Private Collection
2 July

I'd stayed overnight in a private guest house, the Garth Hotel, on Gower Street, just down from UCL.

I decided to pass a little time in the capital over the morning by doing a little shopping and by visiting the National Gallery to see an exhibition of paintings and drawings collected by an American millionaire.

A Private Passion was an intriguing mélange of works by Beardsley, Blake, Burne-Jones, Courbet, David, Degas, Delacroix, Géricault, Holman Hunt, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Moreau, Renoir, Rossetti, Sargent and Whistler.

The collector, Grenville Lindall Winthrop, was an oddball to say the least. Married, yes. But wife died and he didn't re-marry. Two daughters were kept sheltered, nay cloistered. They both later eloped on the same day; one with the electrician; the other with the chauffeur. Which I feel tells us much about what we need to know. Winthrop became more and more of a recluse. Collected in a very obsessive manner. Bought the site for and built a whole down-town New York townhouse in order to house his collection so that young men from Harvard could come and visit and be educated by exposure to - well he would say art. I feel there's a lot we are not being told. The works are full of evangelical zeal on one side and a cold, chaste and somewhat neurotic sexuality on the other.

Still it was pleasant to promenade among the paintings for 90 minutes or so. I like the size of the special exhibition space in the Sainsbury's wing of the National Gallery. There are some half dozen rooms which give enough space for a variety of work without the whole experience becoming overwhelming. I'm going to award a well deserved three stars.

I thought some more about the paintings on the way home. The Degas was of ballerinas - he did a number of those. A snow scene by Monet - he did a number of those. A nocturnal scene by Whistler - he did a number of those. Nudes by Ingres - he did a number of those. Angelic figues by Burne-Jones - he did a number of those.

And I started to wonder why painters used to paint so many examples of the same thing? Did Manet need to paint quite so many waterlilies? And the answer came back, yes. They all had to keep painting in order to get it right and still accept that they would never get it right. After all, in a fashion shoot, photographers take hundreds of photographs in order to use maybe half a dozen. It's the same principle. I guess that one of the reasons that I keep writing is in order to get it right.

I've moved by the way. A few weeks ago I started the process of transferring downstairs from my little box room and I'm now installed in the Music Room where I can type all of this quite happily and listen to good quality music reproduction and also gaze through the window at the ever changing loveliness of my garden.