Whistler Stop Tour

 

I have been back in the Deep South for a couple of weeks, which has not been compatible with maintaining the blog. As usual, much of this time has been spent speed reading in the British Library, but we also did a certain amount of gadding about, chiefly in search of Rex Whistler. Thus we went to Mottisfont, to see the elegantly lifeless grisailles in the drawing room, to Salisbury, where there is an exhibition of his paintings and drawings, and (the Professor having meanwhile gone off to darkest Lancashire) to Port Lympne, which must surely be a contender for Queerest House in England. It’s, inevitably, in the belt of Kent/Sussex where interwar homosexualists had their county retreats, and it was built as a party house, no expense spared, halfway down a cliff, overlooking Romney Marsh and the Channel. There is a bizarrely sumptuous Italianate garden full of giant masonry, some of which looks as if it was nicked off the Gésu, and the interior (complete with an elaborately patterened floor of black and white marble, a many-pillared hall in the Moorish taste, marble baths, and a library copied from the Radcliffe Camera) breaks out in murals: there was once a room decorated with charging elephants and other symbolic fauna by José Maria Sert, and a dining room which originally had lapis walls, opalescent pink ceiling, gilt-winged chairs with jade-green cushions, and a black, white and burnt-sienna frieze in the Egyptian taste of nude Africans processing with bullocks, amphoras etcetera, by Glyn Philpot. The Africans now wear little drawers, due to a hasty day’s repainting after Queen Mary announced her intention of visiting, but the effect is still camp beyond belief. The house is now owned by John Aspinall’s foundation, and used as a wedding venue, which is something of a come down, though probably the  best a place like that could hope for these days. The Sert room has been replaced with a rather worrying, very brightly coloured mural of assorted Asiatic fauna, and though the Philpot frieze survives, it has been moved out of the dining room, which is now blandly corporate (and currently in the middle of a refit, which self-evidently will substitute another variety of Neutral Hotel Taste for the slightly shabby NHT now on offer), and into what was Philip Sassoon’s bedroom which is presently being transformed into a bar. And there is also Rex Whistler’s Tent Room, which is what I had gone to see. It’s very fine, and very sad, whereas Philpot’s black boys, even in their present somewhat reduced circumstances, are rather jolly. It gives the strongest impression that all the figures are revenants, something which derives, I think, partly from the colour scheme – the prevailing tone is dusty turquoise – and partly from the fact that the figures are wearing clothes of different periods. I’m very glad to have seen it, and the Aspinall people could hardly have been nicer or more helpful.  Another excursion, which was not Whistler related, was to Campion Hall to see the notorious ‘objets d’Arcy’ – this too well merited the detour. We are assured by the Society of Jesus that Father’s Christian Dior sequinned op-art cope is still worn on occasion (though it has to be admitted that orange is not, conventionally, a liturgical colour, especially not in combination with mauve and bright green…) Ahem. Campion Hall itself is terrific – Lutyens letting his hair down. The ceiling lights in the chapel are in the shape of cardinal’s hats, and there’s a lifesize, baroque Spanish high-relief sculpture of Ignatius Loyola and companions in the middle of the hall, which in Oxford, comes as a bit of a surprise. It was all very interesting, but it was also nice to get home. Tony & co had looked after the house and the beasties beautifully (Miss Dog, by the way, made a swift and uproblematic recovery from her operation and has forgotten all about it), and everything was looking in splendid fettle. The only remotely unpleasant surprise was something which turned up in the post yesterday – an Amazon package which proved to contain a surreal  looking CD of a heavy metal concept album on the life of Charlemagne by Christopher (‘Dracula’) Lee. I could of course think of several wags who might have sent me such a thing as a joke or a wind-up, but what was rather worrying was the invoice indicated that it has been ordered by me. A hasty examination of conscience suggested that I had not been plastered enough to order Amazonia at random and forget about it within memory, and I followed up with an examination of my back-orders file which confirmed as much. Even Aunty Amazon can make mistakes, but it was momentarily rather disconcerting, like something dropping out of a parallel universe, especially since I have been brooding extensively about the intrinsic spookiness of Rex Whistler’s murals. Fortunately, there was no time to give it any further thought: we were going to New Deer, since yesterday was the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, which we celebrate annually with our composer friends (Peter and Paul respectively), so along with shopping at the rather nice New Deer deli, we nipped up to the post office to return it to from whence it came. The party was lovely. Like all dos involving musicians, it ended round the piano and broke up at one in the morning.