Steve_Bamlett_blog

Leonardo da Vinci (about 1499-1500) The Burlington House Cartoon.Charcoal (and wash?) heightened with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas, 141.5 x 104.6 cm. Purchased with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organised by the Art Fund, 1962. NG6337. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG6337

There were a group of us who lived at Commonwealth House in Cartwright Garden just between Bloomsbury and Kings Cross. Commonwealth House was for boys only – though as far as we were concerned it was for men (the fantasies of seventeen-year-olds are simple). We considered certain people to be in the know.

Sam Fogg, a student then at the Courtauld Institutes, was a decided favourite as the expert on art history and what to like about art, but also about magic mushrooms and painting under their influence, and – of course – second-hand books, in which he was already a runner (an apprentice form of bookseller who got rare books from sources where they were not recognised as valuable and into the hands of people who know they are). I recently came across a photograph of Sam as he is now, which shows his current fascination with medieval art, of which he is a writer for the connoisseur collector, and, of course, of fabulous books.

I recognise that lithe man and smile still, though I have not seen or heard from him since. In an interview with Sheila Markham he said:

‘After I left college, I survived for a while as a painter, living on social security which I supplemented by running secondhand art books up and down Portobello Road. Eventually, I got a stall under the bridge. It took another eighteen months to realise that I was lonely and miserable as a painter and not very good at it, whereas I really enjoyed running books and did it well.’

Sam chose to become a full-time bookseller and continued on his own for another couple of years before hitting a bad patch and losing books in a disastrous flood. Next came his partnership with Sims Reed, which he broke off five years ago to go back to running his own business.

‘I enjoy being my own man. It’s really due to my inability to work well with others. I know I’m not a good boss, as I don’t get the best out of people easily. If I do, it’s because of them and not me.’

..,

‘I’ll trust my instinct if I haven’t the time or ability to trust anything else. Having said that, I’m very lazy about doing homework. I have often wondered about becoming an academic, but I’m not sure I have the patience or talent for truly useful research. Also, I like earning more money than I would as an academic.

‘I would quite like to be at the top, but this is not colossally important. I love the things I deal in and want to sell the best and that probably coincides with being top.

‘Actually, I give most energy and attention in my life at the moment to my family. Six days out of seven, I make sure I see my children morning and evening. I know I can become obsessed with work, but my family comes first and I wouldn’t be interested in a life in which that wasn’t the case. I know this addiction to work is very unhealthy for me, and if I wasn’t careful, I would be working all the time.’

I recognize the man here: the activities, the shy modesty of a greatly talented person, and even some of the phraseology he used as a student. I recall his love of making money by strange means of buying and selling. I liked his paintings at the time, as I remember them when others were writing epic poems after the manner of Byron whilst I had no confidence in myself as a maker of art, or much else, at the time, but, most of all, I recognise the love of the detail that denoted the mastery of masters of painting and drawing.

When I first came to London as a raw working class boy, sadly culturally deficient, Sam was an admired example of a public school boy, his father an accountant for the then patrician and cultured Tory Party – not the bag of rats in a sack it is now. Sam shaped my tastes in visual art, of which I previously had none. When he first mentioned a trip to the Leonardo cartoon, I thought he was taking us to the pictures to see a spoof of the artist played by Donald Duck, for cartoons were just that to me – not even then (it was my first year) did my understanding extend to even the political cartoons of Gillray:

Sam always encouraged groups of us on excursions – teaching us to ‘truckle’ as we went (those innocent days) shouting out as we kicked our legs out: “We’ll truckle down the road ….”. Reader, I did it too.

It was easy to gain admission then to the National Gallery, even amidst IRA bomb scares, which occurred regularly. You walked up the grand stairs to the main entrance. Turning left, the Burlington House Cartoon, which was in a small room to the left again. The huge cartoon was on its own where small groups could sit and admire it. We did. Sam talked us through it in ways I had never before experienced. It was my first introduction to evoked spaces wherein the beauty of form lurked in a large drawing – in both its surface configurations and in its illusions of fictive depth, solidity, and volume. Art would have been closed to me otherwise.

However, I won’t try to reproduce what Sam said or even give my present readings of this cartoon. Indeed, all I want to say is that this was ‘my favourite cartoon’. Now, I dislike the word ‘favourite’ as a means of assessment, especially of an Old Master cartoon. This one, like others, was meant to prefigure later paintings, except sometimes in Leonardo, those paintings were never made. In the case of Michelangelo, the cartoons by him were studies [disegno] for paintings by other painters than he, and overshadow the paintings done by those others from them. Those latter cartoons featured heavily in the last British Museum retrospective of Michelangelo drawings (see my blog at this link).

That was a nice memory. I bet Sam Fogg has no memory of me at all – not the sam foggiest!

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxx