Gift Books
ENGLISH GARDENS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. By A. G. L. Hellyer. (Country Life, 30s.) FROM BLOSSOM TIME TO AUTUMN FROST. By Istray Homoki- Nagy. (Dennis Dobson, 42s.) AT this time of year garden books proliferate and A Picture Book of Gardens is a fair sample, though a little suburban in feeling as though ranging round Sunningdale and the Sussex and Surrey gardens. English Gardens is more ambitious and more than twice as expensive. But this is a Country Life edition and it covers gardens of every date and description from the clipped yews of Packwood House, planted in emblem of the Sermon on the Mount, to the formal canals of Westbury-on-Severn, and from Haddon Hall to Nymans. Picture Book of Britain, another Country Life publication, is an omnibus of four volumes and has some really charming pictures in it. And from gardens it is a natural transition to nature studies which are the theme of From Blossom Time to Autumn Frost. But these are unusual for they all come from the forests and plains of Hungary, and this gives the book an exceptional appeal in this tragic hour. It has some wonderful subjects : great white herons, black-winged stilts. spoonbills, avocets (one of them pretending that its wing is crippled in order to draw the 'sportsman's' interest from its young), and a picture of falcons sitting on perches in the State falconry which looks as if they had invaded a 'crazy' croquet lawn. At the end are some wonderful colour pictures with a 'close-up' of a hoopoe showing off its crest and looking more than ever like an important Oriental in a Carpaccio painting.
After this, Lindsey House, Chelsea, is a little uninteresting despite distant association with the avenues of Badminton. It will have its appeal, nevertheless, to lovers of old Chelsea. Grand- father's London, It little intimidating in title, is the book I have enjoyed most of those so far mentioned. It is a collection of photographs of street scenes taken in and around Greenwich in 1885, at the instigation of one of the twin sons of the great Non- conformist preacher, Spurgeon. They form a marvellous docu- mentary of this London suburb, though I looked in it in vain for a picture of the old naval school opposite the Royal Hospital, where I saw the children playing exactly as in one of Cruikshank's coloured etchings to Tales of Greenwich Hospital. This book has a double edge to it, for those old enough to remember and those who can know nothing about it. But my own memories, which
begin some twenty years later, recall something of the general scene. Particularly, in the town where I passed much of my child- hood I remember an old beggar man almost exactly resembling the cake-seller on the cover. There must be many children, now, who have never seen an old man begging. It is only a pity that the theme of the book is limited to Greenwich. Some wonderful detective work has been done in verification of the local details, but what one wants is a documentary of, for instance, Piccadilly Circus, or the saturnalia of Mafeking night. However, the cat's- meat man is a study in itself; and amateur statisticians will be satisfied to know the cat population in the UK was estimated at seven million. One closes this wonderful and rather painful book with its distant background of costers' songs and hurdy-gurdy music, hearing in imagination the clop-clop of hooves of the hundred thousand horses then working day and night in London. The name 'London' is as the far-oft roar of traffic.
The Connoisseur Year Book, 1957, takes us to another world altogether. But in its essence a very English one, as we see from the horsemen riding out from Clandon Park upon the cover. The frontispiece is a colour plate of the music room at Mellerstain, in Berwickshire, one of the most beautiful of Adam houses. It is in lovely gradations of blue with white cameo-like ornaments; and there follow pictures of the Adam library and the light- hearted, dolphin-spouting Adam bathroom, a unique feature. Next, Burton Agnes, of the 'screaming skull,' with wonderfully intricate Jacobean carved screen and fireplace, almost of German elaboration, and, more surprisingly, many modern French paint- ings collected by the present owner. There follows an account of the Strand premises of Coutts & Co. and relics of their famous clients, including Cardinal York who writes to acknowledge the annuity offered him by George III.
There is more still in this Year Book. An article on drinking, glasses, some simply shaped, others less so, including Dutch roemers with their knobble-stems; one of Greenwood's engraved goblets; and in the learned cross-talk of the glass addict this collection 'continues beyond the great periods of the giant enamelled Humpen and superbly engraved Pokale to include the often-ignored nineteenth-century Paganinis of glass decora- tion: Scheidt, Kothgasser and I3imann.' On this, and on much more, I confess my ignorance. And the volume ends no less bril- liantly with an article on the City of London Swords and Insignia (though not illustrating the City Sceptre or Crystal Mace which sounds to be the most interesting of all); an account of Turner's verse-book, in which the painter wrote his poems (and how bad those are it is difficult to believe until you have read them!); and an engaging article on Jamaican engraved tortoiseshell wig- combs, an extreme rarity of which there are only sixteen surviving specimens in all, and they are in a kind of Caribbean chinoiserie all their own, to rhyme with the turtle's calapash and calapee• Mid-Georgian (1760-1800), Country Life Limited, is almost tame after this for one knows just what to expect and gets it. But with the unknown, as well, for there is Clare House, Kent (1797), surely the most delightful of all verandah'd, bow-windowed, Regency villas. There follow glorious pictures of Harewood House and its Adam furniture; and in this plethora of every country house of the period we pause in wonder at Wyatt's Heveningham Hall, and at the problem of whether Wyatt or an unknown architect
designed the dining room at Crichel. SACHEVERELL SITWELL
Previous page
