Red pants, white cups and blue dragons

New purchases, for me, like new ideas, are not embraced immediately: they sit prominently displayed where I – crab-wise and apparently typically of my zodiac sign – walk by, look askance at, consider, reject for a while, even play with... until I finally trust them. So it was with the red pants I bought three weeks ago: only yesterday were they taken out of their packaging and moved on to the next part of the journey to what will be part of a splendid outfit. So it will be with the white, mark-embossed Meissen demitasses I bought on Saturday - they sit in their box by me on the dining table, yet to reach the china cupboard - and so it is with my writing about Roderick Cameron and his circle.

In many ways I walked backwards into Cameron and now shortly will begin an amble through his circle of friends - people who, in the main, held him in deep affection and appreciated his talents. His sister, particularly, loved him deeply and judging by her autobiography, was also in awe of him. As well she might have been, for in her book the man who hitherto I saw only in glimpses now has shading and depth. In a profession where we tend to exalt those with talent, and it must be said, those without a shred of it, I found it refreshing to read about man of quirks, pretensions, standards, erudition, talent, taste and, very definitely, clay feet. Affectionate, though, this portrait of one sibling by another is, it's no canonization.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the more I learned, the more connections made, that my scope should widen and a greater picture would emerge, however faded and overlaid with the chicanery of memory, of a band of men who, to a great degree, were outlaws in their own time. Socially acceptable only because they were obliged to hide their inner lives, their sexuality and their partners. It is a dichotomy that continues today in the lives of many and leads in increasingly more instances to unspeakable tragedy - except where anonymity can be bought. 

I have mentioned before, how fortunate I've been in receiving positive comments, suggestions for further research, anecdotes from people who worked for him and on occasion scans of images from magazines not available to me. One correspondent scanned the photograph of Cameron's Paris living room - yet to be used in a post but no less welcome for that. If it were possible to tell you who these people are I would, but they generally speaking wish to remain anonymous. Another such kind soul, the blogger le style et la matière sent me the photograph above of Cameron's Anglo-Indian room, his study at Le Clos where he wrote his books - The Golden Riviera, the book I've just finished being one of them.

"By the time Rory had finished Le Clos itself, the top two floors consisted of six bedrooms and ensuite bathrooms and the ground floor was the dining room, a library and a large sitting room. The walls were painted the palest of pale olive green. I watched him pick an olive leaf and, turning the back of the leaf over, he got the painters to match the color. The sofas were large and opulent, covered in off-white, thick textured cotton with matching cushions. The chairs were large and Louis XV. Stripped to a pale olive grey, they were also covered in heavy cotton but in the lightest of lemon yellows.

Rory was, I believe, the first person to conceive the idea of the modern-day tablescapes. Large tables were covered in thick layers of material that flowed to the floor and on them he would place his flower arrangements and his precious collected pieces. He would go to the Nice market and buy tuberoses, carnations, lilies, and roses, all in the palest of pinks, whites, creams and yellows. He would cut off the stems and arrange large bowls of massed flowers. The rooms all had french windows open to the sunlight, which used to filter through the leaves of the olive trees and dance on the Aubusson carpets. The scent of the flowers would drift through a house bathed in the glow of warm Mediterranean sunshine. One of the sitting room walls had Louis XV panelling to frame Rory's collection of beautiful leather-bound books, many of which were first editions of the Belgian botanical artist Pierre Redouté and the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. There was a secret panel in the carving and on pressing one of the rosettes, a door would swing open, leading into a library where other first editions lay opened and displayed on easels, their pages changed each day. Not nearly as large as the sitting room, the library walls were also panelled and housed the rest of his famous collection of books."

Soon I shall move away from Roderick Cameron - not entirely, for I'm not yet done with him - to his circle and beyond. Some are well-known, others less so. Not all are known for their decorating skills but all were in their times famous or even notorious for how they lived their lives.

Interesting, isn't it, that Cameron's sister credits him with the invention of tablescapes - that pleasurable if not always beautiful arrangement of favored objects so indelibly associated with David Hicks - a great friend of both Cameron and his sister. Those early arrangements of objets de vertu arguably are the parents of many a tabletop agglomeration of ... well, just stuff, and which of us is not tempted by such a display, especially when persuaded that we too can live the life portrayed by magazine proppers and stylists? But that is a discussion for another day.

Blue Dragons? Roderick Cameron in The Golden Riviera begins a lovely account of an early morning on the Pointe de Saint-Hospice with "How one becomes attached to routine, always the same china: Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', a stylised pattern dating from the last century and one that is to be found in countless English houses." I will continue with this story in a later post but for now here is Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon'.

Quotation from A Lion In The Bedroom by Pat Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney, 2004.

Photo of Roderick Cameron at his desk in the Anglo-Indian room and of the library at Le Clos from the book mentioned above but for which there is no attribution given.

Mr Baldwin's scrapbook

"... The enormous doors of the house were open, and I stepped into something that I simply couldn't believe. Althorp indeed! Althorp was the house from Country Life that I pasted in my scrapbook many long years before, and the room I was standing in was an immense entrance hall in which there were five life-size paintings of horses by John Wootton.

"I said, 'I cannot believe it.' And as I uttered those words I was presented to the earl, who was absolutely beaming with pleasure and looking great in a marvelous tweed suit. I said, 'I must tell you that I saw this in Country Life in 1921 and put it in my scrapbook. It is one of my favorite places in the world, but I had forgotten the association of it with its name, Althorp. However, I remember the photographs so well that I can tell you about that chair which is sitting in front of that wall.' The earl seemed terribly pleased, but the overwhelming thing to me was the scale of the huge stallions.

"We were taken almost at once into a long, long library, which was a huge white room with huge fireplaces with beautiful windows opposite them and it seemed as though the room was composed of books on one side and glass on the other. The style of the room cannot even be imagined and the scale was colossal because the room was. Around each of the fireplaces were big groups of very comfortable furniture, and in front of them were a few young people. They were the earl's children by his first wife."

One of the real pleasures of having a library is that I can browse, dabble here and there, do a little research - if something so pleasurable can be called research. I wish I could say at this point that the satisfaction I'm expressing prevented me from buying more books, but it doesn't. 

I mentioned a while back that friends who were moving house had given me their extensive collection of magazines, some of which were back issues of Veranda, and whilst that has never been one of my favorites, it was always a good and comprehensive source of interior decoration south of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least before it had to broaden its scope. Now no longer a Southern magazine by any definition, since the Atlanta offices have been closed and the whole shebang –whatever that means after the job-losses that ensued – has moved into the New York offices of the publisher.

Part of Veranda's geographical reach-broadening was to include work done outside the South and, though this might have happened earlier than I think, to include articles about houses such as Althorp. Southern or national, it was a handsome magazine, one that looked well in the salons of Atlanta, be it nail, hair or grand drawing room. On leafing through the pile of back issues it became clear to me that Veranda really did have its own local flavor – a regional style that one sees only if one motors the country roads not yet subsumed in suburbia, walks the country towns rich with architecture as ramshackle as their history, and enters some of the older houses in this city. Veranda was local – if such a vast region that stretches from Texas to the Florida Panhandle can be called local – and had a style that was beloved by many. How it will fare as a national book remains to be seen.

However, I have digressed a mazy way from the hall and library of Althorp to the salons of the South and the country towns of middle Georgia. 

Photos of the family seat of the Earls Spencer, in Veranda reminded me that I'd read in Billy Baldwin's autobiography how he and Arthur Smith had been driven to lunch to Althorp by Hardy Amies. I reread the passage today and wondered if somewhere in my library I might find the photograph he mentions as having pasted in his scrapbook. I think I might have.

Ah, the pleasures of the library, indeed!

Quotation from Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography with Michael Gardine, Little, Brown and Company, 1985.

Black and white photographs (unattributed as far as I can ascertain) from English Country Houses, Mid Georgian, 1760 -1800, Christopher Hussey, Antique Collectors' Club, 1986. (An unnumbered edition of 500 copies principally for sale overseas.) First published by Country Life Ltd., 1955.

Other photographs by Fritz von der Schulenberg to accompany text by Charles Spencer for Veranda, March 2008.

Rant @ 45 rpm

If you've ever wondered when precisely it was the world changed and you became an old fogey then you'll know what I mean when I say that one of the most irritating things in the world is to find, for the second time, doddering-old-fool-like, you'd forgotten that you need a bloody iPod to play music through the dinner-plate sized speakers you discovered in the living room ceiling one late night after a long drive through another rainy georgia night.

I drove home late this sodden afternoon listening to Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine - this being what I wanted to listen to again at home - and wondering, crossly, what it is about rain that makes Georgia drivers throw on the brakes when the first drop hits the windshield. Answer comes there not.

The rhubarb pie I'd discovered at the back of the freezer went into oven, the CD - I still call 'em LPs in moments of inattention to the great amusement of the my other half - went into what I'd forgotten was the DVD player and would not play music. Simply-would-not-play-the-damned-music! One tantrum later - not quite throwing myself kicking and screaming to the floor but could have at a moment's further provocation - the Celt arrived home in a stinking mood (clients) to find the rhubarb pie lovingly thrown into the Miele had fossilized - if rubber can be said to fossilize - me clutching a glass of whine trying to write about the connection between Monteverdi and our library, a photo which you will not find below.

The room you see here is a library, dearth of books notwithstanding, and one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever had the pleasure to be aspirational about - the perfect room in which to listen to a scratchy vinyl 45 of Brook Benton singing A Rainy Night in Georgia.

Photographs by Henry Bourne for an article written by Carol Prisant about an interior by William Diamond and Anthony Baratta published in The World of Interiors, January 1994.

P. S. Just learned I could have used my iPhone to connect to the sound system (are they still called that?)

I'll show you mine ...

.... the latest in an occasional series about libraries.

A good old fashioned bookroom is something one sees rarely nowadays - there are books all over the place as decorative accents - supporting lamps, assisting as flotation devices for scented candles and pinned down by cache-pot, but a room of books? Who has one?

To digress a little, today I listened to two bloggers - I didn't get involved in the conversation -discuss marketing potential and the commercial benefits they are enjoying from them. This got me thinking about my blog - this ramble through my enthusiasms, delusions and obsessions - on which I allow no advertising, overt or covert, and ended up wondering if this makes me perhaps a bit old-fashioned ... as old fashioned as a collector of books these days.

So, to relieve my unsettled mind, I post photos from 1994 of an extraordinary and impressively blue gothick library. I have a library in the senses of a bookroom and a large and growing collection of books. None of them is used as decoration, as props in themselves or for other objects, and none is so decrepit it is refused succor.

Who else has bookrooms? I've shown you mine, now show me yours.

Photographs by James Mortimer from article written by Elspeth Thompson for The World of Interiors, March 1994.

Libraries ...

the latest in an occasional series.

The longest room, at 195 feet, in Oxford, the Codrington Library, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, built in the 1730s at the College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed, a college founded in 1438 by Henry VI and Henry Chichele the Archbishop of Canterbury. A library and occasional dining room.

Finding Angus McBean's house in a 1980s edition of World of Interiors has had me sitting on the floor in my library looking for what else there might be. The 1980s were strange years, saturated as they were, in terms of architecture and interior design, with two major styles, each equally nostalgic - the English Country House Style and Post-Modernism. The two styles did mate at times and the pups of that liaison were quite laughable, or mystifying, depending on one's predilection.

It was in the 1980s, too, that Neo-Baroque, a Goth combination of curlicue, skull, horn and gold, with none of the majestic scale of the original but with all the quirkiness without the nobility, gained a foothold and galvanized magazine editors into paroxysms of delight. Also, in those years, te Deums, (or rather ta-dahs) were sung to owners of ancient piles who apparently for nothing more than an acknowledgement or, more likely a surge in entrance ticket sales, allowed photographers and stylists to disturb and record the dust of countless generations.

Such an ancient pile you see above, and very thankful I was to find it.

Ta-dah!

I forgot to attribute, thus .... photography by James Mortimer, accompanying an essay by David Sexton, from World of Interiors, June 1986.