It all went right on Saturday morning when the heroic postman delivered three packages that, had they arrived on any other day, at least one would have had to have been re-arranged. It is now time to stop placing orders for books, discs and even artwork for the year. I don't mind the cost, it's the house room, it's the worrying about delivery and its having the time to do them justice and appreciate them fully.
A picture gets more attention than a book or music in the long run because it will be there long after the others have been filed away. Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots looks great in its new frame in the front room while Vermeer's Street in Delft has made way for it by moving over into a corner opposite. I wanted Brighton Pierrots as soon as I saw it in the Ashmolean a few years ago but however many novice hurdles they run at Wincanton and Plumpton, I thought I'd never be able to afford it, nor could I find a print of it available anywhere on the whole of the internet.But one never stops trying. After all these years, I am still in search of a track called Breaking the Rules by Racing Cars, broadcast in a Peel Session. I will find it one day. Last week I found Brighton Pierrots.
On opening it, I was dismayed by the quality of the poster. At close quarters, the colours looked wrong, the print looked vague and I thought I'd blown it on some cheapjack operation. But I think it's fine. Seen from six feet or six yards away it is better than from six inches and such, I suppose, is Sickert's brush work.
The composition is in two halves, the pillar supporting the stage roof divides the canvas into a close up left side of the stage and the long perspectives onto Brighton seafront on the right. The point of view is from the side of the stage, skewed as Sickert often does decide to see things from non-obvious angles, and we see the sunset, the empty deck chairs in front of this colourful vaudeville act whose fading glamour looks a bit desperate. What a sensational painting. It owes a debt to Impressionism, of course, but we don't let France have it all their own way if we can help it.
So Vermeer is now not relegated by given a rest between Lips & Bananas and Dave Brimage's Rainy Night, both of which are the original. Below Rainy Night are two small black and white photographs of Prague and below that my so-far thriving cyclamen, which is the most gorgeous colour of any of them.But, to complete this tour of my front room art collection, we must not leave out Gwen John who has occupied that quiet corner demurely but much loved for so many years. All I really want now is a bit of outrageous passion or unrestrained flamboyance from Maggi Hambling to fill a remaining space, to the right of Lips & Bananas and it simply won't need anything else.
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But the bingeing on these tremendous luxuries must be curtailed. The more one has, the less one appreciates each item. With thirty discs of Buxtehude to listen to, the purchase of Dvorak's Complete Symphoies is put on hold. One last book order was placed over the weekend to augment Delmore Schwartz over Christmas and one more disc of solo baroque violin music is on its way. And then there must be a moritorium. It's not as if I need to go looking out for new things to buy but it's difficult to read reviews wityhout feeling a compulsive need to have them. I don't know what it would have been like if I could have afforded everything I wanted in 1971 and didn't just go into HMV to gaze at Electric Warrior whereas now I don't even have the time to decide which version of it to listen to because there's a steady stream of differently crucial material coming through the front door.
It will take until April to finish the books I have lined up, finish writing my own makeshift novel, hear everything of Buxtehude that has come down to us and exercise some restraint. Making a New Year's Resolution is not the sort of thing I'd do but let's see how it goes.