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Cheyne Walk, An Interior by Victoria PressLots 1-152 Physically a sparrow, albeit with an eagle’s heart and eye, Victoria Press loved things of scale. And dynamic difference of scale was a key factor in the way she put together a room. She backed something huge that seemed intended for the great hall at Blenheim into a tiny nook near a kitchen where it looked perfectly at home and ruled. She would put a pair of Chinese vases more or less her height up taller on glamorous gold stands behind an open door, and then hang one of the smallest pictures that Marie Laurencin ever painted beside them. All would be the better for it. Her favourite word was “terrific”, with all of its implications and that is how I would describe the overall impact of the rooms she made over many years at her house on Cheyne Walk. I have heard it said that you know you are in the presence of an artist when your understanding of the world shifts, deepens, and things look different after an encounter with their work. Then for sure the way she made her rooms was art. She would never have claimed anything of the kind for herself, but I would call her an artist in the way she achieved a result greater than the sum of its parts, and changed the way you saw. She used diagonals and symmetries between things, set rules of balance and texture, then broke them with exceptionally well-chosen punctuation of furniture. It was a private pleasure…. she did it entirely to please herself, but delighted her audience in any case. She knew not to pile masterpiece on masterpiece, but that a plain thing makes a rich thing sing, and that a plant (she favoured recently a malevolent-looking begonia which dangled from Imari pots and flowered spectacularly for her every year) can orchestrate the mood of a space and change and recharge the atmosphere for a few months like an exotic visitor. She liked snacks and cocktails and glass and tureens and hated packaging… a trolley stood charged and ready for cocktails with cheesy biscuits in cut-glass bonbonnières and shocking pink-painted chinoiserie cupboards kept an electric kettle at arms-length and in sight for tea from gold lustre upstairs on demand. She challenged herself to make the rooms better and tried out new arrangements without cease. The carpets were lifted in the summer and the wooden floors were bared, polished with beeswax, and things in general were constantly on the march… an outdoor table of painted iron would find itself indoors surrounded by painted Italian, perhaps Neapolitan, chairs… daybeds would be shuttled from upstairs down, and her favourite form, the duchesse brisée, several of which might suddenly be brought together in one room, would be angled like broken armadillos across the space between tiny interesting tables, a miniature boulle desk and a comfortable fringed modern sofa piled with fresh catalogues, her favourite reading. If she had a restless eye, mind and taste the result was a safe and serene house. Cheyne Walk, like her piano nobile in Venice, was a place of frequent pilgrimage. Family, friends and other visitors streamed through…. She was fascinated by strong characters (mirrors of discovery?) and gathered them about her. But the furniture itself assumed equal rank, status and quality with her best friends… she talked about a good chair affectionately, almost as she might discuss an eccentric favourite (Robert Heber Percy was such a one) or a great actress, just as if it was someone she simply adored and wanted to know better. As with her friends there was no unifying principle to her collecting other than quality and fitness for purpose, and contrast was her pride and joy. She listened as hard to the places she lived in as to the people she brought together there, and captured echoes of their imagined past to create a brilliantly evocative present. She always said that if you listen to a place or a thing it will tell you how it should be and where to place it. I suppose that is her version of consulting “the genius of the place in all.” Perhaps that is why her rooms seemed just as happy when they were filled with friends or when one sat in them alone, But then one was able to see that a master had been at work in the details of things, the juxtaposition of fabrics and objects and the originality of her choices, and above all of her uniquely personal combining of colour, form and space. She was incapable of having an ugly thing near her, it really distressed her and an immediate effort was always made to remedy the situation. In Cheyne Walk she perfected the art of having the eye coming to rest on beautiful things… always. If some of this might sound pretentious Victoria was always the first to burst that bubble…she had no truck with airy-fairy. It never occurred to her in the slightest that these rooms with their collections might impress…. They just had to be “right”. When she was frustrated that after years of looking she could not find enough of the right Blanc de Chine to deck out two fantastic overmantels as she wished, she got a wood turner to make a squadron of them in pine and her Venetian restorer to paint them porcelain white. She lugged them back to London in her suitcase, called me over and handed me a 2B pencil. “Do craquelure” she growled. Obviously I obeyed. She often wondered where her things had been and who had touched them and what they had witnessed in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that they had mostly lived through. I know she would not remotely have imagined that those things move forward now to new hands greatly enhanced by living with Victoria, a layer of provenance of the highest order of taste, having been placed together in the happiest of circumstances, by a remarkable woman, in a wonderful house. Patrick Kinmonth Patrick Kinmonth is a opera and film director and designer, he lives a stone’s throw from 4 Cheyne Walk.VICTORIA PRESS & THE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSEThe rooms Victoria created at Cheyne Walk had an extraordinary magic – she had an innate understanding for the feel of a room, how to make it interesting but with charm, how to let the bones of the room speak, how to give it a mellow gentleness and harmony that immediately made one feel better for being in it. And we all immediately felt better by being with Victoria too. I loved seeing her in the saleroom, almost always swathed in black, diminutive and yet powerful, a very dear and special figure to all those, like her, who love houses, rooms, furniture and objects. Looking was the essence of life for her and she never stopped – her enquiring mind always wanting to see another house or another collection. In the days when we had more offsite house sales, Victoria would always appear – however remote the place and however difficult to reach, there would be that unmistakable figure. I was always amazed at how she had actually arrived but there she was. And it was not just for house sales but for every Georgian Group or Furniture History Society outing – and many others – she never wanted to forgo the opportunity to look and learn. Those happy chance meetings in the saleroom were always amusing and enlightening, as without fail, she had a strong view and an opinion on the taste of whatever collection we were selling – ‘I hate it!’ – or if it came up to her high standards: ‘I love everything. I want it all!’ In any sale she would always find something so the chance meeting invariably began ‘You know what I like – I’ll show you’ and off we would go and inevitably she would stand in front of the thing that I admired the most too. She always had a special place in all our hearts at Christie’s, as apart from loving the same things, she was an alumni of the inaugural year of Christie’s Fine Arts course, where she made some of her dearest friends. She loved old surfaces, lacquer, paint, worn gilding – the patina of the past that spoke of the lives of those pieces, the journey they had made and those who had owned them, the parfum du passé as the painter Walter Gay described it. In many ways she was in tune with the collectors of the 1920s, reacting against the opulence of the Edwardian era, discovering the charm of ancient houses, old textiles, needlework, lacquer, golden walnut, collectors like Sir Philip Sassoon, Consuelo Balsan, May, Duchess of Roxburghe for all of whom, like her, romantic associations and historic provenances held a special appeal. But typically for Victoria she was also ahead of the game, as original surfaces and patination are again a key factor for today’s collectors. She wanted to live in a world of beauty and indeed she did. The last time I saw her in her beautiful palazzo in Venice, not long before she died, it was in a room of breathtaking beauty created by her on a corner of the Grand Canal with walls of mottled pale pink plaster, the upholstery of all the many chairs – she loved chairs – soft white damask or satin, the pale winter sun filtering in through the windows. Victoria adored the house in Cheyne Walk – in almost forty-five years she never ceased to enjoy every aspect of it and that marvellous painted staircase by Thornhill and Devoto was always a thrill for her. And she was always perfecting it, rearranging the furniture and objects, moving things around in her quest for beauty and magic. What was so wonderful about talking to Victoria was that she understood immediately what was special about an object or a room – she got it, she understood completely. The beauty she created enhanced not only her life but the lives of all those around her, her family and her legion of devoted friends. Charles Cator
A PATINATED-BRONZE HEXAGONAL HALL LANTERN
MODERN, OF GEORGE III STYLE
Details
A PATINATED-BRONZE HEXAGONAL HALL LANTERN
MODERN, OF GEORGE III STYLE
The circular foliate cast corona above palm fronds, fitted for electricity
33 in. (84 cm.) high; 16 in. (41 cm.) wide
MODERN, OF GEORGE III STYLE
The circular foliate cast corona above palm fronds, fitted for electricity
33 in. (84 cm.) high; 16 in. (41 cm.) wide
Brought to you by
Katharine Cooke