Page 30 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

astonishment, discussed world politics and current affairs as if with an equal. I remember but a few other visitors
but Ambassador Francisco de Assis Chateubriand and Pietro Maria Bardi appeared occasionally as would H.E.
Jorge Ortiz Linares.This would put the household into a ferment of activity and I was exiled to the nursery.20
My father’s inner sanctum was on the top floor. One ventured there at one’s peril as he withdrew behind closed
doors to reflect, write and work. Indeed I cannot say my upbringing was ‘Edwardian’ in the strictest sense but
there were distinct boundaries and certain disciplines and a child was expected ‘to be seen not heard’.Thus the
nursery and bedroom were mine but the grown up sitting room only between 6 and 7pm. In my later teens and
early twenties, when my mother in an attempt to impress my father had signed on at The Courtauld Institute,
the house was filled with a series of nubile and extremely glamorous young women with brains with whom I
respectively fell in love passionately in my most impressionable years, learning from the one world literature
and from the other architecture and music and a great deal about ‘life’.21

My father’s interest in the arts extended across a very wide field – Italian majolica as we have seen, Renaissance
bronzes, a great love of old master drawings, old master paintings and impressionists – and while in no way forcing
culture upon me he made sure that I absorbed it, if not through any other way, at least by being surrounded by such
objects in his house (alas swingeing death duties in 1963 meant that the best were later lost to me). But above all he
had a passion for nature in all its complexity and its simplicity and in plants and gardens in particular.An avid visitor
to the R.H.S.Wisley gardens he loved to potter around.Thus when in 1958 he purchased a georgian english country
house four miles from Canterbury called Elbridge, built in 1798 in the Adam style for Denne Denne Esq., he was in
seventh heaven.The house possessed an oval reception hall, bow ended drawing rooms, an 1800 gun and china cabinet
in the dining room, cellars, washroom laundry, seven bedrooms some with four posters, stable yard, a walled one
acre vegetable garden with glasshouses for vines, a huge regency conservatory and a lake with a Regency wrought
iron bridge leading to an island filled with mature rhododendron. Occupied by the army duringWWII and needing
serious maintenance, having paid the £5500 purchase cost, he set about investing several times that sum in restoration.
He planted trees and flowers everywhere but above all in conjunction with an Ashford nursery he set about planting
and propagating camellias. He planned to retire there and run a scaled down business from offices in the house. He
was supremely content.To this day I retain three of the camellias, now well over 70 years old which have followed
me to two houses and which are a constant reminder of this time with their floribund generosity lasting from February

20. Ortiz Linares was a favoured client and friend and in time I became a friend of George Ortiz whom I have always admired as a role model.
Chateaubriand, a newspaper baron, wielded immense power in Brazil. His favourite ploy was to announce in his newspapers that such and such an art
object had actually been acquired with a significant donation by a named individual when in effect it had not thereby putting both the benefactor named
and the authorities on notice to foot the cost. My father was involved with the founding of the São Paolo Museum whose first director was Bardi selling
a number of things including the major part of the Imbert Collection of early majolica.

21. Ursula Nemethy (later Digby-Jones and then Behrens– seeT. Behrens, The Monument, Jonathan Cape, 1988), a devastatingly intelligent and ravishingly
beautiful blonde Hungarian woman who escaped on foot the Hungarian uprising in 1956 with a bullet wound and a copy of Gray’s ElegyWritten in a
Country Churchyard in her pocket, sent me reading lists and letters to Oxford; and Gillian Harvey (later Parkhouse) who was a lifelong mentor and
friend until her demise in 2006 and a highly accomplished pianist as well as an exquisite beauty. Both were my first Muses.Alas, Ursula disappeared
from my life early but Gillian remained a dear friend until her death.

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