Restoration Conversations magazine

Restoration

Conversations

ISSUE 7, SPRING 2025

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Above: Flavia Arlotta, Still Life with Red Ribbon, c.1936. Colacicchi Family Collection

From the Editor

celebration of restoration and art production, our Spring 2025 issue delves into the

A Innocenti Hospital’s historic archives, in search of stories and ‘tokens’ belonging to

its girl foundlings; then, we revel in the before-and-after glory of eighteenth-century

painter Violante Siriès Cerroti’s newly restored Reading Madonna – never published

before. Florence’s Museo Sant’Orsola ushers our readers into the world of contemporary

art production with three artists at work for the venue’s upcoming show: Mireille Blanc,

Shubha Taparia and Cécile Davidovici.

In England, we meet Harriet Loffler, curator of Cambridge University’s Women’s Art

Collection, and contemplate John Singer Sargent’s satin-clad ‘dollar princesses’ at Kenwood

House, before venturing ‘Beyond Bloomsbury’, the Carrington exhibition at Chichester’s

Pallant House Gallery.

This issue of Restoration Conversations travels from the chestnut grove of farmer Miranda

Tomatis, in ‘Women Who Save the Earth’, to Elizabeth Von Arnim’s turn-of-the-twentiethcentury

garden in the mind of modern-day garden designer Maria Chiara Pozzana. Flavia

Arlotta’s family share ‘Inner Gardens’ at the painter’s historic home, and author Katia Lysy

recounts what it took for writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio to grow a ‘Paradise in

Tuscany’.

We are transported from the Neolithic Age, to a world without stars, thanks to cosmologist

Roberto Trotta’s book Starborn, before finding ourselves amidst the pages of Days of Light,

through author Megan Hunter’s ‘personal reflections’ on her forthcoming novel, liberally

inspired by artist Vanessa Bell and her daughter Angelica Garnett.

Enjoy the issue!

Fondly,

Linda Falcone

Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations

Managing Editor

Linda Falcone

Publisher

Calliope Arts Foundation, London

Contributing Editor

Margie MacKinnon

Design

Fiona Richards

FPE Media Ltd

www.calliopearts.org

Instagram: @calliopearts_restoration

YouTube: Calliope Arts

Charleston Festival 2024, ph. Lee Robbins

4 Restoration Conversations • Spring 2025

CONTENTS SPRING 2025

PRESERVING CULTURE AND TRADITION

6 Little Meteors: the girls

12 Before and After

18 Women Who Save the Earth

24 A Spirit of Generosity

31 Relative Ties

HOW ARTISTS SEE THE WORLD

34 Chance Encounters

40 Gold Holds the Answer

46 The Eye of the Needle

54 John Singer Sargent’s ‘Dollar Princesses’

60 Carrington

WRITERS AND MINDSCAPES

68 Inner Gardens: Flavia Arlotta

74 La Foce. Paradise in Tuscany

82 Starting with the Stars

87 The mind behind Florence’s monumental green

94 Personal Reflections...on Vanessa Bell

Spring 2025 • Restoration Conversations 5

Little meteors:

the girls

Restoring tokens at the Innocenti Institute

The Innocenti Hospital’s historical archive comprises more than

13,000 documents and objects from the thirteenth to the twentieth

centuries, including ‘tokens’ that parents left with their foundling

children, as proof of identity. Located in the ancient refectory, the archive

hosts one of the world’s most unique archival collections, that of the

city’s foundling children, most of whom were girls.

As an update on the project ‘Florence’s Daughters at the Innocenti’,

sponsored by donors Connie and Doug Clark and Margie MacKinnon

and Wayne McArdle, Restoration Conversations had a dual interview on

site, with two members of the all-woman project team Antonella Schena,

Head of Archives and Museum/ Cultural Activities and services, and the

Innocenti Institute’s archivist Lucia Ricciardi.


The Innocenti Hospital’s historical archive,

ph. Marco Badiani, 2025


Antonella Schena: ‘Florence’s Daughters’ is a

pilot project, because we are striving to develop

a lasting method, in order to research, transcribe,

restore and digitise the entire exhibitable

collection, starting with 100 tokens belonging

to little girls. The project is experimental, in the

sense that we’ve never worked with the 1900s

collection in this way before. For certain elements,

we know more about the 1400s, than we do about

the 1900s!

The documents and interviews linked to the

100 tokens selected were filled out by physicians,

from 1901 onwards. Inclusion of the mother’s data

was considered mandatory, while the father’s

was optional. These documents were created

so that the Innocenti Institute could understand

whether or not a foundling’s mother had suffered

from venereal diseases, like syphilis, or had other

relevant health problems.

Our tokens from the 1800s are stored in special

boxes, but in this case, and more specifically

from the 1890s onwards, we are working with

folders and files that are stapled together, which

always represents a challenge. Most of the paper

documents are not spotted or marred, but some

have circumscribed damage, often derived from

the simple fact that they are stored standing

upright, and not lying flat, which can cause

crinkling over time.

Several conservation issues are being

evaluated, and perhaps they will need to be

stored differently, with special paper and proper

separators, or even made-to-measure boxes.

These objects’ digitalisation will reduce the need

to handle them, if not for exhibition purposes.

Lucia Ricciardi: I’m happy to report, I found

documents for a baby called Calliope (see back

cover) among the tokens selected, and thought it

would be nice to tell you about her, considering

that this project stems from the Innocenti’s

partnership with the Calliope Arts Foundation.

She is the project’s namesake child! We have

an annotation about her father and know he

Below and right: Children’s tokens: Flora, 1901 and Maria Luisa, 1905. Courtesy of Istituto degli Innocenti, ph. M. Lanza


is archival and the second safeguards artistic

heritage. In the case of Baby Calliope’s token, it

involves fabric restoration, because of its pink bow

threaded through two Italian coins with holes in

the middle, one of which is cut. A metals restorer

will be involved as well. In this time period, each

baby had eight to ten sheets attached to their

case – and the paper has its own set of needs

from a restoration point of view.”

was a 25-year-old farmer. Her mother, aged 23,

is described as follows: ‘Poor. She attends to

rural tasks’. Both parents were from the Mugello

area, where Calliope was born and reportedly

baptised. The child was admitted on 13 February

1901, when she was ten days old. Baby Calliope’s

token is a complex one, because it’s made of

several different items. The first, called a ‘breve’,

is a miniature pin cushion-like object, once used

for devotional purposes. It likely contains prayers

or other kinds of texts, but they’ve never been

opened.

These messages were tucked inside the object,

and sewn up tight before being further sealed

with trimming. They constitute the token’s secret,

which we respect. Through restoration, will we be

able to look inside one or two, using radiographic

techniques? That remains a question for the

superintendency and the restoration team.

To understand the complexity of a restoration

like this one, where all one hundred tokens are

completely unique and comprised of multiple

materials, it’s important to note that two

superintendent offices are in charge of planning

and monitoring the restoration, together with

project conservators. The first superintendency

Antonella: The project is focused on the

Innocenti’s girls and its initial phase has involved

the census of our early twentieth-century tokens,

dating from 1900 to 1924. We are choosing from

an initial pool of 300 cases, whose files contain

both physical tokens and paper documentation.

The tokens themselves are not dissimilar from

those in our nineteenth-century collection. Yet,

from the turn of the century onwards, as official

paperwork became a mandatory condition

determining the Institute’s acceptance of children,

the presence of tokens diminished considerably.

After the anonymous abandonment of children

became illegal in 1875, and the Innocenti’s grated

‘foundling’s window’ closed forever, parents no

longer needed a severed coin or a bauble cut in

half, as a means of reclaiming their child. When

tokens stopped being considered a child’s identity

card, they became – as the name itself suggests

– a sign of their mother’s affection or symbolic

protection.

Lucia: Many early twentieth-century parents who

brought their children to the Innocenti had no idea

that foundling tokens were no longer ‘necessary’.

Perhaps they were told by their female elders

about age-old traditions linked to turning one’s

children over to the Institute’s care. During the

first two decades of the 1900s, it accepted roughly

700 children per year, 300 of which arrived with

tokens, called segnali, or ‘signs’ in Italian. Among

the 100 tokens chosen, those needing restoration

or conservation will be subject to treatment.

The choice of which ones to restore depends

on several factors; some are chosen for their

aesthetic quality, and others are selected for the

story they tell. Because the project involves a

small-scale exhibition at our museum, starting 5

November 2025, we have looked for tokens with

a certain degree of narrative power. We’d also

like to contextualise these tokens, and see what

story they collectively tell, as a reflection of their

historical period.



caption

The Innocenti Hospital’s historical archive, ph. Marco Badiani, 2025

Above, left: Lucia Ricciardi . Right: Antonella Schena, phs. Marco Badiani, 2025

Lucia: A project like this one gives these little

girls relevance. They are given their own place

in history, however brief. Wouldn’t it be nice, if

each of us had our own physical page in history?

These girls sometimes lived no more than a few

days or even hours; they were meteors. But this

project affords them attention, salvaging them

from oblivion, and the gesture seems to stop –

even for a moment – the mad rush in which we

find ourselves, as members of the modern world.

If children, in general, had few rights at that time,

these children had even fewer. So, the project

enables them to emerge. It is about uncovering a

still hidden side of social history.

For several months, while working on the

project’s archival phase, we would pore over the

archives and talk to each other in hushed voices.

The whispering was a form of respect, I think.

Like the project’s sponsors, we are very keen

on giving solidity to these girls’ stories – as we

raise awareness about the small but significant

‘body of evidence’ that constitutes their life story.

Something similar was done with soldiers from

World War I, so that they would not remain a mere

list of names, and be remembered as people, not

numbers. I feel it is my duty to give these girls

the story to which they have a right. History with

a capital ‘h’ is made of many small stories, such

as theirs.

Antonella: 1900 to 1920 was a time of great

change, as far as social services for women are

concerned, albeit policies were usually formed

from the child’s perspective, not necessarily the

woman’s. At the dawn of the twentieth century,

the Innocenti started studying solutions to

keep mothers and babies together, by providing

them with external services, like childcare. As

physicians began to see maternal breast milk as

the primary safeguard against infant mortality,

national policies were rolled out throughout Italy,

to make breast-feeding by mothers mandatory for

the first few months of a child’s life. The Innocenti

Institute hosted two of the first-ever conferences

on this topic. Wet-nurses became a thing of the

past, even if artificial milk available at the time –

usually goat milk – could offer no real guarantees

of an infant’s survival.

Our history is comprised of many small stories

that are difficult to reconstruct. For ‘Florence’s

Daughters’, we are not talking about complete

histories or literary narratives. We have sparse

information, yet it was collected and it has been

preserved. Without this archive, we would know

nothing of them. It still fills me with wonder to see

how the Institute has managed to maintain these

ties through time, unlike other historic foundling

hospitals of its kind. In many ways, we are looking

at the history of the poor, the history of social

welfare – an important story to reconstruct and,

ultimately, to understand.

LINDA FALCONE


Before and After

Conservator recounts

Violante Siriès’ restoration

In 1770 Violante Siriès became the first woman artist allowed to copy

works at the Uffizi Gallery. Of all the possibilities there were to choose

from, Siriès picked a small painting on copper by Venetian master

Francesco Trevisani, The Madonna Sewing. It must have been an image

close to Violante’s heart because, several decades earlier, she had painted

the Virgin Mary with a sewing cushion and needlework by her side, for

the Carthusian Monastery in Galluzzo, just outside of Florence. In Siriès’

Reading Madonna, the Virgin Mary is gazing down at an open book

placed on a table, or to be more precise, she is praying, because the large

volume, with its first three lines in Hebrew script, is obviously a prayer

book. The Madonna’s hands are clasped as she tilts her head downwards

in meditation. Lying under the book is the Virgin’s sewing cushion, with

a piece of white embroidery, needles and thread. She appears to have

just set down her work to pray. The painting is a clear depiction of the

monastic ideal: prayer and work. The monks’ active and contemplative

life is personified in this site-specific picture, created as the altarpiece

for the prior’s private chapel. The image of Mary alone and engaged in

prayer is an unusual one. But above her head, on the frescoed ceiling of

the chapel vault, is a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit and the annunciation

of the birth of Christ.


Restoring hands, ph. Marco Badiani, 2025


Above: Saint Catherine, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso

The Prior’s Chapel was frescoed in the 1600s

by Bernardino Poccetti, and then modernized in

the mid-eighteenth-century Rococo style with

gilded stucco work by Sebastiano Salvini, fresco

decoration in delicate hues by Bartolomeo Nesi,

and three paintings on canvas. The two smaller

oval paintings on the side walls of the chapel

were created specifically for the space, just like

the Reading Madonna. They depict the early

Christian martyrs Saint Catherine of Alexandria

and Saint Agnes. Catherine is identifiable by her

crown and the wheel of her martyrdom behind

her, while Agnes holds a lamb and the martyr’s

palm branch. Both saints are also depicted in the

cycle of Della Robbia’s glazed terracotta busts,

which decorate the Large Cloister adjacent to

the Prior’s private apartments. Saint Catherine of

Alexandria was a famed scholar and orator, while

Saint Agnes was known for her great piety – both

are fitting counterpoints to the Reading Madonna.

The restoration and study of the paintings was our

focus, as part of the Accademia Women project,

and our conservation process comprised the

active and the contemplative values inspired by

the paintings’ monastery setting. Besides complete

conservation of the three canvases, our aim was to

study and compare the paintings’ techniques and

stylistic qualities, utilizing findings gleaned from

diagnostic photography and scientific analysis,

in combination with our first-hand observations

during the restoration itself.

At the start of our project, the paintings were

covered with a thick layer of dirt and candlesmoke

deposits. The two ovals had been inserted

into their niches by glueing their stretchers to

wooden slats affixed to the plaster wall. The hot


glue dripped onto the canvas and contracted,

forming blisters in the paint layers of Saint Agnes

and partially glueing the canvas of Saint Catherine

to its stretcher, as well as damaging the painted

surface. The wooden frames of all three paintings

had been nailed directly onto the front of the

canvas. Reading Madonna had over 30 nail holes

of varying sizes in the paint layer. Its gilded frame

had evidently been removed during a previous

restoration, as we found both eighteenth-century

nails and more recent nails and screws. The

corners of the canvas were badly frayed and their

paint was actively flaking, and the same was true

in many other areas of the painting.

There were four larger tears in the canvas, three

of which had been patched from the reverse. The

patches were made of fine pink cloth formerly used

in book repair, carefully applied with vegetable

glue. These interventions may have been the

work of the monastery, which once specialized in

book and manuscript conservation. Paint losses

were evident around the tears, concealed from

the front by fills and clumsy repainting. The most

severe paint loss was the Madonna’s hands, most

probably damaged when a large bronze crucifix

fell off the altar and hit the painting. That damage,

and its subsequent repaint, which was itself

flaking away, are visible in the only extant photo

we found, which dates before 1994.

The ovals had numerous nail holes along the

edges and some minor holes in the central areas.

Fluctuations of temperature and humidity caused

the canvases to sag on their stretchers, with the

imprinting of the stretcher bars visible on the

painted surface. Cracking of the paint was plainly

visible in all three works, but so severe in Saint

Agnes as to render the image almost unreadable

and at risk of flaking.

Above: Reading Madonna, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso


The wooden frames of all three paintings had been nailed

directly onto the front of the canvas. Reading Madonna

had over 30 nail holes of varying sizes in the paint layer.

Its gilded frame had evidently been removed during a

previous restoration, as we found both eighteenth-century

nails and more recent nails and screws

Before moving the paintings and their frames

from their niches, flaking areas were protected

with facing paper and cellulose adhesive. After

diagnostic photography and paint analysis of

micro samples, the cleaning of the thick layers

of dirt and smoke deposits was carried out using

a mild anionic surfactant. The layers of yellowed

natural resin varnish dating from the previous

restoration were removed with dilute solvent

solutions, whilst we monitored the process under

magnification and in UV light. The repaints and

fills were removed with solvent gels and through

the use of small scalpels. During this process,

we discovered original paint underneath the

repaints, which aided in reconstructing the

Madonna’s hands.

The structural conservation process achieved

its goal of re-adhering the layers and minimizing

cracking and distortions. The painted surfaces

were protected by facing paper, before removing

the paintings from their stretchers and cleaning

the reverse of the canvases, which included

the removal of the patches and glue. Tears and

holes were rewoven and reinforced with artificial

silk patches adhered with resin film. Next, we

mounted the paintings onto larger working

stretchers by attaching strips of polyester canvas

to the flattened tacking edges. Two types of

consolidants, one water-based and one resinbased,

were applied to the reverse of the paintings

to strengthen the canvas fibres and re-adhere the

paint to the canvas. To ensure the penetration of

the consolidant resin throughout the layers, the

paintings were placed under controlled heat and

low pressure with the use of a portable vacuum

pump and a conservation mat, a flexible silicon

pad with temperature sensors. The process

assured the controlled reactivation of the resin,

which was then allowed to cool under weight.

To protect the paintings once back inside their

niches, an isolating layer of polyester canvas was

stretched onto the new expansion stretchers

before mounting the paintings. After filling the

paint losses, retouching was carried out using

gouache colors and pure pigments ground in

non-yellowing varnish. The retouching on the

Madonna’s hands, using relief mapping of the

paint loss and comparing the hands with other

paintings by Siriès, remains identifiable as

restoration, when viewed from close-up.

Scientific analysis of micro-samples of paint

from the three works enabled us to identify

pigments and preparation layers consistent with

mid-eighteenth-century painters’ practice, with

the use of white lead, carbon black, red lead,

red lake, and earth colors. Observation under

magnification and diagnostic photography of

Reading Madonna confirm a painting technique

very similar to that of The Madonna Presents the

Christ Child to Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi,

a large altarpiece painted by Siriès in 1767 and

restored in 2015-16. During that AWA-sponsored

project, we examined numerous paintings by

the artist. The brushstrokes, use of colour, canvas

preparation and even the adhesion problems in

the paint layers of Reading Madonna are consistent

with her oeuvre and with the previous work

restored. The style and brushwork of the Saint

Catherine shows many stylistic and technical

similarities with Siriès’ other work. However,

Saint Agnes appears to be by a different artist

altogether. Both the stretcher and the canvas type


Above: Saint Agnes, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso

are different in the two ovals, which is unusual, if

they were prepared or ordered by the same artist.

The brushwork is quick and loosely executed,

compared to the careful, meticulous rendering of

details in the other two paintings. The strokes that

create shadows and light on Agnes’ face are much

more defined than those used in modelling the

faces of Catherine and the Madonna. The extreme

cracking of the paint on Saint Agnes also points to

probable differences in the painting’s execution.

While not providing definitive answers to the

authorship of the ovals, our project has taken us

one step further in the exploration of Violante

Siriès’ oeuvre. We’re happy to be able to add

another piece of the puzzle to our understanding

of this intriguing artist, and to preserve her

paintings for generations to come.

ELIZABETH WICKS

The ‘Accademia Women: Violante’ project, executed

by restorers Elizabeth Wicks and Marina Vincenti,

was organized by the Accademia delle Arti del

Disegno and Syracuse University in Florence,

thanks to the support of the AWA Legacy Fund

and donors Connie Clark, Pam Fortune, Nancy

Galliher, Nancy Hunt, Margie MacKinnon, Donna

Malin and Alice Vogler. With special thanks to the

Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio

per la città metropolitana di Firenze e le province

di Pistoia e Prato and the San Leolino Community

at Certosa di Firenze.


Women Who

Save the Earth

Women farmers and ‘foodies’

take the road less travelled

Founder of the association ‘Wheat and Roses’, Barbara Nappini

is author of the book La natura bella delle cose (The Beautiful

Nature of Things) and the first woman president of Slow Food

Italy. Like the organisation she has headed since 2021, Barbara

is committed to food as a source of pleasure, sovereignty,

biodiversity and integrity – in a world of frenetic eating habits,

GMOs and mass industrial agriculture. With Slow Food since

2012, she is co-creator of the project ‘Women Who Save the Earth’

– an awareness-raising initiative which aims to give value and a

voice to women whose efforts cultivate and preserve the Earth’s

resources or produce food according to age-old traditions.

“Historically and for centuries, women were obliged to take

care of meal planning and food preparation. That was their

role, and they had virtually no choice in the matter,” says the

Florentine author. “Taking care of the family garden has always

been the prerogative of women as well, and they ran the pantry

– which we call ‘governare la dispensa’ in Italy – the key to

household ‘governance’. Women developed the ability to feed

large families on scarce economic resources. They learned

to collect ‘scraps’, to profess the ‘cult of the necessary’ and to

promote no-waste principles. These were all skills and values

women cultivated, as part of their historic role as caregiver”.


Above: Miranda Tomatis at her chestnut-drying hut, ph. Oliver Migliore

Perhaps today, if a woman is dedicated to food,

cooking and the land, it is more of a choice, selfdetermination.

In Barbara’s view, in these and

other spheres, women are extremely creative

and innovative, as they brave less-travelled

paths, and expand more ecologically-conscious

horizons on farms that embrace organic and

biodynamic methods, engaging in low-impact

livestock farming, or food production on an

artisanal scale.

Impressed by Slow Food’s activities and its

president’s interest in women in agriculture, the

Piedmont Equal Opportunity Department asked

Barbara and her team to develop an awarenessraising

project, which they ultimately called

‘Women Who Save the Earth’. These women were

presented at the World Earth Day in spring of

last year, and later at the ‘Terra Madre Salone del

Gusto’ conference in Turin in September 2024.

“We shortlisted a group of 10 women who work

to preserve the Earth’s biodiversity and fertility

– particularly in association with the food sector.

Among them, we find Bruna Ferro, a vine grower

who uses all-natural methods, integrating

polycultures of different plants and animals; Rita

Tieppo, a retired schoolteacher who coordinates

a hundred other teachers and brings vegetable

gardens into schools to teach children about

land cultivation and nutrition education; Elisa

Mosca, a young breeder of indigenous cows at

risk of disappearing, and producer of raw-milk

cheeses; Ariele Muzzarelli, a nomadic beekeeper,

protector of pollinating insects and regenerator

of fallow land; and Alice Cerutti, a grower of

historic rice varieties, protecting them from

extinction while creating an oasis of biodiversity


Above: Elena Rodigari with her goats, ph. Oliver Migliore

for endangered plants and animals. “A small

action is the representation of what is possible,”

says Barbara Nappini. “Therein lies the courage

to make revolutionary choices.”

Among this agriculturally-minded network of

women, two stories particularly struck Barbara.

One is that of Elena Rodigari, a 28-year-old

shepherdess. As a young girl, she’d go with her

grandmother Mariuccia to her mountain cabin

in Val Chiusella, where her Nonna’s dozen goats

grazed. After her final high school exam, her

examiners asked what Elena was planning for

the future. She was ashamed to say she wanted

to become a shepherdess, even if her suitcase

was already packed and waiting at the foot of her

bed. She left for ‘greener pastures’ that very day.

“Around here they started calling me ‘La

Cravera’, the goat herder. I really liked it and

decided to call my farm that,” says Elena. The

farm is now fifty goats strong and counting, as

Elena works to develop her dairy business. Her

days start at 5am and work ends no earlier than

8pm: She cleans the stables, checks on newborn

kids, and feeds and milks her goats two or three

times a day. Barring thunderstorms, the goats

stay outside day and night in summer. In winter,

they graze a few hours each day, unless there

is snow or bad weather. Elena doesn’t deny

the difficulties that arise as a result of her life

choices: “I do everything by hand and our road

doesn’t even reach our house. Cars can’t make

it. I go by tractor.”


“For me, shepherding feels like free time,”

she says, when asked about her animals. “While

they are grazing, I am able to see whether or

not something is wrong with one of my goats.

If they have a problem, they look for me, and I

understand right away.”

Another of Barbara’s favourite stories is that

of Miranda Tomatis, 69, of Torre Mondovi. She is

a chestnut farmer working in the Ligurian Alps.

She shares her knowledge with preschool and

primary school students in the area through

educational activities, and hosts initiatives for

enthusiasts and hikers. Miranda cares for her

family’s chestnut groves, maintains an old-time

scau, or stone hut for drying chestnuts, like the

many that once dotted the forests of Piedmont,

and she recently bought another abandoned

chestnut grove with the intention of salvaging it.

From an early age, Miranda lived among her

grandmother’s chestnut groves and says, “My

grandmother was widowed at a very young age

with four children. Everyone contributed, even

the children, and in the autumn, chestnut picking

came first, then school. My grandmother’s

chestnut grove fed us, protected us.” Miranda

vowed to care for the grove until the end of her

days, and so she has.

“In the autumn months, I harvest the chestnuts,”

Miranda explains. “I stay at the chestnut grove all

day, because the work has to be done quickly.

After harvesting, we gather the burrs [prickly

chestnut husks]. Then, on winter afternoons,

Above: Slow Food Italia president Barbara Napini, ph. Alessandro Sgarito



I dry the chestnuts. This work used to be done in

huts in the woods. We’d light a gentle fire and lay

the chestnuts on grates. They were beaten when

ready, to remove the husk. That work took 40

days, and sometimes we’d sleep in the huts on

a bed of leaves. Today, air drying speeds up the

work, but we are now seeing a return to more

natural methods. Taking care of the chestnut

grove is of fundamental importance to me. I

have always thought about doing my small part,

like the hummingbird.”

In conclusion, Barbara wishes to point out

that although these women’s contributions were

unknown before the project, they all share a

concern for the community. In other words, had

they not made this choice, the unique reality

they work to protect would have disappeared.

The herd would have been sold and slaughtered;

the pastures lost, the chestnut grove forgotten or

cut down. No one would be producing milk and

cheeses locally. Their small villages would have

been depopulated and their traditions forgotten.

“Among women’s gifts and skills is the ability

to create and regenerate their environment,

endowing it with meaning or beauty in many

forms,” says Nappini. “In that sense, women –

like those who ‘save the Earth’ – are the driving

force of silent but revolutionary change.”

CHIARA VOLTOLINI

Left: Ariele Muzzarelli and her bees, ph. Oliver Migliore. Above: Elisa Mosca with her cows, ph. Oliver Migliore



A Spirit of

Generosity

Behind the scenes at

The Women’s Art Collection

The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University’s Murray

Edwards College has over 600 artworks by more than 300 women

artists. Housed in a strikingly modern purpose-built building which

opened in 1965, the Collection consists mainly of works donated by

artists, alumnae and supporters which are exhibited throughout the

college, allowing students to live and study surrounded by art. The

Collection is also open to the public. Restoration Conversations

had the pleasure of viewing the Collection in the company of

curator Harriet Loffler, who recounted the history of the college and

the origins of its unique art collection and shared her excitement

about an upcoming exhibition planned for 2026.

Left: Suzanne Treister, Discover the Secrets of the Universe, 1991 . On long term loan to The Women’s Art Collection © The artist


Restoration Conversations: Your current

exhibition, which tells the story of The Women’s

Art Collection, is called Conversation not

Spectacle. Have the artists in this collection

become a bigger part of the conversation over

the thirty years since the collection began?

Harriet Loffler: Absolutely. Despite being the

largest collection of art by women in Europe, to

a certain extent, we are still undiscovered. And

I think we’re at an interesting moment where

people are starting to learn more about us and to

engage with our work. But it’s uncharted territory.

There are a lot of artists in our collection who

haven’t been subject to that much research, so it’s

a treasure trove. It feels like a charged moment

that is full of potential.

RC: What can you tell us about the history of

Murray Edwards College?

HL: The College was founded as New Hall in 1954

at the instigation of a group of very determined

individuals who wanted a college for women

because, at that point, Cambridge University had

the lowest proportion of female undergraduates

of any university in the UK. The university did not

admit women until the late 19th century, and then

it took another 70 years for women to be issued

with degrees.

Rosemary Murray, who was the founding

president, went on to become the first female vice

chancellor of Cambridge University. But, at the

time, nobody knew who she was because, when

students arrived at the College, Rosemary could

just as easily be found making the tea, emptying

the bin, or interviewing prospective students. The

College was renamed Murray Edwards in 2008 to

honour Murray, as well as the Edwards family who

provided a generous endowment.

RC: Given that many Cambridge colleges

date back to Tudor times and even earlier,

Murray Edwards stands out as a modern

presence amongst the more traditional college

buildings. What was the thinking behind its

distinctive design?

HL: Rosemary Murray appointed the architects

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who would go

on to design the Barbican in London, in the

then emerging Brutalist style. The College was

designed very much as a manifesto for the

education of women, with an intention of looking

up and aiming high. You feel that in the dome,

which is an iconic space, and then in the library,

which was seen as a kind of Temple to Learning

with this rising staircase in place of an altar. I

think it is fascinating that the importance of

women’s education is articulated in the fabric of

the building. Outside, instead of the traditional

Cambridge cloister, we have a fountain court

which is flooded with daylight.

RC: How did the College’s art collection come

about?

HL: The collection started when Mary Kelly,

the American conceptual feminist artist, was in

residence at New Hall as part of a programme

which placed artists into the Cambridge colleges.

Valerie Pearl, who was Murray Edwards’ president

at the time, wanted to bring more creativity into

the space where she was working, and Kelly had

just shown a conceptual work in London which

had caused considerable controversy. So, it was

a bold choice of the College. Kelly made a body

of work called Extase (1986), as part of a wider

series, Corpus, about women’s experience, which

was acquired by the College. That kick-started

something in the College community to think,

Okay, well, what else can we do? The response

was, Why don’t we ask women artists to donate

work? Ann Jones, who was an independent

curator and married to a fellow at the College, put

together a list of 46 artists and sent letters to each

of them asking for artworks.

RC: Who were the artists they first

approached?

HL: The artists were mainly British-based but

very intergenerational. Established artists like

Paula Rego were selected alongside Maud Sulter,

who was then an early-career artist. There wasn’t


really an overarching theme, so the collection is

eclectic, as you can imagine. They were mainly

looking for wall-based work. And, as much as we

would like to say that we took a radical feminist,

political approach, it really wasn’t that strategic. It

was just about adorning the walls of the College

with some work that would inspire the students

and might or might not be a financial asset.

RC: What was the response to the letters?

HL: I think Valerie and Ann were stunned at

the response as almost everybody said yes. It

was an amazing act of collective generosity:

the College received over 70 artworks. But it

is important to say that lots of artists couldn’t

afford to donate work. Elizabeth Vellacott, for

instance, and Suzanne Treister, initially said

no, although we are thrilled that they are now

represented in the collection.

One of the essays that accompanied the first

exhibition of all the donated works was by Marina

Warner, who was actually critical of the endeavour.

She problematised the ‘woman artist’ label, and

she also questioned why women should be

expected to donate their works. Would we ask

men to do that, she wondered. Among the first

Harriet Loffler, Spring Curator, 2025 The • Restoration Women’s Art Conversations Collection, ph. Lloyd Mann

27

Above: Rose Garrard, Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade, 1982 , The Women’s Art Collection © The artist


cohort to give, there was a resistance to being

known as a ‘woman artist’ rather than an artist,

but I think there’s a lot more ownership now of

that identity. There’s power in it now, which maybe

there hasn’t been in the past.

RC: How did the collection grow from there?

HL: There was a period of about 20 years when

the College just received donations. Artists

were recommending other artists. There was

an informal arrangement whereby artists could

have the exhibition space for free for a month

in return for a work. This became a sort of selforganised

open-source way to acquire new works.

As a result, there are a number of pieces in the

Collection that were not necessarily selected or

shortlisted. In more recent years, we’ve had a

curator in place, so there has been a shift from

the initial organic acquisition strategy to a focus

on choosing artworks that address themes of

inequality and question the rigid hierarchies

within the art historical canon and stereotypes

about women generally.

RC: One of the artworks that caught my eye

as we walked around the collection was the

piece in the stairwell with the frame that was

coming off the wall. What can you tell us about

that particular work?

HL: That is Rose Garrard’s Models Triptych:

Madonna Cascade (1982). Some time ago, Garrard

talked about an exhibition she had been to in

Nottingham in 1982 called the Women’s Art Show,

which was a historical exhibition of women

artists. She just couldn’t believe what she was

seeing, because she was like, There are all these

women artists! How did I not know about these

women? She said she had found her family, her

[artistic] genealogy.

Madonna Cascade is one of three works which

recreate self-portraits by women artists [the others

being Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabeth Vigée

LeBrun] who were once highly regarded but fell into

posthumous obscurity. It shows Judith Leyster, the

Dutch Golden Age painter, holding her paintbrush

and palette, framed by cascading plaster figurines

of the Virgin and Child. Judith Leyster was almost

erased from history after her death, by dealers

who attributed her work to male contemporaries

like Franz Hals. The deconstructed frame suggests

a breaking away from the patriarchal art ‘his-story’

which has hitherto suppressed her. It literally

takes up space. And I think she is making a point

about the frameworks that women have to break

through in order to take up space, politically,

socially, domestically. I love that behind it you see

the bricks and mortar of the College. It’s a sort of

support structure for women across the centuries.

RC: Garrard’s work would have been one of

your earlier acquisitions. Can you tell us about

a work you have acquired more recently?

HL: Not long ago we acquired a performance

piece, Nativity (2022), by an artist called Rosa-

Johan Uddoh. This work is about Balthazar,

the Black wise man at the birth of Christ who

appears in lots of nativity scenes across Western

art history. Her piece was a kind of pantomime,

performed by three Black women. It examines the

role of people of colour within popular culture. I

love the idea of performing this every five years

and to see how it alters our perception of Nativity

plays which seem to be less and less a feature of

children’s education.

RC: What is it that you get when you acquire

a performance?

HL: That’s an interesting question, especially as

it pertains to acquisition and conservation and

all the things you think about when looking after

an accredited collection. In this case, we got a

box of props, a script, instructions, permission

to perform it again and a film documenting the

first performance.


RC: As we are focussing on women and

gardens in this issue, could you tell us a bit

about the College gardens?

HL: The College was built around some quite

ancient woodland so, while the building is

modern, it is surrounded by some very mature

trees. The land was donated by the family of

Charles Darwin, and we still have his widow

Emma Darwin’s greenhouse with its original tiles.

Darwin’s granddaughter, Nora Barlow, was an

important botanist who lived on this site. A very

old plant specimen, the Aquilegia Nora Barlow,

which was named for her, is still grown here. Katie

Schwab, an artist we have commissioned for a

new project (see p.31) is thinking of drying some

of those flowers from the garden and making

paper which will be used in hand-printed designs.

There is a wonderful interplay between the

gardens and the architecture, with sight lines that

allow you to see the gardens while looking at the

art and to see the art from afar while sitting in

the garden. You will never see a Keep Off the

Grass sign here, and the students are encouraged

to pick the flowers. There is an amazing spirit of

generosity which runs through the College and

its Collection.

MARGIE MACKINNON

Left: Mabel Pryde Nicholson,

The Artist’s Daughter, Nancy as a Harlequin 1910,

The Fleming Collection

Right: Nancy Nicholson,

Auntie’s Skirts – The End, 1916

© Estate of Nancy Nicholson


Relative Ties

Three generations of creativity


Above: Katie Schwab and the Studio Collective, Rag Rug, 2019, Horniman Museum and Gardens © The artist

“ I’m having the time of my life with this material,”

says curator Harriet Loffler, about an upcoming

exhibition at The Women’s Art Collection,

which will involve four women artists from three

generations of one family. “The exhibition will

bring together material from all four artists to

explore matrilineal lines – what gets inherited,

what gets passed on, what happens when we

collaborate with siblings.”

The starting point is EQ Nicholson (1908-1992), a

painter and textile and rug designer. Her designs

for fabric and wallpaper were much in demand and

some are still in commercial production today.

EQ Nicholson was influenced by her sisterin-law,

Nancy Nicholson (1899-1977) who worked

on textile design with her artist brother Ben

Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara

Hepworth. Nancy’s work was exhibited at the

Victoria and Albert Museum in 1976.

Nancy’s mother, Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-

1918) was a distinguished painter who frequently

used her children as models in striking, theatrical

poses. Mabel’s portrait of young Nancy as a

harlequin introduces the power and allure of

fabrics, costume and dress. The exhibition will

trace the importance of this impulse which

persisted in Nancy’s creative work.

The story continues with Louisa Creed, EQ

Nicholson’s daughter, who donated a rag rug cat

to The Women’s Art Collection in 2004. Creed


experimented with the traditional technique

of hooking, using strips of old clothes as a way

of recycling them, and has produced over 200

works, some of which can be seen in museums

throughout the UK.

In response to her research into the Nicholson

family’s many creative (but largely unknown)

women, and in anticipation of the Relative

Ties exhibition, Loffler decided to commission

contemporary artist Katie Schwab to make a new

work for the show. She is being supported in this

by Christian Levett, whose FAMM museum in

Mougins houses another of Europe’s significant

collections of art by women. Although Schwab is

not an artist in The Levett Collection at this point,

its eponymous owner notes that, “she is now

firmly on our radar. The Levett Collection and

FAMM have been building an ongoing and fruitful

partnership with The Women’s Art Collection over

the last two years. The upcoming exhibition,” says

Levett, “is a great opportunity to build on that,

and the venue is perfect for showcasing Katie

Schwab’s work.”

“There is something about bringing women’s

art together that has this incredible alchemy,” says

Loffler. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I

think it is extraordinary.”

MARGIE MACKINNON


Mireille Blanc, Clémentine, 2023, ph. Mireille Blanc


Chance

Encounters

Artist and curator in conversation

A“All the works being created for Museo Sant’Orsola’s upcoming

exhibition (opening 5 September 2025) “aim to show visitors that our

future museum will strive to enhance the memory of the place. The

museum does not have a surviving collection, because the complex’s

cultural heritage has been dispersed, destroyed and forgotten,” says

Morgane Lucquet-Laforgue, Museo Sant’Orsola’s curator. “My guiding

question is this: How can we remember and share the history of

the place through contemporary action, and through the gaze of

contemporary art?”

“For centuries in Florence, artists were commissioned to produce, and

we’d like to continue that tradition. At the end of each show, we hope to

acquire one artwork per artist, to form the museum’s permanent collection,”

Morgane continues. “The twelve artists featured in our September 2025

show – eighty percent of whom are women – will be working in dialogue

with the space, including the excavation site, and several employ ancient

techniques once used or presented at Sant’Orsola.”


Above, left: Lola Costa and life’s stages at Il Palmerino, Angeli Archive.

Right: Lola Costa, 1937, Tulips and playing cards

Above: Mireille Blanc, Leonardo Bianchi, Alessandro Bianchi in the Bianco Bianchi scagliola studio in Pontassieve, ph. Cinestudio, Italy 2025

The space was originally conceived as a convent,

became a tobacco manufacturing plant and,

in the 1960s was repurposed as housing for

refugees from Istria (the southern part of modernday

Croatia and Slovenia, and once Italian

territory): Hundreds of refugee families lived in

the complex for decades. Through the centuries,

it has hosted and witnessed thousands of lives.

“Right now, it’s a fascinating moment and the very

last time the future museum site will have such

large walls, and so much room, in which to create,”

Morgane explains. “When our September show

ends, this space will become a construction site,

as the venue is renovated. The new museum is

scheduled for inauguration at the end of 2026.”

As Morgane’s dozen trickle into Florence this

spring, to create their site-specific artworks,

Restoration Conversations is on site as well, for

interviews with the visiting artists (See pp. 40 and

46). In the first of this interview series, we met

French artist Mireille Blanc, for whom Morgane

is exploring the State Archives, including

the Napoleonic registers, to find documents

describing convent meals, which are certain

to inspire Mireille, as she produces her smallscale

works and one monumental piece for the

show. “I’ve followed Mireille’s work for quite

some time, with the idea that someday we would

work together. Two years ago, after meeting the

scagliola masters of the Bianco Bianchi workshop

in Pontassieve, a thought came to me: why not

put artist and artisans together, since Mireille

explores a lot of their same subjects – still life,

food, deserts, plates, tables and materiality,” says


Morgane. “Once you see their works together,

you will understand the link.”

Born in 1985, in Saint Avold, France, Mireille is

a figurative painter based in Paris. She teaches

at the National Academy of Art of Paris (École

Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris). She

is represented by Anne-Sarah Benichou Gallery

in the French capital and The Pill in Istanbul. Our

conversation started with reflections on her first

encounters at the Bianco Bianchi studio, which

just so happens to be an Italian variant of her own

surname Blanc.

“For the Museo Sant’Orsola, I am working with

Bianco Bianchi, in collaboration, not directly

in their studio, and we are creating a dialogue

between painting and scagliola. Their craft

involves making marble-like inlays with coloured

pigments, natural glues and selenite powder.

Having access to their studio, where this artisanal

work is passed down through generations, is

pushing me to think differently! I paint very

quickly, and my canvases are generally small – so

in one week’s time, I produce an artwork,” says

Mireille. “Seeing crafters working for months on a

single piece, their engraving process, the way they

mould matter to create a surface, it’s like watching

a layer of time form, and then be sanded down.”

When asked how the scagliola technique differs

from her own process and why she thinks the

project relevant, Mireille explains the following: “I

work in one go, with fresh paint that is never quite

dry. Scagliola is a very different process, and it is

useful for me to see the patterns inherent in this

craft. There is no room for ‘the accidental’, which


so often characterises my own painting. But there

is an element of trompe-l’oeil in scagliola, which

is relevant to my work with illusions, and the

kitsch aspect in my paintings. I look at my subject

and see things from above, which tends to make

things more abstract, because it distances you

from them, which doesn’t happen when working

vertically, with a painting propped on an easel.

Artisans at the Bianco Bianchi studio and I share

the perspective of our vantage point.

With this project the Bianchi Bianchi studio will

start from my painting to create original work.

Some say scagliola is a dead artform, and others

said the same about painting in France, claiming

it was not contemporary. But painting or scagliola

are just tools… why should they be stuck in the

past, when it is simply a matter of what we choose

to do with them?”

Mireille’s art explores the idea of chance

encounters with everyday objects, which become

enigmatic and ambiguous. “We paint what we

are, and as a viewer, I push everyday objects

towards abstractionism – or at least make them

appear stranger. I believe that adopting a ‘new

gaze’ enables us to observe history and the past

with freer feelings. I need to paint, photograph

Above: Mireille Blanc, Anniv (J), 2024, ph. Mireille Blanc


Left: Mireille

Blanc, Grappe

(Marceau), 2024,

ph. Mireille Blanc

and crop, and with the visual framing of an image,

guide the gaze. I like to ‘disturb’ objects. I look

at items from humanity’s common past, things

that remind me of childhood and our collective

memory – not necessarily my own. I seek the

intimate nature of childhood objects, but my

choice of subjects is never pre-meditated. In a

word, I want to make mundane objects odd, and

familiar things visible.”

“I like to work with the end of things – after the

moment of celebration, after the cake is cut. My

destroyed-cake painting is one example,” Mireille

says. “I work with patterns in oil and find thick

impasto exciting. That is why I like to paint the

cream and frosting on cakes! People make cakes in

the shape of something else – like cars or castles

– and place funny, even eerie statues on top. My

work with all things kitsch is about limits – feeling

that I have taken an object that is disturbing, and

transforming it. I work with the strangeness of all

that is glittering, glowing and shiny. Essentially,

my work is about fascination and repulsion. I

strive to reach beyond expectations of good taste,

to overcome initial repulsion, and in this process,

I see painting as a way to sacralise, transcend and

elevate. Objects, after all, are keepers of stories,

like a souvenir.”

LINDA FALCONE


Captions


Gold Holds the

Answer

CAn interview with artist Shubha Taparia

Curator and conceptual artist Shubha and restoration. I approached the

Taparia has lived in London for twentyfive

years, but it was in India, standing in restoration and later learned how this

technique as a symbolic form of

front of her ancestral home – a sevenstorey

wooden structure at the end of with Kintsugi, which aims to restore

idea is present in the Japanese culture

its multi-century life – that she posed a cracks using gold. In London, there

question that has guided her art journey

since: “What would it take to restore it?”

Then the answer came to her, as simple

and bright as the word itself: Gold.

Restoration Conversations: You often

use gold in your monumental artwork,

and that journey started in Ratlam, a

small city in central India. Where has it

taken you since?

Shubha Taparia: Among India’s ancient

manuscripts, there’s one text called

Swarna Tantra, which talks about gold as

a material symbolising transformation

are so many buildings that become

derelict, or are being repurposed, so

my question became: If the material or

physical world keeps changing, what

lives on in a place?

I use gold as a way of highlighting that

spirit – the spirit in the inanimate. My

future intervention for the upcoming

exhibition at Museo Sant’Orsola

(opening 5 September 2025) lends itself

to this idea perfectly, since the venue

is being rediscovered, after having

lived ‘many lives’, which are waiting to

be brought to the fore and restored to

collective memory.

Left: Shubha Taparia at work, ph. Michiko Isobe


Above: Shubha Taparia, Palace Street, 2019

RC: Is there one work in particular that has

influenced your creative process in the long

term?

ST: There is one sculptural installation I did,

using a hand from a third-century sculpture

of a Buddha from China. During the Cultural

Revolution, the sculpture was broken down, and

this bronze hand – which I found by chance with

an antiques dealer in London – was all that was

left of it. The symbol of the Buddha was etched

on the palm, and on the other side, there were

what looked like hammer marks. Some worker

must have picked it up and used it as a hammer.

I bought it, selected granite rocks as a base and

displayed that hand – hammer marks showing

– as an installation. It is very interesting to me

how that hand survived, reached an artist and

became an artwork again… and to view it that

way. It was made for reverence to begin with,

and then it served a utilitarian purpose, and now,

once again, it is food for thought. In a way, this

piece represents my observation and belief that

the spirit of something is what survives.

RC: Tell us more about your work with gold

and what it means to you?

ST: At a certain point of distillation, art becomes

universal across cultures. I feel like there are lots

of things that divide us – we continuously talk

about how we are different, but we do need some

people who show the unifying factors in human

beings, and that is the hope for peace. Gold is

something that everyone understands and has

for millennia. In every culture, gold is seen as a

symbol of regeneration, enlightenment, the light

of God, or wisdom, so it’s a very special material

that never tarnishes and, in that sense, there is

an eternal quality to it.


When I work on paper, I apply 24-karat gold leaf.

When using gold on the walls directly, or on

materials like tarpaulin, I use gold leaf that has

the feel of 24-karat gold. The most difficult thing

about working with gold is that it is used a lot

for decoration. I have to be very cautious and

only use as much as required. Very often, when

I start a project, those working with me will say,

“Oh, should we put a little bit here? It will look

nice.” And I say, “That’s not the point. It doesn’t

have to ‘look nice’ – it shouldn’t be ornamental.”

RC: Have you ever returned to India to

produce ‘gold’ art?

ST: I’ve done photographic works of the spice

factories in Kerala, which is by the sea. It was

known for its spice trade around the world. Many

of them are crumbling, but their warehouses are

still used to store spices. Because I was unsure

of how long the buildings would last, I started to

wish I could highlight their spirit somehow.

In this case, I did not work with the physical

buildings, but with printed photographs and

gold leaf, so these were fictional landscapes,

something that doesn’t exist in reality, but it exists

for me, because I’ve transferred it onto paper. It

was incredible because the photographed walls

and the colours of that artwork are identical

to those of the building where the works

were displayed in the former Hotel Averard, a

temporary exhibition space across from Hyde

Park, where I’d put actual gold on the walls.

And you couldn’t tell if the walls hosting those

photographs were part of Kerala’s heritage – and

this was in London! The conversation between

art-in-two-places emphasised the universality of

the idea of the spirit.

Below: Shubha Taparia, The Averard Hotel, Slate Projects, London 2016



RC: What does your creative process look

like?

ST: In terms of process, I just get visions of final

artworks. Something comes as a vision to me,

and I don’t even know how it will be executed,

or very often I don’t have the necessary skills.

It’s almost like working backwards: I’ve already

seen the final piece, and know what it will look

like. It’s like time travel in quantum space. Then

I say, “Okay, how would it come into existence?”

Fifteen years ago, when I began making

lenticular prints, an artwork came to me as a

vision. Then, I did research on what I had seen,

to understand what technology I’d need to create

that particular effect, and I must have made 50

phone calls about lenticular prints. During the

last one, a lab owner told me to go see him and

we’d experiment. Once I have that vision of a

thing, the process is very challenging, but that’s

where my purpose and my growth lie.

RC: What does it feel like to be an art ‘time

traveller’? How do you access these visions?

ST: I can tell you about the time I was doing a

huge installation, which was eighteen metres

long and six metres high and I was working with

scaffolding and light technicians and all these

people. There were days on end, in which nothing

worked. The team would come to me and ask,

“What are you smiling about? Nothing is going as

it should”, and I would answer, “But I know there is

an end, and I’ve seen it”. I tell myself, ‘If I don’t stay

calm and enjoy this process, then there is nothing

for me to gain from my art”.

That’s all there is to my artwork. Once the

work is made, it’s a ‘third person’ for me. At

that point, that art is for other people. I am very

objective about it. I can say, “Oh look, this is so

good”, or otherwise. What I had to get out of it

is the process. Artwork serves as a reminder, but

I am detached from it. I find it is important to

avoid over-excitement, and to keep my reactions

measured. In the art gallery business with my

husband, he sometimes says, “Oh, aren’t you

happy about this big sale?” I say, “Yes, I’m thankful

that it happened, but let’s move on.” An excess

of emotions slows down my process, and that’s

not the point. The point is simply to continue

the journey.

RC: For the Museo Sant’Orsola show, you’ve

been awarded an artist’s grant by the

Calliope Arts Foundation, in partnership

with the museum. Could you tell us what you

and the museum are planning in terms of the

work’s execution?

ST: I have help whenever I have a very largescale

work to do, because my brain works at a

much faster pace than my hands! With Museo

Sant’Orsola, we plan to involve the art student

community and the general public of Florence in

the gilding process, giving them the opportunity

to become a meaningful part of the work.

LINDA FALCONE

Left: Shubha Taparia, Picadilly, 2021


The Eye of

the Needle

Textile storytelling with

artist Cécile Davidovici

CCome autumn 2025, Paris-based French artist Cécile Davidovici is

expected in Florence, where her works will form part of the threemonth-long

12-artist exhibition opening at the Museo Sant’Orsola

on 5 September 2025 (see pp. 34 and 40). A self-taught embroidery

artist with an eye for innovation, Cécile adopts a process that’s both

meditative and modern. She is the recipient of an artist production

grant, supported by Calliope Arts, in partnership with the museum.

The artist shares insights on her 7-year career, from her first approach

to needlework, to her collaborative artworks today.

Right: Cécile Davidovici at work at Museo Sant’Orsola , ph. Cinestudio Italy © Museo Sant’Orsola


Restoration Conversations: You studied theatre

in Paris and film in New York, and went on to

become an award-winning film writer. Why

did you shift your artistic energy from moving

pictures to the textile arts?

Cécile Davidovici: I was working as a writer, film

director and editor, and first discovered embroidery

for fun, as a hobby. The tangible and tactile element of

embroidery was a game-changer for me, because it is

absent from film, which is more abstract. When I lost



When I lost my mother twelve years ago, I began

to feel that something was missing from my

artistic practice. Embroidery gave me the touch I

was missing from her. I didn’t mentalise it at the

time… I reached that understanding later

my mother twelve years ago, I began to feel that

something was missing from my artistic practice.

Embroidery gave me the touch I was missing from

her. I didn’t mentalise it at the time… I reached

that understanding later.

For my first body of works, I drew from VHS-tape

home videos from my childhood and explored

family themes, where each scene was meant to

tell a story. ‘Textile’ and ‘Text’ have the same root

texere, which means to weave, so the transition

made sense. Telling a story with an embroidered

image is a very different exercise than telling it

with a series of moving images, but I’m always

looking for new ways to evolve, in terms of how I

might do it. Today, I am less literal.

RC: You’ve often called embroidery a meditative

process. Can you tell us more about your art

production from that angle?

CD: Embroidery involves repeating the same

gesture over and over again, and as a meditative

state, it has helped me. Artistically, I am interested

in talking about time – bridges in time between

the past and the present and into some sort of

eternity, but as I embroider, it is just me in the

moment and in a meditative mood. Today, things

go so fast; embroidery is a counterpoint. In fact, if

I don’t embroider for a few days, I start to feel like

I need to, because it brings me a sense of peace.

You might call it ‘soft concentration’. The mind

stays focused but it’s not strenuous or intense. In

a word, I find it a calming practice.

I also feel a real sense of connection by doing

something traditionally practiced by women

through the ages. It is about escaping, and being

with yourself. It is about having time to think, and

not being simply overwhelmed by household

chores, or being at home but never actually being

present. I think that’s what women of the past

may have used it for.

RC: Historically, embroidery has been

considered one of the ‘minor arts’. How is that

preconception changing today and what is

your perspective on the difference between

craftsmanship and the fine arts?

CD: Embroidery is really unique and I find working

with this media today a special experience. It

is a media traditionally associated with women,

but historically, artistic creation has largely been

the domain of men. My aim is to move this

craft beyond its conventional links to delicate

embroidery or domestic decor, and to redefine

it as a powerful form of artistic expression. To

be part of this change is incredible, as I help

shift embroidery’s standing, by positioning it

as a media capable of creating works of art, not

craftsmanship. What rings true for any work

of art applies to embroidery as well: you have

to ask yourself what you are trying to provoke

and express. The artisanal nature of needlework

is changing. There are so many textile arts. It

is about what you want the viewer to feel or to

react to, because art is not just about technique,

it’s about intention.

Left: Cécile Davidovici, Project 1988, 2019


Above and right: Cécile Davidovici, La Jeune Fille Au Miroir, a self-portrait from 2022

RC: First, let’s start with technique. You’ve

brought innovations to your field with a

practice you call ‘thread painting’. Tell us more

about it.

CD: As the name suggests, thread painting

involves using thread to achieve a painterly effect.

With needlework, mixing colours is a challenge,

because if you try to ‘blend’ threads, you risk

getting a ‘hairy’ effect. With painting you can mix

or even erase colours, but with thread, it can’t

be done, so I’ve managed to achieve a blending

effect by using a cross-stitch with thinned thread.

For instance, the cotton thread I use is comprised

of six strands, and I take it apart and embroider

with one strand at a time.

Lighter thread helps me achieve the nuances

I’m looking for, which is very important especially

with portraits and for flesh tones. The skin has so

many colours to interpret and translate, because

of how light interacts with it.

The embroidery of my initial works was very dense

and thick, and I did not achieve a wide range of

hues. Now, I have a wall hosting 500 colours, but

I have started dyeing thread – to get more of the

shades I am looking for. Five hundred colours

sound like a lot, but you need many more in

embroidery to attain the versatility of what paint

can do.

RC: You mention portraits and the rendering

of skin tones. How would you describe your

portraiture?

CD: Today – this year – I am doing less portraits,

perhaps because people like them so much.

I don’t want to get stuck doing just one thing.

But I do recognise there’s a sort of magic that

happens with portraiture. What I want is for

the viewer to look at the portraits I create, and

to see themselves. In my dual portraits, both

figures represent an alternative version of the



52 Restoration Conversations • Autumn 2024

Above: . Cécile Davidovici, Portrait of a constant dream IX, 2021. Left: Davidovici and Ctiborsky, Tant de siècles et pas un souvenir

same person. The faces are exactly the same,

but different, because I can’t embroider the same

figure twice. With needlework, even if I try to

be exact, there will always be variations, in the

colours, in the threads. What a person does with

their life is based largely on their heritage, but

my dual portraits are a symbol, that you can take

different paths, with what you have in hand. I

believe portraiture is about transmitting what lies

inside us – what we are, and what we carry.

RC: For the Museo Sant’Orsola exhibition,

you’ll be working with your partner, French

film director and visual artist David Ctiborsky,

with whom you’ve created a number of works,

including your widely acclaimed still-life or

‘silent life’ series, called La vie silencieuse.

What is your collaborative process, and what

can we expect at the museum?

CD: We’re preparing two pieces with mixed

media – mixed layers imaginary architecture and

landscape, that will invite the viewer to walk

through time and space, as they interact with the

pieces. We thought about the concept together.

Now David is creating the compositions. Ultimately,

we print those images on fabric and I embroider

them.. Some parts are completely covered with

thread and others remain uncovered, which gives

depth to the work. We like the viewer to see the

underlying layer, for it to peek through, so you

can see how the work was built. David adds to

the conversation and enriches my technique by

introducing elements of light or shadow to the

original image. Our art develops as a constant

dialogue. We don’t see our work as two separate

phases.

Our research residency last year at Museo

Sant’Orsola was a whole new world. Very rarely

does an artist have the opportunity to respond

to such a huge space – and beyond its size,

we’d like to enter into dialogue with its layered

landscape, which is still visible. Our two pieces

are conceived in order to interact with the place

and with each other. One of them is large scale,

which is a nice challenge for this technique.

LINDA FALCONE


Left: John Singer

Sargent, Margaret Hyde,

Nineteenth Countess of

Suffolk, 1898, courtesy of

Historic England


John Singer Sargent’s

‘Dollar Princesses’

A fresh look at portraits from the Gilded Age

In the years between 1880 and 1920, some

400 marriages took place between American

women and European aristocrats. It was

understood that the women, daughters of

nouveau riche industrialists from Britain’s

erstwhile colony, were seeking social status and

titles in exchange for a much-needed influx of

cash into the depleted coffers of titled European

families. The women were sneeringly referred

to as ‘Dollar Princesses’, lumped together as

having no individuality or interest beyond the

size of their dowries.

Whatever other attributes they may have

possessed, one thing many of the so-called

‘Dollar Princesses’ did have in common was to

have their likenesses painted by the foremost

portrait painter of the day: John Singer Sargent,

an American-born, French-trained artist who

lived and worked mainly in London. A new

exhibition at Kenwood House in London will

bring together 18 of Sargent’s portraits of these

young American ex-pats.

The timing of the exhibition is auspicious

because 2025 marks the centenary of Sargent’s

death in 1925. Kenwood House and its estate,

which adjoins Hampstead Heath, was the home

of Lord Mansfield and is now a picture gallery

overseen by English Heritage. Their collection

includes Sargent’s portrait of Daisy Leiter,

originally of Chicago, who would become

the nineteenth Countess of Suffolk on her

marriage to Henry Howard. As part of a gift

to the nation from the Countess, Kenwood

acquired the Sargent portrait which now hangs

conspicuously in the main stairway of the

house.

Curator Wendy Monkhouse explains that, “the

reason we’re doing the show is that it’s never

been done before. Of all the Sargent shows

that have happened, nobody’s actually done

the ‘Dollar Princesses’. So it seemed exciting

because, with Daisy Leiter’s portrait, we have

an extraordinary key work. Then, when I started

looking into the heiresses who sat for Sargent,

I started to wonder if the generalisations about

them held up. The research began and, looking

at them one by one, it became clear that only

a few fit the stereotype behind the ‘cash for

coronets’ tag.”

Commissioned as a birthday gift from her

parents, Daisy’s portrait was exhibited in the

1898 summer show at the Royal Academy. Daisy,

a nineteen-year-old with “the loveliest eyes in

Washington,” looks directly out at the viewer in


Above: The Music Room at Kenwood in Hampstead, London. Courtesy of Kenwood House

a fabulous Worth gown. “It was not a marriage

portrait,” says Monkhouse, “as in, it was not a

portrait to get a husband, nor was it a portrait

upon a marriage. Sargent didn’t keep sitter

books, so it is difficult to know exactly when and

where it was painted.” Daisy brought youth and

beauty to her marriage to the Duke of Suffolk, as

well as funds to restore Charlton Park, the family

seat in Wiltshire, which had fallen into disrepair

ever since the family had backed the wrong side

in England’s Civil War. However, the marriage

was relatively short-lived, as Henry died in battle

during the first World War. Daisy raised their three

children on her own, never remarrying. A keen

horsewoman, it has been suggested that, later

in life, she became a helicopter pilot and flew

from her Cornish home to her suite at the Ritz

Hotel via the Battersea Heliport. “At the moment,

I’m trying to find her helicopter license,” says

Monkhouse, “because the Ritz story is told all


the time and I want to know, did she fly it herself

or not? Because if she actually knew how to fly a

helicopter, that’s quite impressive.”

Daisy’s most lasting accomplishment was

her bequest to the nation of the collection

of artworks from Charlton Park. The Suffolk

Collection, as it is known, occupies the upper

floor at Kenwood House and features royal and

family portraits spanning the sixteenth to the

nineteenth centuries, including an important

group of paintings by Jacobean portraitist

William Larkin.

Though some of the marriages were

undoubtedly transactional, others were

grounded in affection. Lyon Playfair, first Baron

Playfair, recalled in his memoirs that his wife,

the former Edith Russell of Boston, “has been to

me a constant source of support and sympathy,

both in my private and public life.” He was also

delighted that, through her family, he became


Above: John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Wilton Phipps

(Jessie Wilton Phipps), c. 1884

© Steven DeWitt Lowy

Above, right: Lydia Chapman, Kristhel, 2022

Right: John Singer Sargent, Mary Crowninshield

Endicott Chamberlain, 1902. Gifted to the National

Gallery of Art, Washington DC by the sitter,

Mary Endicott Chamberlain Carnegie


acquainted with the highly intellectual mavens

of Boston society. “Longfellow, Emerson, Wendell

Holmes, Lowell, and other men of light and

leading I met at their house, forming many

pleasant friendships for the future.” Monkhouse

notes that, “Edith Playfair’s portrait from 1884

is the earliest in the show, and it’s absolutely

fantastic. She is wearing a fashionable gold

cuirasse bodice which is meant to look like the

sort of waistcoating piece of defensive armour

worn over the chest.”

Another trans-Atlantic union that excited a lot

of press interest was the 1888 marriage of Mary

Crowninshield Endicott of Salem, Massachusetts

to Joseph Chamberlain. Mary was a descendent

of John Endecott, the first governor of the

Massachusetts Bay Colony and Ellen Peabody

Endicott, granddaughter of one of the wealthiest

men in America, Captain Joseph Peabody. Her

impressive pedigree was much remarked

upon, with Mary’s brother suggesting that it

was, perhaps, the bridegroom who was a bit

too middle class. But with a substantial income

and estates of his own (although no peerage),

Chamberlain was not looking for a bride to

bail him out. By all accounts, the marriage was

a happy one, with Mary assuming social duties

and supporting her husband’s political concerns

after he became Colonial Secretary in 1895,

engaging in the quiet diplomacy that comes

from “orchestrating conversations over dinner

and mediating between people who wouldn’t

ordinarily get on,” says Monkhouse.

In her memoirs, Joyce Grenfell, a noted actor

and writer who had her own photographic portrait

done by Lord Snowden, dated the painting of her

grandmother, Jesse Wilton Phipps. “The Sargent

portrait of my grandmother hangs in our living

room,” she wrote. “It was painted in 1883, three

years after the birth of her eldest son, my father.

She was enchanting to look at even as an old lady,

and she was obviously remarkably good-looking

as a young woman when John Singer Sargent

painted her portrait. I love the picture, but I never

got close enough to my grandmother to love her

…But there were compensations about staying at

Chorleywood (her country house)… There was a

sponge cake of the most satisfactory consistency.

After a slice had been wrested from it, the cake

rose back to its original height, at least five inches

of it.” But before Mrs. Wilton Phipps became a

cake-baking grandma (or a grandma with a good

cook), she had a career as a municipal politician.

Phipps was elected to London County Council

in 1907, and served on the council’s education

committee, chairing it from 1923 to 1926, the first

woman to do so. In 1926, Phipps was made a Dame

Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

It is interesting to imagine Sargent at work in

his Tite Street studio in Chelsea darting back

and forth to his easel while painting portraits in

the time-honoured ‘sight-size’ tradition, which

requires the artist to stand at a distance to view

the canvas and the subject side-by-side, then

rush back to apply brushstrokes freely to the

canvas. What would the American heiresses

have made of the rather large painter, who

was otherwise unfailingly polite and charming,

retreating and advancing while staring at them

with fierce intensity?

One of the visitors to the exhibition will be

Charles Cecil, whose eponymous studio in

Florence aims to preserve and advance the

‘sight-size’ tradition of drawing and painting from

life, whose exponents have included Velazquez,

Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as Sargent.

In 2022, works by students from the Cecil atelier,

including Lydia Chapman, were featured in the

exhibition ‘Portrait Dialogues’ at Villa Il Palmerino

in Florence, former home of the writer Violet

Paget, better known as Vernon Lee. Sargent

was a childhood friend of Lee’s and frequently

attended her weekly salons there. His loosely

painted portrait of her, dedicated to “my friend

Violet” reveals something of her intellectual

nature and preference for ‘masculine’ attire.

No one will mistake her for a ‘Dollar Princess’.

In her essay, ‘The Psychology of an Art Writer,’

Lee, whose views on art were influenced by her

relationship with Sargent, wrote that, “a great

picture is made to be seen at several goes.” It is

time to take another look at the heiress portraits

– beyond the technique, beyond the fashion –

to discover the women regarding us confidently

from the canvas.

MARGIE MACKINNON


Carrington

Bloomsbury’s shooting star

While Vanessa Bell was being celebrated at the MK Gallery (see p.95),

another Bloomsbury figure, Dora Carrington (1893-1932), had her own

exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. As in life, Carrington

received less attention than the slightly older and better-known Bell.

But, as co-curator of the Carrington exhibition Anne Chisholm explains,

“we felt that people should be reminded that she was a very gifted and

considerable artist. Because she didn’t produce all that many works, and

because so many of them had gone missing, her standing as a painter

had got a bit sidelined. So, we thought it was high time to have another

look.”

Chisholm explains that she first became interested in Carrington while

working on a biography of Frances Partridge, who was to become the

second wife of Carrington’s husband, Ralph. “Carrington kept attracting

my attention,” she says, “but as Frances was my focus, I would have to

push her out of the way; but I did find her intriguing. When I was starting

work on the biography, I went to see Catherine Carrington, the artist’s

sister-in-law, who was then approaching 90 and living in a small cottage

near Lewes in Sussex. There, on the wall, was the pencil drawing of Noel,

[Catherine’s husband and Dora’s brother]. I thought it was one of the most

beautiful drawings I had ever seen. And I still think so.” Done while she

was still a student, Noel Carrington (c.1912) shows Carrington’s mastery of

the Slade techniques, as taught by drawing master Henry Tonks who was

himself profoundly influenced by Michelangelo.

She had been an indifferent pupil at the Bedford School for Girls

but her artistic talent had shone through enough for her mother to

encourage her move to the Slade, which the older woman imagined as

a sort of finishing school for proper young ladies. Carrington, who was

only too anxious to shake off her mother’s conventional, petit-bourgeois

pretensions and strong religious views, was delighted to find that, in

fact, the Slade provided exactly the sort of bohemian environment in

which she could re-invent herself. She quickly dropped her first name,

which she considered to be redolent of ‘Victorian sentimentality’, and

was known thereafter within her circle simply as ‘Carrington’. Defying the

conventions of the time, she cut her hair into a short bob, becoming one

of the first ‘Cropheads’ (a term coined by Virginia Woolf), along with fellow

students Dorothy Brett and Barbara Hiles.


Above: Dora Carrington, Noel Carrington, c.1912, Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (The Higgins Bedford)


Above: View of the exhibition, courtesy of Pallant House Gallery

Unlike Bell, whose experience at the Slade was

disappointing, Carrington was a star student,

winning prizes and scholarships. She was a

popular figure with the other young artists,

both male and female. “She was,” according to

Chisholm, “mesmerising, and people did fall for

her tremendously; she had a kind of power to

attract.” Her fellow student, Mark Gertler, fell

completely under her spell and her failure to

reciprocate his passion, Chisholm says, “drove

him nearly mad. But, despite their tortured

romance, they did have a very strong artistic

connection. They were two gifted young painters

who helped each other in the early days” and

maintained a lifelong friendship.

In the exhibition, Carrington’s 1919 portrait

Mrs Box is shown next to Gertler’s 1913 portrait

of The Artist’s Mother, which have undeniable

similarities in style, composition and subjectmatter.

Carrington and Gertler were selfproclaimed

outsiders, aware that they differed

from other members of the Bloomsbury Group

in terms of class and educational background.

Chisholm notes that, “like many key Bloomsbury

people, David Garnett [who would later edit an

edition of Carrington’s letters] thought she was

socially and intellectually not quite up to them.

They were fearful snobs. One of the problems

was that her style of painting was very different

from that of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. And

it was Roger Fry and Clive Bell who were the

arbiters of Bloomsbury artistic taste.” The 1910

exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists,

organised by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, was

a pivotal event that sparked the Modernist

era in British art. “But,” notes Chisholm, “while

Carrington attended the exhibition and admired

Cézanne and the other French artists in the

show, she wasn’t nearly as affected by them as

the other Bloomsbury artists were. Her work

remained more realistic, with a strong bias

towards the representational.”


Above: Dora Carrington, Mrs Box, 1919, The Higgins Bedford


Above: Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey Reading, 1916 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The most important person in Carrington’s life

was one of the Bloomsbury Group’s founders,

the writer Lytton Strachey, best known for his

biographical study, The Eminent Victorians. They

famously met in 1915 at a house party in Sussex

given by the Bells where Strachey was a fellow

guest. Describing that weekend in a letter to her

friend Christine Kuhlenthal, Carrington wrote:

Duncan Grant was there, who is much the

nicest of them & Strachey with his yellow face

& beard, ug ! We lived in the kitchen & cooked

& ate there. All the time I felt one of them

would turn into mother & say ‘what breakfast at

10.30! Do use the proper butter knife!’ But no.

Everything was behind time. Everyone devoid

of table manners, & and the vaguest cooking

ensued. Duncan earnestly putting remnants

of milk pudding into the stock pot! They were

astounded because I knew which part of the leek

to cook! What poseurs they are really.

Carrington at first rebuffed Strachey’s

advances only to fall completely and irrevocably

in love with him soon afterwards. The fact that

he was a well-known homosexual did nothing to

dampen her passion. She would eventually go

on to marry Ralph Partridge and have affairs with

other men and women, but Lytton was the person

she chose to spend her life with. Carrington’s

Lytton Strachey Reading (1916), which is part

of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, is

an intimate and finely observed portrayal that

reflects the artist’s deep feelings towards the

sitter, while Strachey’s delicate elongated fingers

and total absorption in his book identify him as

a man of letters.


The artist’s later work defies categorisation.

As Chisholm says, “There isn’t necessarily a

distinctive Carrington style because she painted

in so many different styles. Comparing the Farm

at Watendlath (1921) to Spanish Landscape with

Mountains (c.1924), for example, you wonder

how these could be by the same painter.” The

former, a moody English landscape with two

tiny enigmatic figures in the foreground, came

second only to a David Hockney in a public vote

taken in 2014 on the most popular work in British

museums. Spanish Landscape, on the other

hand, is a surrealistic dreamscape radiating heat

from its vivid sensual forms.

Carrington’s artistic output encompassed

a wide variety of forms. Even before she had

left the Slade, she was commissioned to paint

frescoes at Ashridge House, a stately home in

Hertfordshire. She was a skillful printmaker,

producing four wood-cuts to illustrate Leonard

and Virginia Woolf’s first Hogarth Press

publication. She worked as a designer at the

Omega Workshops, the project established by

Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to

bring modern art into designs for the home. She

also designed tiles, cut book plates and painted

inn signs. More than anything, she devoted her

creative energy to transforming the homes she

Above: Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921 © Tate


Above: Dora Carrington, Iris Tree on a Horse, c.1920s, The Ingram Collection, Courtesy of The Ingram Collection

lived in with Strachey. She painted furniture and

created trompe-l’oeil decorations to enhance

their shared environment. She was so successful

in this that she was showered with requests to

embellish friends’ homes as well. A full-size

trompe-l’oeil window on an exterior wall at

Biddesden House, portraying a maid peeling

an apple while the cat beside her looks up at a

canary in a cage, can still be seen today. The work

was a welcome home present to Diana Guinness

(formerly Mitford) after the birth of her son.

Carrington rarely signed or exhibited her

works. “She was almost masochistically selfeffacing,”

says Chisholm. “Her work came from

the heart, and she feared exposing too much

of herself. She dreaded criticism and not being

good enough.” Still, she found a way to earn some

money from her art by selling an innovative

style of ‘tinsel paintings’. Adapting a Victorian

technique of painting on glass, Carrington

created her own small works on glass to which

she would add foil (which came from cigarette

packets and sweet wrappers). After painting the

outline of the design onto the back of the glass,

she glued on foil within the outlines, adding

further paint as necessary to cover the whole

surface. Although it was fiddly work, she was

able to produce these quirky, luminous pictures

quickly and sell them profitably at Fortnum &

Mason and other shops. Her small picture of Iris

Tree on a Horse (c.1920), “turns a tiny portrait of

a friend into a timeless legendary adventure in

miniature,” says author Ali Smith. (The picture

sold at auction for £10,625 in 2011.)

A much-published photograph shows

Carrington cavorting naked on a plinth at


Garsington Manor, home of Ottoline and Philip

Morrell. She looks directly at the camera and

appears to be uninhibited and carefree. In most

other photographs, Carrington is either looking

away from the camera or peering out shyly from

behind her fringe. “She was shy, she was retiring,

and then suddenly,” exclaims Chisholm, “she’s

naked on a plinth! That is why the woman is so

fascinating. You can’t pin her down. You can’t

pin her down artistically, sexually or emotionally.

She’s quicksilver.”

The Garsington photo was taken in 1917, the

year that Carrington and Strachey set up house

at Tidmarsh Mill House in Berkshire, possibly the

happiest time of her life. After a short illness,

Lytton Strachey died in January 1932. Carrington

took her own life just a few months later, unable,

it seems, to contemplate life without him. She

was 38 years old.

No exhibition of her work was held until 1970,

thirty-eight years after her death. Until now,

her most recent solo exhibition took place at

the Barbican in London. Sadly, the budget for

that show did not stretch to a catalogue. That

absence has been made up for with the Pallant

House’s beautiful volume of reproductions of

her paintings and decorative objects, along

with essays by scholars who have re-examined

the significance of her multi-faceted work, and

friends whose memories of her convey the deep

affection in which she was held.

MARGIE MACKINNON


Inner Gardens:

Flavia Arlotta

An interview with

Francesco Colacicchi and Alta MacAdam

Walking up the wide but wooded

path, to the Colacicchi house on via

dell’Osservatorio, was my first taste

of Spring this year. It was also the closest I will

ever get to fulfilling a childhood dream: to be

able to step inside a painting and into another

world. Francesco Colacicchi and his wife,

author Alta MacAdam, opened their home for

this interview, and to discuss, with co-curator

Federica Parretti and myself, the September

2025 show at Il Palmerino, featuring Francesco’s

mother, painter Flavia Arlotta, co-organised by

Il Palmerino Cultural Association and Calliope

Arts Foundation, in collaboration with the British

Institute of Florence.

Francesco is a painter, like his mother Flavia,

and his father Giovanni Colacicchi, an artist who

achieved considerable acclaim in Italy’s largely

unexplored Novecento period. To say the family

home is a wunderkammer (or cabinet of wonders)

is an understatement. Its shells, bottles, baubles,

cups, rocks and glassware all seem to have their

painted alter egos, and the walls are hung with

works by all three of the family’s artists, that tease

the visitor by mirroring the world outside the

frame. “It took me a moment to make the house

my own,” Alta admitted – “but what a home it is!”

Francesco works by the window in a sunlit

corner of the room, “where I feel good”, he says.

He produces zen-like still-life works, that are

properly described in these liberally translated

words by Maria Cristina François: “In your

paintings, I breathe air, poetry, solitude and light. I

feel better, and wish I never had to leave them. I’d

like to stay inside them, and find myself, as if by

some spell, painted too.”

Restoration Conversations: “You learned

the rudiments of painting from both your

mother and father. How would you describe

Flavia’s work?”

Francesco Colacicchi: “My mother’s painting

is linked to the home sphere, like many stilllife

artists, and the objects she collected are a

symbol of her way of being. Often, my mother

would choose a corner of the house, set a scene


Above: Francesco Colacicchi’s corner-studio, ph. Margie MacKinnon, 2025



and paint it, but her objects seemed to fit, and

looked like they had always been there; they

never looked like arrangements. She learned how

to use colour from my father, but the way she

saw the world was entirely different. My parents’

use of light is one example. No other twentiethcentury

painter had my father’s ability to capture

light and shadow at a precise moment in time, or

‘recorded’ light quite like he did. The light in my

mother’s painting is beautiful, as if it comes from

the inside – an inner light.”

RC: “Flavia graduated from Florence’s

Accademia delle Belle Arti in 1935, and

participated in a number of collective

exhibitions, including shows at Palazzo

Strozzi and the Galleria dell’Arte Moderna

in Rome. Her Girl in a White Dress is part of

the Gallery of Modern Art’s collection at the

Pitti Palace. What can you tell us about your

mother’s portraiture?”

FC: “Flavia was very good at understanding

people’s psychology, and created wonderful

portraits because of it. To make a good portrait, you

have to understand the personality of the person

being painted, and perhaps my mother was better

at it than my father, who tended to focus more on

the task’s formal or classic elements. My mother

knew how to put the sitter at ease, and their

dialogue was completely different. Unfortunately,

here at home, we only have a little one – a

portrait of a girl – because, normally, portraits

were sold to the sitter. In Mother’s Little Girl in

a Red Coat – who was probably 11 or 12 years

old at the most – the sitter is approaching the

brink of womanhood. Her attitude, the placement

of her hand… her slightly pouty mouth – it’s a

masterpiece of psychology.”

RC: “Flavia wrote a war-diary memoir entitled

Ricordi, published in 2013, after her death.

During the war, your family spent time in

Valombrosa, guests of Nicky Mariano and

Bernard Berenson, and later moved to via

Marignolle, on the edge of Florence. Tell us

about Flavia during the war years.”

FC: “In 1944, Florence lived through what was

called ‘The Emergency’. The Allies arrived, the

English and American troops, to free us from nazifascism,

coming up from Sicily, and fortunately,

the Germans fled north. In August, the front

passed through Florence, and that period was the

Emergenza. Only women could leave the house.

Our whole family – I was two years old and my

older brother Piero was five – lived as refugees,

inside the Accademia delle Belle Arti. My father’s

candidacy for directorship there would have to

be approved by the Allies later. That building

seemed the safest of all places, to my parents and

other artists and professors with families in tow.

In fact, it was. At least it was not bombed.”

RC: “But your family home was bombed – this

house, in via dell’Osservatorio?”

FC: “Yes, because the partisans informed the

English and American troops that there were

enemy ammunition trucks in the neighbourhood,

near Villa della Petraia. They found no trucks here,

but saw the house, thought “maybe that’s the

place”, and bombed it. The first time it happened,

my mother was here, down in the cellar. When

she heard the explosions and understood what

was happening, she said, “I don’t want to die under

the rubble”, and went out into the garden, where a

bomb dropped no more than a few meters from

her, “like it was falling on my head”, she said. But

several days later, she came back again, on foot

from Piazza San Marco, with a wheel barrow,

determined to find us something to eat. She

found the house in ruins, but its main walls were

upright. Ultimately, my parents spent their whole

lives trying to rebuild the house, but a part of it

was never reconstructed.”

RC: “Tell us more about Flavia’s character and

your parents’ dynamic, as two painters living

under the same roof.

Left: Flavia Arlotta, Girl with a Red Coat, 1979, Colacicchi Family Collection, Florence


FC: “Flavia was extremely courageous and

endowed with a real practical sense. She was

educated, culturally, by her journalist father Ugo.

Her mother, Russian sculptor Elena Albrecht Von

Brandenburg, abandoned the family when Flavia

was still young. She was brought up by a Russian

nanny, Duniascia, a woman of great strength and

affection, who became, in all practical terms, my

grandmother. Flavia had that same determined

Russian character.

My father was a sunny, joyous person, who

thought of nothing but painting. Flavia took care

of everything else. Flavia painted, raised her

family, managed this house. My mother drove

him, and us, wherever we needed to go. My father

didn’t even have a driver’s license, and for the

longest time, he thought ‘right of way’, was part of

the custom ‘ladies first’.

Her artistic process was different from my

father’s, whose method was ‘fare e finire’, or

painting to finish, all in one go, but Mother

worked on her paintings for a long time, leaving

them in stand-by, before taking them up again,

and a number of her pictures remain unfinished.

Without so many commitments, she would have

done more – but in spite of it all, she painted a

Above: Flavia with Piero and Francesco in Vallombrosa, 1943


Above: The Colacicchi home, ph. Linda Falcone, 2025

few hundred paintings, most of which survive.

The canvases she didn’t like, she’d immerse in a

tub of water, to remove the paint and reuse.”

Between sips of coffee poured from a pot that

may well be a ‘character’ in Flavia’s paintings, I

asked Alta, to elaborate on her mother-in-law’s

character as well. Our readers will know Alta

MacAdam as author of the ‘Blue Guides’ for Venice,

Rome and Florence. She is currently updating the

Florence guide, of which she says, “be patient”.

“Flavia was very energetic, nothing stood in her

way,” says Alta. “She could get through anything,

and if you came to her with a problem, she was

always there, to help sort it out… she took time

to relax and found time to talk. But Giovanni

took up lots of time – he did a lot of painting,

and had to, for there was not much money to be

had. Sometimes, I’d come in to find Flavia in her

overalls, trying to avoid being interrupted, but she

was always ready to be interrupted. Any time they

spent at the sea was her time to paint, sometimes

on summer holiday, and sometimes in winter –

especially later in life, as treatment for Giovanni’s

bronchial problems. I think she used painting as

a time to ‘switch off’. Inside her studio, she was

meditative, and inside her own world.”

LINDA FALCONE


La Foce:

Paradise in Tuscany

The gardens at La Foce, Courtesy of La Foce


A new book by Katia Lysy sparks memories of her

grandparents Antonio and Iris Origo. “Iris was my

mentor,” says Katia, “I strive to preserve her memory.”


Above: Katia Lysy, courtesy of La Foce

Restoration Conversations: You’ve once

said that your best advice, when it comes to

learning more about your grandmother Iris

Origo, is to read her autobiography, Images

and Shadows, where she talks about her

ivory-tower upbringing as an Anglo-expat in

Fiesole, as of 1910.

Katia Lysy: While living at Villa Medici as a

child, my grandmother used to say she felt

like a little parrot, obeying the instructions of

very educated and highly cultured people. Her

mother was Sybil Cutting, whose salon hosted

personalities like Edith Wharton, Somerset

Maugham, Henry James – and that whole expat

entourage, and they all disliked each other

and, most of all, they disliked their hostess, Iris’

mother. Still – they were expats in Florence, all

together, and they had a way of showing off and

showing each other up. Imagine the likes of

Bernard Berenson, who was likely Sybil’s lover

and a huge show-off, and all the ‘feuds’ that arose

between artists and art historians! They played

a game they called Conosci, presumably from

conoscere, to know. It was a sort of a charades

with artworks, so you’d act out something like

Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi, to

flaunt how well-learned you were. Growing up,

Iris had no real contact with the Italians at all,

and in a way, that still happens with the Anglo-

American community.

RC: Who was Antonio Origo, and how did

their shared dream at La Foce come about?

KL: My grandfather Antonio had a passion for


agriculture, which he studied and wanted to put

into practice, and my grandmother inherited her

philanthropic vein from her American side of

the family, the Cuttings. She had a real desire to

improve other people’s lot in life, and found the

way to do it through agriculture. My grandparents

bought the estate together, but all the money put

into it came from Iris, as my grandmother was

her family’s only heiress. Antonio could never

have bought it on his own.

Antonio came from an artistic, but also

flamboyant family – his father Clemente Origo

was a very good painter and bronze sculptor, who

won the silver medal at the World Fair in Paris in

1900, but since he was a marquis, he never gave

art his full attention. Antonio was an illegitimate

child, because Clemente fell in love with Rosa, an

amateur opera singer, and the couple ran away

together, but had to wait for her husband to die

before they could be married. So, the illegitimate

young Antonio was sent off to boarding school

in Switzerland – and although his parents were

affectionate, he was not allowed to be around, or

in sight. Eventually, that changed, with the death

of Rosa’s husband, but all of this is to say that,

like my grandmother, he grew up without ever

following a path he decided on himself. So, this

couple found each other – and knew they no

longer wanted to be removed from the world, as

they had been during their previous lives apart.

They wanted to make a difference in people’s

lives, and that’s how it all began.

Above: Katia’s grandmother Iris Origo at work , Courtesy of La Foce


Aerial view of La Foce, Courtesy of La Foce



RC: From La Foce estate, your grandparents

transformed an arid, poverty-stricken region

into what is now known as ‘quintessential

Tuscany’. They shaped and enriched the

area’s landscape, physically and culturally,

whilst transforming La Foce into what you

call ‘Paradise in Tuscany’ – the title of your

new book

KL: Through their work, La Foce became a

garden within a much larger ‘garden’. But, when

they first moved there, the garden was not a

priority. The garden came afterwards, only when

Iris’ American grandmother Margaret Lascelles

arrived, and found herself, with the couple and

their new baby, in this beautiful but crumbling

fifteenth-century villa, with only one bathroom.

“Okay,” she said, “You are having a garden, and I’m

giving you money for a pipeline to the spring” –

which was about 3 km away, off in the woods.

That spring still exists and my grandfather had

the reservoir built in the 1950s, which continues

to be the sole water source that feeds the

garden. Water was never taken from agriculture

– that was fundamental. Antonio and Iris agreed

that farming came first – the people who did the

farming came first. Water was their priority – not

for the garden, but for the region.

My grandmother was a fantastic organiser

and planner; she had intuition about who the

right people to work with would be. Antonio

worked with the peasants and the government,

leading the huge reclamation project the couple

had in mind. He did not care for the fascists

and considered them posturing idiots, but he

thought they were useful because they were

giving him a lot of money in support of the land

reclamation process, and giving him power over

a very reactionary people; with it, they made

a lasting mark on the region’s physical and

cultural heritage.

RC: Italy’s entrance into the war led Iris

to establish schools for local children, and

she is widely remembered locally for her

philanthropy. Tell us more.

KL: The school she opened had a Montessorilike

approach – which is rather weird in the

middle of fascist Italy, and before long, it became

a shelter for refugee children from Genoa and

Turin – the first cities to be bombed by the Allies

– which resulted in children living in the sewers

and so on. Iris got the idea from Britain, so it

wasn’t original… but such initiatives were new for

Italy, and she managed to have the children sent

to her thanks to support from members of the

Italian royal family. Iris was always conscientious

about writing to the children’s families. One

mother wrote her back to say: “My son is so

happy with you, can I send my daughter too?”

Iris’s book War in Val D’Orcia is the war diary

that culminates in the escape of these children

through mined fields, with Allied aircraft bombing

them, as they seek refuge in Montepulciano. Iris

and Antonio led 24 refugee children to safety,

along with their own daughters, plus local

youngsters from farmers’ families. They must

have been 60 in all. When the war was over, in

the late forties, Iris took these two buildings and

decided to make the former kindergarten into

what she called La Casa dei Bambini, which

hosted 10 orphans at a time, in a small, familylike

setting. The structure remained open until

the late 1960s, and I can remember being cross,

because these children called my grandmother

Nonna, and I protested, “Only I get to call her

Nonna” – you know what children are like!

She only took slightly older children, the ones

nobody usually wants to adopt. I remember

there being a blind boy, a polio-injured girl with

leg braces, one boy who was half-Chinese... Iris’s

aim ultimately, was to find these children homes.

RC: You consider your grandmother your

mentor, and you found and edited your her prewar

diary, called A Chill in the Air, published in

2017, along with the re-publication of several

of her other books. What have you learned

from Iris Origo the writer?

KL: I always find her creative side amazing to

think about. My mother and aunt would say that


Above: Interior view of La Foce, Courtesy of La Foce

when Iris was writing, you did not disturb her.

If you knocked and went in, she would say, “Oh

Darling, yes, would you close the door behind

you, with yourself on the other side?” Her

approach to her writing was very focused and

creative. At the same time, she did not find that

practical matters took second place, and I think

that’s a reaction to her childhood. Some of her

works have become real classics thanks to her

ability to combine facts with a genuine empathy

for people, whether or not she liked them. But

my biggest take-away is that the life in the books

was the same as in real life; there was no border

between the two.

RC: Tell us more about your own book and

your work at La Foce today.

KL: My mother created the same kind of book

25 years ago and it’s always been a point of

reference for us – but the photographs have

evolved since then. I was setting the archives

right, and I found all the old photographs about

building the garden, before and after… I’d always

written about my grandmother, and I thought,

“She’s part of the story, but not the whole story,

I’d like to talk more about the garden itself.”

Cecil Pinsent, well-known as a garden architect,

was also a great architect of interiors, which

became evident during our restoration of the

property. Pinsent’s very solid underlying design

came out – aesthetics and functionality – and I

was hugely happy with it! As for my own role,

I am a preserver of culture. I strive to preserve

the memory of my grandmother, to maintain

the estate and its gardens and to uphold my

grandparents’ work.

LINDA FALCONE


Starting with the stars

An interview with Starborn cosmologist Roberto Trotta


Roberto Trotta, professor of Theoretical Physics at the International School for

Advanced Study in Trieste, Italy, and a visiting professor at London’s Imperial

College, is the author of Starborn: How the Stars Made Us, and Who We Would

Be Without Them. He calls the book ‘a stylistic jolt’ for Italian audiences, as it makes

its springtime debut up and down the Boot, following best-selling editions across

the English-speaking world.

“‘No stars’ means we’d have no astronomy, no physics, no science and no technology.

That is the clear fil rouge that really hangs all of this together,” said Trotta at the start

of our interview. “You take away the fundamental building block of the stars, and

it all crumbles.” As Roberto takes us into the firmament and back again, from the

Neolithic age to a cautionary future, Restoration Conversations asks about women’s

roles in building humanity’s connection to the stars.

Restoration Conversations: You’ve done a

lot of thinking about what the world would

be like without stars. Where do women fit

into this thought process?

Roberto Trotta: Women have a prehistoric link

to the stars, but first I’d like to take a step back

and provide some background. We have to start

by considering the mystery surrounding our

Neanderthal cousins, who disappeared almost

instantaneously 42,000 years ago. Yet, they were

masters of fire and they had technology. Their

build was physically stronger than ours, they had

greater cranial capacity, and they had adapted well

to the glacial ages’ coming and going. So, it’s really

a mystery as to why we are here, instead of them.

My hypothesis is that the stars had something to

do with it – or that our ancestors’ obsession with

them did – because, if you start paying attention

to the stars, to the phases of the Moon, and to the

way things follow cycles, you can then learn to, if

not predict, at least correlate what is happening

in the sky or what will be happening in nature.

You can predict the availability of food and other

resources, the migration of wild animals, and

human fertility, particularly if you understand that

the Moon has a cyclical nature, 29.5 days, which is

mysteriously linked to a woman’s menstrual cycle,

a connection which has never been scientifically

explained, but is certainly a fact.

RC: In Starborn, you hypothesise that the

first astronomers were likely women. Tell

us more.

RT: We have evidence of counting, 25,000 years

ago, based on a unique artifact, a baboon fibula,

with 29 carved notches. We don’t know whether

the sequence continued, because the bone is

broken off at one end, but 29 notches are pretty

close to the length of the menstrual cycle and

the moon cycle, and we know that it was carved

on purpose and used at length because it’s very

smooth. Certainly, those most interested in

Left: Mary Fairfax, Mrs William Somerville, 1834, Scottish National Gallery, Google Arts & Culture asset


Right: Margaret Sarah Carpenter,

Ada King, Countess of Lovelace,

1836, Government Art Collection.

following, understanding and keeping track of

the lunar calendar were women. We can reach

the conclusion that, not only were women the

very first pre-historic astronomers, they were

also the very first mathematicians.

RC: Your book spans centuries of knowledge,

in which you explore a ‘constellation’ of

women scientists including astronomers

like Annie Jump Cannon, who over the

course of 40 years, personally classified and

measured 200,000 stars, or Henrietta Leavitt

who was instrumental in determining the

relationship between period and luminosity

for the variables that then enabled Hubble to

discover the distance to Andromeda. From the

Eighteenth century onwards, it appears that

women were very much committed to making

research more accessible, even to scholars.

How did women increase the relevance of

pre-existing studies in various fields?

RT: We have stunning examples of women

who carved a place for themselves through

translations or by adding another dimension

to pre-existing studies, including self-taught

Scottish astronomer and mathematician Mary

Sommerville (1780–1872). Among other things,

she translated a fiendishly difficult treatise about

celestial astronomy by Pierre-Simon Laplace,

from French to English, and she made it so much

better in translation by adding copious notes,

plus much-needed explanatory material, that it

became the standard text of celestial mechanics at

both Cambridge and Oxford for several decades.

Anecdotally, there are a good number of female

science translators, partly because, for centuries,

women were largely excluded from giving their

own original contribution, due to a lack of formal

training and because they were thought of as not

being up to the task.

Another similar case was that of Lord Byron’s

estranged daughter, mathematician Ada Lovelace

(1815–1852). She was not an astronomer, but hers

is a case in point about translations. Ada Lovelace

died tragically young, at the age of 36 – just like

her father (whose poetry her mother forbade her

to read). Named Countess of Lovelace through

marriage, Ada was a brilliant mathematician,

and she became friends with Charles Babbage,

inventor of the first mechanical computer, that,

tragically, was never built. But the point is that

Babbage had an obsession – computing – and

that obsession was born among the stars. Ada

Lovelace was a great champion of Babbage’s ideas,

and she took his entirely unreadable treatises,

which had been published in French in the 1880s,

and translated them back into English. She added

a number of explanatory notes, that were twice

the length of the original work, regarding how the

computing machine Babbage had in mind should

work, and among those, in Note ‘G’, she includes

an algorithm to compute Fibonacci’s numbers. It

went down in history as the first-ever computer

programme, and Lovelace is recognised as the

first computer programmer in history.

RC: Your book skips over the experience of

contemporary women astronomers, who

you’ve suggested best speak for themselves,

as in the case of the first-person narrative

The Last Stargazers, by astrophysicist

Emily Levesque, who has had first-hand

experiences with all its characters. So, from

the early twentieth-century, you catapult us

into the future, where your real concern lies.

Could you tell us more about that?

RT: I look to the future, because I believe it

is necessary for us to recapture the cosmic

perspective. The stars cannot be an escape,

or drive a quest for cosmic consumerism or

colonisation, through technology. I want to

deconstruct that false narrative, and turn to the

stars to limit the hubris of our species. I want to

counter the idea of conquering the cosmos, or

treating the skies like an imperial Wild West, up

for grabs among the world’s space barons and

tech bros. There is an absence of the female

voice in this imperialist and AI-guided ego-trip,



Left: Roberto Trotta

Below: Book cover for UK edition

that is exclusively male. We are paying the price

today for the lopsided, testosterone-fuelled

approach of the social media, and more recently

AI overlords: female voices are silenced, their

concerns overlooked, their perspective ignored.

Unfortunately, male dominance can be held up

as a cautionary tale, and, as part of that, I am

very wary of AI undermining human psychology,

and reducing our ability to feel, think, or have

meaningful relationships.

I subscribe to the idea of a ‘reverse’ overview

effect, as discussed by Samantha Harvey on

a BBC radio show we were on together. It’s

‘reverse’ because it grips you as you look up

into the sky, not down on planet Earth from

space, as with the overview effect that has

brought about a spiritual awakening in many an

Apollo astronaut. Harvey described astronomers

experiencing that feeling when they look at the

beauty, the fragility and the fundamental unity of

our planet. But that experience is not available

to everyone, unless you want to hitch a ride on

a space-baron rocket. Still – there is no shortage

of ways to be inspired and humbled or to feel

appropriately small, when looking up. For me,

the reverse overview effect involves looking

up at the uniqueness and the vast inhospitality

of the cosmos. Earth is a very special place. It

cannot be discarded, from a scientific or societal

point of view. Our stand is to be made here.

LINDA FALCONE


The mind behind

Florence’s

monumental green

Maria Chiara Pozzana at work, ph. Giovanni Breschi

On a quest to “connect history with

the future”, Maria Chiara Pozzana is

an author and university professor,

but her claim to fame is that of professional

garden designer and restorer of historical

gardens. She has led projects for forty years

including one at Villa Demidoff, where in 1985,

she employed specialists to uncover the park’s

ancient hydraulic system, which once fed its

fountains. “Everyone gets scared when you

bring in the archaeologists,” she explains,

“because it often means the work must stop as

ruins are uncovered. But in Italy, gardeners and

archaeologists must work together.”

When Dr Pozzana was commissioned to

design Villa Bardini’s garden – a project that ran

from 1996 to 2019 – she pored over unstudied

historical documents, and looked at relief

works, to recover the census of plants that

once grew there. “There was no garden; it was

pure wilderness! I led the efforts to recover the

garden’s central staircase, and we cut through

the brush, which triggered the discovery of the

Canale del Drago, and the villa’s Baroque garden,”


Above: Pozzana’s wisteria loggia at Villa Bardini, ph. Maria Chiara Pozzana

Dr Pozzana explains. “One of the solutions I

designed for Villa Bardini ended up becoming

very famous: the wisteria pergola, which marks

the coming of summer in Florence.”

Since the 1990s, she has populated the

garden of Villa della Gamberaia with “an

itinerary of colour” based on blooming

schedules, and according to a planting list

from the turn of the last century. The villa’s iris

staircase – which involved 900 iris plants and

help from the American University in Rome –

is what Dr Pozzana calls “a true restoration, in

the archaeological sense”.

Last year, when Dr Pozzana read Australianborn

English writer Elizabeth Von Arnim’s 21

books, “all in one gulp”, she discovered her

affinity with the novelist, which she calls “a

sentimental bond”. The following interview,

with one of the most brilliant minds behind

Florence’s monumental green, is interspersed

with snippets from Arnim’s first book

Elizabeth’s German Garden. It’s a liberty we’ve

taken here at Restoration Conversations,

because we cannot resist putting these two

‘green-thumbs’ together in animated ‘dialogue’

across the ages.


Maria Chiara Pozzana: “As you read Von

Arnim’s first novel, you are transported back

to the mindset of the late 1800s in Germany,

as she seeks a way to express herself, beyond

having children. She was an English woman

living in Germany, but don’t forget that

German women of her era and social status

were in charge of their working estates, and

that meant things like overseeing the pigs, and

the production of sausages. Elizabeth’s garden

is linked to the art of escape. It is a place of

solitude, not loneliness. I strongly identify

with her garden as a true refuge, and with the

way she enters that space. She develops her

own personality in the garden and achieves

a measure of personal freedom, because she

uses it as a source of individual expression

and, ultimately, of joy.”

Elizabeth Von Arnim: “This is less a garden

than a wilderness. No one has lived in the

house, much less in the garden, for twentyfive

years, and it is such a pretty old place that

the people who might have lived here and

did not, deliberately preferring the horrors of

a flat in a town, must have belonged to that

vast number of eyeless and earless persons

of whom the world seems chiefly composed.

Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty;

but the greater part of my spring happiness is

due to the scent of the wet earth and young

leaves. I am always happy (out of doors be it

understood, for indoors there are servants

and furniture) but in quite different ways, and

my spring happiness bears no resemblance to

my summer or autumn happiness, though it

is not more intense, and there were days last

winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my

frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and

children. But I did it behind a bush, having a

due regard for the decencies.”

MCP: “Von Arnim garnered an incredible

amount of public acclaim with her first two

garden-inspired books. Twenty-one editions of

Elizabeth and her German Garden were printed

in its first year, between England and the

United States. The wealth and editorial success

she achieved was incredible, which makes

her alternating critical success surprising.

In fact, much like English author Vernon

Lee, Von Arnim was completely forgotten

after World War I, until the 1980s, when the

feminist publishing house Virago Press began


publishing her novels. The name Elizabeth von

Arnim was actually coined by that publisher,

because previously, the by-line of her books

was ‘Elizabeth of the German Garden’, so no

one would know who she was! Her real name

was Mary Annette Bouchamp, and, at first, she

hid her writing from her husband, who later

accepted her becoming an author, as long as

her identity remained undisclosed.

Today, she is often pegged as a ‘sentimental

writer’ but if you read between the lines of

her delightful garden talk, her political insight

is considerable, and her humour and irony

reveals her keen eye for the paradoxes of

human relationships, especially those between

men and women.”

Elizabeth Von Arnim: “Pansies seem to like

the place and so do sweet-peas; pinks don’t, and

after much coaxing gave hardly any flowers last

summer. Nearly all the roses were a success,

in spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose

Adam, which was covered with buds ready to

open, when they suddenly turned brown and

died, and three standard Dr. Grills which stood

in a row and simply sulked. I had been very

excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the

catalogues being specially fascinating, and no

doubt I deserved the snubbing I got. ‘Never be

excited, my dears, about anything,’ shall be the

advice I will give the three babies [girls] when

the time comes to take them out to parties, ‘or,

if you are, don’t show it. If by nature you are

volcanoes, at least be only smouldering ones.

Don’t look pleased, don’t look interested, don’t,

above all things, look eager. Calm indifference

should be written on every feature of your

faces. Never show that you like any one

person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid, and

reserved. If you don’t do as your mother tells

you and are just gushing, frisky, young idiots,

snubs will be your portion. If you do as she

tells you, you’ll marry princes and live happily

ever after.’”

MCP: “From January 1897 until her death, Von

Arnim wrote an extremely detailed diary every

day, and, at the same time, she kept a gardening

diary. No one has the love of flowers she

had. At one point she writes, ‘I don’t believe

a garden is ever finished’, and I know this

to be true. Elizabeth’s German Garden was

published at the start of 1898, and in her diary,

she calls the acceptance of her manuscript


A garden view at Villa Gamberia, ph. Maria Chiara Pozzana


Above: The Apennine Colossus, ph. Giovanni Breschi

“the greatest joy I’ve known in my life”.

‘Elizabeth’ in the novels is an entirely different

person than Mary Annette Bouchamp of the

diaries. So, she created this German alter-ego,

a mirror personality, and it looks to me that

this character was her refuge whenever she

couldn’t bear her nobleman husband anymore

– her duties, her five children, or high-society

expectations.”

Elizabeth Von Arnim: “I have been much

afflicted again lately by visitors – not stray

callers to be got rid of after a due administration

of tea and things you are sorry afterwards that

you said, but people staying in the house and

not to be got rid of at all. All June was lost

to me in this way, and it was from first to last

a radiant month of heat and beauty; but a

garden where you meet the people you saw

at breakfast, and will see again at lunch and

dinner, is not a place to be happy in. Besides,

they had a knack of finding out my favourite

seats and lounging in them just when I longed

to lounge myself; and they took books out

of the library with them, and left them face

downwards on the seats all night to get well

drenched with dew, though they might have

known that what is meat for roses is poison for

books; and they gave me to understand that

if they had had the arranging of the garden it

would have been finished long ago – whereas

I don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They

have all gone now, thank heaven, except one,

so that I have a little breathing space before

others begin to arrive. It seems that the place

interests people, and that there is a sort of

novelty in staying in such a deserted corner of

the world, for they were in a perpetual state of

mild amusement at being here at all.”

LINDA FALCONE


Personal reflections …

on Vanessa Bell


Taking inspiration from the influential Bloomsbury Group, author Megan

Hunter’s forthcoming novel, Days of Light, chronicles six pivotal days across

six decades. The book opens on Easter Sunday 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready

for her life to finally begin. In the idyllic Sussex countryside, her bohemian family

and their friends gather for lunch, awaiting the arrival of a longed-for guest. It is a

single, enchanted afternoon that ends in tragedy. Days of Light moves through the

Second World War and the twentieth century on a radiant journey through a life

lived in pursuit of love and in search of an answer.

Restoration Conversations: With less than a

month until the publication of Days of Light,

what can you tell us about how your interest

in Vanessa Bell and Angelica Garnett became

the genesis of the novel?

Megan Hunter: I first really engaged with

Vanessa Bell as Virginia Woolf’s sister. Woolf is

the writer who has influenced my work the most,

and I became more aware of Bell in 2018 when

I gave a talk at a festival at Charleston about

my debut novel. We had a tour of the house at

night, and I had a very visceral reaction to the

house and the paintings. I had a sort of restless

excitement that indicated that a book could be

beginning to take shape. The tour guides were

telling us stories about the family, about their

relationships and the complexities of them. And

one of these complexities was the relationship

between Bell and her daughter Angelica and

the question of Angelica’s paternity. I immersed

myself in the lives of the people who lived at

Charleston, reading memoirs, letters, biographies,

and I became interested in Angelica’s life, partly

as the child of famous artists, and her struggle to

define her own identity in the face of this.

RC: Is Days of Light a biographical novel?

MH: I did write a sort of biographical version of

the book that didn’t really work. When I initially

approached the material, I was looking at all the

dates and thinking, when did he say this, and

when did she do that? It’s an approach to fiction

that, for me, didn’t come alive on the page. I

need to have the galvanizing force of fiction, of

a narrative that is free to take any shape. So,

in Days of Light, the artist character, Marina, is

not Vanessa Bell and Ivy is not Angelica Garnett.

I wanted to inhabit fictional characters rather

than my imagined versions of historical figures.

With the male characters, Angus and Bear, you

can perhaps see the inspiration more clearly, but

they are not the centre of the book.

RC: How did Bell’s art influence your writing?

MH: While writing, I became slightly obsessed

with a painting by Bell called Interior with

Two Women, which has a clothed woman and

a naked woman seated together in a room. It

wasn’t that I saw one of them as Vanessa and the

other as Angelica, but that the painting seemed

to be saying that every woman is, in some sense,

Left: Charleston Farmhouse. ph. Mark Antiquary, CC BY-SA 4.0


Above, left: Interior shot of Charleston house, ph. Margie MacKinnon. Right: The nymph, ph. Wayne McArdle

an interior inhabited by at least two forms. What

I found wonderful about Bell’s life and her work

is how she had this sense of incorporating her

life into her work. She painted her children,

painted around her children and she had this

unwavering commitment to continue her artistic

practice.

RC: What can you tell us about your own

experience as an artist/mother?

MH: My journey into writing was very bound up

with my children. I was a young mother when I

started to write seriously, and initially I was just

writing notebooks which were about my life with

them. And so my first book is all about those early

days of motherhood. My children, in a way, have

been my muses. I couldn’t possibly say that they

prevented me from being a writer, it’s the opposite.

I used to try to write when I was younger, and I

struggled with it. I wanted to be a writer from

when I was about twelve. There were times in my

early 20s when I had time to write, a room – all

the things that you need – but I found that I didn’t

write anything that stuck, as it were. So, actually,

my journey into writing was through motherhood.

RC: There is a spiritual element to the

book which you have said is in some ways

autobiographical. Is the character’s turning

towards religion linked to the traumatic

event that occurs at the beginning of the

novel?

MH: Yes, in one sense, she’s on a quest for spiritual

truth to deal with the trauma, but it is the trauma

itself that provokes a sense of mystery. Her world

is shattered by this event and the rest of her life

unfolds according to that shattering and takes

unexpected turns. It was a way of following,

through that character, some of the things that

have shaped my life, one of which is religious

questing. Religious exploration is sometimes

sparked off by people who have had some kind of

difficulty in their early lives who are searching for

some other meaning in life. When I was younger,

I was very religious, and at one point trained to be

a priest, which is part of my autobiography that

I’m bringing into the light, because it is integral to

why I wrote the book. It is a book that allows for

the reality of faith.


AN EXCERPT FROM THE OPENING OF DAYS OF LIGHT

BY MEGAN HUNTER

When Ivy looked back, this was what she

remembered.

Joseph was singing. Here was a rare thing

her brother couldn’t do: his voice was tuneless,

rambling, reaching for a note as though for a

high ledge on a mountain. But the fact remained:

Joseph – their own plain, sensible Joseph – was

singing. He lay in his bed in the next room, the

painted walls sentinel around him, his window

open, already wafting sweetness. He was opening

his wide lips, feeling the vibration build in his

stomach, rise into his chest. Here was music: in

his throat, on his tongue, whistling through his

teeth. Ivy held her own breath to try to hear the

song more clearly. It was a low, almost continuous

sound, a bird on a summer night, an anonymous,

homeless tone, the sound of yearning itself.

Ivy pictured Joseph in his set at Oxford. The

two little rooms with their air of adolescent

disarray, his girlfriend a shape at the edges. Their

father, Gilbert, had given him a gramophone for

his twenty-first birthday, and surely Joseph would

dance his girl around the study, taking care not

to bump into the clumsy armchairs, the solemn

wooden desk. Joseph was a good dancer. He

would have his arm wrapped around her waist.

Ivy could see the waist – its deep dip of invitation,

its stretch into arm and shoulder – but above

this was a blur. Joseph had never described this

girl much beyond her name – Frances – and just

once after dinner and wine: lovely.

Over time, Ivy had filled this blur with figures:

a girl leaning to pick up a penny, rising like a

child who has stamped her gumboots into a

puddle, with a loose, opening smile. Or: a more

serious woman, wearing a beret at an angle, a

cigarette tucked between her fingers, lips poised

with experience. Sometimes the figure was

simple, even incestuous: herself or her mother.

Ivy did not berate herself for this. After all, after

today, these figures would vanish forever. Today,

the real Frances would visit for Easter.

Through her open window, Ivy could smell

the goodness of the garden outside, the truth of

another morning arriving. The birds made their

expectant, nervous morning calls; even they knew

about this day, Ivy felt. They sensed its particular

quality. How even at Cressingdon – the most

secular house in England, Mother had once called

it – Easter meant something. It meant something

to the trees, and to the greying statues of the

garden, their subtle turns only children could see.

When Ivy was six or seven, she had watched the

small nymph by the pond turn and wink at her. It

was, perhaps, the single most significant moment

of her childhood – magic proven, the shell of

reality cracked. But when she tugged, hard, on

her mother’s skirts, Marina only said of course,

darling, and moved away.

(Copyright Megan Hunter 2025. Reproduced

with kind permission of the author and Pan

Macmillon)


Above : Angelica Garnett and Vanessa Bell taken in 1939. Picture from

Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album

Right: Annie Dressner’s portrait of Megan Hunter

In January of this year, as part of its exhibition

Vanessa Bell, A World of Form and Colour, MK

Gallery organised a conference on Bell and her

career. This included a conversation between

Bell scholar Rebecca Birrell and novelist Megan

Hunter. Megan began by reading an excerpt

from Days of Light, not yet published at the time.

Calliope Arts was pleased to sponsor this talk

and the first ever reading from the book.

MARGIE MACKINNON

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Hunter is a prizewinning novelist, poet

and screenwriter. Her first novel, The End We

Start From, was published by Picador (UK) and

Grove Atlantic (US) in 2017 and translated into

ten languages. It was adapted for feature film by

Alice Burch, starring Jodie Comer and directed by

Mahalia Belo. Days of Light, published in the UK in

April 2025, is her third novel.


Front cover:

Cécile Davidovici, Portrait of a Constant Dream V, 2021

Opposite Contents page:

Shubha Taparia, Palace Street II, 2020

Contents page:

Marco Badiani, The Innocenti’s historical archive, 2025

Interior of Charleston House, ph. Margie MacKinnon

Villa Bardini, courtesy of Maria Chiara Pozzana

Back cover:

Token: ‘Calliope, 1901’ from The Innocenti Hospital’s historical archive

Ph. Marco Badiani, 2025


Restoration Conversations magazine - Spring 2025

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Restoration Conversations magazine - Spring 2025

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