Aubrey and Sickert in Oxford

John Aubrey (1626-97, pictured) was best known to me as the early biographer of Shakespeare as part of his Brief Lives. His dating of Shakespeare's up and off from Stratford to London is early and I for one would like him to be right on that as it would help our little Shakespeare biography project quite nicely, thank you. The Bodleian Library have an exhibition of Aubrey's books this summer, showing him to be an innovative biographer of his time, introducing significant anecdote and telling detail to both enlighten and, in retrospect at least, amuse.

However, biography was only one of many polymathematical areas of study that Aubrey was involved in, in an age in which one could excel in a variety of disciplines without being suspected of dabbling. Aubrey was a 'scientist' before the word, an 'experimental philosopher' in fact, and interested in Astronomy, Mathematics, Earth Sciences and was ahead of his contemporaries in dating Stonehenge as pre-Roman.

However, the exhibition is of books and however in favour of books one is, looking at them in glass cases has a limited appeal. Much better to look at are paintings and the recently refurbished Ashmolean has some particularly fine ones, especially those by Walter Sickert. I've long been an admirer of his study of marriage gone past its crisis, Ennui, all modern desperation and quiet horror. But next to it is the even finer Brighton Pierrots, pictured. The bright splash of vaudevillean colour is backlit as the show struggles on, end of season, early evening, empty seats and only an echo of better days. What a tremendous painting. It made the trip to Oxford worth it on its own and any day would be worthwhile if one discovered such a thing, and any year in which one discovered 365 such things would be quite a year.