The landscape architect Kim Wilkie grew up in a house on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. ‘Things decayed as fast as they grew.’ Leather shoes would fur over with mould within hours if left outside. His father was posted to Iraq next. ‘Everything was brown.’ But stare long enough at the sand and you
Late in the 19th century, archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum discovered a lime kiln. It had been built to incinerate marble into an aggregate for the mortar for the new structures of the Middle Ages. Inside were statues of six Vestal Virgins, stashed together like firewood. Their arms had been snapped off. The image
Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC
The Royal Academy has had the brilliant and brave idea of asking James Fenton to write its history. Fenton is not only a great poet, but also one of Britain’s most interesting writers on art. In his first collection Terminal Moraine (1972) he published a beautiful poem on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and
On 12 November 1759 London’s leading artists assembled at the Turk’s Head pub on Gerrard Street and decided to put on the first ever exhibition of contemporary art in Britain. They became the Society of Artists, and Matthew Hargreaves is the first scholar to tell their story. The Society tends to be written up as
Recently an auction house in Swindon sold for more than £11,000 a cracked tooth of Napoleon’s, extracted during his exile on St Helena. Although Napoleon did little except talk, write and dig and garden, his final six years have been the subject of more books than any other period of his life. It was recently
For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine o’clock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleon’s courtiers during the six years of the emperor’s captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the
My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who
At the Italian seaside last week I flicked through the hotel’s copy of a translation of Gombrich’s Story of Art. The publisher had reproduced Reynolds’s portrait of his friend Giuseppi Baretti to a larger size than any other British picture. ‘Ottimo,’ said the text, and by some odd process of displacement I was all the
In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading ‘Mr Gainsborough, Painter’. The artist’s showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister’s millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled