art

Did I Tell You About My Holiday?

/ aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

I will start with the apology that we were lucky enough to be able to go to Florence and surrounding areas in September.

Now the apology is over, I can tell you some stuff about it.

So, as I was saying, we got to go to Italy when there were few other tourists – well there were some young German professionals who had driven down to Italy – some not so much working from home as working from the terrace of a pleasant agro-tourisma.

I could show off about the places we got to stay which we would never normally be able to afford or book. Shall I ? Oh, you look less than enthusiastic at the prospect of me boasting.

Are you sure you don’t want to see some photos? Really no? OK then, I will move on…

But just let me tell you this. Because there was no queue and not many people, there was space and time to look at some pictures. I won’t go on about the big stuff but look at this. Who’d have thought – Mark Rylance in the Uffizi.

Anyway, moving on, I am an atheist but the Best Beloved and I do like to visit a church. 

And there were some very fine examples in Italy ( did I mention we were there in September?…)

I do like a good fresco and some of them were very fine indeed.

This is the drunkenness of Noah. I didn’t know anything about this biblical story so I looked it up and it turns out there are various interpretations including this one which I find a bit hard to believe:

Another explanation offered is that Noah was after the cognitive powers that could be harnessed through alcohol, wanting to broaden his horizons in the study of Torah.

Now I know that whilst any one of us can believe that we are much more witty and erudite when we have had a drop too much – we would be wrong – but I can’t ever recalling anyone I know thinking that a gallon of wine was going to sharpen their brains to the point where they could study complex theological texts to get never before known insights.

Then there is this explanation:

Noah wasn’t trying to imbibe spirits to lift his own. He also wasn’t looking to drink in moderation to jump-start his brain. Noah’s plan from the beginning was to go all in, to get completely under-the-table, stripped-down-to-the-flesh plastered.

Having witnessed extreme depravity and immorality, and the destruction it left in its wake, Noah had come face to face with the consequences of sin. Noah got drunk (and subsequently disrobed) as an ambitious attempt to return the world to the innocent time before sin. He was trying to undo and reverse the negative effects of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden.

Really? Let’s get really drunk and drive out all sin. I think you need a stronger drug to be able to convince yourself of that.

Anyway, in the same church there was this lovely fresco marred only by the fact that Jospeh seems to be having his dream whilst covered by a rather cheap and nasty duvet cover. ( Sorry, if it  matches the one you love most.)

Indeed that duvet cover seems to have been all the rage with San Gimignano painters as look, here is another one.

(Job lot at the local Dunelm maybe.)

Now, this one is part of the decoration in a bedroom and the series of frescos  which are the equivalent of a wedding day photo album.

An interesting way to start your wedding day is apparently riding on your new husband’s back and beating him. I make no comment, but clearly the onlookers in the bird hide are somewhat surprised.

I am impressed he keeps his hat on throughout the whole series of events…..

I love this next one because that young man has clearly just remembered he has forgotten his mother’s birthday, or to renew his MOT, or any number of things we have all forgotten with Covid brains.

What exactly he is doing sitting at the bedside of someone who insists on wearing his hat of office in bed, is anyone’s guess.

I used to work for the National Rivers Authority and learned quite a bit about flooding – and the misery a flooded home – so I am interested in San Frediano and his rake.

This ex-Irish prince-come-hermit was appointed the bishop of Lucca.

( I can tell you of a lovely place to stay in Lucca if you wanted some holiday information, just saying.)

Anyway the good people of Lucca came to said bishop and asked if he could do anything about the flooding of the River Serchio and Fred ( as I am sure his friends called him) took a rake to the river’s edge.

The legend goes that he persuaded the river to follow his rake and took it away from the danger zone.

There are all sorts of things I could say about movement of water courses in flood plains and displaced water and canalising rivers and the impact and so on and so on. But I won’t bore you.

What I will say is that by the looks of the strapping lads and the work going on, the bishop was smart enough to get a few more flood resources to hand than just his rake.

And finally, there are times when you need a break from church visiting.

More on Aunt Jessie

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Just a quick re-cap: the Best Beloved and I have an autumn project to find out who Aunt Jessie was, and who painted her.

So, this is a long read and there is only one picture

Two strokes of luck and serendipity have got us this far:

Aunt Jessie was Jessamine Thompson, a dressmaker by profession, born 1874 and who died in a mental hospital in 1943.

She lived as head of the household with her brother James and sister Margaret, in Heaton and then by 1939, she was living alone in Jesmond.

We only ever knew her as Aunt Jessie, and had no other information except that she had come down the female line to my BB, and that his mother’s family were based in and around Newcastle.

Having posted about this, it turns out the BB’s niece was smart enough to ask her grandmother (Joan) about Aunt Jessie and to get her grandmother to write out that bit of the family tree – and was is more, she had kept it. 

This is what Caroline ( aforementioned niece – it may be hard to keep up with all these family links..) knows:

The picture is Jessimane Thompson. She is Joan’s actual Aunt. Sister of Joan’s mother Margaret Thompson. Daughter of James Thompson and Jane Ellen Watson who married in 1868. Jessimane never married. Her sister Elizabeth did and named her daughter Jessimane

Caroline also said her grandmother had said Aunt Jessie was clever and independent, and indeed she has that air about her.

Meanwhile, as they say, I was Googling trying to find out about the art scene in Newcastle in that period when I came across a really interesting leaflet called Artists in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne 1820 -1900.

Click to access 19c-Newcastle-artists.pdf

(We were pretty sure Aunt Jessie had been painted around the turn of the century judging by the clothes she wears – but what do we know…..)

Anyway, it was a really interesting read and as a long shot, I looked up the author, Gill Hedley, and sent her an email asking if she might be able to point me in the direction of research. 

I was thinking she might point me in the direction of an amateur art historian with an interest in the period who might be able to – well, actually I wasn’t sure what.

We have no signature on the painting as far as we have found yet, so identifying the artist and even their relationship is going to require research skills we have yet to discover in ourselves…

The other night, waiting for the kettle to boil as tea in bed with a good book is an essential, I was checking my emails and imagine my delight when I found this:

What a nice email to receive, especially prompted by something I wrote so very many years ago. 

I now write more or less full time, largely biographies, so this sort of research piques my interest. I’ll start by saying that it is a very nice painting. I have no instant idea of the artist but am happy to look a bit further. I have looked up Miss Thompson (what a lovely name, Jessamine) on an ancestry site and find she was a dressmaker born 1874, died 1943. Very sadly, that was in a mental hospital as I expect you know  Forgive me, if you did not. Perhaps she lost someone 1914-18. She lived with a brother and a sister in Heaton as an adult and was the head of the household. Then in 1939, she was on her own in Jesmond, where I grew up;  she was in a street very near where I lived when I wrote that leaflet.

I would guess the portrait was painted before the war, maybe 1910, but why? Did she have a friend who was a professional painter? Maybe the artist was a dressmaking client or his wife was? The artist and the sitter knew each other, clearly. This is not a commission.  Intriguing.

I will look at all the portraits in the Tyne and Wear museums collection to start with. These are all on the wonderful ARTUK website but I have it in print form which makes clicking through a bit easier.

How annoying to have no signature. Is there nothing on the back at all? Nothing to be seen anywhere on the front under a very strong raking light? You are safe to use spit on a soft cloth to enable a closer look in either bottom corner…socially distant, of course!

Anyway, your really long shot has found its aim and I will see what I can do.

 Best wishes

Gill

What a stroke of amazing luck to find someone who has much better things to do, willing to help.

If you have any doubt that Gill Hedley has better things to do than research Aunt Jessie, see here

https://www.gillhedley.co.uk

And I have found an art restorer who says she will have a look at Aunt Jessie and tell us what is needed to fix her up.

She said it was not necessarily all that common to sign a painting especially if the sitter and the painter knew each other well and the painter was not a big name.

So, even when we get the back off, we may be none the wiser.

I sent a photo to a Newcastle auctioneers to see if they can shed any light and got a reply saying portraits weren’t great sellers – if you don’t have any connection with the person, why have it, except to decorate a room in your B&B and who wants to pay much for that…

He said,

An excellent painting that unfortunately, may struggle to find a market.  Portraits are particularly difficult to sell.

Auction value is probably less than £60.  We would accept this for auction but you should consider carefully before proceeding.

I take this as meaning, please don’t put this into an auction ( not that we ever would.)

So, here we are so far.

But who was Elizabeth mentioned by Joan in her family tree conversation as we know that Jessamine had a sister Margaret ( mother of Joan) and a brother James who are in the records.

So, to add mystery. An ancestry site records an Elizabeth Thomson, daughter of James and Jane Ellen ( Jessamine’s parents’ names) and she was christened in September 1874.

Which is the same birth year as Jessamine.

But there is no mention of her except for Caroline’s record that she married and had a daughter which she named Jessamine….

And who painted Aunt Jessie?

Lottery Winnings

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Within almost spitting distance of our hotel room, there were two conflicting ways in which to get rid of quite a lot of my lottery winnings.

It was the end of the season so the very big yacht/boat/whatever/, was all alone against the jetty and watchable from our hotel bedroom window.

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Indeed so close were we that – if we had only had the right passwords – we could have logged onto to crew, captain’s, owner’s or guests’ wifi.

It is called Apogee which I thought, perhaps a little optimistically, meant that its owner had a sense of humour.

It turns out that its owner wants rid – perhaps, I thought, indeed it had been the apogee, and then things had gone downhill for him.

(The price has been reduced by $500,000 and it is now going for $24,950,000.

Or you can charter it for $275,000 per week.)

But no, a little research shows that the owner is someone called Darwin Deason ( yes he is American) worth some $1.45 billion dollars so he can probably live with the current disappointment of no sale.

I looked up what we might get for that amount of winnings and the specs were indeed impressive – if, I have to say, tasteless.

The main salon is panelled in mahogany and has white carpet and brown furniture.

Well, white carpet is so James Bond circa 1970s and completely impractical ( for the cleaning crew.)

And if I was out and about in Med on a boat like that, in the sunshine, why on earth would I want mahogany and brown furniture – I could get that in Furniture Land in Croydon.Image result for yacht apogee images

Mind you, the spec says, guests can converse there in comfort whilst waiting for their dinner to be served at the 10-seater dinning table – indoor one or outdoor one, so that is all right.

Image result for yacht apogee images

Image result for yacht apogee images

The master suite has his and hers bathrooms, a walk-in wardrobe, and office and a sitting room.

And of course there are guest rooms though one of them has a double sofa bed which hardly strikes the same note of luxury – I had one of those in my first student flat.

There is a gym, jacuzzi and two bars – one each side so you can shuttle across to see a different view, or oscillate between sun and shade.

There is an indoor pool and an area at the bow ‘to store motorised toys’.

Now I didn’t think they’d be posh rubber rings and indeed they aren’t…..

‘Two Nouvurania tender dingys with a 300 hp & 230 hp engine respectively, four 3 person Kawasaki water bikes, various scuba diving equipment, water-skis, fishing gear, underwater aft lights, two see through bottomed Explorer kayaks.’

All this is courtesy of a 2013  -refit which is something my other choice to spend my lottery millions, did not have.

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This was the home of an artist.

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It turns out – there has been time to do quite a lot of research given that we have been somewhat rain-confined to our holiday rental – Angelos Giallinas 1867-1939 was one of the last of the Heptanese School of Art.

That got you sitting up straighter didn’t it?

So, to quail your beating heart, here is the information you need and I am sure you will feel better for it:

‘The School of the Seven Islands, (Hepatense) also known as the Ionian Islands’ School succeeded the Cretan School as the leading school of Greek post-Byzantine painting after Crete fell to the Ottomans in 1669. Like the Cretan school it combined Byzantine traditions with an increasing Western European artistic influence, and also saw the first significant depiction of secular subjects. The school was based in the Ionian Islands, which were not part of Ottoman Greece, from the middle of the 17th century until the middle of the 19th century.’

So, Giallinas had painted murals at Sisi’s palace in Achelleion – where we were just today but I hadn’t known that when I visited – how exciting…..

(I am leaving it to you to do the research on Sisi and her palace and rather tragic history.)

I read that Giallinas, after studying in various places, decided to specialise in watercolours and had his first solo exhibition in Athens in 1886 where he met the British ambassador Clare Ford.

Then I got a bit carried away.

I was going to make sure this lovely, neglected building was restored and what is more, not just made beautiful (with no white carpets and places to stow your ‘water toys’) but into a (tasteful) place where he and the female – because what a shock, we had a female, yes female, ambassador in the 19th century – were celebrated.

I had salons planned, rooms, other rooms, gallery spaces – and though I am not a fan of 19th century watercolours  I was willing to be liberal and show them off – and did I mention rooms? – a very nice set of rooms for friends and family.

(Not mahogany and brown upholstery but something much more light and airy and suitable and yes, in better taste.)

And what is more, I planned a celebration of this unknown female ambassador. 

I would track down her history, her letters, her relationship with Giallanas……

Then, I did some more research and found that Clare Ford had commissioned our artist to paint landscapes in Venice, Rhodes, Istanbul and had arranged an exhibition in London and introduced him to London society.

Well done that woman, I thought.

Clare Ford, it turns out, was Sir Francis Clare Ford.

My Best Beloved and I spent the evening thinking of colour schemes, but I am not sure the millions are yet decided.

Sappho and Christmas 2017

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So, if you don’t get your Oxfam retail act together for Christmas sales, you are in trouble.

We, or less modestly I should say, I have been hoarding books for Christmas since late August – and not just any old books but those which are in such mint condition no one would know they are second hand.

Upstairs in the shop there have been teetering piles of plastic crates with imperious labels on them saying ‘please leave for table display’ or ‘please leave for Lucy to deal with’ or ‘gets your mitts off, I have these put aside for special use’ – no, not the last one.

Now here is a weird thing.

In the autumn sometime I had found an art book called Pastoral Landscapes which had lovely woodcut images which had links to pastoral poets. Never seen one before – and it was worth a bit.

A fellow volunteer, let’s call him Jim, was recently in the shop and, as ever, more than diligently sorting books, when I reached into one of those crates to show him this nice book.

We chatted about it and I went back to put it back for later use – and then he called to me.

I went into the other room, where he was, and the next book he had pulled out of the bag he was sorting was, yes dear reader, another copy of the very same book….

They have both sold.

Indeed by now almost all of the excellent Christmas gift books have sold so I am down to sorting out the ‘dregs’ and working out what table display to make of them.

When I work it out – actually that will be Thursday – it will be I think a green and red display and then next week we will go for the nativity look – though you have to race in immediately after Christmas to get rid of it as there is nothing worse than a nativity after the event.

We open Sundays in the run up to Christmas and so I had the key to the shop and, against the rules, went in early to create a Christmas table I had been planning – a blue table.

It was all blue china set out like a table setting with blue books on it and loathe though I am to take any credit, so many people said how lovely it looked.

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Now here is the thing, the table stuff sold slowly – but that is not just what it is there for (though that is nice too.)

It is there to get people into the shop and to appreciate what an effort we have made, how nice it looks, how we work to make the window and table look good every week of the year and especially at Christmas – and then go on to buy other books.

And they did.

That week, we made £2,499.87 – I think any volunteer in the shop would have put in that extra 13p to round it up if we had known.

By the way, you see that books called Snowflake and Schnapps? Well, it was a lovely cookery book – and dear reader, I was tempted.

But, lacking milk for essential tea-making one day, I went to Waitrose to get some and bumped into a regular customer who I knew to be a cook/proper chef type and I told him about it.

Once I had the milk, I went to the bank or something, and by the time I got back to the shop, there he was with it in his hand.

I had to take a photo of one recipe I had my eye on and he said we would share the books’s recipes, but no way was he letting it go.

So, one or two other little stories:

I have a habit of setting the people on the till a challenge to sell a particular book that shift.

So, we had a volunteer, let’s call her Margaret, who had a book to sell and when I came down from sorting things out upstairs (aka behind-the-scenes), it was still there on the desk.

I was berating her, in an oh-so-jocular fashion about the fact it was still there, and a couple heard us talking and said they hadn’t noticed it before but how lovely it was.

The man said his daughter was an artist – and it was an art book – so Margaret and I went into overdrive extolling its attributes.

But, he said, his daughter was a children’s book illustrator and this book wouldn’t be for her.

Oh, said I brightly, I can’t stop now, I have to get home, but I am sure I have a book on children’s illustrators somewhere upstairs. Give you number to Margaret and I will call you when I find where I have put it.

He did. I did. He bought it. Margaret sold the other book to the next customer.

The small books are often the interesting ones and I found one which was Sappho’s poetry with art nouveau illustrations of the period, about 4 inches tall, handcut pages and rare-ish.

I was showing it to a volunteer, let’s call her Judith, and we were admiring the illustrations.

She is a lovely woman who gardens, paints and decorates not only her own house but her son’s, she and I talk auctions, antiques, cooking, she also is an excellent needlewoman I understand, and she treks in by bus to volunteer with us.

She is a woman of a certain age and, given that we were talking about Sappho, the subject got onto sexuality, gender, homosexuality, gender fluidity, transgender issues, what a waste a good looking gay man is to us heterosexual women – however older we may be.

And, how all these issues should be on a live and let live and let’s get past it basis – all the normal chat of an Oxfam volunteering conversation – but apparently not one her granddaughter had expected to find so easy when she had broached the subject.

(Don’t, granddaughters, assume stuff about your lovely grandmas.)

The book was worth a bit, so we agreed what we needed was a relatively well off lesbian shopping in Oxfam Petersfield for that just so unusual Christmas present.

The book is still in our cabinet should you be that person.

 

 

A Very Good Day

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As you know, there are good and not so good days ‘working’ at the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield – and today was a good day.

I am going to save the best bits to last, so you are welcome to skip.

Volunteers are always a scarce resource but we have a few, valuable, new ones and they are making such a difference.

They make my life a whole lot easier because they do things I mean to do but just haven’t time and, of course, the more volunteers, the less the chance we have to shut the shop when someone goes on holiday, or is ill, or has a better offer for an afternoon.

Today one volunteer did a sterling job of putting in date order the five crates books of the Institute of Naval Architects from 1940 to 2004 and logging the missing volumes so I can list them on the internet. (Should you be interested, £200 and buyer collects.)

Another volunteer said she liked sorting things out so I asked her to sort out the jumble upstairs on two shelves of travel books, natural history books and transport books – Steam Railways Past and Present should not be in natural history…..

After that I walked her round the shop and explained what was what on each shelf.

Now, dear reader, you might think that the shelves would be like a supermarket – here is history/baking goods, here is academic/canned vegetables, here is crafts/cheese, but it is rarely that simple.

We have no control over what is donated and we cannot have empty shelves so we are always juggling shelf-fillers and categories.

(Who’d have thought we needed to fill two shelves with books on mathematics and maths puzzles – but that is what we did when the Christmas goods were over and removed.)

I was worried that she would be overwhelmed and put off but at the end of her afternoon, she said, ‘I feel as if I have only been here 5 minutes and it has been hours, and there is so much left to do, this is  great.’

That’s what I like to hear – someone who has found what they like doing in the complex business of running a bookshop and is planning on putting more money on their car parking ticket next week so she has longer to sort things out.

So, now to the bits that added a good feeling to the day.

Readers with a good memory will recall that some time ago at the bottom of a box of rubbish books, I found a book called The Square Book of Animals – a children’s book with lovely illustrations and which sold on the internet for £450.

Well guess what, at the bottom of another box of books a few days ago, I found something called The Rabbit Book by Charles Pettafor, and again I thought this might be worth something.

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(Children’s books of some age that are not wrecked, scrawled on, and in one piece are often worth a bit – just because they have survived relatively intact.)

I looked it up on Bookfinder and Abebooks but couldn’t find any for sale. I looked it up on Google and found it mentioned, but non for sale.

Now that makes it rare.

So I called our excellent book specialist and said I had a tasty treat for him – I don’t ask him to come in all the time, just when I have something(s) I can’t price.

Usually, he can find its price and, usually, I am disappointed, but I am learning from his tuition and this time I thought it was a good find.

He came in and we looked at it. ‘It is pre Beatrix Potter,’ he said, ‘It is about a rabbit and look at the illustrations. Could he have influenced her? Could this rabbit have sparked her?’

Not according to Google – he was not listed as an influence in her.

But still, we had a book that people were looking for. We had a book which we thought had a small print run. We had a book which was a children’s book from about or pre 1900 in great condition with lovely illustrations.

We decided to put it on the internet for £500. I will let you know if it sells for that.

And, finally.

Some time ago I found a small glass vase and I mean very small, on the shelf out the back and it was very light.

I happened to be meeting that very same book specialist and he is also an archeologist and a trustee of the local museum and so I asked him whether it might be old.

(I love the idea of old glass – how can it have survived? How lovely that it was blown by hand as it were…)

Last time I rang him, I asked whether it had got information on whether indeed it was indeed old and he said –  he couldn’t find it.

‘What,’ I cried, “ I wanted to buy that!’

‘OK, I will bring you another Roman glass vase instead’ he said.

And he did – how amazing is that….?

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I can’t tell you how delighted I am with this.

It turns out that the local museum has the original and if that turns out to be real rather than a good fake, I will buy that too.

A good day or what?

You can’t overcook a mushroom

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It is a time of mysteries at the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield and that is not a sentence which often forms itself around the mundane life of our bookshop and what is more, they are nothing to do with books.

I will leave the most recent mystery to last, and start with the first.

( This is a long story, dear reader, I must warn you, so either get yourself a drink and settle down or decide you really must break off and go and clean out the fridge. I will quite understand.)

We have an art sale of books and pictures about twice a year and they are, by our standards, a big money spinner.

Most of the art we get is not, shall we say, of the highest calibre – amateur daubs, dreary and not very good Victorian prints of Bath, watercolours of geraniums in France, that sort of thing.

But now and then we get some good stuff.

(Three large oil paintings did a treat as centrepieces in the window and though they were not worth the £200 we originally thought, they did sell for £50 a piece.)

Then, by complete chance, a week before we were due to do our sale, the nice man closing down his art shop in a nearby town, brought us all he was left with. Including, a large image of Marilyn Monroe that he had paid some £300 for. (Whether we can get anything like that at auction – for that is where we will sell it, remains to be seen but, be assured,I will let you know what happens.)

I assume by now, if you are not clearing out the fridge, you are asking yourself what is, in the remotest sense, mysterious about all this – well, nothing.

But, as I was rifling through art donations, I came across this:

Now I am a sucker for any painting with snow in it and any Russian painting with snow in it gets my heart beating a little faster.

But I am not sure whether this is an amateur daub worth diddly-squat or the nice early piece by an up and coming Russian artist – and Russians are willing to pay quite a lot for their art these days.

I put out on Facebook the image of the cyrillic and what I presume is the translation on the back and asked for help – and indeed got it not least via the Polish friend of a French friend.

But no one has come back with any information about the artist.

It took it to a local auction house who said they weren’t sure either and the only way to tell whether it was a rare find or a piece of nice junk, was to put it in the auction and see what happened.

Oh, dear reader, my dilemma. I want that painting. But I also want Oxfam to get as much money as possible. So, what to do?

I brought it home and asked another auction house – where I happened to be, bidding for stuff but more of that in another blog – even if you have stayed with me this long, there are only so many diversions and sentences you can put up with.

They said they had an art expert and send over some picture of the painting and they would get her to have a look.

All excited I did that – but she is away for two weeks.

Then I Googled for longer and with more patience than is usual and found that there is a register of several thousand Russian artists but it costs money – remember this is Oxfam so we can’t go mad and short of crowd-funding the registration fee or getting my best-beloved to pay up on what might be a wild goose chase, that is not going to happen.

The Polish friend of my French friend suggested I got in contact with the union of Russian artists, and I did, and I have heard nothing.

In the village is someone who deals in East European art and in the ways of villages and I am thinking of contacting him and asking for help.

The second mystery is about three photograph albums which belonged to, we think, the son of the more famous father, Lord Raglan – in case you re racking your brains, the father sent off the boys in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

But you can get the full details of that story in a previous blog. All that remains is to see what they fetch at an April auction.

So, the final mystery.

I had been sorting and sacking a depressing amount of books on Monday and needed a rest.

So, I went upstairs and rooted around the Old and Interesting shelves to get them in some order.

It is my contention that in our shop you can put something down and it might well be there several years later but then again, if you need it be there two days later, it will have vanished.

It is also my belief that there are all kinds of hidden treasures to be unearthed if only you have the time to rootle behind and under shelves and desks and boxes.

Anyway, on this occasion, I found, on a windowsill and god knows how long they had been there, two postcard and picture albums with a handwritten slip in one which read, ‘My parents Eileen and William Shackleton holidays in Switzerland 1906 -1913.’

There were indeed images of Switzerland – but also, I have to say, Llandudno and other places.

I know that anything relating to Ernest Shackleton is priceless but were these people related.

My Googling has not yet been extensive enough to find out and right this minute I need to go and cook a nice risotto for the best beloved so I will ask any reader making it this far and who has any information, please let me know.

I am pretty sure that is a very long shot, but thank you anyway.

PS I had to leave off and go cook that risotto but I had left those mushrooms cooking and realised (too late) that you can over-cook a mushroom, so it will be a ham and pea risotto…..

 

Art in Our House

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We have quite a lot of art in our house – some of it brought from our previous lives (and quite different tastes ) and therefore some pieces are having to live cheek by jowl with pieces they would never normally want to cohabit with.

In our bedroom we have what I think is a great piece. Painted for me by a struggling artist – he swapped this piece for a sofa I wanted to get rid of – it is an abstract made up of lots of small squares in which you can find all sorts of images if you look at it in the right way.

I can find hens in a wintery yard, hook-nosed man, birds, reindeer..… sorry this is not a good image of it but you, dear reader, get the general idea.

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It used to hang it in my sitting room in a previous life and many a friend has sat on the sofa – obviously not the one I swapped for it – and found all sorts. Mostly they had a wine glass in their hands, but it whiled away many a pleasant half hour or so.

As it was painted for me. So it has a lot of snow in it. I like it very much.

(That cannot be said of my best beloved and my family who with the exception of my very smart, insightful, artistically thoughtful niece, seem to have no inclination appreciate it at all.)

In our sitting room we have some pictures which really, badly needed lighting better and it is amazing what a difference good lighting makes to how a painting looks.

Never ones to go half measures, we set about designing and installing really good lighting appropriate to each picture.

No, of course we didn’t.

But we did buy, from Ikea as it happens, a central fitting with directional lights so each picture now gets its own lighting. It works very well.

But it does show up that the painting of Aunt Jessie needs some attention. Aunt Jessie is some relative of the best beloved’s mother’s family but we have no more details.

 

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Isn’t she an amazing woman?

She used to hang above a mantlepiece in Brussels which could be seen from the street and more than once, a passing neighbour would stop us and say how much they liked to see her as they walked past.

One day soon we will get her cleaned up and the small tear in her mended.

But what needs more urgent attention are the more than 20 pictures which we have earmarked for the small bedroom.

Framed by the BB way back in the Autumn, they are waiting to be hung.

It is a testament to this year’s good weather that we decided to wait until there were some grey days when we weren’t doing anything else to set about hanging them.

As I speak I can see them over my left shoulder, all propped up and anxious to be hung….

Remind me one day to show you all the lovely woodcuts I have found in books falling apart and the hare painting, and while I am it, remind me to tell you about the Japanese images we have got in the kitchen and the two images my BB bought as cards for me to describe our relationship, and then remind me to talk about how we bought the painting by a Brussels painter of the walk we used to do – and it is a snow image, and the boat painting we bought in the Paris antiques market and the painting I bought him when he thought I was leaving him – and he loves best , and the one over the sofa in the kitchen, painted by the same artist who did my bedroom painting – this time I swapped it for a bed…….