Hermione Eyre

From 1940, at Benton End, near Hadleigh in Suffolk, the artist Cedric Morris brought his eye to breeding irises. Eliminating hated shades of ‘salmon or knicker’, he was, according to his biographer Hugh St Clair, ‘unstinting in his efforts to produce a pure, delicate pink’. Forty years of dedication brought a wild abundance to the garden, which was packed with cultivars, including ‘Benton Baggage’ (pale rose with a blue blaze), ‘Benton Persephone’ (very large white flowers) and ‘Benton Mocha’ (coffee-coloured, with a bright orange beard). A living flower painting.

I approached this exhibition like a conscientious critic, poring over the catalogue, the signage, making notes… And then, about halfway through, I drifted. I dawdled. I stopped thinking and gave in to the aesthetic rapture, the rhyming half-tones, the ‘breath-like softness’ of Whistler’s paint. I was a disciple, briefly, of art for art’s sake, even though I wasn’t wearing white, nor carrying a peony. It was the room full of Nocturnes that sent me. Their opiate-like gloomth put me right beside the Thames at dusk. No, that’s too pedestrian. Not beside the Thames; with the Thames. Whistler lived on Cheyne Walk, but watching the river was not enough; he would take a boat out at night to prepare for his paintings.

At Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s home of 42 years, now owned by the National Trust, lies his painting studio. Reached by a path through the green-gold gardens, it is a standalone building with a little doorway and a soaring ceiling, clearly a place of refuge, and recreation, but also of serious commitment. The walls display a hundred or so paintings, lit by a big window that gives on to the garden and the purple horizon of the Weald of Kent; his armchair is set at the easel, near his twisted paint-tubes, housed in a former cigar humidor. His bespoke painting overcoat is flung over the armchair, his drink of ‘mouthwash’ (a splash of whisky and a lot of soda) set ready. It was here that Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection, had his revelation.

I feared this summing-up of Tracey Emin’s career might be self-congratulatory – biennale here, damehood there. But it’s Emin at her most operatic, facing mortality after surviving extensive surgery for bladder cancer in 2021. Blood and suffering are its subjects: the broken body, and the ascension of the spirit. The Young British Artists are getting on for 60, and Emin embraces it. Arranged in the centre of the exhibition is a ‘corridor to the afterlife’, inspired by an Egyptian tomb, dark and narrow. Along one side are sexy Polaroids she took of herself 26 years ago, along the other, gruesome hospital selfies. You might not want to look too closely at the latter, but the dialogue between the two is strong. ‘You thought you had problems?

Roll up, there’s a new old master in town. Or a new old mistress, if you prefer. Michaelina Wautier (1614-89) is revealed here as a painter who excelled within the genres of her time: flower painting, portraiture, emblematic tronies, and, if the scholars are right, classical epic, too. The new Royal Academy show cracks open the received idea of what a Flemish woman operating in the decades immediately after Rubens and Van Dyck could achieve. Her c.1650 self-portrait at the easel is a confident statement. She is enthroned under a mantel of lusciously painted black velvet, which looks restrictive, but emerging from it comes her agile, three-dimensional painting hand. Her beauty is incidental, an aspect of her concentration and skill.

When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorientating, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the iPad sketches he made have been put together here, blended into a frieze, a walk-through panorama of the seasons rendered with Vivaldi-like virtuosity. As we move along the curve of this frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles As we move along the curve of this 90-metre frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles. He distils the garden to its dramatic essences.

A pilgrimage to Cardiff Central, sorry, Caerdydd Canolog (according to the signage in the station, which also had my return train’s destination ‘Lundain Padd’ton’) to see the new Gwen John show. She is being lauded as Wales’s greatest artist, but she left Tenby at 18 in 1895, and never went back. After studying at the Slade she moved to Paris, fell in love with Rodin, and adopted the Catholic faith.

The long overlooked staircase by Hogarth at St Bartholomew’s Hospital has been cleaned and restored in a £9.5 million scheme. It is now open to the public, the management says, for the first time since the 1730s, although when I lived nearby in the 2000s, I used to slip in to look at it sometimes. No one seemed to mind. Murals are of course the original site-specific artworks, and you have to enter a working hospital to see this one. Literally: turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural. Turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural You might pass a small group of patients smoking outside in the James Gibbs quadrangle; I remember seeing people who were visibly sick, in wheelchairs or on ventilators, puffing away.

‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer. Mystically devoted to the Berkshire village near the Thames where he grew up, Spencer was synonymous with Cookham as early as 1912, when he was at the Slade; ‘Cookham’ was his nickname. His greatest work is probably ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’ (1924-7), and he lived out his life there. He became known for pushing an old pram full of paints around town. The former Wesleyan Chapel, where he worshipped as a boy, is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. So it was intriguing to come across this new show connecting him with Suffolk.

Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though a big fan of Egypt, was still slightly hesitant about whether this would be the most interesting angle. It began with a 4,000-year-old stele, or tombstone, on loan from the Louvre, praising the sculptural and painterly skills of an artisan called Irtysen, about whom, of course, nothing more is known. The perennial problem. General information, however, came thick and fast. We learned that a cooperative of skilled workers was a hemut, and a singular skilled worker a hemu.

The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in Ayrshire, they met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming lifelong partners and painters. Well-connected in louche literary London, their conversational barbs were recorded by Julian Maclaren-Ross, their jig-dancing antics noted by Joan Wyndham, their drunken fights observed by Anthony Cronin – so that one sometimes forgets what sort of art they made. This show, staged in a former municipal building in Lewes, is a reminder. The work is haunted, unbeautiful British neo-romanticism, second cousin to Piper and Sutherland. They established this angsty, angular modernist style in the 1940s.

This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s 17 years on the throne with detail, focus and flair. There are 34 items here that she owned personally – opulent, carefree objects that resonate with impending disaster. These precious items need protecting from light, and in the first room curator Sarah Grant cleverly runs with this, evoking the candlelit ambience of a Versailles ball by hanging silver baubles from the ceiling and covering the walls with smoked mirrors. Here we have a taste of Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe – its annual budget peaking at £1.

In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat a pointillist melody as he works, crotchet-dabs of blue, blue, blue, red, red… Seurat’s muse, meanwhile, is called Dot. Seeing the National Gallery’s somewhat overloaded presentation made me long for the light touch of Sondheim.

If you came to this show accidentally, or as a layperson, it could confirm any prejudices you might have about avant-garde sculpture. Pretentious, ugly and resorting to kink. Those pendulous string bags, that enormous turd – gimme a break. Except that would be a mistake. Because the work here is the real thing: the 1960s originals that spawned a million imitations and parodies. The exhibition is perhaps a little cool about selling itself, so allow me. This is a snapshot of the work of three artists around the time they all took part in a 1966 New York show called Eccentric Abstraction. Two of the artists, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, were nascent superstars.

This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’, applying that sturdy English put-down ‘arch’, and generally carping at ‘rich insider’ Sir Grayson Perry for posing as an outsider artist. Word-of-mouth reviews were completely different, however, almost as if gallery-goers, free from the necessity of taking an art-historical position, had just really enjoyed the whole bonkers experience. To get to the exhibition, which is down in the former cellars of Hertford House, you first walk through the Wallace Collection, past its gleaming ormolu and onyx treasures.

‘Remember, Roy, white flowers are the only chic ones.’ So Cecil Beaton remarked to Roy Strong, possibly as a mild put-down to the young curator. But it was a curious put-down to make because Beaton broke his own rule happily, buying mountainous armfuls of speckled yellow, pink and scarlet carnations at Covent Garden and longing to fill his borders with Korean chrysanthemums and purple salvias. This small exhibition at the Garden Museum enjoys the sweet-pea surface of Beaton’s creations, while giving a flash of the glinting secateur that also made up such an important part of his personality. Beaton’s ability as an image-maker was astounding. Those famous photos of his Cambridge days with the Bright Young Things are still outrageous, a mad foray into camp pastoral.