I went to the National Gallery in London on Friday, and paid a tenner to go and look at the temporary exhibition of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby. I particularly love Wright’s work for its significance in recording the history of science and science education, and I was a little disappointed that the text around the exhibition puts the emphasis his technique of light and shade and use of candles, slightly excluding what it is that the paintings are actually about. (See also a critique by Rebecca Owen-Keats, who unlike me is an actual expert on Wright.)

But it is all great stuff. Here is a scientist pumping air out of a jar in which a bird is desperately fluttering; one of the little girls cannot look, while the other is grimly fascinated.

Here the kids are looking at an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. I always wanted one of those. The two youngest are complete rapt in the turning spheres.

And three men look at an ancient Roman statue, one of them sketching it.

Two young men exploring a cave find a scraggy philosopher, looking for the meaning of life and death in a skeleton. He will not find it.

The full title of this painting is “The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers”. It does what it says on the tin.

Finally, Wright in his own self-portrait looks out at us from the shadows.

I bought the souvenir book of the exhibition, but have not read it yet; perhaps it will have more on the content as well as the style.

There is plenty else to see in the National Gallery, and my attention was caught by John Singer Sargent’s portrait of seven-year-old Victoria Stanley.

Dressed for hunting, she is clearly ready to have fun but also won’t take any nonsense from anyone.

I was delighted to find that there are two portraits of her from the 1920s, one by Sir John Lavery (in the collection of the London art dealers Colnaghi) and the other by Minnie Agnes Cohen (recently sold at auction). You can clearly see the little girl in the adult Victoria. There are plenty of photographs of her taken during her life, but none captures her character as these portraits do.

Victoria was the daughter of the Earl of Derby; her great-grandfather served three terms as prime minister. Her first husband was Neil Primrose, son of the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery and himself a Liberal MP. They married in 1915 and had a daughter a year later, but he was killed in 1917 during the Third Battle of Gaza. During her widowhood, her father was appointed British Ambassador to Paris and she became a fixture in the Anglo-French social scene. She then married Malcolm Bullock in 1919 and they had another daughter in 1920; he too served as an MP (but a Conservative) from 1923 to 1953.

Nineteen of her letters are preserved at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York. The earliest is from 1902, three years after she posed for John Singer Sargent. It is about her brothers, and their horses.

Victoria became a leading figure in the world of horse racing and hunting. Her two daughters were among the first three women admitted to the Jockey Club, and her great-granddaughter Clare Balding is a well known sports journalist, particularly on racing. Her father, her mother, her first and second husbands and her daughters Ruth and Priscilla all have Wikipedia pages, but she does not.

When hunting at Lowesby Hall in Leicestershire on 25 November 1927, Victoria risked riding under a low bridge, and was fatally injured when she hit her head on the stonework. (See report by the local history society.) She was 35.

Over the last couple of years I have been deepening my knowledge of a couple of the early twentieth century abstract artists, one of them being Fernand Léger (1881-1955). I was initially struck by his “Jeu de Cartes” at the Kröller-Müller Museum up north in the Netherlands, when we went there in July 2022.

I have since encountered him at the charming museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis and in Brussels, and most recently in Los Angeles where LACMA has his “The Disks”:

I really like the way he plays with shapes to make us look at things in a different way.

At the same time, I’m gradually going through my American grandmother’s memoirs of her life, and have reached her stay in Paris at the age of 20 in 1919. She has the following interesting notes:

One thing that was very nice for me was that Gascon and Mariette Mills heard that I was in Paris and got in touch with me; Gascon’s cousin Rosalie Hinkley had married a cousin of mine, so that though there was no relationship there was a connection. The Millses had no children of their own and were very good to me, often having me to stay at their place at Rambouillet – a delightful hunting-lodge of the time of Louis XIV – quite a large house, really, where they had lovely parties. Through them I met many interesting people, mostly artists, Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine and Picabia and Fernand Léger and Guy Arnoux and lots of others. Mariette herself was a good sculptor and did some fine work; Gascon went in for carpentry and with little assistance built a chalet in the grounds of their house.

So my grandmother knew Fernand Léger! Rather a thrill. More on the people mentioned below, but I also found online a French translation of the English-language memoir Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, by Robert McAlmon (1895-1956) which includes the following snippet from 1921 (with my retranslation back into English, as I don’t have access to the original text):

Le lendemain, je partis pour la campagne, près de Rambouillet. Les Heyworth Mils avaient un château dans la petite commune où je m’installai, et dans un rayon de quinze kilomètres se trouvaient plusieurs charmants villages où l’on pouvait se promener, siroter un petit vin rafraîchissant, revenir pour le déjeuner et travailler l’après-midi. Le dimanche, mais souvent, aussi, les jours de semaine pour prendre le thé, Brancusi, Léger, Picabia et Blaise Cendrars venaient rendre visite aux Mills.

The next day I left for the countryside near Rambouillet. The Heyworth Mills had a château in that little town, where I settled in. Within fifteen kilometres there were several charming villages where you could go for a walk, sip a refreshing glass of wine, come back for lunch and work in the afternoon. Brancusi, Léger, Picabia and Blaise Cendrars would come to visit the Mills on Sundays and often on weekdays for tea.

It’s interesting that my grandmother and Robert McAlmon both namedrop both Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia as fellow guests of the Mills’. It is amusing to think of the two young Americans (McAlmon was 25) possibly at the same tea-party in Rambouillet, wowed by the French artists present and ignoring each other.

So, the people my grandmother mentions are:

“Gascon Mills” – Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1872-1943), born in Switzerland, an American citizen who lived most of his life abroad. He was the son of the Professor of Zend Philosophy at Oxford, also Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1837-1918). I don’t know the origin of my grandmother’s nickname for him of “Gascon” or “Gaston”, which she uses for him elsewhere. Robert McAlmon’s memoir also refers to him as “Le Gaston”.

Mariette Benedict Thompson (1876-1948), was Mills’ second wife (his first wife died in 1902). She was also an American expat, born in Paris, and was indeed a moderately well known sculptor. Unfortunately I haven’t found photographs of any of her work online, but there seem to be pieces in both the Musée d’Orsay and the Pompidou Centre. She is the only woman mentioned by either my grandmother or McAlmon.

Rosalie Hinckley (1887-1981) was Heyworth Mills’ first cousin once removed, the daughter of Rosalie Anne Neilson (1858-1939) and granddaughter of Caroline Kane Mills (1822-1891), whose younger brother was the Orientalist professor Lawrence Heyworth Mills; she was born and died in New York. Rosalie Hinckley’s husband Cornelius Wendell Wickersham (1885-1968) was my grandmother’s first cousin, the son of former Attorney-General George Woodward Wickersham (1858-1936).

Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine must be Oleg-Eugène Tripet-Skrypitzine (1848-1935), who would have been 72 in 1920. He was the son of the French ambassador to St Petersburg and a Russian princess, and is particularly remembered for developing Cannes and the French Riviera, but some of his art survives as well. He had a son, François Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine, but he emigrated to Canada in 1910 and does not seem to have been artistically inclined.

Francis Picabia (1879-1953) is a very well-known artist, one of the founders of Dadaism who then denouced it and switched to Surrealism in 1921 (the same year that he and my grandmother were entertained by the Millses). One of his notable works from 1921 is “Jumelle”.

Fernand Léger is probably the best-known of the artists named by my grandmother. He is usually bracketed with Bracque and Picasso as a pioneer of Cubism. Something about his art really grabs me and from surviving photos he looks like he was fun at parties, even tea-parties. This is his “The Breakfast”, also known as “Three Women”, from 1921.

Guy Arnoux (1886-1951) again had a very different style, much more of a cartoonist and illustrator – indeed he ended up making a nice career in illustrations for American newspapers and magazines, possibly helped by his connection with the Millses. Here’s his “La Robe de Chambre”, “The Dressing-Gown”, from 1921.

McAlmon also namechecks “Brancusi”, actually Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) who is the best known of any of the artists here, though chiefly remembered as a sculptor rather than a painter. Mina Loy’s poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird“, was inspired by a sculpture that she probably saw at the Mills’ Paris house. His “Adam and Eve”, now in the Guggenheim, dates from 1921.

Finally, McAlmon also mentions Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), a writer and poet, rather than an artist, originally from Switzerland. He published a collection of African folk tales in 1921 (with unfortunately a racist title).

Those must have been great tea-parties.