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Quiet days: reading and sleeping
Quiet days on your own, or with close family. If you’re like me you’ve turned to books you’ve loved in the past. Sit quietly in a garden in a sheltered spot. After breakfast, or in the late...
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Wartime paintings
This post is a kind of loose follow-up to the last one and also ties up with Westminster City Archives’ recent posts about wartime paintings. I’ve collected pictures by Josephine “Jo” Oakman, and...
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Walter Greaves: postcards and photographs
Monochrome photographs of paintings are unsatisfactory in most cases. In my travels through archives and reference stores I have come across many old art books full of black and white images which have...
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Madame Bach Gladstone: water colours of a neighbourhood
Local Studies collections quite often contain water colour paintings by local residents. We’re all familiar with that trope of historical fiction and TV drama, the accomplished young lady who paints...
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Christmas Days: a good read
One way or another reading has played a large part in my life, at home and at work, so it’s not surprising that I was given a calendar called Women Reading a few years ago (that’s pictures of women...
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The Children’s Library murals: 1947 and afterwards
Today’s post requires another story about the archive life. Sometime in the late 1990s I found myself, with a couple of companions piloting a large trolley (with pneumatic tires, bought for...
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Louisa’s album, and other memories of an ancient house
Louisa Boscowen Goldsmid’s album is a threadbare scrapbook with a stained fabric cover. Inside it are a set of watercolours. Mrs Goldsmid was clearly an amateur but like other amateur artists featured...
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Markino returns: alone in this world
The recent Christmas post I did about Yoshio Markino, the Japanese artist who lived in Chelsea, reminded me that there were still some images I hadn’t used in a post, even though I wrote four about him...
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In Estella’s house
In the previous post about Estella Canziani I showed you some of the pictures she painted or drew of the garden and the area around the house she lived in for her whole life. This week we’re...
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What Estella saw
`In 1965 a woman died in an old house in Palace Green, a house she had lived in all her life. The house had once been the laundry of Kensington Palace but her parents had just been looking for a...
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Christmas days: a preview for Estella
Only the second year of short posts for Christmas week and I’m already breaking my own rules. I had intended these posts to cover subjects where there wasn’t much to say or where we only had a few...
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Christmas days: a Markino bonus
Today’s short post is a small installment of pictures by an old friend of the blog, the Japanese artist who lived in London, Yoshio Markino. This one is simple called Autumn: The woman wrestling with...
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Charles Conder’s bohemian days
Conder created an Arcadia peopled by dreamy, capricious figures who lead lives of luxurious idleness. They wander at dusk on the margins of tranquil, lapis lazuli seas, of lakes cerulean under the...
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Sunny afternoon: a garden party in Holland Park
The taxman’s taken all my dough / and left me in my stately home /Lazing on a sunny afternoon. [Ray Davies] After last week’s look at a couple of the lost houses of Campden Hill I was reminded that I’d...
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Halloween story: the stranger
This week’s guest blogger is Marianne Collins, former Librarian at the J____ Street Library, now Head Archivist at the European Institute of Esoteric Studies, She presents an episode of library history...
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Mr Griffen in his studio
Although some people liked my post about Francis Griffen back in July as it turned out there still seems to be little known about him. One reader made a comment about buying some greetings cards...
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Shepherd in Chelsea
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd is one of the few artists in our collection who seemed equally happy in Chelsea and Kensington. It could be argued that his Chelsea watercolours have the edge for the variety of...
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Mr Menpes I presume
Mortimer Luddington Menpes is having a bit of a renaissance in his home country. This year there were two exhibitions devoted to his work one in Adelaide, the city of his birth and one in Melbourne. We...
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Shepherd in Kensington
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd doesn’t get a whole entry to himself in the Dictionary of National Biography. The details of his life are tagged on to the entry about his more eminent older brother George...
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Down Brompton Lane: more houses and stories
This is another leg in our journey through Old Brompton in the first half of the 19th century when Brompton Lane (now Old Brompton Road) was a main artery linking Fulham with the Kensington Turnpike....
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