Page 31 - Joseph Wright - Virgils Tomb and the grand tour of Naples

culture upon me he made sure that I absorbed it, if not through any other way, at least by being surrounded by such
objects in his house (alas swingeing death duties in 1963 meant that the best were later lost to me). But above all he
had a passion for nature in all its complexity and its simplicity and in plants and gardens in particular.An avid visitor
to the R.H.S.Wisley gardens he loved to potter around.Thus when in 1958 he purchased a georgian english country
house four miles from Canterbury called Elbridge, built in 1798 in the Adam style for Denne Denne Esq., he was in
seventh heaven.The house possessed an oval reception hall, bow ended drawing rooms, an 1800 gun and china cabinet
in the dining room, cellars, washroom laundry, seven bedrooms some with four posters, stable yard, a walled one
acre vegetable garden with glasshouses for vines, a huge regency conservatory and a lake with a Regency wrought
iron bridge leading to an island filled with mature rhododendron. Occupied by the army duringWWII and needing
serious maintenance, having paid the £5500 purchase cost, he set about investing several times that sum in restoration.
He planted trees and flowers everywhere but above all in conjunction with an Ashford nursery he set about planting
and propagating camellias. He planned to retire there and run a scaled down business from offices in the house. He
was supremely content.To this day I retain three of the camellias, now well over 70 years old which have followed
me to two houses and which are a constant reminder of this time with their floribund generosity lasting from February
to April (several more were given to me by my trusted Emily Farrow). My father had a good friend in John Holroyd-
Reece who had co-founded Albatross paperback books in 1932 whose colour coded subject matter was then avant-
garde and which were based on theTauschnitz editions.When this experiment in publishing ceased in 1939 with the
war it was later taken up and served as the model for Penguin. John resided at this time in considerable style as a
tenant of Lord Massareene in The Keep at Chilham Castle. John’s restoration of The Keep and its Georgian sitting
room with gilded ceiling was exemplary. He was also a fabulous raconteur and someone I hero worshipped. His wife,
Gitta22 was a friend of my mother’s and came to stay in Italy several times, and Gitta’s daughter Elizabeth, long
married to Sir Konrad Schiemann, was a breath-taking beauty. In these latter years my father was stricken by lung
cancer and had a lung removed. The economy was going through a severe contraction and with my father ill the
Matthiesen Gallery was suffering, turning much of its attention to a series of exhibitions of contemporary and
twentieth century art. A lifelong friend from Munich days of Bernhard Degenhart, in the last year of his life he
reconstructed with precision the Moscardo and Badile Album presenting the volume with photos in the place of the
original drawings to the Lugt Foundation (Fondation Custodia) and studied early drawings together with Anegritt
Schmitt who was Degenhart’s star pupil.Anegritt had been sent to London as an intern to work with my father. How
proud he would have been to see her recent publication, almost 50 years on, which Annegrit graciously dedicated to
the memory of my father.23 Days before he died in 1963 he rescued the ailing Matthiesen Gallery by selling a
wonderful Frans Hals portrait to Harry Hyams whose career he had long admired.

My father taught me one lesson and that was that I should remember that despite the times we live in professionalism,
integrity and transparency will always triumph in the longer term.The two schools he sent me to had the following

22. Gitta was both beautiful and an enchanting slightly shy woman of Austrian descent who translated Austrian literature. Her father was Otto Erich
Deutsch the cataloguer of Haydn.

23. Bernhard Degenhart-Annegrit Schmitt, Corpus de Italienischen Zeichnungen 1300-1450,Teil III.Band 3,Badile-Album, Biering and Brinckmann 2010.

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