MAKING PROGRESS

Inspection

I inspected the cleaning of the ceilings last week, which was very exciting. The conservators have now started work on the chancel ceiling, which is quite different in technique from the nave ceiling. The chancel ceiling is painted directly onto the plaster covering the vault, with a rather rough surface. It even looks as though a little sand has been added to the paint in order to make the surface glitter in the light. Or possibly the opposite; an expert on Victorian painted schemes thinks they deliberately added texture to their paint because they were afraid that there would be too much reflection from shiny oil paint, as opposed to the flat matt colours of renaissance fresco. Either way, the result is the same, a desirably varied surface texture which will reflect light unevenly. The 1890 account of the church says the chancel was painted in oil, but that’s really no help, because the nave ceiling is done with oil paints as well, but the technique is very different. One of the conservators was suggesting today that marks in the surface suggest that the chancel was actually painted in proper fresco technique, onto wet (or at least damp) plaster. Proper, renaissance, buon fresco was done with the pigment mixed with just a little water or limewater, I believe, so I’m not sure how adding linseed oil would work, and anyway, the conservators’ report doesn’t suggest that this was really what was done, because there is a solid white paint ground under the colour. Certainly Victorian church decorators were genuinely interested in the techniques of fresco; the infamous episode of the Oxford Union murals, which Rossetti and friends undertook in the late 1850s is an example. The Union Society murals would never have looked much good in daylight, because they are painted onto a sort of clerestory wall punctuated with big windows, so the daylight overwhelms the wall paintings, but the point was that the Pre-Raphaelites had no idea of the technique required, and those are painted straight onto the bricks. We have some painting directly onto brickwork as well, in the westernmost bay of the chancel, around the window, but ours is fairly simple, floral and vegetal patterns on a creamy-yellow ground (rather than elaborate Arthurian romances in dark colours). Part of the issue for our conservators is to keep the whole composition looking of a piece when it is painted on three different surfaces which respond differently to cleaning. The fact that the Victorian artists were probably trying out techniques as well doesn’t help (though it is exciting).

Tiles

One of our central principles has been to involve local people as much as possible in the Project, and it has been frustrating that the conservation of the ceilings has proved to be too technical and delicate to let volunteers loose on. Just to make the point, when I went up to the nave roof, all the conservators were wearing respirators. However, one successful piece of community involvement has been the tile workshops. Lots of us went along one Saturday and designed tiles, based on images and designs from the church, which will end up in the café and in the lavatories. There was also a six-week workshop, though, where a number of people designed tiles to illustrate events or personalities from the history of Paddington, and the idea has always been to put those tiles, with captions, in the stair well of the new building. We shall have dates on the stairs (cast into the nosings on the steps) and then tiles from that period of time will be set into the wall. So the design for the fair-faced concrete of the staircase incorporates a number of recesses, into which the tiles will have to fit. So one of last week’s enjoyable tasks was to sort out the tiles and make a final choice of which will go where, and to compose the captions. Happily, the group had made tiles illustrating more or less all of the most significant events in Paddington’s history, and many of the most interesting personalities. I can live without the ones they omitted. My anxiety is whether the designers of the tiles which we haven’t actually chosen to use will be terribly hurt. I don’t know who designed what, so I hope we have a tile from everyone involved in the group. They all knew that all the tiles could not be used, but it would be natural to be disappointed, so I hope they will be happy that all their names will be on a credits list. I’m very happy with what we’ve got, as it has a pleasing symmetry, and covers a very diverse range of subjects.

More Kites

Driving along the M40 I saw three red kites about a mile east of the Beaconsfield Services, so that’s perhaps seventeen miles from here, as close as I’ve seen them.

Charles the Martyr

I marked the feast of Blessed Charles Stuart, King and Martyr, by going to see the show of his picture collection at the Royal Academy. There are some lovely things. It is impressive the see the Louvre “Roi en Chasse” alongside the two great equestrian portraits, and you are just reminded of what a magnificent painter Van Dyke was. There are three Titians hung together (two from the Louvre, one from the Prado) none of which I knew, and all are top-notch. There is an exquisite Rubens allegorical landscape, which I’d never seen before. Holbein, of course, stands out as usual, but it is instructive to be reminded that it was Charles who bought all the Holbeins, not Henry VIII at all. What is also notable is how many of the pictures are actually in the royal collection now, having been bought back by Charles II. The Mantegna “Triumph of Caesar” pictures are easier to see here than they are at Hampton Court, but no more likeable; you can acknowledge their greatness without finding much to delight in. Of course it’s also special to see the Mortlake tapestries which were made for Charles from the Raphael Cartoons (which are normally in store somewhere in Paris) but I find it hard to get too excited about them, because they’re not actually doing the things that tapestry does best, they really are just paintings translated into tapestry. This is a magnificent show, though. It’s wonderful what you can see in London.

Comic Opera

I even went to Islington to see three comic operas, at the King’s Head Theatre (behind a pub). My friend John Whittaker had written one of them, “The Proposal”, based on Chekhov, and it was great to see that. It’s only a short piece, (not as short as the 4-minute middle one) but it stands happily alongside a piece by Offenbach which was the third. These were put on by three singers and two musicians (one of them John, which was not what he had planned) so it was hardly grand opera, but it was good fun. The singers sang very nicely, and I think we laughed when we were supposed to (and not when we weren’t). A really entertaining evening.