Fish are depicted in some of the earliest cave paintings and feature in Grecian and Roman friezes, floor mosaics and on terracotta vases. Some of the most aesthetically beautiful and scientifically useful of all fish pictures, however, are those that appear on paper, generally published in books from the middle of the 16th century.

Two of the first illustrated fish books were by Frenchmen: Pierre Belon in 1553 and Guillaume Rondelet a year later. These feature small woodcut engravings of several hundred fish and other aquatic creatures, alongside occasional imaginary ‘monsters’; Belon is infamous for his ‘sea monk’.

The first ever coloured book of fish by the French émigré book dealer (and alleged spy) Louis Renard, Poissons ecrivisses et crabes (1719), features a less-than-glamorous picture of a mermaid among its depictions of multi-hued tropical fish from Indonesian waters. All these works were produced with scientific intent, but undoubtedly will have also served as valued library pieces for wealthy collectors.

Almost contemporary with Belon and Rondelet was the Italian Ippolito Salviani, who was a doctor with close links to senior figures in Rome, including several successive popes. He was ahead of his time using the more delicate copper engraving technique and he included no monsters in his line up of almost 100 fish and some cephalopods. His exquisite, folio-sized images are considered by many — including the most celebrated ichthyologist of all time, Georges Cuvier — to be the most scientifically accurate, not only of that period, but for several centuries hence.

These early engravings by Belon, Rondelet and Salviani were issued uncoloured, although many have subsequently been coloured to make them more attractive for the market. It is hard to believe that such wonderful engravings on ancient, watermarked paper have survived more than 450 years and yet can still be purchased as individual prints, extracted from loose or distressed copies of these books, for as little as tens of pounds from print dealers. They even occasionally pop up on eBay.

The first notable illustrated fish publication to appear in Britain was Historia Piscium, written by renowned Cambridge scholars Francis Willughby and John Ray in an era of enthusiastic natural-history collection and scientific drive. This book almost bankrupted the Royal Society in London, which published it at such great expense in 1686 that it couldn’t afford to publish Isaac Newton’s Principia, with his theories about gravity, the following year.

Historia Piscium was also issued uncoloured, but, from the mid to late 1700s, a crop of very fine coloured books focusing on British fish was published. One of the loveliest of these is by the Anglo-Irish naturalist Edward Donovan, The Natural History of British Fishes (1806). He took considerable efforts to paint his subjects ‘in the highest state of perfection, and while they yet glowed with the vivid hues of life’. His book featured common species, such as mackerel and cod, as well as rare visitors, including the opah. Remarkably, it received poor reviews at the time, although it is highly sought after nowadays.

Some of the most admired of all fish prints are by the German Marcus Elieser Bloch, from his book Naturgeschichte der Fische (1782). The bold copper engravings were handcoloured, often with specks of metallic paint and egg white to mimic the iridescence of a freshly caught fish, and all are highly collectible. I bought my first Blochs back in the 1990s for £50 a piece; now, they start at three or four times that price.

If game fish, trout and salmon are your thing, then two monographs and the engravings within will appeal most to you. Both were published in 1839 and are very rare. One is by Sir William Jardine, most famous for his mini Naturalist’s Library, but his British Salmonidae is massive — described as elephant folio— a nd has only 12 beautiful plates.

Perhaps more delicate and sumptuous still, although smaller, are the engravings by Louis Agassiz in his Histoire Naturelle des Poisons, completed before he decamped from Switzerland to almost single-handedly establish natural history as a discipline in the USA.

For the American market — and specifically targeted at anglers — two more folios of fish prints merit high praise. Both are later and no longer engravings, but rather chromolithographs produced from originals painted on stone. Samuel Kilbourne’s Game Fishes of the United States (1879) is large format (not quite elephant folio) and captures fish in their natural habitat, whereas Sherman Denton’s images for the U.S. Fisheries Report (1895) are smaller format, yet, I think, still present some of the most sublime ichthyological portraits ever.

I’ve been collecting prints of fish for nearly 40 years. It used to be a case of visiting antique-print dealers and fairs in the UK; further afield, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris remain brilliant places to pick up beautiful examples at bargain prices. Today, it isn’t strictly necessary to venture out, as many dealers are on the internet and one of my favourite websites is Rare Fish & Marine Life Prints. Be warned, however, that adding to your haul can become extremely addictive.

Paul Martin is professor of cell biology at the University of Bristol.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

The Earl of Kerry, 11th-generation custodian of Bowood, holds a framed certificate in the Diocletian Wing. The text begins: ‘During the Great War of 1914–1919 this building was maintained as a hospital for British sick and wounded.’

Its ornamented borders feature the arms and floral emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Dominions, as well as the initials of the unidentified artist ‘F. R.’.

Those words commemorate an extraordinary time in the house's history. In the First World War, this space was transformed into an Auxiliary Red Cross Hospital under the aegis of Maud, 5th Marchioness of Lansdowne, whose youngest son was killed at Ypres in October 1914.

A senior member of the Red Cross before the conflict, she was instrumental in establishing 3,000 auxiliary hospitals in houses across Britain. All received identical certificates.

Bowood accommodated 54 convalescing soldiers at any one time, served by 20 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, with the Lansdowne family and household staff. Dozens of other country houses across Britain served as wartime hospitals and convalescent homes, including Brighton's Royal Pavilion, Great Dixter and Highclere Castle. Yet if it weren't for the example of Bowood, how many of those would have played the same role?

‘This initiative was not only a turning point in Maud’s life, but in the history of country houses generally,’ explains Lord Kerry.

‘It catalysed social change. By opening Bowood’s doors to troops and breaking down class barriers, it became a beacon of recovery.

'Today, this tradition lives on, with visitor support ensuring Bowood’s continued preservation.’

Visit Bowood's website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Standing up for what you believe in can come at a high price — the highest price. It's a lesson that William Tyndale learned in October 1536, when he was strangled to death, and his body then burnt at the stake. Even that was supposedly a mercy for a man found guilty of heresy: the fact that he was strangled before being burnt was a concession to his stature as a scholar.

Tyndale's crime was becoming a major figure at the vanguard of the Reformation in England. His New Testament, the first complete translation in English, proved hugely influential in both religious and literary terms. Much of it can still be seen today: scholars have estimated that 84% of the King James Bible was taken from Tyndale's work.

Translating the bible had long been a risky pastime in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, but Tyndale might have survived if he'd left it at that. Instead, his scholarship picked at the open sores of the Reformation, enraging first the Catholic Church — by supporting Henry VIII's right to be head of the church in England — and then, two year later, infuriating Henry VIII himself by arguing against the King's proposed divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Tyndale judged Henry to be the more dangerous, and fled to the Continent — only to be arrested in 1535 by imperial officers of the Holy Roman Empire. He was imprisoned for over a year in Vilvoorde Castle, near Antwerp in modern-day Belgium, convicted of publishing a translation of the Bible without church approval, and executed as a heretic on October 6, 1536.

Four centuries later, Willie Hartley Russell stands in the pulpit that originally came from St Adeline’s Church in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where Tyndale began his ecclesiastical career after leaving Cambridge. Open in front of Hartley Russell is a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, first published in Worms, Germany in 1525.

Tyndale was briefly a tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor and, by tradition, preached from this pulpit. It was transferred to the manor house — a former home of the Hartley Russell family — when St Adeline’s was rebuilt in 1849 and then to Bucklebury House in about 1906.

On the table is a bust of Benjamin Franklin, who collaborated on his own abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer in 1773, aiming — in the spirit of Tyndale — to make its text more usable for ordinary people.

Hartley Russell as another connection to one of the men who shaped the modern world: he is a descendant of David Hartley, who corresponded with Franklin, and was a rare voice during the American Revolutionary War as a British MP sitting in Westminster who called for an end to hostilities, and supported the rights of the colonists.

As well as pushing for conciliation, Hartley also proposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1776. As a representative of the British government, he was a signatory of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, which recognised the independence of the United States.

Find out more about Bucklebury House and estate at their website.

Highclere became world-famous in the 2000s as the impossibly grand Hampshire house used as the location for the filming of Downton Abbey. Yet it was a place celebrated long before ITV's film crews turned up to create the classic period drama, not just for its architecture, but also for the treasures that lie within.

The most famous of these are its Egyptian antiquities, collected by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb; and its Napoleonic memorabilia, including the Emperor’s chair and desk, personal effects sold from Longwood House on St Helena after his death in 1821.

Today,, though, the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon stand in the Smoking Room at Highclere, an interior redecorated and rehung in the 1990s, in front of a different antique: a table that incorporates decorative panels representing birds and fruits made of ‘hard stone’ or pietra dura.

Making decorative use of stones such as lapis lazuli, onyx, cornelian and sardonyx enjoyed particular popularity in the late 16th century and Ferdinando I de’Medici established a workshop — the Opificio delle Pietre Dure — in Florence in 1588 that became a centre for its subsequent production.

The panels here are thought to date to the 17th century, but were subsequently united in this table, probably in the 19th century. In several cases, the stones actually project from the surface of the panel, giving it real depth.

‘We both love Italy and think the craftsmanship of this table is exceptional,’ says Lord Carnarvon.

‘I love the idea of Nature set into marble, frozen and made eternal. John Keats explores this in his celebrated poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, published in 1819; this table is our urn.’

A version of this feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Whenever I visit the British Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I always stop in front of a Gothic Windsor armchair, made in about 1760, with a towering, pointed back and stacks of intricate tracery.

Although originally intended for a country house such as Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, I like to imagine it in a Manhattan penthouse, blending into the skyline outside the windows. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

‘A new generation of collectors and audiences is turning to British furniture (and to historic works overall) because of extraordinary craftsmanship, sustainability and the human stories embedded in every piece,’ says Helen Allen, the executive director of The Winter Show, America’s longest-running fair for classic art and design.

This is very much in evidence at the Met’s British Galleries, which were completely renovated in 2020, just before the onset of covid.

Where earlier incarnations of the galleries focused on Georgian furniture, a longtime staple of American collecting, the new presentation of the spaces shows the breadth of British design, from a state bed made for the Court of William III to a Victorian side chair by Edward Welby Pugin, son of Augustus. The emphasis here is on discovery as much as it is on history.

‘One takeaway with English furniture is that you have to see it in person,’ believes Wolf Burchard, the curator of the Met’s new galleries. ‘For example, we are now showing an incredibly beautiful China table attributed to Chippendale, which was sitting in storage and which I only knew from photographs. The moment I laid eyes on it in person, I knew it had to go on view. Now I think it is one of the best pieces we have on display.’

Collectors — and, of course, the dealers who advise them — may take this approach a step further. ‘At The Winter Show, there is a growing emphasis on context and storytelling — placing English furniture within narratives that connect design, history and contemporary life,’ explains Natasha.

‘Exhibitors are increasingly thoughtful about juxtaposition, showing historic pieces alongside modern works to highlight their continued relevance.’

The resurgence of certain niche collecting fields highlights this hybrid American taste. Patrick Bavasi, who recently opened his own gallery after a decade directing the venerable Hyde Park Antiques, notes a renewed interest in Anglo-Indian and Chinese export furniture. ‘Americans aren’t fussed necessarily with absolute English tradition in terms of the decorative arts,’ he notes. ‘I don’t think we are averse to interpretations on a theme.’

Where does this leave ‘my’ Gothic Windsor chair? Interior designer Bunny Williams and her business partner Elizabeth Lawrence, New York’s arbiters of Anglophile style, put me at ease. They describe a pair of English furniture collectors who recently moved to a modern apartment in town.

‘They had one of the most beautiful walnut secretary desks,’ reveals Bunny, ‘The wood was beautiful, it was period, it was incredible, and moving that into a white room with contemporary paintings — all of a sudden, you noticed it because it wasn’t with other English furniture. It sort of became a piece of sculpture in the room.’

‘It gave it new life,’ Elizabeth adds. Perhaps, that’s what English furniture can achieve today in the USA: a new, if unexpected, life at a time when we are craving authenticity above all.

‘In a world of digital saturation and fast production, an 18th-century English chair or cabinet offers something increasingly rare and, frankly, radical — permanence, provenance and a profound connection to the arc of history,’ considers Helen. ‘When the present feels uncertain, the past becomes a source of meaning, stability, and truth.’

Why not aim for that in a Manhattan penthouse?

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sally Raikes sits in the library with a manuscript copy of the Bible bound in three large volumes. As a note in the front of the first explains, they were ‘The gift of Elizabeth Armstrong to her grandchildren, written by herself’.

The same hand has added the date ‘1823’ with a different pen and continued: ‘To be given to Robert Raikes my grandson when Thomas Raikes (my son in law) pleases to part with them.’

It proved an appropriate gift. Robert was a wealthy young man from a Yorkshire family who fell under the High Church spell of John Henry Newman and John Keble when at Oxford in the 1830s and became a Tractarian. He and his wife, Frances, purchased the Treberfydd estate in the 1840s, and, with Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson, rebuilt the local church, established a school and created a new house for themselves.

The text is written in an even copperplate hand and — presumably to make it palatable to children — punctuated with engraved illustrations taken from other books. Compiling the manuscript must have been a massive task.

‘These volumes are a physical expression of the High Church spirit that brought my great-great great-grandfather here and created the house,’ says Sally.

‘It is interesting that his namesake and kinsman, Robert Raikes, was the founder of the Sunday School Movement.’ 


See more about the house at the Treberfydd website. 


This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The ‘room’ is a gem of Louis XVI architecture, a triumph of gilded beech, rich velvet upholstery and pineapple finials fringing an exquisite dome. It is not, however, a miniature boudoir, but a maison de chien — a glorified dog bed from about 1775.

Which pampered pooch rested its paws on the plump cushion? The bed is very similar to another, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which furniture-maker Claude I Sené made for Marie Antoinette to house her beloved poodle, Pompon. Might this, too, have once been hers — or rather, Pompon’s? The maison de chien will be on offer with Mallett at the Treasure House Fair, London. This year’s edition of the Treasure House Fair will run until June 30.

If antique dog beds aren't your style, one need only look to 'Barkitecture', the kennel design competition that took place at Goodwoof earlier this year.

With entries auctioned by Bonhams on behalf of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the highly anticipated competition was, this year, hosted by Kevin McCloud, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about it.

The theme for 2026 was 'Dogs in Space', a perfect choice when it comes to making spaces which will be occupied by dogs, you could argue. The winner was HPW Architecture, with 'Star Paws Sleeping Module'.

Their concept — or concpet if you will —was inspired by rescue dog Murphy and up-cycled from disused components (it looks a lot like a washing machine if you ask me, so I imagine some of the components might have been from one of these).

Another practice, Hall + Bednarczyk Architects, celebrated the moment in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey where a bone transforms into a spaceship with their design.

A rocket-shaped kennel, by George & James Architects, was so good, it even saw real life astronaut Tim Peake get on board.

It just goes to show, however mad your ambitions for your dogs kennel are, there are plenty of designs — both old and new — that are simply from another planet. But that's dog people for you.

A version of this feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sebastian Fenwick stands next to his bed at Shilstone House in Devon. Relatively unremarkable at first glance, you might think, but not once you discover that this elegant creation was designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century.

Inspiration for it came from the bed in The Dream of St Ursula, painted by Vittore Carpaccio in 1497–98. This is one in a series of nine paintings depicting the saint’s legend that the artist originally created for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, Venice, Italy.

There are several versions of St Ursula’s legend. She was the daughter of a Christian king — some claim her as British — who was murdered with her 11,000 virgin companions. According to the 13th-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, the angel of the dream foretold her martyrdom.

‘One of Lutyens’s daughters was called Ursula,’ explains Mr Fenwick, ‘and I understand there is a pair of children’s Ursula beds at her old home in Northumberland.

'Lutyens also had an Ursula bed at his home in London,' he continues. 'My grandmother, Violet, who inherited her father’s habit of buying and building houses, commissioned Lutyens to design and enlarge Temple Dinsley, Hertfordshire.

'They became good friends and Lutyens was made godfather to her eldest son, my father. This bed was his christening present to him and I continue to sleep happily in it to this day.

'Shilstone, which I and my wife, Lucy, designed and built, takes inspiration from Lutyens’s work and is a testament to my admiration for his attention to detail and eye for the aesthetic.’

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe. Visit Shilstone's website to find out more.

The 9th Duke of Wellington holds a walking stick ingeniously adapted as a hearing aid. He is standing in the Waterloo Gallery at Apsley House. In August 1822, when Master-General of the Ordnance, the 1st Duke — Arthur Wellesley himself — gave the order to fire a howitzer on an experimental carriage.

The blast ruptured his left ear drum and the immediate treatment almost killed him. For the remainder of his life, the hero of the Battle of Waterloo was deaf in his left ear and suffered from gradually deteriorating hearing loss in his right.

An enthusiast for technology, he used hearing aids to help deal with the problem and this example is one of seven such devices that survive in the family’s collection today. It is practical and plain, a metal walking stick adapted to incorporate a small ivory earpiece and trumpet for the right ear. It was probably the work of an instrument-maker on the Strand.

Shortly before his death in 1852, the Duke wrote to his friend, Lady Salisbury: ‘I have none of the infirmities of old age! excepting Vanity perhaps! But that is a disease of the mind, not of the body! My deafness is accidental!

'If I was not deaf, I really believe that there is not a youth in London who could enjoy the world more than myself or could bear fatigue better, but being deaf, the spirit, not the body, tires. One gets bored, in boring others, and one becomes too happy to get home.’

It’s a poignant admission for a figure familiar today in his heroic character as the ‘Iron Duke’ and the victor of Waterloo.

Find out more at the Wellington Collection website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on May 6, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'Oranges and lemons,/Say the bells of St Clement’s.’ Those of St Giles speak of brickbat and tiles, those at Whitechapel of two sticks and an apple — and all this ‘ding dong’ talk isn’t in London alone. Ever since they arrived in the UK with early Christianity, bells have hailed celebrations and commemorations, raised alarm or simply marked the passage of time.

In a world that has changed massively even in the past two decades, they do exactly the same thing as the day they were first cast, often hundreds of years ago. ‘People have heard the same sound for generations, uniting them in their local soundscape,’ says Jonathan Humbert, who is steeple keeper at St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire, as well as principal auctioneer at Humbert & Ellis. The sale of 25 antique bells, running online until Wednesday, April 15, is, therefore, likely to pique plenty of interest —not least because it is a bit of a rarity.

‘In my 35 years as an auctioneer,’ says Jonathan, who is managing the sale, ‘I have been privileged to offer such diverse items as Princess Diana’s Ford Escort RS2000 and Churchill’s reading glasses; however, I’ve never been invited to sell a collection of historic bells before.’

The story behind this unusual sale has its roots in a Leicestershire market town and a bellfounder named John Taylor, who, in the mid 19th century, declared: ‘I flatter myself that I am at length come to the full knowledge of bell-casting. Master I may say of my Art. I fancy I can execute them in a manner to be excelled by none.’ The claim was bold, but deserved and Taylor’s name still graces the foundry he established in Loughborough in the late 1830s.

Bells are objects of heft and longevity: moulded from molten metal with the aim of resonating — literally — for generations, they require patience and unstinting labour. In Taylor, they found a devoted craftsman. He made his base in the Midlands by fate. As the son of a bellfounder, he had learned his trade early and worked in both Devon and Oxford before receiving a commission in 1838 to recast the bells of Loughborough’s ancient All Saints Church. There was, however, one stipulation: for reasons of tradition, the work needed to be carried out within the parish — so Taylor relocated to the town.

At first, he leased some vacant buildings to serve as his new premises, but, as the years passed by and his reputation continued to grow, he bought land on the outskirts of Loughborough and set up a larger, permanent bellfoundry. He didn’t live long enough to see it open, but the business passed down to his son, John William, and retained the same commitment to craft and quality — so much so that, some 165 years later, it’s still casting bells.

From the very place Taylor conceived, which is now home both to the UK’s last major working bellfoundry and the Bellfoundry Museum, have since come forth more than 25,000 bells, which hang not only along the length of Britain, but in more than 100 countries worldwide. The 16.75-ton Great Paul, the largest church bell ever made in the UK, was cast by John Taylor & Co in 1881 and still lives in the south-west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral. Another mammoth is Great Peter of York, made in 1927 for York Minster, which, although not the heaviest at 11 tons, is the record holder for Britain’s deepest clock chime.

The peals and bongs that resonate in the city hall in Cape Town, South Africa, St George’s Church in Ypres, Belgium, the Rainbow Tower Carillon in Niagara Falls, Canada, and St Andrew’s Cathedral in Singapore — among myriad others — also began life in Loughborough. Perhaps more surprisingly, Taylor’s was even called upon, in 1980, to make a custom ‘Hell’s Bell’ for the rock band AC/DC (tuned to E, if you’re interested).

Today, to visit the foundry, set on an unassuming street in the east of town, is to step back into another era. The casting hall is still a working industrial space of furnaces and 14ft-deep pits (bells are buried in sand as they cool, to ensure an even finish and prevent cracking). The joinery shop is busy bending ash into shape to make bell-ringing wheels and the tuning workshop sees metal shaved away from each bell’s interior, increment by increment, to produce the required harmonics.

‘The foreman’s been here for 40 years, too,’ says volunteer guide Geoff Dilks as we tour, gesturing towards a flat-capped man surrounded by tools and metalwork. ‘And look under your feet,’ he continues, pointing to the time-worn tiles that cover the factory floor. ‘They look like stone, but they’re actually made of oak. Much safer when you’re moving bells around.’

As well as oak tiles, bells need space, which brings us back to the auction and the reason the sale has come about. Despite occupying the same Grade II*-listed red-brick buildings since 1859, John Taylor & Co is now a tenant of The Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust, set up in 2016 with the charitable aim of conserving the bellfoundry, its archives and its museum. A recent, grant-funded refurbishment of the latter has resulted in a spacious modern visitor attraction — you’ll find some absorbing exhibits around the art and science of bellfounding — but a shortage of storage space. This, in turn, has led to the decision to put some of the bells in the collection up for sale, with all profits going back to the trust. Four of the pieces being auctioned were cast (or recast) at Taylor’s, but others were produced by former bellfoundries in cities as diverse as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, Chesterfield, Bradford, Dublin and Sheffield. All have their own stories to tell, ranging from the poignant to the religious.

One of the bells, dating from 1852, once called monks to prayer at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, Leicestershire, these days home to the UK’s only Trappist brewery. Another is a former Second World War cast brass scramble bell from an RAF base, Manston in Kent, engraved ‘A.M. 1939’ and weighing some two stones. Complete with a hand-rung plaited rope clapper, it was tasked with summoning pilots to flight duty. The third has a much grimmer past: cast from iron in the late 19th century and weighing more than a quarter of a ton, it hung close to a jail in Christ Church, Staffordshire, and is thought to have served as an execution bell.

A couple more bells hail from the 18th century: one, inscribed with the date 1711, was cast in bell-metal (a bronze alloy) by Edinburgh bellfounder Robert Maxwell. The other was cast in 1771, then recast by John Taylor & Co in 1883, and is engraved with the company name. It once hung in St James’s Church, Little Raveley, Cambridgeshire — and although neither as sonorous as Great Peter, nor as big as Great Paul, it is a strand of the fabric of the British countryside

As Athena went to press at the end of January, the Government announced a package of £1.5 billion capital spending ‘to restore national pride’.

According to the press release, the intention is to invest this sum in cultural organisations over five years, ‘turning the corner on underfunding over the last decade’. The bold promise is ‘to save more than 1,000 cherished Arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage buildings across England from closure… fix urgent capital needs and open up access to culture for everyone, everywhere’. It goes on, ‘funding for our treasured cultural venues will ensure vital, affordable and welcoming spaces are available for communities to come together and celebrate what makes their local area special’.

The Culture Secretary is quoted as saying: ‘At a time when forces seek to divide us, arts, culture and heritage are what bind us together. Our local cultural institutions aren’t just buildings — they’re part of who we are… they help tell our national story, and provide unique opportunities for young people to pursue their dreams.’

We have heard similar effusions before, but not with the scale of financial backing promised here. This comprises £760 million for museums, the lion’s share of which — £600 million — will be for the infrastructure of national museums and Government-sponsored cultural organisations. The £160 million left ‘will be invested in our local and regional museums’, with the aim of dealing with maintenance backlogs and a transition towards ‘more sustainable business models’.

There will also be £425 million for about ‘300 capital projects in Arts venues across the country’; £230 million for ‘protecting and preserving heritage buildings, including listed places of worship’; £75 million for repairs to historic buildings at risk; £46 million for local communities ‘to take control of… local heritage and bring buildings back into public use’; £27.5 million for libraries and £80 million capital funding over four years ‘to benefit National Portfolio organisations that receive regular investment from Arts Council England’ (ACE).

A £92 million fund called the Places of Worship Renewal Fund will replace the £23 million Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme, promising these buildings ‘access to the same level of financial support from the government as historic houses, monuments and other heritage sites’.

Before rushing out to celebrate this news, however, Athena wants more detail. How much of this fund is really new money for culture as opposed to shuffled budgets? Who will administer it and — thinking of the ACE debacle — on what terms? Bluntly, also, is it enough? £300 million of this fund could go straight back to the Treasury as VAT and major museum projects are costly. The National Gallery has raised £375 million towards its forthcoming Domani Project (without Government help) and the proposed renovation of the British Museum will probably cost more than £1 billion.

Athena, therefore, welcomes this promised £1.5 billion spread over five years, but reserves judgement on how generous it really is.

European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King by Jonathan Marsden (Modern Art Press in association with the Royal Collection Trust, £350) is available now

Indignation flared in 1921, when two 7in by 5in etchings included in the Royal Academy (RA) Summer Exhibition turned out to be the work of a 15-year-old girl. The umbrage was dismissed. ‘We judge the work, not the persons,’ declared jury member Claude Shepperson. ‘We do not know the painter’s name, and it does not matter if the artist is three or 300. Looking at the work from an artistic standpoint we had no hesitation in accepting it. It is no fault of ours that Miss Soper, aged 15, can hold her own with the giants of old age. We are proud of the girl.’

In time, the art of Eileen Alice Soper would find a place in millions of homes, for she would illustrate the covers of all 21 of Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ adventures, published from 1942 to 1963; her wholesome and outgoing youngsters reflecting the period style and taking a firm place in the nation’s illustration heritage. However, long before the Blyton contract, Soper’s sketches of younger children had charmed people both here and in the USA. Exhibitions in Los Angeles and Chicago drew rapturous praise, with one critic declaring her a genius and her portrayal of ‘dream children’ a miracle and another describing her as ‘a schoolgirl among the masters’.

English art critic Haldane Macfall praised her ‘purity of artistic intention thoroughly attuned to the years of innocence’ and ‘wholly devoid of the mechanical stuff of the art schools’, a relevant comment as her natural talent had developed under the tuition of her father, George, a brilliant portrayer of working horses.

Growing appreciation brought a flood of requests, but Soper was ‘far too busy’ and even turned down a commission to illustrate A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The year 1924 saw a particular accolade, when Queen Mary visited the RA spring exhibition and asked for an immediate print of her Flying Swings etching.

Success was proving material. Aged 22, Soper bought a Vauxhall tourer. She not only enjoyed driving (she kept a clean licence for 65 years), but added mechanical skill to her virtues, servicing cars herself. She toured extensively with her father, the pair sketching and painting the natural world.

Motoring revealed a foible, however, for she considered herself frail, had an obsessive fear of hospitals, and would make a detour to avoid passing one. She also thought that cancer could be contracted by breathing and did not welcome general human contact. She is not thought to have formed any romantic attachment and remained a spinster — as did her sister Eva, a potter, with whom she lived.

Soper never went abroad, ate no meat, had pet dogs, hated cats, had no formal religious adherence and abhorred alcohol, swearing, smut and ‘freak’ modern art. She wrote to well-known figures requesting autographs — and obtained Hilaire Belloc’s. She had also long written verse and, although her efforts failed to impress those whose advice she sought, including playwright and novelist John Galsworthy, she forever scribbled lines on bits of paper that lay to hand.

The Soper family lived in a house at Harmer Green near Welwyn (then a village) in Hertfordshire that was designed by George and set in a semi-wild garden. Eileen and Eva spent their lives there and, after their father’s death in 1942, they christened it Wildings. It became a wildlife haven, attracting many animals. Mice ran free through the house; birds flew in to perch on heads and shoulders and be hand fed. Eileen skilfully sketched every species that appeared.

She developed a special passion for badgers, spending cold, dark hours draped in foliage with a red-filter torch to observe them. Cubs took food from her hand and escorted her home across the field. ‘Here, in company with those merry wanderers, I had met the fabulous spirit of midsummer night,’ she wrote. Among other books, the richly illustrated When Badgers Wake established her as a naturalist author.

Soper died in 1990, the same year as her sister, aged 84. Executors found Wildings in damp disrepair and the garden vastly overgrown. Rooms were piled with boxes and bags of hoarded papers, and mice nested everywhere, but a trove of artwork lay within. According to Duff Hart-Davis, author of Wildings: The Secret Garden of Eileen Soper, several thousand works by father and daughter were rescued, with an estimated value of £900,000 (£2.6 million today) and are now sought after.

In one room, some 3,000 jam jars were stored, but not for jam. She had eschewed their disposal as rubbish, fearing they would be smashed on a council tip and cut the paws of her beloved badgers.

Works from the Soper Collection can be viewed at the Pannett in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The collection is on loan from the Chris Beetles Gallery, which holds the copyright and exclusively represents The Estate of George and Eileen Soper

This article first appeared in the January 21 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe to Country Life in print, click here.

Sir James and Lady Graham stand beside a chalk portrait by French Society artist Théobald Chartran of Sister Charlotte Harriet Graham (1839–1927). She was one of nine legitimate children of Sir Bellingham Graham, 7th Baronet of Norton Conyers, who squandered his fortune on ‘slow horses and fast women’. In 1870, aged 31, Charlotte joined the Community of St Peter, an Anglican nursing order and, in 1893, became the head of St John’s House, London. She ran this ‘training institution for nurses for hospitals, families and the poor’ for 18 years.

‘We love this portrait, as the sitter looks kind, calm and sensible,’ says Lady Graham. ‘James feels that her taking the veil may have been a reaction to her father’s feckless and irresponsible behaviour. The artist has captured her compassionate and gentle, but firm character, as well as her authority. She keeps this part of our house peaceful.’

Sister Charlotte is only the second most noteworthy Charlotte linked to the house — and by coincidence, she was born in the same year that her more illustrious namesake visited Norton Conyers. Charlotte Brontë came to the house in 1839, and was — according to her friend Ellen Nussey — much impressed by the house in general, and in particular a dark tale that was part of the Graham family history.

'Like any good novelist, Brontë used her impressions of several houses to build up a picture of Thornfield, Mr Rochester's country seat in Jane Eyre,' Gervase Jackson-Stops wrote in Country Life in 1986, shortly after Sir James took over the the stewardship of the house. 'Yet Norton Conyers, which she visited in the summer of 1839, as governess to the then-tenants' grandchildren, contributed one of the most important ingredients in the book — the Graham family legend of a madwoman confined in the attics.'

The woman in question was referred to as 'Mad Mary', as Lady Graham herself explained in a 2003 article in Country Life. 'Who she was, whether servant or family, is not known,' Lady Graham wrote. 'Perhaps she was a servant who had children by "master" and who suffered from epilepsy or post-natal depression rather than madness.'

Although Brontë's connection to Norton Conyers was well known for many years, confirmation of the existence of the attic didn't come until part of the long refurbishment work undertaken by Sir James and Lady Graham removed some panelling to reveal a previously hidden staircase. Sir James — whose family have owned the house since the mid 17th century — asked for a hollow-sounding panel to be investigated, and his hunch proved correct: stairs up from the 'Peacock Room' to an attic room were uncovered.

There seems little doubt then Brontë based her timeless tale in large part on Norton Conyers. ‘We believe that the house inspired Thornfield Hall and the mad Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre,’ observes Lady Graham.

Both house and gardens at Norton Conyers are open on some days each year. The Norton Conyers website has full details.

I went to the Leonard Lauder Collection auction preview at Sotheby’s New York, thinking I’d better see the Klimt paintings and Matisse bronzes before they’re returned to private hands. I arrived at Sotheby’s new home, in the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, to find that others had the same idea. The line to get in stretched out the door, around the corner of Madison and 75th, and down 75th to Park. The ‘feels like’ temperature of -2℃ seemed to deter no one from waiting. I got in line.

What was it, really, that we’d come to see? The works inside were modern masterpieces, but the turnout felt bigger than the catalog’s sum. Lauder died in June at 92. Had we sensed that as he and other great art patrons of a certain age shuffle off this mortal coil, their way of collecting is vanishing, too, and we’d better bear witness while we can? Lauder was a connoisseur, which in the collecting world means someone who acquires art passionately, knowledgeably and often quietly. Autumn 2025’s marquee auctions, which also included the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection at Sotheby’s (Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Gauguin) and the Robert and Patricia Weis Collection at Christie’s (Rothko, Picasso, Mondrian), were collectively an ode to old-school connoisseurship.

Today’s new buyers find themselves on the receiving end of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, not to mention having made their own ways in lucrative sectors like technology and finance. How, then, are they going about the business of collecting?

Very differently than your Lauders or Pritzkers, according to research. A report by art-fair behemoth Art Basel and UBS, Survey of Global Collecting 2025, says that of spending by high-net-worth individuals on art and collectibles in the first half of 2025, Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) accounted for the highest share in fine art, antiques and watches. Millennials (1981-1996) led the spending in decorative art, design, and jewellery and gems. And Gen Z (1997-2012), representing a whopping 56% of all collectibles spending, had the highest averages in most other categories, including luxury handbags, collectible trainers, and classic cars, boats and jets.

To see whether Art Basel’s findings rang true with those in the collecting trenches, I talked to more than a dozen industry players on both sides of the Atlantic — collectors, collection advisers, gallery owners, and leaders at art fairs and auction houses. While they generally said Art Basel’s assessment reflects what they’re seeing, they were eager to point out other patterns among young people who are collecting art.

Cameron Carani is a Gen Z collector who’s active at major museums in Miami (where he’s based), New York (where he’s also based) and Paris, including serving on the board of the Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art. With his partner, Cameron collects contemporary oil paintings, bronze works and clay ceramics.

Cameron says he’s ‘not surprised’ by his peers’ reported preference for what he points out are ‘mobile, transportable’ items. ‘Respectfully, these are also commonly ostentatious things that photograph well. Including myself here: as Gen Z matures, I think our collectibles will be less about loud display and morph into being more personal and quiet.’ Like his Japanese wood-fired ceramics, for example.

Millennial collector Eden Xu-Martinez, who’s on the Contemporary Arts Council of MoMA and the Young Collectors Council of the Guggenheim in New York, says she and her husband started their collection with paintings and sculptures by contemporary artists represented by blue-chip galleries and have since embraced emerging creatives. Recent art-buying in Paris yielded a Pat Steir painting and a work by a young German artist for less than $1,000.

What each generation chooses to collect is a function of their financial means and how they wish to express themselves, Eden says. ‘Boomers, having accumulated wealth over decades, gravitate toward high-value, lasting assets like fine art and antiques that carry historical weight and prestige. Millennials often favour pieces which combine aesthetic appeal with functionality and fit into transitional life stages like moving homes, building careers or raising families. Gen Z’s collecting behaviours, on the other hand, reflect immediacy, visibility and cultural dialogue. Trainers, handbags and other lifestyle collectibles are often highly social objects as symbols of taste, influence and belonging in digital and offline communities. For them, aesthetics is inseparable from identity and storytelling.’

The drive to express one’s identity, to tell one’s story, cuts across generations; what makes aesthetics so integral to Gen Z’s efforts is social media. To be seen amid the content overload, acts of expression must be conveyed with immediacy, which is to say, visually. Because the message is styled, not spoken, the accoutrements one is seen with in a ‘photo dump’ or ‘day-in-the-life’ reel become freighted with meaning, communicating emotions, beliefs and values.

Furthermore, as Gen Z famously prioritises experiences, it’s no surprise that the assets Art Basel says they’re disproportionately buying are things that lend themselves to said experiences. The jet-setting Gen Z-er happily takes a designer bag, Swiss watch or other wearable symbol of identity along; they’re not going to bring an oil painting on their excursion. At the heart of such storytelling is the search for connection. Style tribes are nothing new, but for digital natives who rely so heavily on visual cues, every object in one’s reach has the potential to signal belonging to a community or embracing shared values like sustainability and inclusivity.

Powerhouse art adviser Allan Schwartzman tells me that, while his clientele does include some young people who are collecting art in the time-honoured, connoisseurial way, ‘many younger collectors are disconnected from the passion and engagement with artists and the institutions that support the ecosystem of art that marked earlier generations of collectors of postwar art’. Allan says younger generations prefer to collect ‘across the market’, seeking out overlooked historical artists and emerging artists. Of course, this is also a form of supporting the arts ecosystem; many people I talked to praised young collectors’ championing of female artists, artists of colour, and others from historically underrepresented demographics who would otherwise struggle to be seen — further proof that for young generations, aesthetics are tied to values and identity.

‘If it were in purely simplistic terms’, Will Korner, head of fairs at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), says of the generational trends, ‘one could say that Boomers tend to collect with a focus on connoisseurship, provenance and long-term value, often building coherent collections and prioritising passion and legacy due to their age group. Gen X (1965-1980) tends to blend traditional and modern approaches, balancing personal taste with investment considerations. Millennials and Gen Z are more visually and socially influenced, drawn to lifestyle and cultural connection as well as trends, but they are increasingly curious and open to learning about the context and history of the pieces they collect.’

Art Basel’s broad findings notwithstanding, there’s plenty of evidence that younger generations intend to invest in art. Crowds at the recent Frieze London skewed notably young; one source said a generational ‘changing of the guard’ was palpable. In New York, last year’s Young Collectors Night at The Winter Show antiques fair was particularly vibrant, with 800 in attendance and Gen Z design darling Adam Charlap Hyman in the spotlight. The London gallery scene is booming, with new spaces opening not in Mayfair or Belgravia, but across the city’s east and south; they are experimental and energetic.

Young collectors are striving to create a personal narrative, and they’re doing so with less regard for chronological boundaries than earlier generations, says Emanuela Tarizzo, director of Frieze Masters. ‘So while different generations may gravitate toward different categories, the unifying theme is that collectors, whatever their age, are searching for stories that resonate with them, and for a sense of discovery.’ Younger collectors are turning to classical art in meaningful numbers, Emanuela says, and Frieze is responding with new initiatives like ‘Reflections’, which shows historical art alongside contemporary works.

Which generation's collections will be worth the most if they sell it all down the line? The annual Luxury Investment Index by Knight Frank offers clues. According to the 2025 report, values for a basket of ten passion investments — handbags, jewellery, wine and other collectibles, with art included — fell by an average of 3.3% in 2024. Of these categories, handbags were the best-performing investment, with values slightly increasing by 2.8%. (‘The ultimate classic handbag, the Hermès Birkin in black Togo leather, is now more valuable than ever when sold on the secondary market’, the report says, quoting Art Market Research.) Fine art alone, meanwhile, was down considerably more than the total basket, falling 18.3%.

The longer view is brighter for all categories, rest assured. The index reports ten-year value growth for handbags at 85.5%; jewellery, 33.5%; watches, 125.1%; and furniture, 140.9%. Art sits comfortably in the middle of the growth range, at 54.0%.

For a more anecdotal data point, consider the results of the Leonard Lauder sale and the season’s other auctions of connoisseurial collections. Together they brought in more than $2 billion.

Art and collectibles have historically been considered ‘investments of passion’; you don’t invest in them strictly for the returns. Whether you’re buying a handbag or a Hockney, though, you want to think the thing will at least hold its value.

The crowd gathered outside Nuremberg’s Frauenkirche in 1452 is clustered around a fire. Its focus is divided: some stare at the flames at their feet, growing minute by minute in intensity, whereas others turn towards the Franciscan preacher, who, from a makeshift pulpit, exhorts them to abandon worldly vanities.

In a contemporary woodblock depicting the scene, made by a German printmaker known simply as ‘Monogrammist HS’, the fire is not consuming heretics, but gambling accessories. According to one account, sexagenarian Cardinal Johannes Capistranus had persuaded Nuremberg’s citizens to burn ‘3,612 backgammon boards and more than 20,000 dice, and playing cards without number’.

By the middle of the 15th century, the city was among the playing-card-making centres of Europe. Religious authorities and priests — such as the future St John of Capistrano — worried about the propriety of card games. Although the first treatise attempting a moral defence of them was written in 1377 by a Dominican friar, John of Rheinfelden, the Reformist theologian Martin Luther would claim that, in his youth a century later, priests refused card-makers the sacraments. Yet, from high to low, the people of Europe were in the midst of a craze that proved long lasting.

Playing cards had almost certainly reached Germany, the Netherlands and France by the final quarter of the 14th century from Italy, notably Florence and Venice, the latter in the medieval period a leading maritime trading centre with links to the Near and Middle East.

Playing cards are also recorded as having existed in Spain at a similar date, imported from the Near East and North Africa. By the early 1390s, Charles VI of France owned at least three sets of playing cards. In subsequent decades, in the German town of Ulm, cards were produced in such quantities that they were exported in hogsheads and, as demand spread, a German card-maker’s wife, Barbel Winterperkin, travelled across Bavaria selling her husband’s cards at local fairs.

The first playing cards in England were probably French imports, arriving early in the 15th century. By 1463, there were enough English card-makers for Edward IV’s government to pass a law that prohibited the import of foreign playing cards (alongside foreign-made dice and tennis balls) in order to protect native craftsmen.

As on the Continent, card games had achieved widespread popularity swiftly; they were enjoyed by English men and women of all sorts, including middle-class families, such as the letter-writing Pastons and their Norfolk neighbours. On Christmas Eve 1459, Margery Paston wrote to her husband, John, that the widowed Lady Morlee had given permission to her servants to play ‘schesse [chess] and cardys [cards]’ in her house of mourning, although she forbade them to dance, sing and play the lute or harp.

The cards that took medieval Europe by storm originated in China, possibly as early as the 9th century. There, according to one theory, cards began as money tokens in gambling games, a practical solution to the difficulties of playing games using paper currency that was easily torn or damaged. Later, playing cards became popular in Persia and Egypt. Persian card games such as ganjifa, played with 96 cards in eight suits, were exported to India, where local makers replaced rectangular playing cards with circular cards, vividly coloured and lacquered to safeguard their longevity.

The earliest playing cards of European manufacture were handpainted, too, and costly as a result. Card games began as an elite pastime, their components decorated with imagery drawn from an aristocratic world of royal power and the hunt, including hounds and stags. As today, the earliest packs featured four suits, initially swords, clubs, cups and coins, or cups, swords, polo sticks and coins, with today’s clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades a French innovation of the third quarter of the 15th century (in Germany, by contrast, acorns, leaves, bells and hearts made up the suits).

In an engraving of about 1500, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Bavaria play at a table in a window alcove, both clasping their cards close to their chests, as the Grand Duchess points coquettishly to the four of hearts that lies between them. In place of today’s queen, early playing cards included a king and two viceroys, an entirely male affair. Advances in printing account for the democratisation of the playing card from the second quarter of the 15th century. No longer did designs have to be drawn or painted by hand: instead, illustrations were engraved onto wood blocks, usually with a number of different images printed on the same sheet, which was then coloured by hand. The card itself consisted of ‘3 or 4 peices of white paper pasted togather and made verie smooth’.

In some instances, playing cards were instructive, as well as decorative. A pack of cards made to designs by William Bowes in 1590 includes annotated English and Welsh county maps. Appropriately for cards made in the aftermath of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada, there is a celebratory bullishness to their vision of the British Isles. Of Middlesex, players are informed that the county has ‘a very sweete & fine ayer, Fertile soile, and full of statelye buildings’, whereas another card notes that Denbighshire is ‘but thinlye Inhabited… hylly & barren’, although ‘othersome very fertile’, and another praises London, its description ending with a prayer: ‘O Lord, grant London long in blisse to blome.’

In 1619, a manufacturer in Paris issued a French equivalent of Bowes’s geographical designs. The Florentine engraver Stefano della Bella accepted a commission in 1644 to make four sets of playing cards, possibly for the six-year-old Louis XIV. These were principally educational, intended to instruct the little King in geography, mythology and his own royal inheritance, with one pack depicting his predecessors as rulers of France, and another, the ‘Jeu des Reynes Renommées’, displaying distinguished women rulers, including Louis’s own mother, Anne of Austria, the Amazon Queen Penthesilea and Elizabeth I.

A homelier note was struck on cards printed in London in 1700 intended to teach users how to carve meat and fish. The king of clubs, for example, illustrates how best to slice a pickled herring. Yet despite this creative fertility, in essentials playing cards have changed little over half a millennium. French revolutionaries insisted on kings who wore berets in place of crowns, but the iconography of king, queen and jack, and graphic impact of red and black suits, scarcely alters.

The playing card’s journey may have been a long one both culturally and geographically, but the enduring popularity of games such as bridge, whist, poker and rummy ensures the playing card retains a continuing place in every British home.

The Earl of Leicester's fireplace in the Long Library at Holkham is one of the highlights of a 1730s interior designed as part of the family wing of this great house by William Kent.

Set in the overmantle is an image of a lion triumphing over a leopard. It is presented as a painting in a gilt frame — and replaces a seascape by the 17th-century artist Claude Lorrain — but is, in fact, a micro mosaic.

Mosaics were staple of art and design in the Ancient World, but micro mosaics are much newer. The term refers to the minute pieces of glass, or tesserae, used in their composition, with some works having more than 3,000 tesserae per square inch.

The earliest known micro mosaics come from the Byzantine Empire, but the development of this type of artwork owes much to the 16th century decoration of St Peters in Rome. The Vatican commissioned a series of artisans to create micro mosaics, since they're far more robust and hard-wearing than paint. If you've visited the great Basilica you'll have seen endless examples: some 10,000 sq metres of this vast church is decorated in micromosaic. Later artists refined the technique used to create micromosaics, and from the late 18th century they became even more intricate.

The Holkham micro mosaic sits in the middle of this timeline. It was purchased in Rome by Thomas William Coke — the great nephew of the builder of the house — on his Grand Tour in 1771–74 from the collection of the Palazzo Mignanelli. It originally came from the theatre at Gubbio, from where it was removed in the early 17th century. The creation of this piece likely dates to that period, but the inspiration is far older: a coarser mosaic of the same subject dating to the 1st century BC was excavated in Pompeii and is now in the Naples Museum.

Lord Leicester stands beside this country house treasure holding an 1817 guidebook describing the mosaic. ‘I don’t like to have favourites at Holkham,' he says, 'but I chose this both on account of its beauty and because its collector went on to become a celebrated agriculturist.'

Visit the Holkham Hall website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Last May, Tate Modern celebrated its 25th birthday with a gala in the Turbine Hall: a raucous affair attended by artists Sir Grayson Perry, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin. Food was prepared by the River Café’s Ruthie Rogers and guests enjoyed a performance by the Pet Shop Boys.

As Hollywood stars Daniel Craig and Reese Witherspoon mingled over Champagne, Maria Balshaw, the director of the gallery, was fielding questions about Tate Modern’s future. Accounts for 2023–24 revealed yet another deficit budget approved by the trustees, ‘due to self-generating income not increasing at the same pace as the cost base post-Pandemic’. Last March, Tate Galleries cut 7% of its workforce.

When asked whether free entry to Tate Modern’s permanent collection could one day be revoked, Balshaw said ‘I very much hope not’; yet she didn’t rule out the matter. Acknowledging these difficulties, the group’s état major launched an endowment fund with the goal of reaching £150 million by 2030. This has been touted as ‘one of the most ambitious campaigns of its kind’, designed to support exhibition programmes, research and public reach. Charlotte Mullins, art critic and former editor of V&A Magazine, describes this target as ‘ambitious, but achievable’. Then came September.

News that the National Gallery had received not one, but two landmark donations, worth £150 million each, sent shockwaves through Tate’s upper echelons. Donations came from the Julia Rausing Trust and Michael Moritz’s Crank-start foundation and, with an extra £75 million from the National Gallery Trust, will enable the completion of a new building behind the Sainsbury wing by the early 2030s. Billed ‘Project Domani’, the extra space will allow the National Gallery to grow its permanent collection beyond the remit of pre-20th-century art — something its director, Gabriele Finaldi, has been keen to do for years.

Not only does this risk eroding Tate Modern’s hegemony on works post-1900, but it also places the museum front and centre of the cultural consciousness. The lark is ascending. The National Gallery enjoyed a wildly successful 2025, which saw the previous year’s 200th anniversary celebrations reach across to May, when the permanent collection was rehung to great acclaim and the Sainsbury wing finally reopened after years of renovations, granting the museum a new entrance.

Although Tate Modern is, technically, also on the rise (its visitor numbers, albeit down 27% from 2019, have been up year-on-year since 2022), it has struggled to win back its historic audience of young European visitors — who, Balshaw believes, have been negatively affected by Covid and Brexit. Since September 26 last year, the gallery has stayed open until 9pm each Friday and Saturday in the hope of wooing young viewers. This would prove to be one of Balshaw’s final moves for the museum: last month, it was announced that she would leave Tate Modern in April, confirming the upheaval previously hinted at by the gallery’s closest observers.

Could Project Domani throw yet another spanner in the works? This remains to be seen. On the one hand, it seems entirely feasible that modern-art audiences might find an expanded collection at Trafalgar Square to be enough and no longer travel south of the river to see works by Dalí or Mark Rothko as often as they once did. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the National Gallery would be able to add that many blockbuster paintings to its collection, given the astronomical costs of modern art. Michael Hall, former editor-in-chief of Burlington and Apollo magazines and Country Life’s erstwhile Architectural Editor, explains that ‘the National Gallery only ever buys masterpieces and notable Continental works from the early 20th century are extremely expensive’.

Despite the gallery’s recently inflated endowment, £375 million goes only so far when it comes to acquiring, say, a handful of Magrittes or Picassos. ‘I don’t think Tate will be having sleepless nights just yet,’ agrees Dr Mullins. Moreover, ‘the modern and contemporary wing will never be the dominant reason to visit the National Gallery — not when the Wilton Diptych, Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, Gentileschi’s self-portrait, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed and all those Impressionists are on the walls’.

One major advantage boasted by the Tate Galleries is volume: their collection is roughly 30 times the size of the National Gallery’s. Works have swapped hands between the two before (on which, more shortly) and it seems likely the National Gallery’s top brass would try to schmooze Tate or even come knocking at the door of its multiple museums in the hope of borrowing back pictures it had previously handed over.

Indeed, both institutions are historically intertwined: Tate exists in part because the National Gallery did not have enough storage space to accommodate the collection of 19th-century sugar merchant Henry Tate, which led to the creation of what was then the National Gallery of British Art, later Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain (Tates Modern, St Ives and Liverpool would come much later). At the time, the National Gallery bequeathed several works from its own collection, including more than 100 by Turner, to the young rival museum in Pimlico. In 1996, an agreement was drafted to cement the dividing line between Tate and National collections. The line was 1900: any European art from before that date would sit in the National Gallery and any after that would go to Tate Modern (which, although not yet open, had already been earmarked for development in the former Bankside Power Station). Tate Britain, meanwhile, would hold onto British art across both time periods.

These various boundaries were never cut and dried, however. They were indications; goalposts; even Tate was able to recognise the National Gallery’s right to acquire 20th-century works by artists typically associated with the 19th (think Cézanne or Renoir). Over time, the latter has nimbly circumvented the agreement’s finer points: in the early 2000s, it hosted an artist-in-residence scheme inviting contemporary artists to show their work alongside the permanent collection and has partnered, over the years, with Richard Long, Paula Rego and David Hockney; in 2025, Ming Wong took the role.

Even when it comes to British art, ‘the National Gallery has never made its approach to collecting terribly clear,’ says Hall, allowing it to dip into waters typically seen as belonging to Tate Britain. Tensions between Tate and the National Gallery came to a head when the latter hosted a landmark Picasso exhibition in 2007. The press, then as now, agrees: it should have gone to Tate Modern. Now, the National Gallery’s promise to grow its modern-art collection has reopened old wounds.

The press, however, has also pointed out that anyone surprised by these developments must have been turning a blind eye. The National Gallery’s ambitions have been ‘hiding in plain sight for years,’ wrote Michael Prodger in Apollo, reminding readers that the museum’s intention is to take viewers through ‘a history of painting’. Speaking on this matter following his appointment in 2015, Finaldi said: ‘As time moves on, 1900 seems increasingly remote and less related to how we think about periods of history and art history... It is slightly frustrating to reach 1900 and then not go on.’

How should the National Gallery go about building its new collection? ‘The relationship between art’s historical past and the present is an important one for most artists and it will be fascinating to see how the new collection at the National Gallery is shaped,’ says Dr Mullins. An approach that illuminates these perspectives would also propose something quite different to ‘Tate’s forward-looking approach,’ she believes: ‘our past informs our future, so why not hunt out artists who explore this fully, such as Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall and Hew Locke?’

One should remember that, more than being rivals, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the National Gallery are first and foremost public institutions. ‘All receive funding from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport,’ says Hall, ‘and they communicate closely with one another.’ With at least five years to go before the National Gallery unveils its new wing, Tate Modern still has time to recuperate and restrategise. Sources close to both suggest that, although gritted teeth are to be expected, the National Gallery’s latest evolution is unlikely to devolve into a full-blown row. ‘It depends how silly the trustees wish to get,’ one says.

The architects shortlisted for Project Domani were announced last month. Among them are Farshid Moussavi, Foster & Partners and Kengo Kuma, with the finalist to be announced in April. The new wing will back onto Leicester Square in a spot currently occupied by St Vincent House, a Brutalist edifice due for demolition that the National Gallery acquired 30 years ago and which currently houses a hotel and office complex.

Londoners who have long avoided Leicester Square for anything other than film premieres hope that revitalising this patch of the West End will improve prospects for both the neighbourhood and the gallery within it. As the National Gallery prepares to build big, Tate Modern will seek to make the most of its own existing infrastructure — what one source calls the museum’s ‘gung-ho extension from 10 or so years ago’. The primary culprit here is The Tanks, open since 2016 and billed as providing ‘a permanent gallery for live art, performances and film and video work from the Tate collection’ — a status that, so far, the gallery has under-exploited. ‘They’ve fallen off the radar for most people,’ confirms Hall, but this creates an opportunity.

Dr Mullins, for her part, believes ‘the Tate Galleries need to concentrate on how to present their collection to an audience that filters the world through social media, rather than make the London sites any larger. Traditional displays of Modernist art on white walls are less enticing to Millennials and Gen Z than the immersive installations of artists such as Yayoi Kusama.’ As it stands, Tate Modern’s 2026 programme is one for the ages, with two blockbuster shows on Dame Tracey Emin (February 26–August 31) and Frida Kahlo (from June 25).

The Tate Galleries would do well to capitalise on this — and, from there, raise a lot more money.

Sixty years ago this month, at the end of 1965, Bond fever was sweeping Britain. Thunderball was breaking box-office records and The Man With The Golden Gun, Ian Fleming’s final novel, was a runaway bestseller — but, quietly, almost unnoticed, a very different sort of spy was about to make his cinema debut.

George Smiley is easy to miss in Martin Ritt’s adaptation of John le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Played by Rupert Davies, he cuts a rotund and unthreatening figure, easily outshone by Richard Burton’s MI6 agent Alec Leamas. However, in the six decades since then, he has somehow managed to notch up almost as many outings as James Bond himself. He is currently in Oxford, integral to ‘John le Carré: Tradecraft’, a new exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries which tells his origin story. It’s superbly done, although Smiley, one of fiction’s most self-effacing men, would surely wince at the thought of display cases being devoted to him.

For Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s youngest son, he has always been like family. ‘My dad would write sections of the books and then read them out loud to my mum,’ he remembers. ‘When I was acquiring language, I was getting 90 minutes of Smiley a day, not only his dialogue, but his world as it evolved.’ Later, he would fall asleep listening to cassette tapes of the novels, drifting off as Smiley unravelled another knotty mystery. ‘Although he belongs to the world of espionage, the books work like detective stories — my dad was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.’

Smiley was born between 1906 or 1916 (the date changes in the novels, stranding him in permanent middle age), but his birth as a character came in the late 1950s when le Carré, then an intelligence officer named David Cornwell, turned his hand to fiction during his commute from Buckinghamshire to MI5 in London. It was the height of the Cold War and the spy-heroes of the 1940s were having to get to grips with a less swashbuckling milieu. Amid stewed tea and clacking typewriters, George Smiley emerged as the antithesis of a kiss-kiss, bang-bang 007 figure.

‘Le Carré was quite explicit about the fact that his spy world was directly in opposition to Ian Fleming’s,’ explains Dr Jessica Douthwaite, co-curator of the Bodleian exhibition. ‘He did an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966 in which he described Bond as an “international gangster” rather than a spy.’

In the books, Smiley is short and tubby, dressed not in a dinner jacket, but a poorly fitting suit. He is an outsider who travels through life ‘without labels in the guard’s van of the social express’. After being recruited at Oxford and a stint undercover in Nazi Germany, he forms an unlikely attachment to his boss’s beautiful secretary, Lady Ann Sercomb. There, any suggestion of glamour ends: the match is roundly mocked and Ann betrays her ‘breathtakingly ordinary’ husband continually, starting with a racing driver. Her infidelities are so public that innuendo follows Smiley wherever he goes, at least until the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy turn him — reluctantly — into the most influential man in British intelligence.

Smiley’s consolation is his desk job at a fictionalised MI6’s grubby headquarters, the Circus. His work feels rather cloistered when he is introduced in 1961’s Call For The Dead, but it becomes increasingly high-stakes: over the course of eight more novels he is dismissed and reinstated, wrangles with Soviet spymaster Karla and saves the day repeatedly, although always at a cost.

What really propelled him into the limelight was the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which drew eight million viewers per episode and created the bowler-hatted Smiley of myth. Tall and imposing, Sir Alec Guinness was physically unlike the ‘bullfrog in a sou’wester’ of the novels and, according to a letter in the Bodleian, he worried he wasn’t right for the part, even suggesting later that Arthur Lowe (Capt Mainwaring in Dad’s Army) replace him. It was le Carré who persuaded him. ‘He wanted to meet a spy, so he and my father went for lunch with Sir Maurice Oldfield [the retired head of MI6],’ Nick recalls. Sir Alec noticed he swung his umbrella ‘in a Charlie Chaplin sort of way’; the detail made it into the show.

Part of the series’ genius lay in its resistance to pyrotechnics and quipping. Much of the action is conveyed by no more than the twitch of an eyebrow and Sir Alec’s Smiley is a Prufrockian figure, cautious and meticulous, entirely without spy-game glitz. ‘It’s a far more realistic characterisation than the idea of someone endlessly glamorous and urbane,’ says novelist Charlotte Philby, whose own thrillers are full of ‘outsiders in a world that doesn’t belong to them’. Le Carré’s shadowy universe has long overlapped with hers: one of his books sat on a shelf in her parents’ house alongside all the volumes on her grandfather, the Cambridge spy and defector Kim Philby.

Smiley’s growing fame was a double-edged sword: le Carré himself found ‘his’ version increasingly difficult to write. ‘For a while the only voice he could hear was Guinness’s,’ says Nick. Smiley, however, was confirmed as a national treasure by being sent up by the Two Ronnies in 1985 and two late-1980s BBC radio adaptations. Denholm Elliott stepped in to play him in 1991’s A Murder of Quality. There are never any exploding pens or car chases: the thrill, as Dr Douthwaite puts it, is in the juxtaposition of ‘Smiley’s idiosyncrasies and insecurities and his extraordinary competence and capability’. Bond is superhuman, impossible to emulate, but we like to believe that we could rise to the occasion as Smiley does.

The next person to drag him out of retirement was Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, who remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in noir style in 2011. Le Carré breakfasted with Sir Gary Oldman, who borrowed some of his mannerisms for his painfully solitary yet steely Smiley (le Carré subsequently kept a photograph of him in costume on a bookcase). He would later don a much grubbier mackintosh to play a kind of parallel-universe version gone to seed: Jackson Lamb of Slow Horses, star of the ‘Slough House’ novels by Mick Herron, who was gripped by the BBC’s le Carré adaptations as a boy.

Le Carré died in 2020, aged 89, leaving instructions that his family should try to continue his legacy. Nick, by then a successful novelist, was persuaded by his brother to write a Smiley novel, which he set in 1963, between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. As soon as he sat down, he found a familiar figure by his desk. ‘It was as if Smiley was there, waiting patiently, and I was slightly late — if you’re quite prepared, Nicholas, we may begin,’ he writes in the novel’s introduction. He felt, too, the presence of every actor who had taken on the role. ‘Each of them did him slightly differently, but each subsequent to the first with a homage to each other. All those inheritances were mine to draw on. His voice is melancholic, it’s contemplative, it’s internal, it’s gentle, slightly suffering… It’s ultimately about revelation and in some senses faith, whether it’s disappointed or not, in humanity.’

Karla’s Choice was an instant bestseller in 2024; there are hopes for a sequel. Meanwhile, earlier this year it was announced that Matthew Macfadyen will play Smiley in a new series. Thus George marches on, his dream of a quiet life continually thwarted by a country that needs him. He offers us the hope that someone seemingly unremarkable can, as Nick puts it, ‘pick up the pieces of the broken vase, then tell you not only how it was broken, but how to put it back together’ — and, in our age of bombast, there is something very appealing about his understatedness.

‘George, you won,’ declares his friend Peter Guillam at the end of Smiley’s People after Karla has been vanquished. ‘Did I?’ says Smiley, with the gentle bemusement of a man who, against stiff competition, has just been awarded the prize for best-kept garden at the village fête. ‘Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.’

‘John le Carré: Tradecraft’ is at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, until April 6, 2026

Ivana Bueno and I are both 26 years old. We have brown hair, brown eyes and are petite in stature. We both enjoy spending time with our friends and families and have jobs we adore. We are similar in many ways apart from one. She is a prima ballerina at the English National Ballet, and I am not. This is immediately obvious, when I meet her at the ballet company’s east London headquarters, by the way she sits (tall and composed), her physique (lean but strong) and how she’s dressed (a red tutu and pointe shoes). Her perfection is ruined only by her nails, bitten down to stubs, a habit she has had since she was a child. The minute our interview ends she will be off to dance. Disciplined and composed, it’s hard to imagine her as a naughty four-year-old who wouldn’t be told what to do in her first ballet class — but she was.

‘I hated it at the beginning, because the teacher would scream at me because I couldn't behave,’ says Ivana, who will be dancing the lead role of Clara in The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum until January 11. When I saw her in it, she took my breath away. ‘I started ballet when I was four years old, but it was always just a fun activity to do, I didn’t know I could live off it,’ she says. Born to a psychologist mother and a father who ran a transport business in Córdoba, Mexico, it was her older sister that encouraged Ivana to begin dancing, along with a family friend who was the director of the local ballet. Ivana attended dance classes after school almost every night. ‘I would finish school at 2:30pm, go home, eat, get changed, and go to ballet from 4pm to 9pm, then go home and do my homework for the next day,’ she recalls.

At the age of 14, Ivana was offered a scholarship to finish her training at the Academy Princess Grace ballet school in Monte Carlo. ‘I only saw it as an opportunity to go abroad and leave home. I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to be a ballet dancer,’ she admits. ‘But once I got there, everything was so professional. Every girl that was there, was there because they wanted to be a ballet dancer. They had it clear, that's what they wanted to do.’ Homesickness hit hard for the teenage dancer. ‘I love ballet, but I've also always been very close with my family and friends in Mexico. So I did struggle quite a bit at the beginning when I got there,’ Ivana says. ‘In fact I was crying every day for three months, missing my parents. But, at the end of that first year in Monte Carlo, when we did the end of the year show, I stepped on stage and I felt goosebumps in my body that — I even get them now, because I remember that moment so well. Then I was like, “No, this is really what I want to do”’.

She was scouted by Tamara Rojo, the then artistic director of the English National Ballet, a year before she graduated, but deferred the offer until she had finished her studies. She then came to London aged 18. ‘It was so different from Monte Carlo,’ she says. ‘I was living by myself and, I'm not gonna lie, it was really difficult… I felt like they’d thrown me into an empty pool and I didn't know how to swim. But then eventually things got better,’ she pauses. ‘I felt so much freedom and I didn’t know how to control it [at first].’

The turning point came when she was given the opportunity to compete in the Emerging Dancer competition. Covid came and pushed it back, but she trained everyday during lockdown. ‘It was like a motivation for me, because I knew that when we came back to work I would still have to do that competition.’ She won, and her career reached new heights again when she was thrown in as the lead of Christopher Wilden’s Cinderella at the Royal Albert Hall, 10 days before the show was due to open, when another dancer became injured. ‘I was really nervous,’ she says. ‘But I have really good memories of it.’ Two years later the same thing happened at the same venue, this time during Swan Lake, but Ivana was ready.

‘I have so much fun in the role,’ she says of dancing Clara, who she describes as ‘curious’ and ‘brave’ in this version of the iconic Christmas ballet, The Nutcracker. She does not have ambitions to be a choreographer: ‘I don’t think that’s my talent, but I enjoy working with them, and I like having someone who lets me input my own ideas from time to time.’ This won’t be a hindrance; she is not only incredibly beautiful but, I realise during our interview, incredibly tough and strong-willed. In short, the perfect Clara for our modern age.

Your aesthetic hero

My mum.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I went with my ballet teacher to The Wallace Collection. It was amazing. I was so impressed.

The last thing you bought yourself

They’re going to kill me about this one, but I bought a Prada bag recently. I don’t really want to say it, but I don’t regret it! It’s white.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

People always say I look like Anya Taylor-Joy, but with brown hair. She could do it… if she can dance. It has to be someone who can dance. Maybe I could do the dancing and she could do the acting.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Growing up I went to this hotel and I have so many good memories of being there with my family. It was in Puerto Aventuras in Mexico, but I think they’ve changed the name of it now.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I would say New Year’s Eve at home, when I was young. Every year it was a really nice gathering.

The music that you work to

When I am not at work I always listen to Latin music, but I like house music as well. My Spotify Wrapped listening age was 25 — I’m very normal.

Your favourite painting

Botticelli’s ‘Three Graces of the Primavera’.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I like reading stories — romantic stories, or thrillers. I recently read Colleen Hoover’s Verity. I couldn't stop reading it, it was so good. I wasn’t really a reader before as when I had free time I would go out with my friends, but it's something I always wanted to become. Eventually I would like to get into more psychology books — for self wellbeing.

The last podcast you listen to

I like Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory.

A possession you’d never sell

I would never really sell my Cinderella pointe shoes. I would sell any of the others, but that pair is special. I gave one to my ballet teacher, and I have the other one.

What you'd take to a desert island

This is so simple. I would do water — to survive. And I’d take my mum, if I could.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Just the ability of being grateful for another day in life. Like this morning, I woke up and I was already complaining because I was cold, and then I was like: ‘I can't complain about this. There is so much going on in the world, and I just have to be so grateful for where I stand and that I'm here to live another day.’

The items you collect

I like to collect travel souvenirs from other countries. And photo booth pictures, because I take them and put them in my dressing room, and I have memories with all of my friends. So every time I see a photo booth, I have to take photos with whoever I am with, to remember the memory.

The best present you’ve ever received

I mean, it's not really a present, but something I'm really grateful for is that my parents always allowed me to live my life and explore without putting limits on me. They always guided me, but never really stopped me from doing anything. They let me go very young and even now they allow me to live my own life. Now that I’m grown up, I think this must be really hard for them, and I think that when I have my kids I will want to protect them so much, and I feel like they never protected me in that way. So that's something I'm very grateful for from them — they always gave me the chance to go and live my life. It's a present, because not everyone has it.

The Nutcracker is playing until January 11, 2026, at the London Coliseum. For more details see their website.

This Christmas, Country Life is raising a glass to the unsung heroes who work all year round to make our seasonal celebrations special. All their stories will be collected together on our Christmas section.

Today, it's the turn of goats' milk soap-maker Nick King and his son Ricky.

When policeman Nick King was diagnosed with low bone density following a car crash, his doctor advised drinking goat’s milk for its high calcium content. ‘I liked it,’ he says, ‘and then I fancied having my own goats.’

He enjoyed the husbandry of goat-keeping, expanded his flock and experimented in his kitchen, first making cheese and then soap. He discovered that the milk was beneficial for skin, high in vitamin A and containing essential fatty acids. ‘It was trial and error to begin with,’ he admits. ‘I burnt the milk, which turned a horrible orange colour.’

He persevered, handing samples to friends and family and eventually getting a licence to sell at farmers’ markets.

We meet at his Somerset workshop, where I discover that things have moved on considerably. He and son Ricky are just off the plane from a trade show in Dubai, where the products have been re-packaged in pink and gold, a startling contrast to the wholesome look designed for the domestic market.

Their goat’s-milk soap, lotions and face creams are stocked in pharmacies and farm shops across the West Country and an appearance on Dragons’ Den this year prompted 250,000 visits to the website. ‘We were quite busy for a few weeks,’ notes Mr King with understatement, as well as taking orders from TK Maxx and Superdrug.

He no longer keeps goats, sourcing milk instead from Bruton Dairy, where they raise Toggenburg, British Alpine and Saanen goats. But this is still a cottage industry, with Mr King and his sons making everything from scratch in a production area the size of a modest kitchen. Milk is heated and blended with olive and coconut oils and shea butter and poured into a mould depicting a goat suckling her kid: ‘We make the moulds ourselves. We can do 500 bars at a time, then they cure for four weeks.’

Some are plain, some scented with essential oils, such as geranium or lavender. Skin creams contain avocado and sweet almond oil with an emulsifying wax; shampoos, bath soaks and candles have been added to the range. Nothing smells goaty and customers claim benefits for sensitive skin, eczema and psoriasis.

Nick King's Christmas treat: ‘Claiming a quiet corner in front of the log burner with a warm drink and letting the world slow back to a normal pace.’

Visit www.goatsofthegorge.com to find out more; and Country Life readers can use the code COUNTRYLIFE20 to obtain a 20% discount.

'Christmas,’ quipped Andy Warhol, ‘is when you have to go to the bank and get crisp money to put in envelopes from the stationery store for tips. After you tip the doorman, he goes on sick leave or quits and the new one isn’t impressed.’ A bit ‘Bah, humbug!’, but then the American pop artist would have had every reason to resent the holidays.

Growing up in a poor family of Carpatho-Rusyn origins, his Christmas had not only been on a different day from most Americans — the Warholas, who practised Byzantine-rite Catholicism, celebrated on January 6 — but it had also been meagre: ‘When I was a child, I never had a fantasy about having a maid, what I had a fantasy about having was candy,’ he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Then, as an adult, the distance — not only physical — that separated him from his relatives made Christmas a tricky time, especially after he sent his mother, who had suffered a stroke, back to his native Pittsburgh in 1971: the sense of guilt kept eating him up every December for more than a decade after she had died.

Even when he had gathered a surrogate family of his own — a vast entourage of friends, acquaintances and hangers-on — the season to be merry often turned out to be anything but. In 1950, at a Christmas Eve party in which he had perhaps entertained hopes of spending time with the poet Ralph Ward, of whom he was enamoured, their friend George Klauber got badly hurt, after which both an ambulance and the police arrived at the scene: ‘Andy was very upset and left immediately, but waited downstairs for Ralph, thinking that he and Ralph could go off together,’ recalled Klauber. ‘Unfortunately for Andy, Ralph came with me to the hospital.’

In 1968, Valerie Solanas, a woman he had helped and who, in turn, had attempted to murder him, called his studio just before Christmas, threatening to try again, unless Warhol dropped the criminal charges against her and paid her $20,000. On December 21, 1980, his then boyfriend, Jed Johnson, put an end to what had perhaps been the most important romantic relationship in Warhol’s life.

Yet, despite all this, despite that doorman quip in his book and despite the money worries that seemed to grip him every Christmastide, the artist never really surrendered to his inner Scrooge. Even following his breakup with Johnson in 1980 — when he told his ‘human diary’, Pat Hackett, to whom he dictated his daily memoirs, that he’d ‘been having the most un-Christmas spirit of [his] life’ — he tried desperately to get back into the festive mood.

Christmas had given Warhol one of his early professional breaks: in his illustrator days, he designed whimsical cards for the Museum of Modern Art, Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany: a star formed from colourful doves or a golden tree made of mermaids and cupids, crowns and cats. More than that, however, the mix of Christianity, tradition, partying and rampant consumer culture — as Pop as Pop could ever get — made Christmas the perfect holiday for a man who was as devout to religion as he was to carousing.

He threw himself into the festivities with fervour and bought presents generously, almost with abandon: ‘He would spend weeks Christmas shopping for his vast number of friends, often up to half the day every day during the last couple of weeks, and arrive at [his studio, known as] The Factory laden down with treasures…’ wrote Victor Bockris in Warhol. ‘All this joie de vivre climaxed with the yearly Factory Christmas party at which all his friends would gather and even the lowliest member of staff would receive a gift.’ Caviar and Champagne were on tap, everyone was given at least a simple wristwatch and close friends would get legendary presents such as, in 1978, the silkscreen paintings of the complimentary drink tickets at New York nightclub Studio 54. That same year, he also starred on the cover of High Times magazine as a dog-carrying Santa to (a very drunk) Truman Capote’s little elf boy.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that when he began work on his 1981 series on American myths, Warhol included Santa Claus, together with Superman, Mickey Mouse and Uncle Sam. He took Polaroid pictures of actor John Viggiano dressed as St Nick — the department-store variety — with his round glasses low on the nose, lush fake white beard, a hint of a cheeky smile and an amused twinkle in his eye. From the photographs, Warhol made silkscreen prints infused with nostalgia, but also acute in their reflection on the popular culture of the late 20th century. The old man in red was the ultimate celebrity, the emblem of materialism and consumption. Yet, for Warhol it was also perhaps a link to the religion of his childhood, as St Nicholas, the ‘wonderworker’, is the patron of the Byzantine-rite church.

The artist doubled down on the Christmas theme, if more subtly, in 1982, with his ‘Poinsettia’ series. That year, like the one that preceded it and the two that followed, he spent the holidays in Colorado with his then love interest, Jon Gould, but all was not well: despite having given everyone ‘framed underwear’ as presents, he noted in 1982 that he had ‘spent a miserable Christmas’. Eventually, he and Gould broke up, yet Warhol clung on to what he could of holiday magic: on December 22, 1985, he bought himself ‘another Santa Claus sculpture’, then ‘took a gang to Nippon for Christmas Eve dinner’ and tried to fend off his solitude by feeding people at the soup kitchen run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest.

He was struck by the gulf between the ‘beautiful, perfect people’ that populated his world and those ‘with bad teeth and everything’ he nourished on the day. ‘It’s such a different world,’ he told Ms Hackett, but volunteered again the following year. Shortly afterwards, on February 22, 1987, he died. Yet, his Christmas spirit lives on in his prints, in the Deck the Walls art sale and party held every December at the New York Academy of Art he founded — and in the soup kitchens across the world that feed those in need on Christmas Day.

This Christmas, Country Life is raising a glass to the unsung heroes who work all year round to make our seasonal celebrations special. All their stories will be collected together on our Christmas section.

Today, it's the turn of Elizabeth Harbour, a decoration maker based in Kent.

Aa child, Elizabeth Harbour and her siblings would decorate the family Christmas tree with great excitement. ‘We’d always drop a few glass baubles and smash them, but it was such fun.’ Later, as an adult living in London, she found herself walking up and down a busy street ‘trying to find traditional Christmas decorations to buy and there not being any’.

Today’s shoppers will have no such difficulty: Elizabeth Harbour Designs has become synonymous with exquisite decorations that conjure childhood celebrations, from a magical ballet fairy to a plump pudding, all made in England from sustainable wood or card. As well as several hundred different hanging decorations, there are angel tree-toppers, mantel ornaments and miniature free-standing Christmas trees that can be flat-packed away.

Elizabeth draws daily inspiration from the Kent countryside where she now lives, its architecture, history and the changing seasons. After studying illustration at Maid-stone College of Art she went on to the Royal College of Art, going on to become a book illustrator. When she became a mother, she ‘started to look at things differently: I wanted to have more design control in my work’.

She began applying her illustrations to card and wood, aiming to create decorations inspired by folk art, wildlife, literature and classical music that would be treasured for generations.

The Christmas build-up is ‘very intense: normally it’s a 12-hour day, posting every day apart from Sundays’. Her husband, artist Llewellyn Thomas (with whom she creatively collaborates), son and daughter all join her. ‘Once we get on top of things, decorating our own tree is something we really look forward to’.

Elizabeth Harbour's Christmas treat: ‘Watching a traditional Christmas film such as It’s A Wonderful Life together as a family.’

www.elizabethharbour.co.uk

Coffee-table books — part pleasure, part performative — have so much to give. There is one for every hobby and interest, they tend to be very beautiful, they double as home decor and can normally be ordered for someone at the very last minute. The best bit? People rarely buy themselves weighty tomes, so you’ll come across as wonderfully thoughtful and generous. Here is my pick of the best 2025 releases.

London Chic (Assouline, £100)

Charles Finch and Mark Anthony Fox pull back the curtains on the capital’s characters, institutions and quirks, revealing the diverse metropolis at its very best.

The Frick Collection: The Historic Interiors (Rizzoli, £50)

A definitive room-by-room tour of The Frick Collection, on New York’s Fifth Avenue — published shortly after its multi-year renovation. More than 200 new photographs illustrate the space’s evolution from the private, pre-War residence of industrialist Henry Clay Frick to an internationally-lauded museum.

Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home by Clare Coulson with photographs by Eva Nemeth (Quadrille, £40)

Eva's photographs are completely dreamy and worth buying the book for alone. But Clare Coulson's interviews with the garden designers (many of them regulars on the garden pages of Country Life) reveal fascinating insights into the evolution of their own gardens that gives hope — and invaluable information — to us ordinary mortals. Deserves a place on every ottoman.

Cellarius Atlas (Taschen, £125)

Andreas Cellarius’s 17th-century masterpiece of 29 double-folio maps detailing the vast celestial systems of the world’s greatest thinkers has been revived and refreshed in a breathtaking volume filled with adorned skies and ornate borders.

Country Life’s Book of Dogs by Agnes Stamp (Rizzoli, £50)

A celebration of Britain’s favourite four-legged friends, through the lens of Country Life. Inside, Agnes Stamp profiles 70 breeds alongside contributions from Jilly Cooper and Trudie Styler.

From Louis to Vuitton (Assouline, £195)

A blockbuster chronicle of Louis Vuitton featuring more than 400 photographs. Starts with humble beginnings (founder Louis Vuitton left his village at just 14, walking 300 miles to Paris where he apprenticed with trunk maker Romain Maréchal) and continues to the luxury powerhouse it is today.

Courtship: For the Love of Tennis by Laura Bailey (Rizzoli, £50)

A photographic ode to the most beloved of racket sports. Laura’s essay illustrates her life on the court, and it features quotes and stories from heroes of the game.

Castle Howard: A grand tour of England’s finest country house by Dr Christopher Ridgway (£85)

There aren't many houses that can sustain a single and lavishly illustrated volume but Castle Howard shines with the attention.

Italian Palaces by Massimo Listri (Taschen, £175)

Extra-extra-large in size and extra-extra-excellent in content, this tome explores the magnificent palaces that dominate cityscapes across Italy. Massimo’s images capture not only the architectural grandeur of each palace, but the unique atmosphere created by the people that occupied them.

Pants World by Pants ($50)

There is something supremely joyful about the art of Pants that is equally difficult to describe. The drawings, Steadman-esque in their sharp ragged lines, depict scenes both banal and absurd, but genuinely hilarious. Who among us has not got riled up for spaghetti night? Nor had their works of grand creation drowned out by the hooves in our head.

Vermeer is beauty and enigma. What makes his pictures at once mesmerising and challenging is the sense that there is more to those frozen moments of daily life than meets the eye, that a pensive look or the hint of a smile hide an elusive message we can’t quite catch.

Now, however, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon believes he has grasped that concealed meaning and has put forward his own interpretation in a new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, which sets out to upend all received wisdom on the painter and, therefore, as Michael Hall wrote in Country Life earlier this year, is bound to be controversial.

With no diaries, correspondence or even drawings surviving, Vermeer’s personality and inner life are shrouded in mystery. Thus, scholars have offered different readings of his work, from Lawrence Gowing’s belief that his paintings are the product of the ‘detachment to which he clings as if in self-preservation’ to Gregor Weber’s take that they are rich in the Jesuit symbolism in which he would have been steeped after marrying into a Catholic family (and possibly converting himself).

Andrew's view of Vermeer’s oeuvre similarly hinges on the artist’s faith — except it’s not Catholicism. Inspired by the work of John Michael Montias, who traced Vermeer’s social sphere in Vermeer and His Milieu — he began researching ‘a group of dissident, free-thinking, clever, compassionate, really good people’, the Remonstrants, and became convinced of their link with the Dutch painter. A strand of Protestantism that split from the main Dutch Reformed Church, the Remonstrants, who still exist today, rejected Calvinism’s theory of predestination. In the early 17th century, some of them, together with other Protestant splinters, began holding monthly meetings, or Colleges, in which everyone, including women, could speak of their beliefs on equal terms. Those Collegiants saw faith as a personal experience and called for tolerance and understanding among Christian churches, opening their meetings to anyone who accepted that Jesus’s teachings would save the world: ‘I was reading their reflective literature and some of the poetry and thinking, “Gosh, this really, this feels like Vermeer to me,”’ says Andrew. ‘“These words seem to me to feel the same feeling as a Vermeer painting, but there can’t be any connection” — and then I suddenly realised that, yes, there was a connection.’ Or rather, he maintains, there were at least two: Johannes Taurinus, the preacher who acted as a proxy to Vermeer’s late grandfather, granting his father permission to get married, was a Remonstrant (and later became a Collegiant); and so was the artist’s principal patron, Pieter van Ruijven. If Vermeer did convert to Catholicism, Andrew suggests, it was probably a feint: ‘He was living in a nest of Jesuits while painting for the opposition,’ he quips in his book.

Van Ruijven was married to Maria de Knuijt, who was, according to Andrew, as much of a patron to him as her husband. She was undoubtedly close to the artist: in her 1665 will, she made a provision to leave him a remarkable 500 guilders should she predecease him — possibly the only case of a patron doing so in the entirety of 17th-century Dutch history. Equally unusual was that de Knuijt and van Ruijven owned some 21 of Vermeer’s pictures — more than half his entire oeuvre. The artist had begun painting for the van Ruijven family in 1657 and for the following 13 years worked almost exclusively for them and their connections — people such as Adrian Paerts, a patron of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and ‘the man at the centre of the Collegiate web’.

Andrew is convinced that, as Protestants who shunned images of Jesus, de Knuijt, van Ruijven and their friends sought images that subtly encapsulated their faith — thus, Vermeer’s cryptic paintings could in fact be allegories. He dismisses the ‘powerful but small idea’ that Dutch art, as the product of and for a merchant society, is all about this world, that it has no soul: ‘I think it’s not true of Frans Hals, not true of any of the great landscape painters, deeply not true of Rembrandt, but profoundly not true of Vermeer.’ As an example, he quotes The Milkmaid: ‘The traditional interpretation is that she’s a woman in a kitchen. Now, a woman in a kitchen is potentially a sexy subject: the rich man who commissions the painting is having a little sexual fantasy about [her], or she’s a kind of object of attraction to him anyway. But if you look at Vermeer’s Milkmaid, there is none of that.’ Instead, he counters, it could be interpreted in a Christian key, if taken together with the painting that hung with it in the entrance hall of van Ruijven’s house: Woman Holding a Balance. ‘I believe they represent Martha and Mary, La Vita Activa, La Vita Contemplativa.’ The Milkmaid is making a bread-and-milk dish for the poor, as Martha would. Woman Holding a Balance is thinking about the state of her soul — and her soul is light, like Mary’s. Although the two pictures are traditionally dated six years apart, Andrew doesn’t think they are. ‘Their hands are in more or less the same position. They are in the same scale relationship to the rooms they occupy. The light comes in from the left in both paintings, they are both doing different versions of the same thing.’

Seen through that prism, the View of Delft becomes ‘a painting about what will happen at the end of time. There has been a huge storm, and [it] has just finished, the roofs of the town are wet and the sun is shining and nothing is happening. Some women are down in the shops; there are some boats; and that storm is not just a storm. That storm is the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War — and now this is what peace looks like’. Andrew references a novel, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus —published by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen shortly after Vermeer painted View of Delft — which tells the adventures of a man during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘At the end of the book, he goes to Switzerland and he says: “God, it’s strange. You can just buy bread, you can walk down the street and there aren’t any dead bodies in the street and the orchard outside hasn’t been burned. There’s trees and they’ve got apples on them. It’s like ordinary life, it is like a miracle.”’ This same spirit, he believes, imbues View of Delft: ‘In my view, it’s not just a topographical painting; that is a painting about all the hopes of this generation, of the first generation of European pacifists.’

His most revolutionary interpretation, however, concerns Vermeer’s most celebrated picture, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Despite its reputation as mysterious, it is, in his opinion, one of the artist’s most straightforward paintings. The Collegiants believed in baptism at an older age, usually about 13, which allowed the faithful to make the conscious decision of immersing themselves in Christ. Magdalena van Ruijven, the daughter of Vermeer’s patrons, was probably baptised in 1667–68, roughly the same year in which Andrew believes the Girl was painted. The author has no doubt it’s Magdalena’s face that gazes back from the canvas: ‘Who else can it be?’ Yet, he continues, this is no mere portrait. The Girl wears a turban made of scarves, which ‘is exactly what Dutch painters would choose to put on a person to indicate that they are someone from the Bible’, and the famous pearl earring. And what could that refer to, ponders Andrew, if not the moment in which Mary Magdalene at last recognises the risen Christ in the garden outside the Holy Sepulchre? ‘At that moment, her soul is so enormous we can only see it in the form of this pearl, which is purity. She is more pure than any human being has ever been, because she’s seeing God.’

Perhaps she is — and Andrew certainly argues his case with stirring passion — but perhaps Vermeer’s greatest magic is that we can all turn his paintings into our own stories. His enigma is his beauty.

his feature originally appeared in the December 3, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.’ Thus C. S. Lewis inventoried the starting point of what would become the best loved of his novels for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published 75 years ago.

The novel’s inspiration, Lewis claimed, also included an image — clear in his imagination since his teenage years — of ‘parcels in a snowy wood’. From these vivid shards emerged the first of what Roger Lancelyn Green (like Lewis, a member of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings) collectively labelled ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’: stories of good versus evil, rich in symbolism, set in an imaginary world of magic and talking animals.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe even featured Father Christmas, ‘a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest’. In Lewis’s Narnian fantasy world, Father Christmas is ‘so big, and so glad, and’ — most of all — ‘so real’; he inspires ‘a deep shiver of gladness’ in the children he encounters. Appropriately for a novel set in the English countryside amid the privations of the Second World War, he brings to Lucy, Susan, Peter and Mr and Mrs Beaver ‘a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot’, everyday luxuries mostly absent from wartime childhoods. As much as anything, it is a story about the return of Christmas to a land from which festivities have been banished during a century of winter. The return of hope, love, kindness and joy.

Described on publication as ‘a kind of modern fairy tale about four children evacuated to an old house in the country during the war’, the novel at first inspired mixed reactions. Fantasy had not hitherto been among Lewis’s stock in trade. For more than two decades a fellow of Oxford’s Magdalen College, the 50-something academic, who later became a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, had achieved widespread renown for a series of broadcasts about Christianity. These were made during the Second World War and later published in a trilogy of volumes that included 1943’s Christian Behaviour.

One early reviewer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe described Lewis as ‘the author of profound works on theology’ and suggested that, in writing for children, he had ‘taken a holiday’. Lewis himself described a prevalent view that children would be unsettled by the life-and-death struggle of good versus evil at the heart of the novel as a hindrance to its initial popularity. In a letter of March 5, 1951, six months after publication, he noted that ‘a number of mothers and, still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well’. Accurately, he pointed out, ‘real children like it… I think it frightens some adults, but very few children’.

‘Real’ children, of course, soon decided the novel’s fate, whatever the misgivings of mothers and schoolmistresses, and the reviewer’s claim that Lewis’s ‘little book may well become a children’s classic’ was swiftly realised. Sales built steadily and continued to for the rest of the decade. Between 1950 and 1956, Lewis published six other ‘Narnia’ stories, culminating with The Last Battle, which won the Carnegie Medal. Winter issues of The Bookseller typically carried an advertisement for which the wording did not change. Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ stories, the advertisements suggested, were ‘always in demand at Christmas’, as they have remained — and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe most of all.

It’s easy to see why. Like Mary Norton’s ‘Borrowers’ stories and the ‘Green Knowe’ novels of Lucy M. Boston, which were also first published in the 1950s, Lewis’s novel begins in ‘the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of… full of unexpected places’; a house belonging to an elderly professor, ‘large and complicated and full of hiding places’.

Among these hiding places is the wardrobe of the novel’s title. Through it, arms stretched out in front of her, Lucy — the youngest and most engaging of the four Pevensie siblings — takes two or three steps beyond a second row of coats and finds herself ‘standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air’. Ahead lies a lamppost, a ‘very strange person’ (shortly revealed as Mr Tumnus the faun) and a fantastical world of mystery and adventure. ‘I can always get back if anything goes wrong,’ Lucy tells herself.

As in the best childhood reveries, the action of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe shapes all four children for the remainder of their lives, long after they have safely returned through the wardrobe — its imprint stronger than their belief in magic, which fades with the cynicism of adulthood. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian claimed that Lewis ‘enters other worlds in the same dreamlike and certain way as Hans Anderson’. For 75 years, he has enabled young and old readers to do the same, and to share Lucy’s certainty that ‘it’s all true… There is a country you can get to through the wardrobe’.

It is, of course, not simply a story about escape. This is a tale rich in Christian symbolism. Although Lewis himself dismissed as ‘pure moonshine’ any suggestion that, in embarking on his first Narnian adventure, he set out to ‘say something about Christianity to children’, the Christ-like figure of Aslan, sacrificed as the cost of Narnia’s victory over the White Witch, plays a key part in both the novel’s plot and Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy’s understanding of good and bad in the troublingly grown-up world they inadvertently enter.

‘At first I had very little idea how the story would go,’ Lewis reflected later. ‘Then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it… I don’t know where the lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.’ The purposeful capitalisation of Aslan’s pronouns is Lewis’s own.

Since 1950, readers have responded differently to this element of Lewis’s writing, even if many agree with the contemporary who argued that ‘the thread of allegory is clear enough to give added point to the story, slight enough to be sometimes disregarded’. Simply written, in a direct, colourful and lively manner, the seven ‘Narnia’ novels tell their stories with absorbing vigour.

A children’s author, Lewis wrote, enjoys a unique relationship with his readers; neither parent, teacher nor fellow child, but a familiar equal, ‘like the postman, the butcher and the dog next door’. He may have a ringside seat, but the novel’s narrator experiences the story’s tribulations and triumphs much as the reader does. Like the majority of children, he cherishes rebellious instincts: made clear in the Professor’s disdain for schools, Lucy’s contempt for the White Witch and the children’s dislike of the animals in the White Witch’s service.

This combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary (Susan’s fearful determination that, whatever the risks, the children ‘must try to do something for Mr Whatever-his-name is — I mean the Faun’) contributes to the success of the book. Like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Boston’s Tolly, the Pevensies are not paragons. Most children recognise aspects of themselves in Peter, Susan and Lucy, as well as Edmund, who backs the wrong horse by choosing self over others, the White Witch over Aslan, winter over Christmas.

Up to a point, Lewis’s novel offers its readers choices, as well as promoting a moral framework in line with Miss Prism’s definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘The good [end] happily and the bad unhappily.’ When he appears to the children, Father Christmas is described as ‘a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him’. Quite soon, the children recognise that the same applies to the godly Aslan.

After 75 years, Lewis’s story has lost none of its power to delight. It ‘will capture the imagination of most children as well as that of an older generation,’ the Catholic Herald stated of Lewis’s fifth Narnian novel, The Horse and His Boy, in 1954. The same is undeniably true of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — and, surely, certain to remain so.

The recent Louvre theft aside, what's astonishing is that many of the world's royal jewels have survived the vagaries of history. At an exhibition at Paris's Hôtel de la Marine, more than 140 of the best are on display.

Three years in the making, ‘Dynastic Jewels’ is the third and final collaboration between the Al Thani Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and looks at the power, prestige and passion of dynastic jewels. It combines stunning pieces from their two collections with others from public and private collections, and archives from high jewellery houses. ‘It's a once-in-a-generation chance to see so many of these incredibly important pieces of historical jewellery displayed together,’ says exhibition curator Emma Edwards.

The location of the show is noteworthy, as it was once the royal furniture repository, where Louis XVI exhibited the crown jewels to the public one day a month. This was also the site of another famous robbery, in 1792, during the chaos of the French Revolution — though most of those jewels were recovered.

The exhibition opens with celebrated stones from history, including the 57.31-carat Star of Golconda, from India's legendary diamond mines. While south Asia was rich in diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds, and attributed divine or talismanic properties to them, pre-Renaissance Europeans had limited access to gemstones, particularly diamonds. That changed in 1498, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama opened a maritime route to India.

Trade in precious stones grew quickly after that, transforming European court fashion, where the custom was to sew them directly onto clothing. Louis XIV thus covered himself from head to toe with Indian diamonds, reinforcing his position as the divinely appointed Sun King.

In Russia, Catherine the Great used jewellery to help secure her authority following the coup d'état that gave her the throne. She immediately commissioned an imperial crown studded with diamonds, and created a room in the Winter Palace to display the royal collection. ‘She really knew how to manipulate the use of diamonds and jewellery so that she shone,’ says Emma. ‘We have some dress ornaments that were used to cover her splendid court attire so that she blazed around her courtiers and everyone knew who she was.’

Napoleon Bonaparte also used jewellery to legitimise his authority as emperor. One of the stars of this show is the sword from his coronation. ‘The sword was designed to house the Regent diamond [now replaced], a statement of the continuity that he wanted to instill in his reign — that he was the successor to the royal kings of France,’ says Emma. His coronation crown was a copy of Charlemagne's, while Josephine wore a diamond tiara that referenced the laurel wreaths of the Roman Empire.

Ancient Rome influenced women's clothing styles under the Bonapartes, as fabrics grew lighter and more delicate, representing innocence and purity. As a result, jewels moved to the body, such as the pearl necklace on display that Josephine is believed to have handed down to her stepdaughter, Princess Augusta Amélie de Bavière.

Pearls were extremely valuable, and could be more expensive than diamonds, until the invention of cultured pearls in the early 1900s. Empress Eugénie, consort to Napoléon III, owned a remarkable pearl-and-diamond tiara that was meant to be in this show, but disappeared in the Louvre theft. But Eugénie had plenty more in her jewellery box, and Mellerio, France's oldest jewellery house, has loaned the exhibition the magnificent peacock feather brooch that it made for her in 1868 with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires.

Another highlight is the simple sapphire and diamond coronet that Prince Albert designed for Queen Victoria in 1840, their wedding year. She wore it in her first official portrait, and copies of the painting were given as gifts around the Empire. The beloved piece is shown next to her emerald-and-diamond tiara, also designed by her regent and realised by Joseph Kitching. As both were passed down to other family members, Emma says, ‘you can speculate that they might have been worn together at fabulous house parties, but they haven't been seen together for a very long time’.

From the late 1800s to the early 20th century, tiaras were the de rigueur headpiece for high society and royal events, and a room at the Hôtel de la Marine is devoted to 11 of them. One, a large, crown-like confection with a matching stomacher was crafted by Garrard for the Duchess of Portland. ‘She was this very tall, elegant Edwardian lady,’ Emma says. ‘The stomacher was made out of jewels that the family owned, and the tiara was made to go with it. The two of them together, within a ballroom setting, would have really made a statement about who you were and your social standing.’

There are the remnants of a tiara given by the future George IV to the twice-widowed (and Catholic!) Maria Fitzherbert, whom he wed in secret. The alliance was invalidated and George agreed to marry Caroline de Brunswick in exchange for his father paying off his colossal debts.

And then there's the Manchester tiara, made by Cartier in 1903 for the Duchess of Manchester, one of the dollar princesses, or nouveau riche who came from the USA to bolster up the dwindling fortunes of the British aristocracy.

Indeed, the centre of power was now moving from Europe to the New World. Monarchies from France to Austria-Hungary to Russia collapsed, and the new regimes wanted to keep jewels out of the hands of any pretenders to the throne. When France's Second Empire fell, Eugénie wrapped up some of her jewels in newspaper and took them to England, where she gradually sold them to support her life in exile. Back in France, the republican government auctioned off 77,000 Crown jewels in 1887, which proved to be a financial disaster. The biggest buyer was the New York jeweller Tiffany & Co.

This was the Gilded Age, and royal jewels were now worn by the new powerbrokers with names like Vanderbilt and Astor and Rockefeller. One exquisite piece in this exhibition is a corsage brooch created by Mellerio dits Meller in 1864 for Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III. Emma calls it ‘a study in naturalism’, a fully bloomed rose set with 2,309 diamonds. The princess, known for her beauty, wore it when hosting salons for Paris's literary and artistic elite. After her death in 1904, it was sold to Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt III, who showed it off at high-society parties in New York.

The 20th century also saw the return of India's influence on jewellery, as maharajahs' fortunes swelled during the British Raj. They brought trunks filled with jewels to Paris, to have them reset in a modern style by jewellers of the Place Vendôme — Mauboussin, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, Chaumet (whose founder, Marie-Etienne Nitot, had been Napoleon I's jeweller) and especially Cartier.

Jacques Cartier travelled frequently to India, where his biggest clients were not women, but men. He made a necklace with multiple chains of diamonds for the Maharajah of Patiala, and a turban ornament featuring a rare brown tiger eye diamond for Maharajah Ranjitsinhji de Nawanagar. In turn, India's exoticism influenced Western taste, as the heiress Daisy Fellowes commissioned Cartier to make a ‘Hindu Necklace’ in its colourful Tutti Frutti style.

In 1933, a woman, Jeanne Toussaint, became director of high jewellery at Cartier. Her nickname was La Panthère, and she leaned into the house's panther motif, creating sculptural versions for Wallis Simpson, such as a diamond and sapphire panther seated proudly on a large sapphire cabochon. The Duchess of Windsor wore the brooch on her shoulder — a power statement if there ever was one.

Dynastic Jewels is open until April 6, 2026, at the Hôtel de la Marine. Click here for more information.

‘Hee might have 500.lb. for his Picturary of flowers if hee would take it,’ wrote Samuel Hartlib in 1654 of his friend Alexander Marshal, the keen gardener and painter who had devoted his life to painting the flowers in his own and his friends’ gardens. These brilliant watercolours — of 600 different plants, native and exotic, as well as insects, birds and animals (including some remarkably awkward greyhounds) — represent the most important surviving work by Marshal, our first botanical artist. Shockingly, perhaps, it is also the only extant British Florilegium of the 17th century.

Flower books were popular on the Continent, where they were a happy offshoot of the passion for collecting — being the only way one’s treasures could be recorded. Indeed, the use of the word ‘Florilegium’ to mean a book of flower paintings was coined by the Flemish artist Adriaen Collaert (1560–1618) in 1590. Marshal, who was fluent in French, possibly grew up in France, where many flower painters worked. He might well, therefore, have seen the works of Daniel Rabel (1578–1637) and been inspired by the way the Frenchman decorated his flowers with insects and butterflies. Rabel’s countryman Nicolas Robert (1614–85), who produced the Vélins du Roi — botanical paintings on vellum — for Louis XIV, was similarly prominent, but there was no major British player until Marshal.

Despite the high offer, it is fortuitous, perhaps, that Marshal didn’t sell his Picturary as, after his death, the paintings eventually passed to his wife’s nephew and, by a circuitous route, were presented to George IV. Today, they are safely stored in the Print Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, where Country Life was privileged to see them.

There are more than one million items in the Royal Collection, ranging from Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci drawings to the grand piano from RY Britannia. It was Prince Albert who instigated the cataloguing of the ever-expanding collection of works on paper, being determined to bring some order to the extensive historic collections spread throughout the royal palaces. At his request, the designer, architect and sculptor John Thomas (1813–62) created the print room, which is lined with oak bookcases beneath an ornate plaster ceiling. Installed in 1859–60, its shelves were soon filled with albums and folders of prints and drawings. According to Alice de Quidt, assistant curator of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, it was some time before Queen Victoria was able to enter the print room after Prince Albert’s death, so full was it of her husband’s presence.

Even the highest-quality reproductions cannot prepare one for the sight of Marshal’s original watercolours, most of which were painted on the best French and Italian papers. Some have watermarks, some the horizontal rope marks left from where the papers were hung to dry. Brilliant yellow and red-striped tulips, a giant sunflower, an almost-black iris and roses, softly petalled and painted from every angle, shine out from the stands where they have been arranged for us to see.

There is a naturalness in the works that comes as a surprise — yellow blemishes on a leaf are carefully recorded, holes left by a hungry caterpillar are rendered in detail, petals are painted where they fell. The brushwork is the finest a human hand could manage. Most startling is the juxtaposition of subjects. To give one example, a delicate little English wayside flower, the blue-eyed germander speedwell Veronica chamaedrys, is depicted almost touching the powerful head of the magnificent mourning iris, Iris susiana. The latter is native to the Lebanon of the eastern Mediterranean and would have been a highly prized import.

Although the bulk of the Florilegium had been completed by 1653, later additions were made from plants growing in the garden at Fulham Palace in west London SW6. This belonged to Henry Compton, Bishop of London (about 1632–1713), who lived there from 1675 and was both a keen botanist and a good friend of Marshal. They had first met in 1667, when Marshal became Compton’s steward at the Hospital of St Cross, near Winchester in Hampshire. Marshal moved with Compton to Fulham Palace and lived there — even after his marriage to Dorothea Smith three years later — until his death in 1682.

Marshal was born in exciting times, not only because new plants were being transported back from the Mediterranean, South Africa and the Americas, but also because he was painting during the reign of Charles I, the upheavals of the English Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We know he had been a merchant and had possibly lived in France, but it is sure that, by 1641, he was living in Lambeth with his friend John Tradescant the Younger (1608–62) and was painting on vellum a Florilegium of the flowers in Tradescant’s garden.

This was the garden the latter had inherited from his father, John Tradescant the Elder (about 1570–1638), who had been gardener to Queen Henrietta Maria and an avid collector of plants, art and foreign curiosities. The younger Tradescant followed his father as royal gardener and also travelled, bringing back plants from North America. Such foreign specimens were planted in the garden in Lambeth and were no doubt eagerly observed to see what miraculous flowers might burst forth from unprepossessing roots, tubers, corms and bulbs.

Close by was the Ark, which housed the Elder’s strange collection of artefacts from around the world and was the first museum in the country to open its doors to the public. Tickets were sixpence and gave entry to both the museum and the garden. (The Ark’s collection was the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.) Marshal’s Florilegium is noted by the Younger in 1656 in his Musaeum Tradescantium or A Collection of rarities preserved at South-Lambeth neer London as ‘A Booke of Mr TRADESCANT’S choicest Flowers and Plants, exquisitely limned in vellum, by Mr. Alex: Marshall’.

Sadly, that one didn’t survive, but we have Marshal’s own Florilegium, almost complete, in the Print Room at Windsor Castle. After Marshal’s death, it went to his wife, Dorothea, and was then left to his nephew, Robert Freind, headmaster of Westminster School, and thus to his son, William Freind. Noting a handful of missing pages from the Florilegium, the latter mentions ‘a Guernsey Lilly, which was cutt out of the Book by a Lady of great Rank at Chelsea, to whom my Father had lent it’. ‘It has been suggested,’ comments Prudence Leith-Ross in her introduction to The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen at Windsor Castle (Royal Collections, 2000), ‘that this was the first Duchess of Beaufort, whose family owned Beaufort House in Chelsea. She gardened enthusiastically both there and at Badminton in Gloucestershire.’

The surviving pages were sold after Freind Jnr’s death at ‘Messrs Christie and Ansel on Friday, 25 April 1777’ making £52 10s and, by 1818, they had appeared in Brussels, where they were bought by John Mangles of Hurley, Berkshire. He reordered the paintings and had them rebound in two volumes, which he eventually gave to George IV. The date of presentation was not recorded, but Marshal’s masterwork was safe. Today, his paintings — and other prints and drawings in the collection — can be studied by researchers in the Print Room by appointment and on the website of the Royal Collection Trust.

‘Botanicals from the Royal Collection’ (£12.95) is available at Royal Collection Trust shops, as well as all good bookshops — www.royalcollectionshop.co.uk

A cricket match changed Sherree Valentine-Daines’s life. She was pitch-side, brush in hand, capturing the bowling and batting, when someone extended the invitation that would fire up her career: ‘Do you want to paint at The Oval tomorrow?'

'I didn’t even know where that was,’ she laughs. She did find it — and painted ‘a lovely big scene’ of England playing against the West Indies. ‘Then the BBC thought: “Oh, this is good television.” I was invited onto the cricket highlights and the producers said: “Next year, would you paint the Ashes and we’ll film the whole series?”’

It was a triumph for the girl who had left school at 15 ‘because the only thing I was good at was netball’. Although she did then go to art school for four years, forging her name as an artist had initially appeared daunting. ‘It’s like falling off a cliff, because there’s no job out there. I had my one-man show in a local school and sold everything. I thought, “Oh, this is great” — then started approaching galleries and [saw that] they only want you when you have success. I realised I had to make my own success.’ The BBC’s Ashes commission gave her the break she needed, although, she admits, she was rather out of her depth when it came to her cricket knowledge: ‘Famously, [in] one picture that went into the Olympic Games exhibition, I had 13 players and four umpires, because I thought it was a nice composition.’

As it turns out, that sporting blunder didn’t matter. The Ashes paintings led first to a solo exhibition at the Barbican — ‘I don’t know how, as this young girl with no contact at all, I managed to do that’ — then a commission to paint a rugby match. The much faster nature of the game made it a trickier proposition than cricket — where, she chuckles, the change ‘from a left- to a right-handed batsman was probably the most excitement’.

To pile on the pressure, when she arrived at The Stoop, the Harlequins’ stadium in Twickenham, west London, her patrons told her the finished picture would be auctioned off for charity at the end of the match. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted. Anyway, I quickly painted green all over and a bit of blue at the top, then I put a couple of posts. And I thought, well, the Harlequins wear four colours, so I squiggled all these lumps of colours, the arms and legs. I think the other team was red, so I did lots of red, then a ball in the middle and somehow it looked like a rugby match.’

What she endearingly calls squiggles and lumps are in fact the building blocks of her neo-Impressionist style: back in those early days, she realised that, ‘because people move so fast, you end up painting an impression of someone. [My choice of style was] probably not by design, but just happened.’ Soon, this accidental Impressionist was painting races, carriage rides and regattas up and down the country, capturing all the action and glamour of the Season, for which she had long had a fascination.

‘Growing up, I’d never been on holiday, never been anywhere: I had a very ordinary, working-class upbringing,’ she recalls. ‘At art school, someone invited me to Henley. It was a Thursday and I thought: “Don’t people work on a Thursday?” They had boaters on, they had the old school jackets and trousers that were too short and pink socks, drinking Champagne and eating lobster. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ A later brush with Royal Ascot persuaded her that she wanted a way into that life: ‘Painting,’ she says, ‘has been my ticket into this other world.’

Among the many doors her art opened was Glorious Goodwood, which the 10th Duke of Richmond asked her to depict some 30 years ago — and, now, she has returned to the West Sussex estate as artist-in-residence. Earlier this year, she sent the 11th Duke a selection of drawings she had made when she had first worked at Goodwood — beautifully attired people arriving in their Rolls-Royces or charabancs — and he invited her to record a year at the estate in pictures. She has since been going, sketchbook in hand, to every event — Goodwoof, cricket, racing and her personal favourite, Revival — portraying life as it unfolds.

She’s finding it ‘great fun’, despite the hurdles the great British weather sometimes flings her way: once, she recalls: ‘I had a great big painting, it was really windy and it blew over, hit me on my neck, fell over and hit me on my nose — it was quite embarrassing.’ People, she reports, love seeing an artist at work and recognising themselves on canvas — although once, as she had began a new scene, she met a critic who was as ruthless as he was small: ‘What happens when I start a painting [is that] it looks like an abstract rubbish and I had a kid come up to me and say: “My brother’s only two and he can paint better than you!”’

Neither incident, however, compares with the time she took her brushes to the vegetable market at Croydon, south London: ‘I painted there for a week and it rained just about every day. I took an umbrella and did this amazing street scene, where the vegetables, in all the bright colours, were reflected in the wet pavement.’ Water gushed past her feet as she worked, but what really threw her was the fact that not a single trader said a word to her for the entire time — until the very last day: ‘One of them came up and said: “Oh, you can paint. We thought you were the tax inspector, painting as a ruse.” Then they offered me free veg and a cup of tea.’

Suspicious traders apart, food, she finds, is very much on the menu when she paints outdoors, perhaps because of the starving-artist trope. Once, when she was stationed between a house and a bakery, working away, both the baker and the homeowner brought her food halfway through the morning, at lunchtime and mid afternoon, and stood there expectantly — ‘so I ate all this food. Then, at the end of the day, the man in the house said: “I’ve got this beautiful cupboard.” Obviously, he thought I had no furniture — and he gave me a cupboard as well’.

She pauses, then laughs: ‘I wouldn’t mind some Champagne. Perhaps, after I’m done at Goodwood, I’ll paint outside Bollinger.’

An unavoidable fact about working with flowers is their transience. No more so than with a wildflower such as a field poppy, the very fragility of which — the wrinkled silky gleam of the petals, the fine hairs on the stem — is its beauty. When the artist Kate Friend was planning her next project — photographing wildflowers that grew in places that had witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary — therefore, she had to design a mobile studio that would enable her to capture the flowers’ essence before the heat made them wilt. To which end, she built a box that could be transported to a mountain or field and set up as a portable studio.

‘When I went to Fatima [in Portugal], I knew I was going to be in blazing sunshine and I needed a way to control it more,’ she explains from her home in Lisbon. ‘The box is brushed-gold aluminium inside and out to resemble a reliquary — gold also reflects light, keeping the flowers cool. I carry boards in different colours, too, and slot them in.’

The genesis of the Virgin Mary series was the imminent arrival of Pope Francis in Portugal and the photographs were shown in an exhibition, ‘There Are Always Flowers For Those Who Want To See Them’, at the Lyndsey Ingram gallery, London W1, in April this year. In keeping with almost all of Kate's flower pieces, each has as its focus a single stem or spray displayed in a small vase against a coloured background. It sounds simple enough, but the thought, preparation and the practicalities of producing each work results in a powerful image that resonates long after viewing it.

‘I knew I’d be picking wildflowers on holy ground, so the moment of picking them becomes a kind of prayer… a form of worship,’ she reveals. ‘You’re isolating them and spending time with them and the flowers become the icon — the way in. There needs to be a sense of ceremony. Looking back, the process feels like a madness.’

Most extraordinary was what happened on the drive back down a winding mountain road after her last shoot at La Salette-Fallavaux, which had received a Marian apparition in 1846. The road had recently been resurfaced and she felt the car wheels lose their grip on the asphalt; the next moment, the hired Alfa Romeo had come off the side of the road and she remembers rolling over and down, before, just in time, being saved by a small group of trees.

The windscreen was broken, but she and her equipment were unhurt. It was an experience that profoundly changed her outlook on life and brought her closer to the earth and to the flowers that emanate from it. ‘Where do you go from there? You live again. What do you do with your time here?’

This was a world away from Kate’s first beginnings as a photographer in her twenties, when she took on commercial projects in travel or advertising. At the same time, she launched and, from 2010–15, ran a limited-edition boutique magazine, Mother, which brought commissions from Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Maison Margiela.

She had come into photography assuming she would be using an analogue camera, but, after five years of working with digital equipment, as was then the convention, she realised she wanted out. ‘I quit and sold all my equipment and had a strange 180 where I didn’t know what I was going to do, I had no money, I had all sorts of weird part-time jobs. I had gone from shooting fairly big-budget things and flying around the world to absolutely nothing.’

Discovering her old Pentax lying in a drawer, she began experimenting. ‘I would find flowers in funny places and pick them… I photographed a very beautiful white onion and was obsessed with its form and structure, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with any of it.’

Exploring further, she realised she needed to go where the flowers were at their best — ‘Covent Garden flower market was very much not it’ — and so began her first project working with head gardeners. ‘I did a series of 16 portraits at Great Dixter in East Sussex, Chelsea Physic Garden in London and elsewhere. They set the tone, style and philosophy and practice of ensuring that I prioritise the sourcing of the flower first and above everything.’ She had ‘an amazing time trailing behind celebrated gardeners and being given armfuls of cuttings… there was no small talk, it was just about the plants and appreciating them in a way we could share’.

The Garden Museum in Lambeth, SE1, suggested a show of her botanical portraits, which ran in 2018. This drew Kate to the attention of Lyndsey Ingram and, in 2021, the gallery presented the exhibition ‘Portraits, As Chosen By…’. The idea behind this was seeking out people who had a relationship with flowers, but were not necessarily gardeners, and to ask them to select a flower and a vessel. Margaret Howell (dried hydrangea) was the photographer’s first subject and gave her the confidence to keep going.

The show also included flowers chosen by, among others, the landscape and garden designer Dan Pearson (Dianthus cruentus and Dierama pulcherrimum); Olivia Harrison (Himalayan blue poppy), who has overseen the restoration of the historic garden at Friar Park, Henley, Oxfordshire; the fashion photographer Juergen Teller (strawberry); and Maggi Hambling, whose cactus was photographed in her studio. ‘As Chosen By… Part II’ opened at Lyndsey Ingram in 2023, for which the list of subjects expanded to people and plants as varied as their responses.

‘Sometimes, people are clear about what they want, such as the psychiatrist and author of The Well Gardened Mind Sue Stuart-Smith (Tulipa ‘Helmar’), for whom it was all about the tulip. Then sometimes I’ll see someone like the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf and he’ll say: “I love everything, go into the garden. Good luck to you, see you later.” (She selected a Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, for him.) ‘Each visit was very indicative of the person’s character and all were very enjoyable for me. I like putting myself in those circumstances, that’s the process in which each work becomes a portrait.’

The artist Ai Weiwei gave her an hour with the bloom of a mother of thousands plant (Kalanchoe diagremontiana). ’I was under close supervision by his staff, so then you’re really under pressure, which can be great for results, because your hyper focus is completely switched on.’ The landscape designer Luciano Giubbilei simply provided a GPS and wished her good luck. ‘I ended up in the middle of Majorca in a massive storm trying to find this asphodel, but it was also brilliant… I loved that.’ She met Fernando Caruncho, the garden designer and philosopher in Madrid in the middle of winter. He selected a pretty pale-yellow, scented, winter-flowering Chimonanthus fragrans and took her to lunch in a nearby restaurant. Over wine and good meal, he told her: ‘If you can get to the dark heart of the garden then you are really getting somewhere.’ Kate remembers: ‘His words carried me through the last project and perhaps this project that I’m about to start.’

It is too early to say what this will entail. She is currently in what she calls ‘the digesting phase’, researching and trying to reflect what is going on in the world. Come the spring — and the beginning of the flowering season — she will be ready to head out again with her mobile studio and Pentax.

Kate Friend’s work can be seen at Lyndsey Ingram, London W1, and will feature in ‘In Bloom: How plants changed our world’ at the Ashmolean, Oxford, from March 19–August 16, 2026

In December 2019, a metal detectorist in Warwickshire made an astonishing discovery: a gold and enamel heart-shaped pendant, probably dating from 1518, that bears the monograms of Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon. In October, the British Museum launched an appeal to raise the purchase price of £3.5 million by the deadline of April 2026. This week (February 2026), they announced that they'd successfully raised the full amount.

In the run-up to the announcement, Athena had heard that the response from both funding bodies and the public had been gratifyingly generous (as well as luxury brands such as Boodles). The treasure's acquisition is a triumph for the museum. The pendant’s authenticity and significance were confirmed by the research of its curators and technical staff and its determination to acquire an item of extraordinary historical, as well as artistic, significance was a welcome sign of energy and optimism in an institution that has shown little of either in recent years.

For a decade, the museum’s senior management seemed inert in the face of criticism and scandal. It made little effort to push back against grossly exaggerated claims that the collection was in essence colonial loot and, although it acknowledged that the building was seriously neglected, did not make public the details or timetable for the masterplan that would provide the drastic overhaul it needs. Then, in 2023, wavering public support for the museum was threatened by the scandal of thefts from the collection by one of its curators.

Much credit for bringing calm to this situation is due to Sir Mark Jones, a former director of the V&A Museum, who ran the Russell Square museum for six months before the installation of a new permanent director, Nicholas Cullinan, in June 2024. Dr Cullinan has not let Sir Mark’s patient work go to waste. In particular, he has at last got its masterplan off the ground with the announcement in February of an architect — Lina Ghotmeh — for the refurbishment (or ‘reimagining’) of the galleries for ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, Rome, Assyria and the Middle East.

The cost will be enormous — the overhaul of the entire museum seems likely to cost about £1 billion. Dr Cullinan has shown himself ready to make tough financial decisions. To allow the work to start, he (and the museum’s trustees) has accepted £50 million from BP, in the teeth of criticism that it should not take money from a company implicated in climate change, albeit at the same time ending sponsorship from Japan Tobacco International, which supported tours for blind and partially sighted visitors.

In the light of the sums needed, the £2.5 million raised by the much-publicised Pink Ball in October 2025 won’t go far, but the event showed that the museum can generate positive headlines, a feat it is likely to repeat with the display of the Bayeux Tapestry this autumn. With the Tudor pendant now safe in its care, the Tapestry is a further sign that the fortunes of this great institution are at last turning.

A version of this article first appeared in the December 3, 2025, issue of Country Life magazine.

The build up to Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year for William Barsley. I first noticed his work in the Parliament Shop, of all places. Sandwiched between stuffed toys, rubber ducks in the shape of Big Ben, and other such mass-produced gifts were his delicate, intricately crafted wooden angels. William specialises in bespoke woodcarving and creates unique scale replicas of the 14th-century angels that sit high in the hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall — the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster.

The 26 angels have seen it all, Westminster Hall having played a central role in Britain's history. They’ve watched over the trial of Guy Fawkes, the crowning of Henry IV and the lying in state of Elizabeth II. They’ve welcomed Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. William’s replicas are so beloved that gardening superstar Alan Titchmarsh has two of them in his house. But the carver started off in an office job, at the UN in Rome, no less, and only switched to carving full-time after taking a course at the City & Guilds of London Art School.

After that he went straight on to Westminster Hall, for an 18-month project to help restore the hammerbeam roof in 2018. ‘It was great and unbelievable,’ he recalls. ‘The angels are huge, and the stuff they’ve seen is just mind blowing, especially as it’s a very unassuming building from the outside. I didn’t really look back.’

As the days went by, his obsession with the angels grew. They had to work at night, so as to not interrupt the daily goings on of Parliament. With head torches and hazmat suits, 40ft up among the trusses, William and the team worked painstakingly in sweltering heat and freezing cold, as the scaffolding swung perilously with each sharp movement they made. ‘We were doing indents and repairs in sections, but often they were just elements of the angel. I really wanted to carve the whole angel, because — how amazing? I'm a carver. How did they do it?’ William would go into work early with a sketchbook to capture the 8ft-long angels as best he could. ‘I got really geeky,’ he confesses. ‘I started modelling it in a little wax model, so that it wouldn't dry out like today. And then there's a certain angel in there, which is the only one that's quite smiley, and I quite liked that. So I designed it off a specific angel.’

As the project was coming to an end, William approached the shop with his idea and they were impressed. ‘The fact that they were willing to go for that was quite cool,’ he says. On the launch day of the angels in the shop, Elizabeth II died. ‘It came at a really interesting time for the country, to understand what the angels were.’

Working on the angels ‘takes me back to working in the hall,’ William says. ‘I could literally close my eyes and make them now, because I've done so many. But each one is different when I carve it, depending on what mood I’m in, how I'm feeling and how my energy is, so that's quite nice.’

William also takes on private commissions, with a toilet seat being the weirdest thing he’s ever carved. ‘That was as a joke wedding present. There was really nice lettering on the lid.' He never carves the likenesses of people’s pets, ‘because trying to get it to look like their exact pet is very tricky’. He also does restoration and conservation projects, heraldry, and runs carving courses at his new south Devon studio, The Orchard Carving Studio. ‘I don’t think it’s well known as a career,’ he says of his profession, ‘but saying that, we are in a bit of an age of a renaissance. If you look at the amount of craft on TV — The Repair Shop and all the sewing shows, there are now a lot of role models for people to look at.’ He hopes his courses at the studio will help raise awareness of the heritage craft and get more people involved in his onetime hobby that went on to become a beloved career.

Find out more about William’s work on his website.

It's the Christmas news we've all been waiting for. The interior designer and socialite Nicky Haslam has dropped his annual Christmas tea towel: a list of everything he finds common. This years contenders include, but are not limited to: referring to The Spectator as ‘The Speccie’, couture trainers and Stonehenge.

We've handily created a little quiz so that you can find out how common Nicky Haslam's tea towel thinks you are, if you are so inclined. Enjoy. The commoner you are, the more points you win.

You can purchase one of Haslam's tea towels for £50, and subsequently use it to mop up spillages in your kitchen, on his website. For an extra £20 he will even sign it and add a short message! It's a festive bargain, in short.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

'Vases coloured like an autumn sky’ caught the eye of the Italian correspondent of The Architectural Record at the Paris Exposition of 1900. They were the work of American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Italian reporter was not their only admirer: another critic celebrated their ‘almost supernatural light’, which he called ‘as roseate as a sunset’.

Glass vases produced by Tiffany’s French contemporary Émile Gallé were equally commended, in the Journal of Glass Studies, as ‘gems of enflamed transparencies, of bottomless blues, of congealed opals’. Iridescent, crackled and flashed, glass produced by luminaries of the Art Nouveau movement, resembling the shimmering interiors of seashells or the soft translucency of Roman unguentaria, inspired by Byzantine mosaics and medieval enamels, by shards of quartz and agate, has a glister, glamour and, in some instances, intensity of otherworldly colouring uniquely its own.

Exoticism and decadent modernity were hallmarks of the movement. The ‘new art’ style — named after the interiors emporium Maison de l’Art Nouveau, opened in 1895 at 22, rue de Provence in Paris, France, by art dealer Siegfried Bing — spread across Europe and the USA between the 1890s and the outbreak of the First World War. Characterised by exaggerated organic forms, sinuous, molten lines and asymmetry, in a rejection of the often cumbersome historicism that dominated much of the 19th century, it reshaped furniture, architecture, fabric and wallpaper patterns, metalware and — famously, through the work of Alphonse Mucha and his imitators — graphic and commercial design. Nature would determine the luscious colours, form and surface decoration of much Art Nouveau glass; it also left its imprint on the shape and pattern of everything from wrought-iron balconies to tiaras.

Makers looked to plants and flowers, to swirling tendrils and falling petals, hedgerow greens and the colours of blossom, irises and rusty chrysanthemums, peacock feathers and carved cameo shells and, in the case of crystal studio founders the Daum brothers, to entire landscapes of trees. In Britain, exponents of the new style were influenced by motifs drawn from Celtic art and Japanese print-making.

So close was the relationship between the natural world and Art Nouveau that, in his native Nancy, Gallé served for many years as secretary, then vice-president of the town’s Horticultural Society and contributed a number of articles to its bulletin. ‘If Émile Gallé has renewed decorative art,’ wrote his wife, Henriette, ‘it is from having studied plants, trees and flowers both as an artist and a savant.’ The motto he adopted — ‘My roots are in the depth of the woods’ — revealed the extent of his commitment and that deep engagement shaped designs such as his Oakleaf vase of 1895.

It was no different for Tiffany. An advertisement of 1897 by Parisian shop Le Grand Depot claimed of Gallé that ‘Nature is for him the material of poetry; it has impregnated his soul’ and, two years later, the catalogue for a Tiffany glass exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries trumpeted: ‘Never, perhaps, has any man carried to greater perfection the art of faithfully rendering Nature in her most seductive aspects.’ At the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, its entrance framed by towering sculpted sunflowers in place of columns or pilasters, Bing displayed Gallé and Tiffany glass side by side, next to paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat, and plant- and flower-inspired jewellery made from coloured and clear glass, enamel and gemstones by René Lalique.

As a medium, glass was ideally suited to the elegant experimentalism of Art Nouveau. ‘[It] has a molten state in which it can be blown into the most beautiful shapes,’ wrote the British designer Christopher Dresser in the early 1870s. It was the material of choice for leading masters and lesser-known designers alike, from Tiffany, Gallé, Lalique and the Daum brothers to Val St Lambert in Belgium, Beckert in Germany, Bakalowits & Söhne in Vienna, and, in Britain, Dresser himself. The latter entered into a partnership with the Glasgow-based glass-works of James Couper & Sons. Their collaboration resulted in a range of pieces that seemed to preserve in finished form the liquid flow of the medium’s molten state, achieving wonderful levels of technical proficiency.

With its pitted and bubbled surface, Dresser’s ‘Clutha’ glass drew inspiration from ancient Roman glassware — streaked and speckled with colour, iridescent as dragonfly wings, like fragments of sea glass washed up on the shore. It was sold by Liberty in London: the shop described it as ‘decorative, quaint, original and artistic’. To modern eyes, in pieces such as Dresser’s Clutha propeller vase of about 1895, qualities of originality and artistry are more apparent than quaintness, the timelessness of the bubbled glass balanced by its remarkably modern twisted shape. The vase imitated both Nature and art. Dresser used aventurine glass, inspired by translucent aventurine quartz in which mineral inclusions create a metallic shimmer. In doing so, he also referenced the attempts of Renaissance Venetian glassmakers 400 years earlier to re-create the effects of the stone.

Tiffany successfully mastered something similar: in a number of decorative pieces, including some he made for himself, he reproduced the iridescence of ancient glass. He claimed that he achieved this ‘by a careful study of the natural decay of glass’, working backwards from observation. In fact, as Bing explained, the glass, when still hot, was ‘exposed to the fumes produced by different metals vaporised’, metallic oxides being the key to its iridescence.

Technical wizardry of this sort earned Art Nouveau glassmakers critical acclaim and a healthy commercial following. At its best, suggested American Arts magazine Brush and Pencil in December 1901, glass of the sort made by Tiffany was ‘opalescent as a soap bubble… heavy with jewelled effects and rich with gold dust blown into the molten glass… [and] every piece gives an almost infinite variety of beauties’. Displayed at the international exhibitions of the time, it attracted marked attention and, inevitably, spawned imitators, although, in some cases, such as the work of ceramicist-turned-glass-maker Amédée de Caranza, shimmering Art Nouveau glass did not emerge from an instinct to copy, but earlier experimentation with ceramics.

Caranza had perfected techniques of working with metallic oxides when designing faïence and began experimenting with metallic lustres on glass in 1890. He created designs for the Belgian glassmakers Val St Lambert, specialising in decorative pieces in earthy red- or tobacco coloured lustres, patterned with stylised designs of mountain ash, violets and swirling leaves. Like Tiffany, Caranza was proud of the technical prowess his pieces displayed, more than once applying for a patent for a firing method during which the metal ‘oxides are deprived of oxygen, so that they are restored to the state of native metals’.

Tiffany’s ‘favrile’ glass — the term derived from ‘fabrile’, meaning handmade — set a benchmark for lustrous shimmer and magnificent colour. Among early admirers was Max Ritter von Spaun, the owner of the Johann Lötz Witwe Glassworks in Bohemia, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At von Spaun’s instigation, the company embraced Art Nouveau forms, including plant-shaped vases, and the metallic iridescence of makers such as Tiffany, but ultimately achieved its own distinctive variant, ‘Phänomen’ glass, characterised by wave and stripe effects redolent of stylised seashells. Johann Lötz Witwe designs were more abstract than those produced by French and American makers, despite affinities of shape, inspiration and surface effect.

The Art Nouveau movement proved short-lived, succeeded by the geometric sleekness of Art Deco, among the leading lights of which was Lalique, who had played a key part in the emergence of Art Nouveau jewellery. Yet, for as long as fashions lasted, the movement’s designers transformed glass, moving away from the heavily cut, bright-sparkling confections of the 19th century and reinvesting this magical material with the mystique and exoticism it had possessed centuries earlier.

It was his chance to be bold and John Constable seized it. In the spring of 1831, the Suffolk artist, elected a fellow of the Royal Academy two years earlier, was on the hanging committee for the annual exhibition — and he placed his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows squarely between two of J. M. W. Turner’s golden paintings, Caligula’s Palace and Bridge and Vision of Medea. The arrangement caused a stir, with the press calling it ‘a clash of fire and water’, one painter ‘all heat’, the other ‘humidity’.

Turner and Constable had been compared since at least 1819, but, says Amy Concannon, Manton senior curator of Historic British Art at Tate, it took until 1831 for the two to be pitted as rival powers in landscape art. Until then, the competition had been rather one-sided, with the less celebrated Constable at once remarking, ‘Did you ever see a Turner and not wish to possess it?’ and making snippy comments about ‘he who would be Lord of it all’.

The ‘Lord’ in question probably didn’t give as much thought to his would-be contender — until Constable shunted one of his works to the side to claim the centre spot for himself. When the two artists met one evening, soon after the exhibition had opened, Turner went down upon the younger painter ‘like a sledgehammer’, according to his biographer, Walter Thornbury. A year later, he would put the red buoy on his Helvoetsluys seascape to outshine Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, prompting the latter to say: ‘He has been here and fired a gun.’

Nearly two centuries later, Dr Concannon is reviving that rivalry in a forthcoming exhibition, ‘Turner and Constable’, which she has curated for Tate Britain. Intended to celebrate the bicentenary of both artists’ births — Turner’s fell this year; Constable’s is in 2026 — it is a battle of artistic Titans, where some of the hanging had been conceived to suggest ‘what the press saw in 1831’.

Curating the show was itself a titanic effort, with Dr Concannon determined not only to ‘do both artists proud’, but also display rare treats that have not been seen in this country since at least the 1970s — such as Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 — and highlight unexpected facets of their work. As an example, she mentions Constable as a painter of cityscapes: London, Salisbury and Brighton. For all that the Suffolk artist said he ‘should paint [his] own places best’, she finds that ‘he was really at his boldest when out of his comfort zone: it was his painting of London that rattled Turner enough to put that red blob on his seascape’.

The exhibition sets out to challenge the way in which the two artists have long been typecast, Constable as the traditional artist, Turner as ‘the maverick, the really experimental magician’, whose subject matter and technique both point to the future. In fact, argues Dr Concannon, ‘in terms of technique, Constable was probably braver earlier’. At the turn of the 19th century, when paintings were expected to look smooth and polished, with no visible brushstrokes, Turner adhered to the canon; Constable didn’t. ‘He wanted to keep his paint surfaces reflective of the liveliness, freshness and atmosphere in the countryside, so they have that sense of texture, of the landscape moving, the foliage moving. He preferred to keep his brushstrokes quite visible and that was very bold.’

Constable, whose sketching chair will be on display at the exhibition, was also more of a plein-air artist than Turner: ‘He was so wedded to the idea of everything about his work being authentic, he became almost superstitious that he couldn’t make a painting if he hadn’t made at least a sketch of the scene outdoors.’

It was London that weaned him off that habit, but not before he had accumulated enough sketches to sustain him for the rest of his career. ‘When you think about how difficult that would have been,’ muses Dr Concannon, noting he would have had to lug pigs’ bladders filled with the oil paints he had previously mixed, as well as dealing with wind, rain, insects and nosy passers-by, ‘you have a new level of respect for Constable’.

She contends that, even in terms of subject matter, both artists were equally modern, reflecting the fast-changing world in which they lived. Turner may have painted steamboats and trains, but the Constable we now see as nostalgic instead captured a transforming landscape: ‘The canal he depicts, that’s one of the earliest industrial innovations in the countryside.’ As Britain’s war against France raged on, he also tapped into national pride. Art, notes Dr Concannon, was used to drum up patriotism: ‘Artists played into a self-congratulatory [message]: “Isn’t our landscape wonderful?” That’s effectively what Constable’s paintings are saying.’

Ask her which she prefers of the two men and she is stumped. ‘It’s really impossible for me to choose. There are works by both of them I truly love. Most often, Turner has that initial ‘wow’ factor. However, [with] Constable, you can stand and look at the marks and get lost in his paint surface. They both have something very different to offer.’

Where Turner definitely excelled over Constable was in enterprising spirit. The latter made far fewer sales in his lifetime: ‘If something was a success, it was by happenstance: someone liked what he was doing.’ Turner, on the other hand, knew how to please his patrons: ‘I’m sure [he] really loved to paint Venice, but Venice was also a really marketable subject matter.’ Perhaps this contrast stemmed from their origins. Constable came from a more affluent family, but one with ‘quite narrow middle-class expectations’ that initially held him back from an artistic career. Turner not only had the encouragement of his father — and was gaining recognition for his work when Constable had barely started art school — but he lived in Covent Garden among people who had to be resourceful to make ends meet. He believed in himself and in the market, where Constable has a certain reticence in ‘getting his hands dirty’.

Yet, at a human level, Constable is perhaps the more relatable: ‘He always struggled with his confidence. He worried if things were good enough, whether his paintings were finished. There was one point when he was between houses and he worried that, because his studio was in London, but his family was in Hampstead, he could neither work very well, nor parent his children very well.’ In this, he was already a man of our times.

‘Turner and Constable’ is at Tate Britain, London SW1, from November 27–April 26, 2026

Throughout his life, Stanley Spencer was drawn to the numinous. As a small child, he defined angels as ‘great big white birds wot pecks’; he likened the sound of his brother William, a child prodigy, playing Bach on the organ of the village church, to the joy of angels. The village in question was Cookham, on the Thames, close to Maidenhead in Berkshire, afterwards described by Spencer as ‘my Paradise’. He was born there in 1891 and died there 68 years later: so great was his attachment to it that, as a young man, his fellow Slade School students called him ‘Cookham’. In the village, where his father read the Bible aloud daily to all nine Spencer siblings, he was ‘brought up with the notion that Heaven was, if not all enveloping, at least straight ahead’ and there he would set a number of religious paintings, in which Christ and New Testament figures such as Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, appeared in its lanes and churchyard and among the boats of its annual regatta.

Among Spencer’s particular gifts was an ability to discern the spiritual in the everyday, in the allotments, wrought-iron railings and rows of cabbages of an English village. ‘My feeling for things being holy was very strong,’ he wrote. Sometimes, it came upon him suddenly, he explained in 1934, and he ‘became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy’.

Spencer’s strong religious faith, inculcated during his childhood in what was then a fairly isolated village community, never left him. It encompassed a stirring sense of the wonder of Nature, which also lasted for the rest of his life, colouring every engagement with his surroundings, from a stand of dead nettles encountered in the corner of a meadow to ancient Ming tombs seen on a tour of China in the mid 1950s. A thread of religious absorption was a feature of his volubility, his conversation, a friend remembered, typically ‘of Ibsen and malthouses, frescos, religion and morality’. Unsurprisingly, forceful religious faith irradiated many of his paintings and affected his attitude to realism in his work. As his own focus oscillated between the natural and the supernatural, so his paintings betrayed by turns a pre-Raphaelite level of exactitude and an idiosyncratic stylisation intended to convey the miraculous nature of events being portrayed.

Pure landscapes and Nature studies such as Cookham of 1914, The Vale of Health, Hampstead (about 1940), The May Tree (1933) and Ricketts Farm, Cookham Dene (1938), complete with piglets and lopsided hay ricks, embody what Spencer described as his ‘personal value of the Englishness of England’. Other images set aside conventional realism, their unsettling visual idiom adding to their impact — Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, painted early in his career, and the late Crucifixion of 1958, commissioned for the chapel of a boys’ boarding school.

Art, Spencer once wrote, emerges from a melting pot of feelings and experiences: the mix he described would have surprised some of his contemporaries: ‘Love, desire, faith, passion, intimacy, God, spiritual consciousness, curiosity, adventure.’ Not for Spencer the hostile antithesis of religion and sex that characterised the culture of recent generations, including his own God-fearing parents and grandparents. Sex and an earthy fleshiness also play their part in the work by this preeminent 20th-century English visionary.

A very short man, he conceived a large and distinctive, highly personal vision. Much of it was shaped by events in his own life and the places in which he spent time — Cookham, but also the north of Suffolk, around Wangford and Southwold. The area played a key role in both his art and his personal life, as an exhibition opening this week at Gainsborough’s House Museum in Sudbury, ‘Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk’, reveals. It was there, in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, Wangford, that Spencer married fellow artist Hilda Carline on February 23, 1925, and here that the couple spent their honeymoon.

Spencer made a number of paintings of Suffolk farmyards and landscapes, including Tree and Chicken Coops, Wangford, Turkeys and The Red House, Wangford. When, a decade later, Spencer’s first marriage ended unhappily and he found himself trapped in a loveless, unconsummated second one, he returned alone to north Suffolk in an unsuccessful attempt to rekindle vanished happiness. Then, he painted the beach at Southwold, an enigmatic image with its rows of striped deckchairs and sagging lines of drying bathing costumes. It offers the viewpoint of an observer, detached from the scene, at a remove from the pebbled beach and its happy holiday atmosphere.

Another important influence for him came in the form of early Italian masters, including Duccio, Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Angelico, which he discovered when he trained as an artist at the Slade School from 1908–12, after having been mostly educated at home by his sisters. The directness of their work thrilled him as much as their religious subject matter and led him towards mural painting, which came to occupy an important place in his own output — Spencer frequently referred to himself as a muralist.

Best known among his mural commissions is the sequence of paintings he completed for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. The commission occupied Spencer for six years, much of it shaped by his own experiences in Macedonia during the First World War. He devoted almost a year to the largest panel, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, in which, to remarkable effect, a tangled netsuke of human and animal bodies recedes from view beneath a jumble of white wooden crosses. Cottages at Burghclere, one of his best-loved, most ‘English’ views, was also painted during this period.

Spencer once claimed that his only really significant love affairs had been with places. Chief among them were the village in which he was born and in which he spent much of his life and, as the Gainsborough’s House exhibition shows, landscapes associated with early years of his first marriage. Religion, he said, ‘came into my vision quite naturally, like the sky and rain’. Hypnotically, it coloured sky, rain, fields, rivers, whole villages and whole vistas.

‘Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk’, is at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, from November 15–March 22, 2026 — www.gainsborough.org

The exhibition will head to The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham from 2 April - 1 November 2026.

Paintings courtesy of Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham; Estate of Stanley Spencer; Bridgeman Images; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Tate

A very Berkshire Eden

There was a ‘sacred quality in most unexpected places’ in Cookham, Stanley Spencer suggested in middle age. This awareness on the artist’s part lent a brooding, pregnant, eerily still quality to a handful of overtly realistic views of the village and its surrounds that he painted in the 1930s. All are characterised by shimmering intensity. Gardens in the Pound, Cookham, with its vivid red bedding plants and rope-twist glazed-terracotta bedding edging, Cookham, Flowers in a Window, in which each vein of hellebore leaf and filament of crocus is crisply delineated, and the magnificent Bellrope Meadow, bathed in golden light, every petal and leaf of purple aster clean cut, all celebrate an earthly Eden rooted in ordinariness, elevated by the artist’s unwavering affection.

The life and times of Stanley Spencer

1891 Born on June 30, the eighth surviving child of William and Anna Spencer, in Cookham, Berkshire

1908 Attends the Slade School of Fine Art, after having been educated at home. His contemporaries include Paul Nash and Dora Carrington

1912 Exhibits in the English section of Roger Fry’s controversial Second post-Impressionist Exhibition, together with Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell

1914 Rents a makeshift studio in Cookham, Wisteria Cottage, and comes to the attention of a prominent collector of modern art, Eddie Marsh, who buys Apple Gatherers and Self-Portrait

1915 Following the outbreak of the First World War, volunteers for ambulance duty with the Royal Army Medical Corps; is sent to Macedonia, where he remains until 1917, when he is ordered home after repeated bouts of malaria

1919 Meets Hilda Carline

1920 Undertakes a series of religious paintings, including Christ Carrying the Cross, for a private oratory in Buckinghamshire

1925 Marries Carline (three years after announcing their engagement); their first daughter, Shirin, is born in November

1927 First one-man exhibition, at Goupil Gallery in London. He begins mural paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere (completed 1932)

1930 Second daughter, Unity, born

1932 Elected Associate of the Royal Academy (RA); meets, and becomes infatuated with artist Patricia Preece, who encourages his affection, despite being herself in a long-term relationship with another woman, Dorothy Hepworth

1935 Resigns from the RA after it rejects St Francis and the Birds and The Dustman or The Lovers from the Summer Exhibition; Carline moves out of the family home

1937 Carline divorces Spencer; he marries Preece, who refuses to consummate their marriage; Spencer requests, but is refused, a second divorce. Unsuccessfully, he attempts a reconciliation with Carline

1940 The War Artists’ Advisory Committee sends Spencer to the shipyards of Glasgow to depict civilians at work

1950 Sir Alfred Munnings, outgoing president of the Royal Academy, brings an obscenity case against Spencer based on drawings in his scrapbook. The case is subsequently dropped and, in the same year, Spencer is appointed CBE

1955 Retrospective exhibition held at Tate

1958 Receives knighthood from Elizabeth II

1959 Dies of cancer on December 13

2011 Sunflower and Dog Worship is sold for £5.4 million, at the time a record sum for a modern British painting

This feature originally appeared in the issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Anyone fascinated by the lives of the ultra rich — which seems to be most of us — and in particular the part that art plays in it, will enjoy digging into the latest Survey of Global Collecting. Published by Arts Economics on behalf of the contemporary art fair Art Basel, it is available free of charge.

Although a dry read — no collectors are named — it’s full of intriguing nuggets. Its author, Clare McAndrew, has analysed the responses to a survey of 3,100 collectors who are either High Net Worth Individuals — those with disposable household financial assets (so not including property) of $1 million or more — or Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, with assets of more than $1 billion. As far as art collecting is concerned, their activities are important for the British economy, as the UK remains one of the world’s three largest art markets: with the USA and China (which, unlike the UK and USA, imports more than it exports), it accounts for 66% of global value.

The overarching statistic is staggering: in 2024, millionaires made up 1.6% of the global adult population, but owned 48% of its wealth. Yet there is one way that the distribution of global wealth is becoming more equitable — between the genders. Athena is delighted that Dr McAndrew has focused in detail on the impact that the richest women are having on the art market. In terms of their growing financial clout, it is significant. Between 2015 and 2024, the number of female billionaires grew from 190 to 344. Although this is only 18% of the world total of billionaires, women control more than one-third of global wealth and are projected to control 75% of discretionary spending world-wide within five years.

The report highlights some telling differences between men and women in these alpine reaches of the market. In particular, women are more interested in women artists. In their collections, 49% of the works are by female artists, compared with 40% in men’s, and women spent an average of 47% of their outlay on art in 2024–25 on female artists, compared with 41% for men.

Financial investment is a less important motive for collecting for these women than it is for men, with the consequence that women are less likely to be swayed by the public profile of an artist: 55% of the women reported buying works by unknown artists frequently or often, compared with 44% of men.

Although painting and sculpture remain the favourite media for both genders, and men are slightly ahead for works on paper, female buyers are broader in their range — they are, for example, more likely to collect photography, digital art, installations and textile-based art.

Given that considerably more women than men intend to donate works to the public (75% compared with 64%), the report provides a riveting glimpse into the future shape of our museum collections.

Items from the collection of Lady Glenconner, who was Maid of Honour at Elizabeth II’s Coronation and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, a friend from childhood, will be auctioned off at Bonhams New Bond Street on November 18.

Highlights include the Thomas Smith of Derby painting The Cullen Arabian held by a groom, before a landscape with classical ruins, which carries an estimate of £50,000–£70,000; Victor Pasmore’s The Painting Lesson (estimate £30,000–50,000); a 1954 nine-carat gold Cartier box, a present from Elizabeth II; and Lady Glenconner's Sir Norman Hartnell wedding dress.

Lady Glenconner comments: ‘I have had such great pleasure living with these wonderful objects, each telling their own fascinating story.’

In 2023, Country Life interviewed Lady Glenconner about her time on Mustique or 'the party island' which her husband, Colin, purchased in 1958 for £45,000.

You can read some snippets from that article, below.

There is a certain serendipity to the timing of my conversation with Lady Glenconner. She is off to Mustique imminently. ‘I suspect this may be the last time I go,’ says the 91 year old, rather wistfully, of the tiny West Indian island she and her husband, Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner), brought to life over many decades, turning it, as Colin prophesied he would, into ‘a household name’.

'The sound of having your very own desert island was wonderful, the reality was far less attractive,’ recalls Lady Glenconner of the scrubby island infested with mosquitoes and overrun with wild cows, where she was to spend months and years eating barely more than tinned beans and ‘sweating rather than sleeping at night’.

Her excitement about her forthcoming trip is palpable — she barely draws breath — so I ask her the five things she is most looking forward to when she gets there. ‘

Oh swimming, of course,’ she says, without missing a beat. A picnic and a swim at Macaroni Beach are nostalgic reminders of her days spent with Princess Margaret (to whom she was lady-in-waiting), perhaps Mustique’s most famous occupant among a roll call of celebrities and who ‘set the island on its way’. ‘I adore swimming in the lagoon, too,’ she adds. ‘Some people don’t like the weed there, but I love the way it strokes your body as you glide along.’

We turn finally to her books and the writing career that has brought her such fame in her old age. ‘I wouldn’t have written my books at all if it hadn’t been for Colin’s ghastly will, which left me with nothing.’ I can feel the shudder on the end of the telephone line as she voices a fear of bumping into Kent Adonai, Lord Glenconner’s only beneficiary, when she travels through St Lucia. ‘I’ll be wearing a mask, just in case,’ she says firmly.

We discuss, in particular, her book 'Murder on Mustique', written partly because she had been inspired by a real, but little documented, murder on the island and partly to give an idea of what the island was really like. ‘How it smelled and how it sounded,’ she says, and I think of a passage in the book’s early pages
when she describes the ‘sweetness of decaying leaves, sea salt and paprika drifting from someone’s kitchen’. I can hear the ‘cicadas chirruping like a round of applause’ and I can imagine Lady Glenconner, back on Mustique, bursting with the same colour and energy as the island that has been so much part of her life.

‘Lady Glenconner, My Life in Objects’ can be viewed online until November 18.

The moped tracks outside the Louvre, in Paris, have barely had a chance to cool, but another important Napoleonic jewel is already making headlines.

However, this time, the historic piece was legitimately for sale. The one-of-a-kind brooch is a glittering spoil of war, owned by Napoleon Bonaparte, and seized by the Prussians during the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815.

Studded with old mine and mazarin-cut diamonds, the jewel appeared on the auctioneer’s block, in Geneva, yesterday (November 12) as part of Sotheby’s ‘Royal & Noble’ sale. Part of a precious cache — including weapons, medals, a hat, silverware, and a box containing dozens of loose diamonds — that the self-appointed French Emperor brought with him to fight, it was expected to sell for between £115,000 and £153,000, but actually went for £4.4 million.

When his armies were overwhelmed on the battlefield by combined British and Prussian forces, Napoleon beat a hasty retreat to the French capital, but famously abandoned his carriage at Genappe, just south of Waterloo because the road was congested. The emperor escaped on horseback, but the bottleneck cost him his carriage and its valuable contents. On June 21, 1815, three days after the fight, the brooch was offered by one Lieutenant von Pless to the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, as a trophy.

‘I herewith humbly present, in the name of the 15th Regiment and particularly the Fusilier Battalion under my command, a brilliant ornament that we captured in pursuit during the glorious battle,’ von Pless wrote. ‘This ornament is so rare that it should rightfully belong only to the Crown of Prussia and our revered King.’

The circular brooch was crafted for Napoleon in around 1810, and measures 45mm across. At its heart sits a dazzling 13.04-carat, oval-cut diamond, ringed by almost 100 more. It was most likely designed as a hat ornament, to be worn on special occasions — a symbol of the imperial splendour that the emperor manifested for himself and his court following his lavish coronation in 1804.

The brooch was part of the House of Hohenzollern’s collection for generations, passing from Friedrich Wilhelm III to German emperors. During the 19^th century, its original pin was replaced with a sturdier fastener, and a pendant loop was added. The piece eventually made its way into a private collection.

Other significant jewels that went under the hammer include Prince Franz Xaver of Saxony and Poland’s (1730–1806) spectacular natural pearl and diamond hair ornament, and matching pin. The pieces were originally crafted for a tiara, for the wedding of the Prince’s daughter Cunegonde of Saxony, in 1796 — which was later dismantled and its various parts remounted.

And then there was the show-stopping pink diamond ring that once adorned the fingers of Princess Neslishah Sultan (1921–2012), one of the last Ottoman princesses. The ring, which is coming up for auction for the first time, features an old mine, brilliant-cut light pink diamond of more than 13 carats. It was estimated to sell for between £228,000 and £379,500. Its provenance is extraordinary: before the princess, it was owned by Catherine I of Russia. It was gifted to the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III in 1711, during the Treaty of Pruth.

These sparkling jewels have, against the odds, survived centuries of upheaval and sweeping political changes, witnesses of events that have reshaped our world and precious links to some of the most prominent figures in human history.

We can only assume that security was sky high (or at least a little bit higher than a German ladder can reach).

In trying to put his finger on just what made Jan Vermeer (1632–75) special, Théophile Thoré-Bürger, the French art historian who rediscovered the painter in the 19^th century, alighted on the nickname ‘the Sphinx of Delft’. The tag, and its inflections, stuck. Now, it is rare to read a book or article about Vermeer that doesn’t refer to him as ‘mysterious’ or an ‘enigma’.

He deserves the terms both because there is very little documentary evidence with which to recreate his life and because his pictures are so rich with possibilities. Predominantly a painter of young women in closed rooms, the narratives are never clear, their thoughts are endlessly interpretable — are these women daydreaming of love, musing on mortality, pondering earthly possessions, yearning for a different life or future, or wondering what is going on outside their windows?

‘Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood’, on view until January 11, 2026, at Kenwood House, on London’s Hampstead Heath, adds a new mystery to the mix. It shows two versions of one painting side by side: The Woman Playing the Guitar. They are nearly identical. The first is a late work, painted by Vermeer around 1670–72, and purchased by Kenwood’s one-time owner, Edward Guinness, the 1st Earl of Iveagh, in 1889. At his death in 1927, it formed part of the Iveagh Bequest, his gift of Old Master and British paintings. The second work is on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). It was first heard of in the Kremer Collection in Brussels in the 19th century and was later bought by the Pennsylvania lawyer John Johnson, and entered the museum collection on his death in 1917.

So are these both genuine Vermeers, or neither, or only one and, if so, which one? The question matters, not least because there are only 37 accredited Vermeer paintings known, so the addition of one more to the canon is a significant event. The differences between the two are minimal, the main ones being that the Philadelphia guitar player lacks the striking ringlets of the Kenwood young woman, and the London painting is signed and the American one isn’t. The PMA painting, however, is being displayed unrestored, complete with a repaired tear and the effects of a brutal 19^th-century attempt at cleaning clearly visible. Its first stop when the exhibition closes will be to the conservation studio.

The truth about these twin pictures has been exercising experts for a century. Initially, the Philadelphia painting was thought to be the original work, but it was relegated to the museum stores when consensus shifted to the better-preserved Kenwood picture. Both pictures have undergone recent scientific research and while the full results have yet to be presented, some interim findings have been released.

The first difference is that the ground of the Kenwood picture — the first layer that readies the canvas for painting — is a pale grey-brown colour, consistent with the ready-prepared canvases Vermeer is known to have bought and used. This same ground, made from a mixture of lead white and chalk, toned with earths and black pigments, can be found in his other late paintings. By contrast, the PMA guitar-player is painted on a dark brown ground, primarily comprising burnt umber.

Importantly, the blues in the Kenwood painting are ultramarine, an extremely expensive pigment made from ground lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, while those in the PDA version are made from indigo, a much cheaper vegetable dye. Meanwhile, the greens in the London picture, predominantly in the painting on the wall behind the woman (but also in the flesh tones) are painted in green earth, a mineral pigment, while those in the PDA picture are made from mixing indigo with yellow ochre.

Furthermore, there are subtle differences in the posture of the two women and their placement within the room, suggesting that the second painting was not made from a tracing of the original. Meanwhile scholars have noted that ringlets such as those worn by the Kenwood guitar-player began to disappear in Dutch paintings around 1700.

While all of this suggests that the Kenwood Vermeer is the original and the Philadelphia painting a good early copy made with inferior materials, neither institution is going so far. The exhibition displays them without a conclusion, presenting the relevant scientific material, and allowing visitors to practise their own connoisseurship. It makes for an intriguing tease. There is no questioning of Vermeer’s authorship of Edward Guinness’s picture, but did he paint the PDA one too? And if not, who did? The artist was too accomplished to be an unknown. Was it the work of a celebrated, but less famous hand? Another mystery.

'Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood' is on at Kenwood House until January 11, 2026. Entry is free.

‘I always wanted to do something in art history that hadn't been done before, I guess, but I didn't know what it was going to be,’ says Katy Hessel. The 31-year-old art historian, writer and curator splits her time between London and New York and was named on Forbes’s infamous ‘30 Under 30’ list in the arts and culture category in 2021. She is probably best known for her Sunday Times bestselling-book The Story of Art Without Men, an examination of art made by women from the 15th to the 21st century, for which she won the Waterstones Book of the Year award. Her Instagram account, The Great Woman Artists, has 462K followers and has spawned a podcast on which Katy has interviewed Jenny Saville, Tracey Emin and the Guerilla Girls, to name just a few.

Her new book, How to Live an Artful Life, is ‘an almanac of sorts,’ she says. Each page is dedicated to one day of the year and features a quote from an influential artist or writer (such as Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Marina Abramović), plus Katy’s thoughts, reflections and creative insights. Today’s quote (November 4) comes courtesy of Virginia Woolf and is paired with notes on how to think about ‘the memory of language’ and a task for the reader — to ‘imagine a palace of words’ and write down the ones that would live in it.

‘The book was designed to show the reader how they can apply that thinking to their life. What I love about artists' words — I mean, I’ve been interviewing them for over a decade now — is that while they are often in relation to their art, they’re also so much about life,’ she says. ‘I love this idea that actually artistic thinking is so important because it applies to every single job that there is. Whether you're a politician or an accountant, you always work creatively, whatever you do.’

Katy was born in 1994 in north London. Her mother, a psychotherapist, and father, who works in property, sent her to the prestigious Westminster School. ‘It was just absolutely amazing,’ she says, ‘and I never really take anything for granted.’ Highlights included Art History classes inside the nearby National Gallery and the chance to observe London’s skyline from the roof of Westminster Abbey (which is attached to the school).

When Katy was 17 she worked at Sotheby’s, as an intern, and then at 18 at the Victoria Miro Gallery, manning the front desk. ‘I wanted to be close to it and I wanted to know how it worked,’ she says of the art world, ‘but I always thought people who wrote books were sort of [out of reach], I never thought that I could be one of them, ever.’ Did she always want to write? ‘Absolutely not,’ Katy says. ‘I was a terrible writer.’ However, her daily Instagram posts on great female artists gave her the space to practice.

Despite her route into writing, Katy is concerned about AI and electronic devices: ‘So many of us look at the world through our screens and forget to pay attention to the world outside. I sort of wrote [the book] for myself in lots of ways, because I was finding that I was just being constantly distracted or, you know, imagination just seems to be outsourced by AI, and actually, that's completely not the point — the creativity is about the joy and the doing.’

She is endearingly modest about her inclusion on Forbes’s ‘30 Under 30’ list. ‘It’s just so lovely to be recognised and art history is often dismissed, so I hope my work brings people in,’ she says. Ultimately, she wants ‘young people to feel like they belong in museums’. She thinks we are lucky that they are free in this country, so that everyone, regardless of their financial situation, can experience world-class art. And she shows no signs of slowing down. The writer has another book coming out in 2027, and a children’s book based on The Story of Art Without Men (for 8-13 year olds) coming out next year.

Your aesthetic hero

I have a few. One of my heroes, just generally, is a mythographer called Marina Warner, and I love her house because it has more books than bricks in it. I think that's such an amazing way to live. And in terms of art, I love the collector, Pauline Karpidas. I'm also sort of weirdly obsessed with noughties decor. So I just love the River Cafe [in Hammersmith, London] and Ruth Rogers’s aesthetic.

The best present you’ve ever received

Recently Bella Freud [the fashion designer] gifted me a suit. We did a sort of art history summer school together, and we both wore matching, different-coloured suits — she wore blue, I wore pink. That was a pretty great gift.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I’m currently in New York and I always stay at a place called The Manner in SoHo. I love it, it just feels like home.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Not that I would ever compare my looks — because she's absolutely beautiful — but people do say maybe our hair is similar, so I think probably Daisy Edgar-Jones.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Life gets me up. It's always so exciting. I spend my life looking at art and I am so lucky. You know, it might not last forever, so at the moment, it's definitely life and art and writing and seeing as much as possible.

The items you collect

I’m an art collector. I run a residency every year for young artists, and have done since 2018, and I've collected pieces by all the artists who've done my residency. My flat is just filled with art, but everything has a personal story. I know every artist personally, whose work I have in my flat.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Speaking recently, I actually think my best meal of 2025 has been at The Devonshire [in Soho, London]. I had the scallops, beef, and then the prawn cocktail and — oh my god — their sticky toffee pudding, which was the best thing in the world.

The last podcast you listened to

The last one was one I'm really obsessed with at the moment called Song Exploder, where they basically interview musicians about why they wrote songs and how they wrote them. Honestly, it's just so interesting.

What you’d take to a desert island

I would take a piano. I would take my friends. I would take maybe something for a party — a speaker, maybe a barbecue — and then some games, probably Monopoly Deal.

A book you found inspiring

For me, it's got to be The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. I read it when I was 21 and it really actually changed how I saw art, but also it opened up the possibilities of how art could be written about. The concept is that it looks at the loneliness of New York through the eyes of a few different artists, like Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, David Wojnarowicz and Henry Darge, and it basically just showed me that there are so many different ways of writing about art, which I just loved. It sort of gave me permission to write how I wanted to, because I always thought that you had to write in a certain way, but actually you don't. You can find your own voice.

An exhibition that has impressed you

This is a very hard question to answer, but one exhibition that completely amazed me this year was ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at the Tate Modern. I had no idea who he was and I just loved it. I loved it for its energy, and I had never really experienced something like that before. He was an iconic figure in the 1980s and was so groundbreaking, and what I loved about it was that it was just so fun. Afterwards, I just wanted to go dancing. I literally called my best friend after and we went dancing all night because I was so excited by the exhibition.

A possession you’d never sell

I have all these notebooks from when I was a teenager. They're art diaries, leather-bound, and I wrote little art reviews in them when I was younger. I'd never like to part with them because they're very special to me.

The music you work to

I listen to Philip Glass when I work, but also when I don't work. It just sends me to another place, and I find it so beautiful as piano music. You're in a dream world when you listen to it and it has no voices, so you can't be distracted by that. It also reminds me of certain times of my life.

Your favourite painting

I feel very bad that it's actually not a woman, but How to Live an Artful Life does include men as well, so I think that's fair enough. I absolutely adore The Tempest by Oskar Kokoschka, who was around in Vienna at the turn of the century. For me, it just sums up the tumultuousness, but reality and also the romance, of love. It’s of two figures, Oscar Kokoschka and his then-lover, Alma Mahler. He's awake and she's asleep, and they're on a sort of cloud, and it shows how, with love, how you can totally be enraptured by a cloud and be in another world, and it feels so incredible. But then there's also the reality of it, and I think he just sums it up so well. It's so romantic. So that's probably my favourite painting. It's not by a woman, but whatever, it's fine. I've spoken about women a lot.

Katy Hessel’s book ‘How to Live an Artful Life’ is out November 6, 2025. You can pre-order it here.

Haloed in darkness, naked but for a sheer gauze across his loins, Satan stands fierce on the edge of a flaming sea and raises his arms, muscles rippling under the weight of his staff, to call his legions. ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!’

With only his glowering eyes and the snake circling his helm marking him as the Devil, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s handsome antihero is a far cry from the be-tailed monsters that boiled fallen souls in the 12th-century mural at Chaldon Church, Surrey.

Vigorous or deformed, fearsome, humbled or desperate, the Devil has been shapeshifting since he made his artistic debut in late Antiquity, taking on as many forms as his names — Satan is the adversary, Lucifer the fallen angel — or, indeed, the religions for which he was the bogeyman (Islam alone has a bevy of devils, led by Iblis, also called Ash-Shaytan).

One of its earliest appearances in a Christian context, according to Italian art historian Laura Pasquini’s 2024 book on diabolic iconography (Il Diavolo. Storia Iconografica del male), is a profile on the mosaic of the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta in the town of Aquileia, Italy. It was made in the 4th century, at a time when the Church was debating whether images had a place in worship or were perilous relics of paganism. With one eye staring fixedly from a tile, forehead frowning under a single, untamed curl and tongue protruding from his mouth, the Devil’s image is reminiscent of the evil-warding masks used in Bacchic and other early rituals — there to warn the faithful of the dangers of embracing the very rites from which it drew its shape.

However, what many scholars deem to be the first proper representation of Lucifer came some 200 years later, at the twilight of Antiquity, on another Italian mosaic, this time in Ravenna. In 493, the Ostrogoth king Theodoric had conquered the city, then capital of the Western Roman Empire, not without a little foul play: he had slaughtered the previous ruler, Odoacer, at a banquet intended to mark a peace treaty between the two. What Theodoric lacked in morals he made up for in a zest for building, not least a church for his personal use, now known as St Apollinare Nuovo. Among the mosaic decorations encrusting its walls is a 6th-century one illustrating the parable of the sheep and the goats. To the left of Jesus, flanked by pristine white sheep, sits an angel; on the right, next to goats spotted black as their souls, is a devil. The two look much alike, except that the demon is clad in blue to the angel’s red, his gaze is deflected and his toes hint at the sharpness of claws.

This diabolical toehold on European imagination became a firm grip later in the Middle Ages, particularly from the 11th century, when Satan loomed large in churches across Europe, ruling over the Underworld and not disdaining a spot of fine dining at the expense of the damned. In Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Last Judgement mosaic for Florence’s Baptistery (1260–70), a macrocephalous Prince of Darkness, equipped with horns, snake-sprouting ears and a remarkable six-pack, gobbled up the sinners like a novel Polyphemus, with some help from hungry, monstrous reptiles.

Horrendous as he was, Satan was at least confined to Hell. Not so his minions. ‘The Devil’s countless little agents were imagined in the Middle Ages not unlike the way we imagine microbes today — always potentially present and malign,’ wrote Luther Link in The Devil: A Mask Without a Face. They picked at will from a panoply of feral features: claws, hooves, talons, goatees, ram horns, tails or wings. In the 12th-century Bible of Pamplona, demons erupted like crazed bats from the mouth of the possessed man of Gerasa, sporting webbed wings markedly different from the feathers of angels, a distinction that would endure down the centuries. Sometimes, they carried spears or pitchforks and often wore skimpy loin cloths. Having made their debut in a 9th-century Carolingian psalter, now in Utrecht in the Netherlands, these ‘shaggy cavemen skirts’, as Luther called them, returned again and again, including in the Winchester Psalter, where they were so minimal that diabolical tails peeked out almost in entirety.

This varied medieval iconography, at times frightening, at others ludicrous, responded to the many facets of the Devil: he lured, tempted, tormented, wheedled and deceived, but also meted out implacable justice to any who deserved it: images were meant to strike terror into medieval congregations, yet also give them hope that, if they behaved, God would prevail. However, those multiple shapes may have also derived from the absence of a unified model from antiquity that could be refashioned in a Christian key. Odd ‘bits’ could be borrowed from pagan gods — not least Pan and, possibly, the ancient Egyptian god Bes (in what would be an astounding reversal of his first role as protector of pregnant women and infants) — but, noted Luther, there was no diabolical equivalent to Apollo, upon which Christ had often been moulded.

It’s striking how the same artist could give his demons a startlingly different appearance — in the cathedral of St Lazare in Autun, France, some devils are large, some small, some have a human face, some look like gremlins, yet all were made by one 12th-century sculptor, Gislebertus. At Chaldon, most have three or four ‘toes’, but one has cloven hoofs. Even Giotto — who, as Andrea Begel maintained in a 2010 article in Notes in the History of Art, was consistent in painting his devils dark and woolly with fur — only gave four-toed claws and gleaming fangs to some of them. As for his Satan, he harked back to Coppo’s man-eater: blue, hairless but for a luxuriant beard, he had curving horns and large ears from which snakes slithered. Unlike the earlier Florentine specimen, however, the King of Hell in Giotto’s Arena Chapel Last Judgement in Padua (1303–1305) was fat from gorging on souls and he expelled some more from his bowels — a peculiar torment imagined by medieval artists and writers in which the damned are consumed, ejected and eaten again in a perennial cycle.

At about the same time as Giotto painted his blue ogre, Dante began writing his Inferno, in which he imagined the ‘Emperor of the kingdom dolorous’: ‘O, what a marvel it appeared to me, When I beheld three faces on his head!’ Although the notion of a three-headed Lucifer preceded The Divine Comedy, these verses crystallised it. In pictures such as Buonamico Buffalmacco’s fresco for the Camposanto in Pisa (1336–1341), the Devil, lynchpin of a Hell split into the Seven Deadly Sins, became enormous, enthusiastically devouring sinners with each of his three maws. Almost a century later, in about 1425–30, Fra Angelico would create a similar image for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, now at San Marco, except that only the torso of his pitch-black Satan emerged from the depths of the infernal lake from which he fished the damned he fed on (blood spurted copious from their torn flesh for added gore).

Not even Fra Angelico’s sanguinary Devil, however, was a patch on those conceived by Netherlandish artists, an outlandish menagerie full of sharp fangs, webbed wings, ram horns, simian noses and beady eyes that turned pictures such as The Last Judgement (1430–40) by Jan van Eyck — and the many others that followed in its wake — into the stuff of nightmares, making demons even more disturbing than in past interpretations.

In The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510), Hieronymus Bosch revisited the convention of Satan consuming and excreting the damned, but his ravenous demon has the head of a bird and an anthropomorphic body (this was perhaps less of a flight of fancy than it might at first appear, coming, as it did, only a couple of decades after ‘the magistrates of Basel in Germany tried and condemned to death by fire a diabolical rooster who had dared to lay an egg’, according to Arturo Graf’s Art of the Devil). This avian horror was only one among many in a Hell populated by pigs with nun veils, disembodied ears and the Tree-Man, an unsettling medley of human head, eggshell trunk and tree-stump legs with boats as feet.

The feral demons of the North couldn’t contrast more with the Lucifer of Renaissance Italy: no longer deformed, nor colossal, he spilled out of Hell looking just like a (frequently handsome) man. Granted, sometimes he retained a hint of horns and wings, as in Raphael’s muscular Devil being defeated by St Michael (the 1518 version — in an earlier treatment, Satan was a horned dragon). However, in pictures such as in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1545 take on the same theme, Lucifer was as delicately beautiful as the angel he fought.

An entertaining offshoot of this newfound humanity is that it gave artists a chance to hit back at their foes. Although the story is likely a fabrication, in his Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari maintained that, when Biagio da Cesena, master of ceremonies to Pope Leo X, criticised Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536–41) as being ‘not a work for a Chapel of the Pope but for stoves and taverns’, the Florentine master retaliated by lending to Minosse — judge of the damned, as in Dante’s tradition — the features of his detractor. Guido Reni may have done something similar almost exactly 100 years later: his 1635 Lucifer — a dark-haired, powerful man in his prime pitted against a blond, soft, ephebic St Michael — probably wears the face of Giovanni Battista Pamphili, later Pope Innocent X, but then a cardinal and a rival of the artist’s patron, Antonio Barberini.

Reni painted his Lucifer in the Devil’s artistic heyday. In a 17th century riddled with war, plague, famine, an obsession for witchcraft and a nascent, but dangerous, scientific knowledge, the great master of disguise wove in and out of Shakespeare’s plays, forged diabolical pacts in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and peered from countless murals and canvases. Often, he looked like the offspring of the Northern Renaissance devils — in his 1645 The Temptation of St Anthony, Italian painter Salvator Rosa imagined him with the skull of a horse, the tusks of a wild boar, the horns of a ram and the tail of a rat — but at times he remained profoundly human. The curly-haired, luxuriantly moustachioed, red-nosed demon that set out to tempt St Anthony in Rutilio Manetti’s 1630 picture, wore, rather endearingly, a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles.

Later in the 17th century, however, another poet emerged who, like Dante before him, shaped the mould from which Lucifer would spring for generations to come: John Milton. One of the earliest paintings drawn from Milton’s verses came in about 1735–1740 courtesy of William Hogarth. In his unfinished oil Satan, Sin and Death, the Devil had the Herculean body of a classical hero, but the repellent face and red eyes of evil incarnate. Yet, it’s at the twilight of the 18th century — as Romanticism took hold and, after Lucifer had lain forgotten for a time, defeated by the Enlightenment’s embrace of reason — that Paradise Lost, with its fallen angel who would ‘rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’, really kindled the imagination of painters.

Milton, sublime before Edmund Burke refined the notion, could not fail to inspire the latter’s protégé James Barry, but also William Blake, Henry Fuseli and Thomas Lawrence. Their strapping Satans rising above the flames of Hell against an all-powerful God shed any vestige of Hogarthian ugliness to become statuesque heroes of ‘unconquerable will’, with ‘the courage never to submit or yield’. They recalled the devils of Renaissance Italy, but transcended beauty to spark Burke’s ‘strongest passion’, the sublime, in which awe mingled with fear.

That said, there was space for other interpretations, too, in the tumultuous years that saw the ideals of reason, liberty and tolerance drown in the blood of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. In Spain, Francisco Goya, tormented first by disease then by growing disillusionment, populated his allegories with witches, giants, horned bats and the Great He-Goat, a red-eyed, lushly-horned Devil. In The Nightmare (1781), Fuseli made his incubus, a male demon who squats on the torso of a beautiful woman and haunts her dreams, into a stumpy, big-eared, malevolent goblin. Even Blake himself (who had argued that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’) was altogether less complimentary towards Dante’s Lucifer, whom he pictured as a three-headed man-eater, and remained true to the Revelation when, in about 1805, he showed Satan as a scaly creature bound by the Archangel Michael.

Yet, as the 19th century unfolded, it was the dashing antihero that had the upper hand. Wings and a suggestion of horns barely dented the athletic appeal of the Son of the Morning, at times raging, at times desperate, but always indomitable. Whether in the painting of Alexandre Cabanel or in the sculptures of Joseph and Guillaume Geefs — Joseph’s 1842 L’Ange du Mal was deemed so attractive to ‘sensitive’ female church-goers that it was removed from St Paul’s Cathedral in Liège, Belgium, and replaced in 1848 by his brother’s marginally more modest Lucifer — the Devil was, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, the ‘Prince of Exile, who [had] suffered wrong, Yet, vanquished, [rose] from every fall more strong’.

All this changed in the 20th century, when the horrors of the Spanish flu and of two World Wars ushered a return to the grotesque forms of the earlier past — which happened to be a perfect fit for Surrealism. In 1945, 12 Surrealist and Magic Realist painters were invited to enter an art competition linked to Albert Lewin’s film from Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami, which required them to reinterpret the Temptation of St Anthony. Salvador Dalí imagined a deserted world in which a tiny, naked saint held back a mutant demonic army comprising a deranged horse with twisted hooves and emaciated elephants on spider legs, which has since become one of the most celebrated pictures on the theme. Back then, however, the Spanish artist lost to Max Ernst, who had created a forest of monstrosities with the shining carapaces of beetles, their sharp beaks and tearing fangs sinking into a red-clad St Anthony, who screamed in agony. Yet, the painting didn’t move New York Times critic Bosley Crowther: ‘It is called The Temptation of St Anthony, but it looks like a bad boiled lobster.’ Not a critique that could have been levelled at a coeval picture that rendered the Prince of Lies as it had never been done before: in one of his earliest action paintings, Jackson Pollock made Lucifer (1947) a chaos of drips, splodges and splatters in green, black, blue and ochre, with only the odd splish of infernal red in sight.

No other artist has since reinvented the Devil so completely, although Jean-Michel Basquiat also resorted to daubs and splashes to paint himself as one in his Untitled (1982), which went on to break the then price record for the artist when, in May 2016, Christie’s sold it for $57.285 million. It’s a monumental canvas in which a horned face jumps out of strokes of colour, its nose wide, its toothed grin reminiscent of those on totem poles, but in some way also of impish medieval devils.

Equally as full, but of serrated fangs, is the mouth of perhaps the cutest of all demons ever created: Takashi Murakami’s Devil KO2 (Clone X). With her purple hair bunches, thick fringe and wide eyes, she seems to have come straight out of a Japanese anime, but her bat wings, protruding tongue and barely disguised ram horns owe much to traditional Christian iconography.

She is proof that there is no end to the shapes the Great Deceiver can take — and that the Devil really is in the details.

This feature originally appeared in the October 29, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Philip de László was Society’s portrait artist of choice in the early 20th century, famed for his abilities to accurately depict fabulous jewelers. He painted: Queen Marie of Romania wearing an incredible Cartier sapphire and diamond tiara; Winifred, wife of the 6^th Duke of Portland in the same tiara that she had worn to the coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra; and, most memorably, American heiress Evalyn Walsh Mclean, who dazzled in the legendary 45.5 carat Hope Diamond and the equally magnificent Star of the East diamond.

This week, a portrait by the Anglo-Hungarian artist, featuring a double strand, headline-making necklace that was stolen, recovered and stolen again, will go under the hammer.

‘He’s arguably one of the very best painters of jewellery. You can easily identify a sitter’s jewels, and exactly what they’re made of, when you look at one of his portraits,’ says Katherine Field, senior editor of the Philip de László Catalogue Raisonné, the authoritative record of the artist’s works. ‘Of course, it came with the territory of painting the royal families, aristocrats and industrialists of the day. For women who couldn’t show off military finery or medals, jewellery was how they signalled their wealth and status at the time. Unlike fashionable clothes, they also couldn’t ‘date’ a portrait to any specific year, giving de László’s paintings an air of timelessness, which he preferred.’

Of all the jewels that de László illustrated during his career, perhaps none are more alluring, or mysterious, than pearls. A metaphor of femininity, purity and integrity for millennia, they feature in no less than 300 of de László’s portraits — and he was highly aware of both their rich symbolism and enormous value as status symbols. Indeed, it’s no accident that in 1925 he depicted them draped around the neck of a young Duchess of York (later the Queen Mother) who was embarking on her career as a member of the Royal Family.

‘Sourced from the Persian Gulf, and in some cases from the Americas, natural pearls were inordinately expensive at the time, before cultured pearls had made their way to Europe from Japan,’ says Vivienne Becker, jewellery writer and historian. ‘Their beguiling lustre, which didn’t need polishing, their link to ancient mythology and their fabulous rarity ensured they were madly sought after. For centuries, they were the ultimate expression of rank, success and style. Think of the portraits of Elizabeth I draped in ropes of pearls.’ They were so valuable in the early 20^th century, Vivienne adds, that their prices were quoted in daily newspapers and in personal wills, much like that of bullion.

De László’s most mysterious pearls are double string blush-pink ones which, in January 1921, were worn for a portrait sitting by Mrs Harold Nickols — the wife of a wealthy English businessman and philanthropist. Born Isabel ‘Bella’ MacConnell in Dublin, in 1878, she wed Harold in July 1908 and lived a lavish lifestyle of couture-filled wardrobes and finely decorated rooms. Her flawless pearls — gifted to her by her husband — included a central gem rumoured to have once been part of the Portuguese crown jewels.

Before they ringed the neck of Bella, the precious pearls had made headlines for their starring role in a jewellery heist. Their original owner was Max Meyer, one of Hatton Garden’s most respected gem dealers, who, in 1913, sent the necklace (then on a single strand and nicknamed the ‘Mona Lisa of necklaces’) to a colleague in Paris, France for appraisal. The jewels were valued at £135,000 (about £20 million in today’s money), but the sale fell through and so they were returned to London by registered post. ‘This was fairly common practice at the time,’ says Vivian Watson, author and third-generation Hatton Garden jeweller. ‘Even the priceless Cullinan diamond was sent to England from South Africa this way, with a security firm acting as a decoy to lure would-be criminals away from the mail.’

Unfortunately for Meyer, his parcel was intercepted by criminals, masterminded by a renowned jewel thief called Joseph Grizzard, who replaced the pearls with sugar lumps. A lengthy investigation by Scotland Yard, aided by underwriters from Lloyd’s, who had insured the jewel for a vast sum, ended in a sting operation and Grizzard’s eventual arrest in September 1913 — though the pearls themselves were only recovered two weeks later by a pedestrian in Highbury (in a matchbox in the gutter).

‘Thankfully no one was hurt in the heist, and Meyer’s reputation as a first-rate pearl dealer remained intact, but it’s definitely the stuff that movies are made of,’ says Vivian.

Unfortunately, the pearls suffered another traumatic adventure with a less than happy movie ending. In 1965, when Bella was 87 years old, her flat was burgled and her beloved pearl necklace stolen. Again. Never to be recovered. On Wednesday (October 29), de László’s beguiling portrait of her will be auctioned off by Dreweatts, once more thrusting its wealthy subject — and the unfortunate story of her precious pearls — into the international spotlight. ‘One can’t help but wonder if those pearls are still out there,’ says Vivian. ‘Perhaps they’ll turn up at auction themselves one day.’

‘I actually did always want to be a writer,’ says Elizabeth Day, the author, journalist and podcast host of the immensely successful How to Fail, where she’s interviewed everyone from Katie Price to Salman Rushdie and Rory Stewart. ‘I remember, aged four, loving books and wanting to be an author, which is quite a weird thing for a four year old to think about, especially coming from a family that has no authors in it.’ Elizabeth’s novels include Paradise City; The Party; Magpie and now her Sunday Times bestselling thriller One of Us — a state-of-the-nation novel that satirises the upper classes and serves as the sequel to her novel The Party.

Born to ‘voracious readers’, Elizabeth grew up in a house full of books. Her mother, a primary school French teacher who later became a magistrate, taught her to read and write before she went to school. ‘I just knew, early on, that stories were this amazing way of escaping into your imagination,’ she says. The first book she became obsessed with was Meg and Mog, a children's book by Helen Nicoll which follows a witch and her cat. The book that really shaped her came later. She remembers her father, a surgeon with the NHS, reading her Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. ‘It showed me just how alive you could make a character, because Anne Shirley, to me, still feels like a friend.’

Aged four, the family moved to Northern Ireland from England for her father’s work. ‘I went to a secondary school in Belfast for two-and-a-bit years and I didn't have a good time there, because I speak with a very English accent, and at that particular time in Northern Ireland it was quite a tricky time to have this kind of accent,’ Elizabeth says.

She left after attaining a scholarship to Malvern Girls' College, a private day and boarding school in Worcestershire. ‘It was the saving of me,’ she says, describing the public speaking and debating she pursued whilst there as being vital to her self-confidence.

She was a straight-A student who went on to attend Cambridge University. ‘All of my family, more or less, have gone to Cambridge. So there was also a sort of unspoken sense that if I didn't apply, I would probably be disowned. I'm only vaguely joking,’ says the author, whose parents met at the university and whose older sister had already been there when it came around to Elizabeth’s time to apply.

She studied history at Queen’s College, which was also where her journalistic career began, at Varsity, the student newspaper. After graduating with a double first — ’genuinely one of the proudest achievements of my life. I don’t even care if it comes across as a humble brag’ — she landed a job at the Evening Standard after a week's work experience saw her get an exclusive scoop for the paper. Women who worked for the Ministry of Defence in the army were getting boob jobs at the tax payers expense, Elizabeth found out. Her reward was an interview with the then-editor Max Hastings, who offered her a job on the Londoner’s Diary column.

On her first day she was sent to a ‘glamorous but scary’ party at Spencer House in Westminster where Sir Dennis Thatcher, the businessman and husband of Margaret Thatcher; Lady Victoria Hervey, the socialite and former girlfriend of Prince Andrew; and Willian Hague, the former leader of the Tory party, were in attendance. Her job? To get a quote for the next day’s paper. ‘It was incredibly intimidating,’ she says. ‘It was also a really fun place to work. And in those days you could still smoke in the office and go for long boozy lunches — so there was that as well.’

After a year, Elizabeth left the Evening Standard to work for The Sunday Telegraph as a news reporter. She went on to write for ELLE magazine, The Mail on Sunday and The Observer. The worst piece she ever wrote for a newspaper (not the Evening Standard, she hastens to add) was when she was asked as a reporter in her twenties to try out an orgasm machine in her rented flat in Sheperd’s Bush. ‘I didn’t even think twice. I was like: "Absolutely. I want to be taken seriously as a feature writer. Slap the electrodes on me.”’ Looking back ‘that was a low point,’ she says.

The writer has been married twice, first to the journalist Kamal Ahmed, who was the business editor of BBC News, who she wed in 2011 and subsequently divorced. Her current husband is Justin Basini, the CEO and co-founder of ClearScore, the personal finance company. ‘I'm tremendously proud of everything that he's achieved, but he's someone who is much more private than I am, and that's also been really great for me. I think I actively wanted someone who wasn't in the media,’ Elizabeth says.

She met Justin in her late 30s. ‘I just got so lucky that in a field of dregs, I eventually was matched with this prince of a man,’ she says of the somewhat lacking dating scene of the time. She has spoken openly during the past year about her struggles with IVF, miscarriage and her eventual acceptance that she will not be a mother. She’s made peace with it, she says and the Elizabeth I meet is chatty, passionate and enthusiastic. A person with fingers in many pies and who seems, despite the pitfalls she’s faced along the way, to be living her life now exactly the way she wants to be.

Your aesthetic hero

Cindy Crawford. I just love her so much — in all ages.

A book you found inspiring

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe because it made me understand how you could have years as a journalist and then transform that journalistic training into this fizzing, kinetic narrative, and write something that was so exciting to read.

The music you work to

I don't generally work to music unless I am in a particularly noisy cafe, and then I will listen to Mozart's Requiem — basically the only piece of music I can listen to and write alongside.

Your favourite painting

The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and it shows three men sanding, essentially by hand, a wooden parquet floor in what looks like a Parisian apartment, and they are stripped to the waist. That's not why I like it, but it's so beautifully rendered for many reasons. One is the perspective and the foreshortening, so it's sort of technically gifted, and it has this atmosphere of camaraderie and labour well executed, and I just find it a very compelling image. I remember going to the Musée d'Orsay and seeing it with my then boyfriend, Rich, who very sadly died in 2004, and so the other reason is that it always makes me think of him, as well.

A possession you’d never sell

I don't consider my cat a possession, but I would never sell Huxley. The possession I would never sell is a cigarette case that belonged to my grandfather that I sleep with on my bedside table, and it's inscribed with his initials, the date 1948 and Cairo, which is where he was posted as a diplomat. And it's also where my grandparents got married. I was very close to my grandfather, and loved him a lot, and so it's a very special object for me.

An exhibition that’s really impressed you

The one that I keep thinking of is the Marina Abramović retrospective that was at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago. An exhibition, if it's done at its best, is like the contents of an artistic genius's mind, and that's how it felt. I went with my friend and I remember there was one point where, for one of the art works, you had to walk through a naked man standing on one side and a naked woman standing on the other side, and it was an uncomfortably small aperture in which to get through, and you had to choose whether you’re facing the man or woman. My friend chose to face the man, so well done her.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I heard someone recently on Desert Islands Discs who gave this answer, and I kind of want to steal it, which was a cinema that would play every single film I had ever watched, but I would take it one step further and ask for a cinema that plays every single film that has ever been made.

The best present you’ve ever received

My parents gave me a moped for my 21st birthday — that was pretty amazing. I was still at Cambridge, and I remember having to ride it from Cambridge to London in extremely cold weather with none of the gear and no idea, and I had to stop regularly to have hot chocolate so that I didn't get hypothermia. But after that, it was in London, and when I worked at the Evening Standard I used to moped to work every day.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Villa San Michele, which is in Fiesole outside Florence. It is a Belmont hotel, and it's exquisite in every single way. We were lucky enough to spend a couple of nights there last August. It just was not long enough, although too long for our bank balance. It's so beautiful that I cried when I walked in. It was just stunning. It's in this former monastery and the food is amazing — best caponata I've ever tasted.

The last podcast you listened to

An episode of Watch What Crappens, which is a podcast hosted by two phenomenally funny gay men who do reenactments of Real Housewives episodes.

The last thing of note you bought yourself

A piece of art, a Maggi Hambling painting, because I like to buy a piece of art with every book that I publish with some of the advance so that I have something tangible that reminds me that I wrote a book and it got published.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My cat meowing very loudly at 6am — sometimes 4:30am — claiming that I am going to forget to feed him, which is incorrect. My husband is not a fan of that, but he is also very good, generally speaking, at being the one to get up.

The actor that would play you in a film of your life

It’s hard to say without it sounding like a massive humble brag, but Keira Knightley or Rachel Weisz, because I actually just think they're both, obviously phenomenally beautiful brunettes, which I am not saying I am — I aspire — but also great actresses.

The items you collect

I keep all of the pieces that I write and interviews that I’ve done — oh, and books. I love physical copies of books and I suppose I collect an inexhaustible mental archive of reality TV programmes, as well.

The most memorable meal you’ve eaten

I love LA and I love having dinner at the Chateau Marmont and there was one particular dinner there with Justin. We had been dating for six months, I was in LA for a month on a book deadline, and he came out to see me for four days and we went for dinner.

I had their salmon, which is delicious, accompanied by their truffle fries, also delicious, and a glass of red. I would have had a glass of Californian Pinot Noir, because I'm obsessed with that particular kind of wine, and I don't care that you're not meant to have red wine with salmon, because it was delicious. That was the first time that we said that we loved each other, and so I've got a real memory of that.

'One of us' by Elizabeth Day is out now (Harper Collins, £18.99)

Remind you of anyone?’ I asked Leslie Caron one afternoon last summer. We were in her London sitting room, looking through the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on John Singer Sargent and Paris, in New York (now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France), and I had pointed out the artist’s most famous painting, Madame X. Caron eyed the portrait of a woman in a plunging black evening gown with all the curiosity of the young courtesan she played in the 1958 film Gigi. I watched her closely, waiting for her to notice the uncanny resemblance.

It had struck me a few weeks earlier in New York, when I was standing before Madame X at the Met’s exhibition. Sargent had created the painting in 1884 as a stylised likeness of Virginie Gautreau, the New Orleans-born wife of a man in the guano business who was determined to conquer Paris. Fittingly, Sargent posed her like Michelangelo’s David in a dress, with a twisted wrist poised on a little round table and a gaze defying her foes in profile. He also placed a crescent moon-shaped pin in her hairstyle, a symbol of the Roman goddess Diana the Huntress. However, Madame X wasn’t only Diana, David or Virginie. To me, she was also someone else.

‘It’s you!’ I announced to Caron, who looked back at me surprised, until I took out a black-and-white photograph that Cecil Beaton had taken during the filming of Gigi (one of his images features in ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery). Beaton had not only designed the film’s costumes and scenery, but also used the story of a young courtesan on the fringe of High Society — not unlike that of Gautreau — as his own paean to Belle Epoque Paris. During breaks in the filming, he would take Miss Caron away to create his own images — in this case, a shot of her at the legendary café Maxim’s in a sweeping white evening gown, one hand poised on a pedestal and head raised in profile. Even a crescent-moon pin was just visible in her coiffure. None of this was by chance. Beaton had already shown interest in Madame X when he sketched the painting for a chapter heading in his 1954 book The Glass of Fashion. He even titled it ‘Sargent’s Madame X’, as if he were planning to create his own version one day.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘Beaton’s photo is practically Madame X, except that your dress is white and there are feathers on the shoulders instead of straps.’

‘They’re birds, actually,’ she replied, ‘and that is entirely me. Cecil came with a design of the dress and I exclaimed “Oh, what a great idea, those birds” and he said: “Birds? You saw birds? Well, we can have birds, if you’d like.” ’ Caron paused for a moment, then said: ‘We were very close in taste. I adored everything he did and he liked my behaviour. He liked the way je me comportais,’ she added wistfully in French.

As we talked, it became clear that few words had been needed between her and Beaton during their photo shoots: the two simply understood each other. Beaton never acknowledged that the Gigi series was inspired by Sargent. Still, Caron is convinced of the resemblance. ‘There are many things about this dress that remind one of Madame X, there is no doubt.’

‘Well, then, may I call you Madame X?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ she answered, with a little smile.

'Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, until January 11, 2026. ‘Sargent: Dazzling Paris’ is at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France, until January 11, 2026.

This article first appeared in the October 15 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

On the night of February 23, 1944, a series of 500lb German bombs crashed down on St James’s, shattering the windows of the Chapel Royal and ripping a hole in the western corner of St James’s Square. Had you been picking your way across the debris afterwards, you would have witnessed an extraordinary rescue operation: a human chain of British and American servicemen and bespectacled Bloomsbury types scrambling to load books into wheelbarrows.

Having survived nearly two wars unscathed (after an October 1917 bombing raid that ‘produced havoc in Piccadilly… our London Library stands whole,’ Virginia Woolf recorded), No 14’s luck had run out — the tall, narrow building’s north-west wing had suffered a hit that destroyed 16,000 books, with those remaining vulnerable to rain and the Fire Brigade’s hoses. It could easily have been the end had it not been for the members and their friends: when the news broke, they rushed to the scene to help salvage what they could.

Among them was the diarist James Lees-Milne, who read about the bombing in Brooks’s and hurried over. ‘It is a tragic sight,’ he wrote, describing ‘books lying torn and coverless. The dust [was] overwhelming. I looked like a snowman at the end’. He spent an hour perching on a girder ‘over an abyss’ catching books thrown to him; the novelist Rose Macaulay, then in her sixties, is said to have volunteered to be held out of the building by her ankles to help get them down to street level. The rescued volumes were carefully wheeled over to the crypt of the National Gallery, where they stayed for the rest of the war.

Somehow, this episode isn’t the most colourful footnote in the London Library’s 180-year history in St James’s Square. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary place: visually a cross between White’s and the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a ‘midwife, refuge, goldmine and cocoon,’ according to John Julius Norwich in 1978. ‘If I were stopped in the street by one of those opinion pollsters and asked to list three specifically British cultural institutions of which I was proudest, my answer would be unhesitating and categorical… the BBC, the National Trust and the London Library,’ he added.

As well as being home to a 1611 King James Bible, a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare and a first edition of On the Origin of Species, the London Library’s membership records read like a Who’s Who of British literary history: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Vita Sackville-West, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, Daphne du Maurier. Bram Stoker researched Dracula here, Ian Fleming gave it a cameo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Bond consults a copy of Burke’s General Armory) and Muriel Spark had its books posted out to her in Italy. More recently, David Nicholls called it one of his favourite places in London, Tom Hanks and Reese Witherspoon posed for photographs outside and Simon Schama declared ‘there is nowhere quite like it’. The chances are that at least one of your favourite novels began its life here: between them, its 7,500 members publish some 700 books every year, plus more than 450 film, television and theatre scripts.

One of them is Victoria Hislop, who joined 15 years ago. ‘When I’m in London, it’s where I go to write; you can leave your domestic life behind and, if you’re a full-time author, it’s nice to have that feeling of packing your satchel and setting off,’ she says. During ‘book crisis periods’ she even comes in on Saturdays, ‘and I do like the late-night opening, being there in the evening in the winter when you know there’s no distractions. It’s an absolute haven’.

‘The minute I saw the place I realised it was ideal,’ agrees William Boyd, who had been hunting for a place to write when he moved from Oxford to London in 1983. ‘At that point, it was something of a time capsule. It’s changed a lot since then, but after all these years as a member it’s a wonderfully reassuring institution. You know there are kindred spirits all around you.’ His books are famous for their globetrotting — the latest, The Predicament, races from Guatemala to West Berlin — and ‘even in the age of Google I have found information in the London Library that the internet couldn’t provide.’ Searching for a guide to the manufacturing of corned beef in Uruguay when writing Any Human Heart, the London Library came up trumps.

With its Portland-stone façade, Robert Adam fireplace in the study, shelves of obscure bound volumes (many of which can be borrowed for months at a time) and leather arm-chairs bearing the impress of countless naps, the London Library looks, and feels, like a club. However, unlike those around the corner on Pall Mall, it’s one that absolutely anyone can join. ‘It’s very democratic,’ confirms Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, who joined the committee in 1988 as a young man. Back then, the atmosphere was rarified, but, today, it’s much more diverse, thanks to discounted off-peak, remote, overseas and youth memberships. ‘One of the things I really admire is the way it has modernised and attracted new members: I’m struck by how many younger people use it now. My sons go a lot.’ With university libraries becoming ever-more digitised, he feels, London students are increasingly seeking out paper, print and human connection.

Members have one man to thank for it all: the essayist Thomas Carlyle. In the late 1830s, he became so fed up with the ‘buzz and bustle’ of the British Library’s reading rooms, as well as the fact he couldn’t take any of the books home to Chelsea, that he decided to set up his own. ‘We have no library here from which to borrow books, and we are striving to get one,’ he informed Ralph Waldo on February 8, 1839, before leaning on friends, including Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, to drum up support. Five hundred initial subscribers were found and two rooms on Pall Mall were stocked with 3,000 volumes. The London Library opened on May 3, 1841.

Although the collection was much more limited than it is today — a testy notice from the first librarian reminded members that ‘this Library does not undertake to supply the various Novels of the day’ — before long it had out-grown its digs and a new home had to be found. In 1845, the committee settled on what was then called Beauchamp House in St James’s Square, which had a dilapidated air after years of being let out (the writer A. I. Dasent pooh-poohed it as ‘the worst house in the Square’). The members didn’t seem to mind: within 12 months, there were 746 of them, with Prince Albert serving as the first royal patron (setting a precedent that Edward VII, Georges V and VI, Elizabeth II and The Queen would all follow). The freehold was secured in 1879 for £21,000.

The arrival of gas lighting in 1866, replacing precarious candle-lamps, had enabled the Library to stay open later, but space continued to be a problem. A solution came from America in the late 1890s: a steel-framed extension of ‘stacks’ with metal-grilled floors. It was one of the first such structures in London and took three years to build as part of a complete overhaul of the premises; Sir Leslie Stephen, who, as well as being president (and Virginia Woolf’s father), was a keen mountaineer, could sometimes be seen scaling the scaffolding to keep an eye on things.

Dimly lit, warren-like and prone to clanging spookily, the stacks are straight out of Hitchcock and, in fact, have appeared in more than one fictional mystery: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1925 short story The Adventure of the Illustrious Client has Watson hurrying back to Baker Street ‘with a goodly volume [on Chinese pottery] under my arm’ and A. S. Byatt’s literary whodunnit Possession opens with a chance discovery by a researcher in a book he has requested.

The proprietary classification system is famously eccentric. ‘One of my favourite juxtapositions is Fishing being next to Flagellation,’ says Country Life’s David Profumo, who joined as a student at Kings College. ‘This morning, I also saw Elephants by Electroplating.’ All 17 miles of shelves (the length of the Circle line) are open for browsing and Kazuo Ishiguro was inspired to write The Remains of the Day by a copy of Harold Laski’s The Danger of Being a Gentleman he stumbled across in the stacks. Not everyone, however, finds the ease of access entirely helpful: the Booker-longlisted novelist and New Yorker gardening correspondent Charlotte Mendelson jokingly describes the London Library as ‘a terrible place to write because it’s so interesting. My current novel has taken a while to get off the ground and it’s definitely the Library’s fault — so much vital research to do on fruit, or weaponry or medieval Northumberland’.

Having survived being bombed, the Library faced bankruptcy in the late 1950s. Churchill rode to its defence in The Times and, once again, writers came to the rescue by donating lots for a fundraising auction at Christie’s in 1960; they included Ian Fleming’s dressing gown and slippers and the original manuscript of A Passage To India. The financial and practical challenges of maintaining such an idiosyncratic building in the heart of a city remain — and, of course, every few years, another half mile or so of books joins the collection. A sympathetic programme of improvement work is currently under way, following 2014 RIBA Award-winning renovations by architects Haworth Tompkins, which, among other things, created a new reading room in the light-well, improved accessibility and made thoughtful use of brass-meshed shelving and glass.

Throughout it all, the Library’s presidents have raised both its public profile and much-needed funds. In 2022 Helena Bonham-Carter succeeded Sir Tim Rice, becoming the first woman to hold the title. She joined not long after starring in A Room With A View, following in the footsteps of her great-great-uncle John Bonham-Carter, a Liberal MP and early member. ‘The past is so tangibly present that it’s almost like you’re walking through a time warp,’ she said when she was appointed. She has immersed herself in the life of the library, throwing a suitably literary biannual party in the Reading Room: the most recent one saw Sebastian Faulks and The Crown’s Tobias Menzies performing a section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Addressing members in 1952, T. S. Eliot warned that ‘whatever social changes come about, the disappearance of the London Library would be a disaster to civilisation’. It would also be a personal tragedy to all the writers, students and book-loving Londoners who file through the doors at 9.30am into the Issue Hall, perhaps hanging a hat up on the venerable stand before making their way to a desk to sit among the benevolent ghosts who also wrestled with the blank page in their time. It’s easy to see why so many members were prepared to risk life and limb in 1944 — there is nowhere else quite so full of illustrious stories, and yet so welcoming, in the capital. Back to Julius Norwich: ‘I know of no more wholly agreeable environment anywhere,’ was his verdict, ‘and in a London without the London Library I should not wish to live.’

Visit the London Library's website for more information.

This article first appeared in the October 15 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Pies, cakes, gumball machines — perhaps it was an early stint working at a café in Long Beach, California, that prompted artist Wayne Thiebaud to begin painting diner food in the 1960s.

It proved an inspired choice: he reinvented still life as a genre and found fame in the process. Now, the Courtauld Institute explores that particularly fertile period of the artist’s life in the first-ever exhibition of his work to be held in a British museum, ‘Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life’ (until January 18, 2026).

1. Born in Mesa, Arizona, on November 15, 1920, he soon moved to California with his family and it was there that he would later work as an illustrator and a cartoonist, including, for a period, at the Walt Disney Studios. After a 1956 trip to New York, in which he met avant-garde artists, such as William de Kooning, he began developing his own style. By the dawn of the 1960s, this had evolved into still lifes of cafeteria food, lusciously painted, often in assembly line rows, against a minimal background
2. Armed with his portfolio, in 1961, he once again headed to New York to secure a gallery. Many doors were closed in his face, but Allan Stone accepted him and staged his first solo show a year later. Reviewing the exhibition in The New York Times on April 28, 1962, Brian O’Doherty called Thiebaud ‘a sort of Edward Hopper of the dinette tabletop’, whose work could be interpreted as ‘a comment on the comfortable desolation of much American life, as seen through the stomach’
3. In the same year, Thiebaud showed his work in two group exhibitions that launched American Pop Art, which over time would earn him the nickname of ‘the Pop master of the confectionery counter’. Yet, as Donald J. Brewer wrote in Wayne Thiebaud survey 1947–1976, the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name held in 1976 at the Phoenix Art Museum, his approach had earlier roots: ‘Thiebaud was painting “popular” objects years before what was to become labeled the Pop Art Movement’
4. From 1963, the artist began developing an interest in figures and, later, landscapes and cityscapes, particularly those of San Francisco in California, where he had set up a studio. These kinds of views became his primary interest from the 1970s
5. In July 2020, some four months shy of his 100th birthday, his Four Pinball Machines, painted in 1962, was sold for more than $19 million at Christie’s. Thiebaud died a little more than a year later, on December 25, 2021

This feature originally appeared in the October 15, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe'.

Tomorrow (Saturday, October 18) George Osborne and Dr Nicholas Cullinan will welcome the great and the good to the British Museum for a party.

The 800-person jamboree and silent auction— tickets at £2,000 apiece — is being billed as London’s answer to the Met Gala, the annual fundraiser for the New York Costume Institute in the USA and reigning champion of red-carpet events. Appearances from Naomi Campbell, Dame Kristin Scott Thomas and Sir Grayson Perry are confirmed. Whether the party has the same impact as the Met’s remains to be seen.

The ball comes at an interesting time for the capital, with London Fashion Week, Frieze and the BFI festival recently prompting the city’s leading voices to defend its merit as a cultural powerhouse. Laura Weir, chair of the British Fashion Council, and Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A Museum, told different news outlets that London was ‘still’ a Mecca for movers and shakers, a place that truly ‘matters’ and where shows of creativity are ‘more important than ever’.

All this is true, of course, although banging on about it sends quite the wrong message. The British Museum, for its part, has an unfortunate habit of landing in hot water. The 2023 announcement that roughly 2,000 artefacts had been stolen, coupled with ongoing debate around the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles and a cosy relationship with BP, has cast a shadow over its once-lofty reputation. Now, the museum has announced that it needs £1 billion to redevelop its entrances, build a new storage facility and improve the management of its permanent collection. Could a party be just the ticket?

Britain does not share America’s affection for patronage and philanthropy, but it should. Relying on government funding at a time of economic uncertainty is futile and, as demonstrated even in countries as sinistral as France, donations by the wealthy in exchange for clout and the renaming of a gallery wing go a long way. The British Museum Ball is a fundraiser, but also a strategic event, a show of soft power amid a culture that seems intent on telling everyone how great Britain is. Let’s show them instead.

As ever with such an event, a larger question looms over the capital’s relationship to the rest of the country. In the Met Gala’s case — buoyed by the unbound nature of the internet — the party has grown far beyond the city it immediately serves. Raising funds for the Costume Institute is one thing, but, for the brands dressing the stars who attend, the value generated through media exposure runs into the billions. American labels, such as Thom Browne and Marc Jacobs, consistently rank among the top choices for guests. There is hope that Burberry, JW Anderson, Vivienne Westwood and others could replicate this success over here in the long term. Party on.

Despite the vitriol that these days surrounds the immigration debate, there is no doubt the intellectual and creative scene in Britain (and many other countries) has been enriched by the arrival of artists settling in from abroad, often fleeing persecution or oppressive regimes, but sometimes simply looking for opportunities or inspiration.

Shapero Rare Books, Shapero Modern and Willoughby Gerrish are putting the spotlight on the artistic contribution of émigrés past and present at Frieze Masters, with the exhibitions then moving to or continuing at their respective galleries (until October 31 for the first two and October 28–November 21 for the latter).

Here are five immigrant artists who changed the history of 20th-century art.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)


Picasso was only 19 when he first visited Paris and the vibrant atmosphere of the French capital proved such a lure that he eventually decided to live there.

He remained true to his adoptive nation even when, during the Vichy regime, he drew the Gestapo’s unwanted attention, yet, he never ceased to care for his country of origin.

Having captured the horrors of the Spanish Civil war in Guernica, he stipulated that the painting could never go to Spain until she returned to democracy.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985)


Born in a poor Jewish family in what is now Belarus, Chagall moved to Paris in 1910 and it was there that he began producing his fantastical artworks.

A brief trip home turned into an extended stay as the First World War broke out, but he later made his way back to France — only to have to flee again during the Second World War, when the Vichy government began persecuting Jews.

He finally settled on the Côte d’Azur in 1948 and continued to work into his nineties.

Lucie Rie (1902–95)


Rie had already won a silver medal at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition when, a year later, Germany’s annexation of Austria forced her to leave her native Vienna.

She escaped to London, where at first she made a living creating buttons. However, Rie never ceased making bowls, vases and bottles and, over the decades, became one of Britain’s most influential ceramicists — and the very first to be made, in 1991, a Dame Commander of the British Empire

Lucian Freud (1922–2011)


Freud was a child when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and his family sought refuge in Britain, where the artist’s grandfather, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, would join them a few years later.

He became a British national in 1939 and went on to forge a spectacular artistic career as one of this country’s greatest portraitists.

Frank Auerbach (1931–2024)


In 1939, Auerbach was sent as a child refugee to Britain in a bid to escape the Nazis — his parents were later both killed in concentration camps.

Naturalised British in 1947, he would become known for his extraordinary technique — painting, then scraping back what he had done, before repeating the process until he was happy with the result — and gain recognition as one of the major figurative artists of our day.

A wise person once told me to always look up because whether you are inside or out, some of the greatest artworks in the world hang right above our heads.

The blankest canvas in most buildings is the ceiling. A vast, white space protecting us from the outside world, but somehow, despite it’s purpose, almost altogether forgotten. Thankfully, they haven't all been ignored.

Country Life’s vast photographic library contains hundreds of thousands of images taken by some of the UK's finest architectural photographers.

This small selection — handpicked from the archive's vaults — aims to highlight just a few of the most exquisite, unusual and earliest painted ceilings.

Painted Hall, Old Royal Naval College, London

James Thornhill was commissioned to decorate the breathtaking Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, in the early 18th Century.

The ceiling artwork, painted when Queen Anne was on the throne, depicts Protestant liberty victorious over Catholic absolutism.

The Great Staircase, Chatsworth, Derbyshire

The vast fresco The Triumph of Semele, executed in 1691 by the Venetian artist Antonio Verrio, adorns the ceiling above Chatsworth house's Great Staircase.

The artist was responsible for introducing Baroque mural painting into England, and served the Crown for more than 30 years.

Heaven Room, Burghley House, Lincolnshire

Much has been, rightly, written about Burghley House's spectacular Heaven Room, but the ceiling depicting the chaos and lurid colour of the Hell Staircase is also worthy of note.

Executed, again, by the much in-demand Antonio Verrio, work on the vertiginous, fiery hellscape was completed between 1696-7.

Double Cube Room, Wilton House, Wiltshire

The central oval detail on the ceiling of Wilton's Double Cube Room was painted by the English Baroque artist, Emanuel de Critz.

It depicts Perseus in the palace of King Polydectes, saving his mother Danae from the king's unwelcome attentions.

Drapers' Hall, Throgmorton Street, City of London

Widely agreed to be one of the finest livery halls in the City of London, Draper’s Hall was founded more than six centuries ago to promote the trade of woollen cloth.

Much later in the building’s history, in 1903, the artist H. J. Draper created this ceiling in the Livery Hall depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Locko Park, Derbyshire

A detail of the ceiling in the front entrance hall at Locko Park in Derbyshire. This late-Victorian addition to the house is attributed to the Florentine artist Federico Andreotti.

The Long Gallery, Parham House, West Sussex

The Long Gallery at Parham House runs the length of the house at 160ft (about 48m) long and is the third longest gallery of its type in the country.

The Elizabethan ceiling remained undecorated until the mid 20th century when the eminent stage and costume designer Oliver Messel was commissioned to paint it in tribute to the renowned botanist Sir Joseph Banks — a relation to the owners. It was completed in 1968.

Law's Close, Kirkcaldy, Fife

This simpler, but nonetheless equally remarkable ceiling was discovered at Law's Close — an early example of a Scottish merchant’s house — by a student in the late 20th century.

The 16th century artwork was hiding behind a 17th century plaster ceiling was this exquisitely-decorated 16th century wooden ceiling.

Watts Cemetery Chapel, Guildford, Surrey

This stunning artwork was the brainchild of local artist Mary Watts.

From 1896, she worked alongside residents of Compton, Surrey, guiding 74 of them towards the creation of this Arts and Crafts pottery and paint masterpiece. The chapel sits on top of a hill in the village’s graveyard.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here