his comprehensive History of Shulbrede here, published in 1920.

On the deep window sill a small museum of archaeological fragments disinterred at Shulbrede during excavations that took place here between the wars. Their labels originally written by Arthur Ponsonby were recopied by his granddaughter Laura.

The dining room was once part of the canon’s refectory, the Ponsonbys furnished it with an oak refectory table, Morris chintzes and rush seated chairs. Their decorating style could be called ‘intellectual socialist,’ says Ian Russell. The local manorial court – a law court trying cases relating to land holdings etc – was regularly convened here or the Prior’s Chamber upstairs until the 1920s.

Buffet in the dining room with pieces of blue and white striped ‘Sussex ware’ and so on.

This dolls house originally belonged to Arthur and Dolly’s daughter Elizabeth Ponsonby who was one of the leaders of the Bright Young Things, said to have been the model for that poignant character Agatha Runcible in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Vile Bodies. Waugh described the BYT’s pass-times as, Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…
‘We don’t treat it as an antique, it’s definitely a working doll’s house.’

The long range seen from the garden, the single story extension on the far left houses the old kitchen. Ian Russell has used his considerable professional expertise as a structural engineer to bring the house’s roofs and chimneys back into good order, following the SPAB’s principles.

Outside, a confluence of roofs

and inside, the old kitchen range chimney from c.1902. Now this is a store for second-hand books sold for charity on open days.

An exuberant hang on the ‘new’ kitchen wall, with Joanna Russell’s schoolgirl staircase painting in the middle and her artist-author sister Harriet Russell’s Partridge and Pear, top right. Peacocks belong to the poultry farm opposite the priory, but spend much of their time and shed their feathers here. This is part of the extension comprising a housekeeper’s room and second kitchen built on by the Ponsonbys in 1914.

Walter, the – sometimes malevolent – rescue cat who is prone to lash out at mealtimes, Magpie (not seen) is far more adventurous and emollient. ‘We don’t know their early history, they both came from the cat rescue by the A3. We think that he had rather a difficult childhood.’ (Moments after this photo, Walter attacked.) The cupboards and dresser are painted a glorious deep blue gloss.

The larder is a landscape all of its own

Catherine Ponsonby painted with her hair tucked behind her ear by fellow Goldsmith’s student Robert Stewart in the 1960s,

Landscape near Shulbrede, pastel by Catherine Ponsonby, 1960s.

And her lino print of a thieving fox slipping away through the grass at Shulbrede. My favourite thing in the house.

The Prior’s Chamber, with the grand piano that Hubert Parry – Dorothea Ponsonby’s father – bought as a student, standing near the window. Sir Hubert Parry set the words of William Blake’s great poem Jerusalem to the stirring tune that we still sing today, Parry’s statuette stands on top of the piano. He composed the Shulbrede Tunes here, each one named for a member of his daughter’s family. A rare colony of Long Eared bats – a species protected by law – roosts in the rafters above.

In the sixteenth century this dividing wall was inserted into the Prior’s Chamber and covered with wall paintings illustrating the folk legend in which the animals receive the power of speech on Christmas Eve to announce their Saviour’s birth. A cockerel announces ‘Christus natus est,‘ a duck squawks, ‘Quando, Quando?’, a Raven answers, ‘In hac nocte,’ a bull bellows ‘Ubi, ubi?’and a lamb bleats, ‘In Bethlehem’ (In Be-e-e-eth-le-he-e-em).

The arms of King James 1 were superimposed over the middle section of the wall painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

A tureen, part of a dinner service. ‘Now that is a bit of Roger Fry for the Omega Workshop. I have memories of the food congealing on these plates.’

The Bloomsbury artist and critic Roger Fry was a frequent guest at Shulbrede, encouraging Arthur Ponsonby’s painting and drawing.

‘When our children were tiny, every time we got some stickers, we put them all over the tiled wall.’

A rather brilliant bathroom painting by Joanna Russell, done when she was at school.

Laura Ponsonby’s room.

 Possibly the satin shoes worn by young Arthur Ponsonby as a page to the elderly Queen Victoria. His father Sir Henry Ponsonby was a courtier and the queen’s Private Secretary.

The huge yew hedges – more like walls or bastions – in the south garden

and the same topiary at Shulbrede by Joe Ruddy, family friend and colleague of Laura Ponsonby at Kew Gardens, mixed media,

‘That’s by Harriet, its a print from a series of pictures for a joint exhibition of blue images, its got the famous Hokusai Great Wave.’ Blue Escapes painting, screenprint by Harriet Russell.

Harriet is a freelance author and illustrator whose work has been commissioned by Hermes, the New York Times, Penguin and many others. Envelopes published by Random House in 2005, was her challenge to the Royal Mail. As a student at Glasgow Art College she designed, drew, stamped and posted dozens of envelopes to herself, concealing her address in cartoons and diagrams, thickets of typescript, collages, a crossword puzzle, a menu and a musical score. You can buy a copy of this funny and ingenious book when you visit Shulbrede Priory, or, here. Of the 130 envelopes she sent, 120 arrived and her triumphant postmen started writing ‘Solved by Glasgow mail center’ on the backs.’The UK postal system has certainly exceeded my expectations.’

You can find Harriet’s online shop here.

and her blog here.

and contact her here.

Shulbrede’s flock of geese congregating by the outdoor bookstall

goose provoked

The cloister…

The cloister with photographer Antony Crolla, teeing up for his shot (for The World of Interiors).

Shulbrede Priory opens to the public on certain days from May to September each year and small groups can visit by appointment. Contact Ian Russell by email: ian@russellconsult.co.uk
 
All photographs copyright Ian and Catherine Russell and bibleofbritishtaste.