Sissinghurst scanned and other stuff

Vita and Harold at Sissinghurst

Picked up Vita and Harold and others from the printer yesterday (now how does that sound?) and they are now nicely scanned, a big improvement on my uncropped distorted homemade images so thought I'd reprise them, as they say.

The Eve of St Agnes

Feeling a bit grumpy and disillusioned this morning because the rains that finally arrived yesterday seem to have vanished overnight. I stood outside in my pyjamas and whooped. The wilted gasping flowers whooped. The stressed out leaf shedding trees whooped.

The cats huddled on the window sills and looked on, mystified by water falling out of the sky.

Now we are back to searing sun by the look of it right now.

Big grumps.

Deep sigh.

 

So ... back to the sketch book and drawing board.

Charleston Farmhouse. (Home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant).

I've almost finished the tiled roof which was my biggest worry when starting. The flint wall with classical heads on top is an interesting prospect. And a borrowed black swan. I love black swans.

More later.

Vita and Harold at Sissinghurst

I put the last touch to this this morning - it was the black bird flying above the tower.

Just about the largest collage I have done to date but one of my favourites I think.

You seldom see a photograph of the Nicolsons at home but there is a dog about. They seemed to be very doggy people. So I have included a couple of what appear to be overgrown terriers.

When I read about the modern history of Sissinghurst it put to shame our paltry sporadic potterings.

Vita and Harold purchased the place in 1930 for £12,000. It was in a complete state of dilapidation. It was a case of camping out in the sixteenth century tower for months. But they didn't hang about when it came to the garden which Harold designed and Vita planted on a site which had to cleared of the "accumulated rubbish of centuries."

Within seven years it was if not exactly done and dusted, certainly done and growing in the "strictest formality of design combined with the maximum informality in planting".

Their son, Nigel Nicolson, said the garden was "like their marriage - a combination of the classic temperament and the romantic.

Here they are some years later: the elderly Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, enjoying the fruits of their labour.

And now for something ...

 

... completely different to what I had envisioned.

So much for the Virgin Queen idea. Somehow or other Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson inveigled their way into the composition. Well, it WAS her tower and writing room. She and Harold saved Sissinghurst from rack and ruin in the 1930s. Here they are, a couple of decades on with no room for any regal visitors. Only dogs.

 

This is still up for changes but most of it is stuck down or decided upon.

Hopefully finished in a couple of days.

 

Hey! My 200th post! Golly!

A Tudor tower

This might look as if I am going off on a completely different tack ... but it really is a writer's house as anyone recognising Sissinghurst Castle's tower (okay, so I have replaced some of the facing which appears to have dropped off over the years) will confirm.

In this case the writer's house really was her castle. Vita Sackville-West had her study on the first floor of this wonderful building. She was the friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, whose house was the subject of my last image. So you see, it's not the non-sequitur it at first appears.

Vita Sackville-West with Rollo and tower

By coincidence I had borrowed The Queens and the Hives by Edith Sitwell from the library, the Queens of the title being Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. There is an evocative description of one of Elizabeth's visits she inflicted on her aristocratic subjects and courtiers during her "progresses" through the kingdom. Dumping herself and her hundreds of followers on her hosts could prove costly to the point of bankruptcy but was an unavoidable honour.

Sissinghurst was a port of call in 1573, on August 15 to 17 to be precise, when the then lord of the Sissinghurst manor was one Richard Baker. Unfortunately I haven't come across any references as to how the Virgin Queen was entertained during her brief stay. The surviving record of her visit to Long Itchington in Warwickshire two years later veers between the sublime (she was met at the Castle gate by the porter in the guise of Hercules and greeted at the lake by a lady and nymphs who seemed as if they walked upon water) and the ridiculous (as the Queen dined under a large tent she was shown two wonders of the district, a huge fat boy and a correspondingly monstrous sheep).

Here is an Elizabeth which will eventually take her rightful place in the foreground. Not sure where I will fit Vita in yet.  But first I am going to get the tower finished and properly scanned as I quite like it in its naked state on a white background. That means it will be out of my hands at the printer for at least a week or so, so I will probably start on something else before I get this house finished. I have a show coming up in December and must crack on ....