Friday, June 5, 2009
Dulwich, London

It seems that either I stay up half the night with sleeplessness or I awake at 8. 15 (now this has to be the latest I have ever awoken here!) and panic. Because I had plans to meet my friend Janie at East Dulwich Station at 9. 30, I tore out of bed, washed, got dressed (no, I did not shower–no time!), threw two slices of bread into the toaster (to eat on the bus) and was out the door like greased lightning!!!!

The 63 took its time trundling along Farringdon Road, but I made the connection to the 176 heading towards Penge really quickly on Blackfriars Bridge and I was at the appointed place at the appointed hour–by some inexplicable miracle! And Janie was not there! It was then that I realized (quelle horreur!) that I had left my cell phone at home!!! I am now beginning to realize that I can get out of the house without my bus pass but NOT without my cell phone.

So, of course, all I could do was twiddle my thumbs and wait…and wait…and wait. Just when I was beginning to despair, I stepped inside and asked the ticket clerk if there was another entrance to the station. Nah. So there I was freezing slowly (because it was a really chilly day which felt like a normal summer’s day in England instead of the scorchers we’ve recently had). At a few minutes before 10 am, I began to consider alternatives. I could take a bus and get to the Dulwich Picture Gallery which was our aim and meet her there. Hopefully, she would still stick with our original plans and not go back home to Clapham (she was driving).

Well, just when my options began to become more concrete, along came Janie! Hallelujah!!! Many relieved hugs and kisses later (she was waiting at the wrong station–North Dulwich instead of East Dulwich!), we were off. Janie suggested she give me a little driving tour of Dulwich Village first. I requested a stop on the street on which Kamala Markandaya used to live. She is the late Indo-British author on whom my doctoral dissertation was based (which subsequently led to the publication of my first book, a scholarly criticism of her novels).

A quick check into Janie’s A to Z revealed that we were not too far away from her place at all and then within five minutes, there we were, in a street filled with lovely Victorian terraced homes with their plaster embellishments running all along the porches and the window frames. I stepped out, took a couple of pictures and then we were back again in the car, heading off to the Village.

My friend Janie is a lover of all things Georgian but mainly their architecture and she is also an authority on it–so it is always a joy to take an excursion with her as I end up learning so much and to see with informed eyes. Traveling with her means becoming aware of things I would never have found out on my own. For instance, she stopped outside a block of houses with blackened brick and explained to me how the windows were raised and lowered using a concept of weights and pulleys that were concealed in the broad window frames! Just next door was a later Victorian house that still used the same mechanism, but the apparatus was hidden inside the house so that the broad window ledges and crowning frames disappeared by the mid-1900s. Not only has Janie an eye for these things but she has the knowledge and the enthusiasm to explain every last detail and the awe and passion in her voice as she speaks is unmistakable.

Getting to Know Edward Alleyn:
She then went on to tell me about Edward Alleyn, a name that I knew was familiar but could not immediately place. When she mentioned Christopher Marlowe, something clicked in my brain, and I remembered he was the Elizabethan actor-manager (of the Rose Theater, a competitor of the Globe) who had taken the debut role of Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play. Well, like Shakespeare, Alleyn made a stack of ducats and ended up with a finger in many business ventures, including dubious ones like bear baiting and brothels! Then, one day, during the scene in Dr. Faustus with Mephistopheles in hell in which he is surrounded by 12 devils, Alleyn counted 13! And that changed his life. He decided that he was a man wealthy beyond his wildest expectations and ought to give something back to the society that had so nurtured his talents and allowed them to bloom. It was schools for little boys that he was going to found with his excess wealth and that he set about doing in the Village of Dulwich in which he lived and had a grand mansion.

So began the God’s Gifts School–first one, then another, then yet another, until the education of boys became his passion and he poured all his profits into them. The establishment of Dulwich College (a private school for boys) soon followed and you can see the imposing red brick building with its exterior Victorian flourishes (reminiscent of The Victoria and Albert Museum) and its magnificent wrought-iron gate alongside his house just next door to the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Janie’s son goes to one of these schools which is how she is so familiar with the history and origin of this set of fine public (which means private!) schools. I took many pictures (despite the drizzle that played almost all day) and decided to explore the area on foot after Janie left at mid-day as she had domestic commitments.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery and Sickert in Venice:
By the time we arrived at the beautiful purpose-built building that comprises the Dulwich Picture Gallery (no marks for guessing that the architect was Sir John Soanes, he of the Bank of England and the famed Museum that bears his name), we were starving and decided that a little pick-us-up of toasted croissants with caffe lattes would do very nicely, thank-you. So we headed off first to the cafeteria and sat ourselves down and caught up! I had last seen Janie when she was kind enough to drive me to Rochester, Kent, to pick up my antique weighing scale. Turned out, she had since then received the contract to design posters and other such graphics for the Rochester Cathedral based on their eagle logo, which she had visited for the first time on her trip with me!

Well, it turns out that Janie actually knows some folks in the antiques shipping biz and I might end up getting a better quotation for the shipping of my antique bureau-desk back home to Connecticut. Wouldn’t that be lover-ly, as Eliza Dolittle would say? More chatter, more sips of latte, more bites into our crispy croissant, and then we were ready to see the collection.

My Met ID card worked and I was granted free entry into the special exhibit entitled “Sickert in Venice”. Entrance into the Gallery is usually free–it is only the special exhibits for which you pay. I felt very pleased indeed though Janie did buy herself a ticket–a rather steep nine pounds, I might add for an exhibition that spanned just four small rooms.

So it was the Sickert we looked at first of all. Those canvasses took me right back to Venice and the fun days I had spent there last March with my friends Amy and Mahnaz. I had gone there for a conference organized at the Venice International University and made a holiday of it–and what a blast it was! Well, there they were…all those images reminding me of those awed times that we climbed the Campanile in Piazza San Marco to watch the pigeons in the square below; the baldachino in the Basilica San Marco that conceals the stunning Pala D’Oro behind it (easily one of the most beautiful things in the whole world that I have ever seen!), the canals with their bobbing gondolas or stopping by the pallazos–some still shining, others rather decrepit, the Rialto Bridge gleaming in the artistic sunshine in shades of pink and blue and yellow. All those memories came rushing at me in Impressionistic idiom and color and I sighed and gazed and sighed again. Sickert’s perspective is often oblique, his tendency (as in the new photographic form) closely cropped to focus on just one element of a Renaissance structure or on the effect of silvery moonlight on a watery canal. It was magical.

And then there were his portraits–mainly of prostitutes who posed for him, their hair coiled up like Japanese geisha girls. More portraits of their mothers saw them looking pale, forlorn and very pathetic indeed. Women in bed sleeping quietly while watched, women stretching lazily like so many graceful felines, women bending over their baths, women chatting companionably (though, in reality, they were ruthless rivals for the same clientele). Surely those years in Venice (the early 1900s) might have been adventurous in the extreme for the young Sickert escaping strait-laced Victorian respectability and middle-class morality in England and sowing his wild oats under the Venetian sun!

Janie left soon after, allowing me to browse through the rest of the small but rather lovely collection. There were a few outstanding canvasses, I thought–the one of ‘Mrs. Moody and her Children’ by Gainsborough was particularly evocative because she died so soon after it was painted and her little boys (both wearing girls’ dresses with great big sashes and bows as, I understand, was the custom until boys were potty-trained!) were painted in later. This naturalized portrait compares intriguingly with Gainsborough’s earlier work such as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (in the National Gallery) which are so much stiffer and stylized. Also lovely was a portrait of a girl at a window by Rembrandt (recently restored and rather beautifully at that) in which she gazes at the viewer quite saucily, her eyes bright with hope for her future. Peter Lely’s young man (not really a portrait since the person in neither known nor named) is wonderfully lit, his features glowing golden in the clever artificial lighting. There were stunning Murillos, Riberas and a Velasquez portrait of Phillip IV in rather an unusual pose.

All the while, you are walking through rooms created by Sir John Soanes, himself a great lover of art and a collector (see Hogarth’s series called The Rake’s Progress in his house at Lincoln’s Inn Field) and I can see how carefully he must have considered the placement of the windows to allow maximum natural light without diminishing the clarity of the paint as time passed by. There are his classical embellishments–the use of four decorative urns at the top of the main entrance, but some modern touches as well–the use of rather unusually designed doors. There is a classical austerity in the many arches, brick-bound and sombre. Enjoy the art but also pause to enjoy the architecture–for the more I see of the work of Soanes and the more I get to know the man, the more he is beginning to feel like an old friend.

Exploring Dulwich Village:
It was time to potter around the Village and my first stop was the spacious grounds of Edward Alleyn’s house (now turned into a number of almshouses). There is a chapel that is open only on Tuesday afternoons but beautifully landscaped rose gardens that were brimming over with fragrant blossoms–a significant flower for the Elizabethans loved roses with a passion. There is also a bronze sculpture that celebrates Alleyne’s thespian contributions to the Theater and set against the quiet square and the blushing roses, they took me right back to those passionate times when blank verse rang out from sawdust covered stages and the groundlings screeched their approval of bawdy lines.

I strolled through Dulwich Village which revealed itself to be studded with coffee shops, a church hall filling rapidly with adorable pink tutu-sporting toddlers off for their ballet lessons, one-of-a-kind boutiques and a few patisseries. It wasn’t long before I got back on the bus, delighted to have made the acquaintance of a rather lovely part of London that has largely remained undiscovered by the conventional tourist.

As the bus wound through Peckham High Street, I spied the Clark Factory Store and out I jumped, hoping to find some plantar fascittis-friendly sandals for the coming summer. And there they were –just the kind I wanted marked at one-third the price in the high street plus I got the second pair at one pound! Hey, you can’t beat a deal like that, so out I walked with a big bag and my summer footwear wardrobe in my hand. I might just make a trip there again next week to take a look at the newer stock as I had reached there at the very end of the day when the shelves were mostly empty and my size was almost impossible to find.

Back home, I made myself a very early plate of dinner (was starving as I had eaten no lunch) which I ate while watching TV for exactly 15 minutes and at 6. 40pm, I began transcribing the interview I did with Noel in Hounslow–an interview that had gone on for hours and would take at least three more to complete. In-between I chatted with Llew and made a few more calls. After the transcribing, the proof reading began and when I looked next at my watch, it was 11 pm!!! Just enough time to get ready for bed, read a bit of Potter and fall off (hopefully without having to count too many sheep).