Travel Sketchbook #2047 England [May 26-28, 1971]

[RB Journal entry]
May 26.
Victoria + Albert today. And the purchase of a handsome blue sweater at the Scottish place (manned entirely by Italians) and the corners.
A compendious place full of things - great 15th Italian plaster sculpture: Donatello, Giombologna, Della Robbia, Venocchio, etc. A great court of plaster masters including Trajan’s Column in scale. Very funny in a way but a God-send to students I should think. Great tapestries. The Raphael cartoons fresh as paint. I talk to two boys who express interest in the time it took to make the works. Not so long I judge.

No connections or hesitations. Very direct in waterpaint. Marvelously spontaneous + rough in the parts, a little tedious in the whole except for the Drought of Fishes.
Constable emerges an authentic master of great integrity. I’m put off a bit by the white + black* but after all he was not interested in tone. Nonetheless a silvery painter.
Beautiful Le Main not the best, but moving!
I feel bit depressed in the Wm. Morris room. In principle it’s admirable but you can’t turn the clock back + it has an of of greater antiquity than certain Renaissance rooms. And a quaintness.
I’m to go up to Regents’ park tonight to visit Francis Dux, Resika’s friend.

“It’s a soft day” says bell man, meaning rain.

May 28
Trees + shrubs of Central England: white clematis, English angle, horse chestnut, white, pink fuschia, hawthorn, ash oak, cedar, yew, Jack-by-the-hedge, cow parsley, liburnum, white + yellow wisteria, box hedge.
Our guide today referred to Britain as the Islands.
I’ve been a greedy eye all day, a popping eye, a bulging eye drinking in the landscape of Buckinghamshire, the Cottswold, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire. Again this kind of pleasure of the senses - mostly a warm sky + mods day - is too much to bear in the massive 8 hour indulgence of it I’ve had, hence it was a comfort to drive back through London’s humdrum side. One cannot support all views, all kinds of possibilities of charm, variety, richness. One view per day is enough.
Alas, only a taste of Oxford. I should go down for a day at least. But I may substitute Cambridge.
The Downs are a caress.

We noted Blenheim castle + Woodstock town, sizeable, from the grounds of Blenheim. And Eton and Windsor at a distance. Old as the Plantagenets. Magnificent oaks.
Little market town of Chipping Norton. I think of Hardy. The Cottswold begins to get hillier. My little neighbor Blanca Babamonde, a retired school teacher from Santiago, Chile, said “veetameens for de ice”

Chipping Camden, a complete town beautiful as anything in Italy, freshened up after rain. Orchards on all sides.
Then Gloucestershire. The aroma of flowers + fields you do not take away with you from the museums.
Shakespeare country. Ach! English gardens. The Avon. The majestic thatching. The shapeliness of everything. We have lived in a jungle. Our artifices seems vain + hopeless given our proportions.
The sheep like polished stones on velvet; heraldic homes greying; rich cattle gathering in clusters under yew trees. The roads are rarely straight (except for those which “once” were Roman roads). It was the custom to make a road around a property, never through it. Fox-hunting country.

The local stone + flints with their unique color, the individual notes, give texture + variety + history to these English places. And the pride in them most of all.