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Letter
Whereas many Londoners have been queuing for
the Hogarth
exhibition at Tate Britain or the Canaletto
exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
this week, we have been enjoying two tiny but
equally wonderful London exhibitions. One is the
portraits of Women
Writers at the National Portrait Gallery,
and the other is Home
and Garden at the Geffrye Museum . The first
is simply twenty-four black-and-white photographs
of novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Brazil,
Georgette Heyer, Rosamond Lehmann, Dodie Smith
and Rebecca West. Noel
Streatfeild is among them, here is the unusually
informal 1936 portrait by Bassano:
I particularly loved the charming untidiness
of Noel’s desk, rather as though she had
been caught unawares; she would certainly have
thought untidiness was essential to creativity
(cf the Persephone Fortnightly
Letter for 15 January this year). Women Writers
at the NPG is on until mid-June.
Home and Garden is in fact Part Three of an exhibition;
the first two parts, the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, were put on in 2003-4. The current
exhibition is 1914-1960 and Part Four, 1960-2006,
follows in October of this year (Part Three is
on until June.). All the paintings are of domestic
interiors, some with people and some without.
As the excellent, and fully illustrated, catalogue
explains: ‘Taken as a whole, the project
provides a thorough exploration of how English
urban middle-class domestic spaces have been portrayed
in paintings and drawings over the last three
centuries.’ Unusually, the emphasis is on
the word ‘urban’, on the English urban
middle classes at home, ‘not just what their
homes might have looked like, important as that
is, but their daily experience of home, the activities
they undertook and in which spaces, and what the
main influences were in shaping their behaviour
patterns and sense of values.’ The introduction
to the catalogue concludes: ‘Academic interest
in the history of the middle classes at home has
been growing in recent years, but compared with
studies of the homes and habits of the upper and
working classes, we are still in the early stages.’
One of the aims of Persephone Books is to contribute
to this process, and to encourage our readers
to spend as much time as they possibly can reading,
or knitting, as in this 1937 painting from the
exhibition by Donald Towner, ‘Alice Ashley
on a Green Seat’:
This has been lent to the Home and Garden exhibition
by the Hampstead
Museum (another small museum well worth visiting).
I love it because of the peaceful atmosphere,
the lemonade, the patterned dress, the cushions,
and in particular because of the swing seat. I
have just realised that I have longed for one
all my life and maybe in 2007 I should buy one!
We are, amid the wild bursts of rainshowers,
enjoying the lovely daffodils blooming outside
the shop:
Nicola Beauman
28 February 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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