Page 30 - Joseph Wright - Virgils Tomb and the grand tour of Naples

furnished the best chateaux and hock. Professor Richard Offner (1889-1965) was a frequent visitor and he took a
shine to the small boy who was an avid reader of TheTimes and who precociously, to his astonishment, discussed world
politics and current affairs as if with an equal. I remember but a few other visitors but Ambassador Francisco de Assis
Chateubriand and Pietro Maria Bardi appeared occasionally as would H.E. Jorge Ortiz Linares for whom I carried
out my first amateur smuggling expedition in 1968.This was the year of the student riots in France and my father
had acquired a precious Fayence cockerel for Ortiz which, in view of the disturbances, he felt he dared not deliver.
Well versed in Customs procedure and travel, thinking to please my father, the following day I acquired a first class
Pullman ticket on the Golden Arrow using all my pocket money savings – about £11, aware that controls were on
board the train and minimalist. I packed the Fayence in newspaper in a huge suitcase and aged 15 set off alone for
Paris. My travelling companions across the aisle in a carriage now used by The Orient Express were none less than
Peter Ustinov and Robert Morley. The conversation was riveting for a boy while I took afternoon tea served by
liveried footmen.As expected I was merely asked if the case in the rack above my head was mine. On arrival in Paris
I took a taxi, totally penniless, to the Royal Monceau to find that my father had already left and had to be taken in as
a ‘waif’ by the Concierge. My father when he was apprised of this episode was far from pleased but the Ambassador
was delighted when I brought the piece to his house and also met his son Georgre Ortiz for the first time.

The aforementioned prestigious visits would put the household into a ferment of activity and I was exiled to the
nursery.20 My father’s inner sanctum was on the top floor. One ventured there at one’s peril as he withdrew behind
closed doors to reflect, write and work. Indeed I cannot say my upbringing was ‘Edwardian’ in the strictest sense
but there were distinct boundaries and certain disciplines and a child was expected ‘to be seen not heard’.Thus the
nursery and bedroom were mine but the grown up sitting room only between 6 and 7pm. In my later teens and
early twenties, when my mother in an attempt to impress my father had signed on at The Courtauld Institute, the
house was filled with a series of nubile and extremely glamorous young women with brains with whom I respectively
fell in love passionately in my most impressionable years, learning from the one world literature and from the other
architecture and music and a great deal about ‘life’.21

My father’s interest in the arts extended across a very wide field – Italian majolica as we have seen, Renaissance
bronzes, a great love of old master drawings, old master paintings and impressionists – and while in no way forcing

20. Ortiz Linares was a favoured client and friend and in time I became a friend of George Ortiz whom I have always admired as a role model.
Chateaubriand, a newspaper baron, wielded immense power in Brazil. His favourite ploy was to announce in his newspapers that such and such an art
object had actually been acquired with a significant donation by a named individual when in effect it had not thereby putting both the benefactor named
and the authorities on notice to foot the cost. My father was involved with the founding of the São Paolo Museum whose first director was Bardi selling
a number of things including the major part of the Imbert Collection of early majolica.

21. Ursula Nemethy (later Digby-Jones and then Behrens– seeT. Behrens, The Monument, Jonathan Cape, 1988), a devastatingly intelligent and ravishingly
beautiful blonde Hungarian woman who escaped on foot the Hungarian uprising in 1956 with a bullet wound and a copy of Gray’s ElegyWritten in a
Country Churchyard in her pocket, sent me reading lists and letters to Oxford; and Gillian Harvey (later Parkhouse) who was a lifelong mentor and
friend until her demise in 2006 and a highly accomplished pianist as well as an exquisite beauty. Both were my first Muses.Alas, Ursula disappeared
from my life early but Gillian remained a dear friend until her death.

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