My last day in London and thought I’d take the opportunity to see the latest David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, titled “82 portraits and 1 still life”. 

Apparently after his monumental landscape exhibition in London in 2012, Hockney turned away from painting and from his Yorkshire home, returning to Los Angeles. Slowly he began to return to the quiet contemplation of portraiture, beginning with a depiction of his studio manager. Over the months that followed, he became absorbed by the genre and invited sitters from all areas of his life into his studio. His subjects – all friends, family and acquaintances – include office staff, fellow artists, curators and gallerists. Each work is the same size, showing his sitter in the same chair, against the same vivid blue background and all were painted in the same time frame of three days. He allows their differing personalities to “leap off the canvas with warmth and immediacy”.

Gregory Evans has been Hockney’s close companion over several decades; their easy relationship makes his portrait one of the most relaxed of the group. 

Edith Devaney is the curator of David Hockney’s show. Coming face to face with her painted likeness, she says she saw herself in a new light. She was struck by a seriousness of expression that her mother recognised instantly, but which she had not noticed from photographs or the mirror.   “In an age of the selfie, and endless meaningless portraits … it’s interesting how little we know ourselves,” she told the Observer.

Barry Humphries, born 1934, is an Australian comedian, actor, satirist, artist, and author. He is best known for writing and playing his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. He is also a film producer and script writer, a star of London’s West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer, and an accomplished landscape painter. David has been a friend of his family for a long time. A reminescence from Barry on the occasion of his portrait sitting, “In this age where it is possible to call yourself an artist without being able to draw, David Hockney is a rare phenomenon. Throughout the process he smoked – there was usually a nourishing cigarette in his left hand. And although he is an energetic and always entertaining talker, he rarely spoke when painting. Sometimes he gave a short grunt of satisfaction or looked up at his subject with a smile that told me it was going well.”

Next, it was lunch at Fortnum and Mason over the road; followed by a brisk stroll down Regent St and Piccadilly Circus checking out ye olde worlde signage and buildings….and walked past an incredible little cul-de-sac, with a Merc quite fittingly parked outside a rather large set of Georgian apartments.   When you stand in the courtyard you can hear the hour marked by the clock chimes of St James’s Church, accompanied by the more uptempo tinkling of the clock at Fortnum & Mason, the local “grocer’s”.  Little did I know of the history of this place, “The Albany”….if you will indulge me….

Home to prime ministers, film stars and poets, this block of flats in central London has been a refuge of the elite for more than 200 years. Next door to Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts and other learned societies, a stone’s throw from the enticements of Soho, the grandeur of St James’s, and the comforts of Mayfair, to say nothing of the canny tailoring of Savile Row, lies this hidden world – part club, part cloister – stretching the full length of its neighbouring Sackville Street.   The secrets of the place – and there are many – have gradually tumbled forth over the years, beginning with those of its first inhabitants, Lord Melbourne and his wife, Elizabeth, for whom the main mansion was designed by Sir William Chambers, one of King George III’s preferred architects, as a palatial town house completed in 1774. Both lord and lady enjoyed numerous extramarital affairs (Elizabeth had children by Lord Egremont and by the Prince of Wales, among other paramours, as well as at least one by her husband), creating a salacious mythology that, rightly or wrongly, persists to this day. After he squandered much of his fortune, Melbourne exchanged his grand house in 1791 with that of the king’s son, the Duke of York and Albany, who installed his Prussian wife and her menagerie of cats, dogs and monkeys. Alas, the Duke of York was as extravagant and dissolute as his predecessor, and he, too, was forced to sell.

In 1803, an imaginative young developer named Alexander Copland purchased the property. He and the architect, Henry Holland, divided the space into smaller chambers and added two additional buildings, creating a total of 69 sets, some of which were subsequently recombined. The shrewd Copland had noted the growing need in London for small-scale residences within walking distance of St James’s and its clubs and the Houses of Parliament, where a country gentleman with no desire for an elaborate dwelling in town could feel at home, with his own wine and coal cellars down below and a modest billet for a valet upstairs. Copland marketed the apartments exclusively to well-to-do, socially connected and unencumbered men. No women were permitted on the premises (at least not officially) until the 1880s.

In his 1848 novel, The Bachelor of the Albany, Marmion Wilard Savage described it as “the haunt of bachelors, or of married men who try to lead bachelors’ lives – the dread of suspicious wives, the retreat of superannuated fops, the hospital for incurable oddities, a cluster of solitudes for social hermits, the home of homeless gentlemen … the place for the fashionable thrifty, the luxurious lonely and the modish morose.”

Other Albanians, some of whose association with the place is commemorated in a collection of plaques and busts adorning the mansion’s central corridor, include a few prime ministers (Lamb, Gladstone, Heath and, for just a few days, Thatcher); writers like the playwright Terence Rattigan; the actor Terence Stamp (of the sapphire eyes and chiselled cheekbones); the glamorous society hostess and publisher Fleur Cowles occupied a grand apartment the width of the mansion, where she entertained everyone from Lady Bird Johnson to Princess Grace; pop singer Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, and for a month or so, Greta Garbo.

The rooms were once haunted by a previous incumbent, an alcoholic Welsh baronet who had reportedly drowned – indeed, boiled – in his overheated bath. His spirit seemed lodged in a dumbwaiter that rose to the attic kitchen, jamming the works. A visiting Jesuit priest exorcised him, gently and efficiently.

Hope you liked the story….amazing what research on google turns up!