AT the time of writing one can only hope, but, this Friday, the rescheduled Petworth Park Antiques and Fine Art Fair is due to open for a three-day run to Sunday, September 13, in the grounds of the great West Sussex house —although, before travelling, visitors are advised to check online at www.petworthparkfair. com for the latest updates.
As the organiser Ingrid Nilson says, there are some changes to the usual layout, with a one-way system, allowances for social distancing and a track-and-trace system. Face coverings will be mandatory in the marquee, and some queuing will be inevitable. However: ‘The catering has been brought outside in front of the marquee, so visitors can relax, if they wish, while awaiting their turn to enter the fair.’
There will be about 50 exhibitors, with the usual wide range of specialities. Among those who can be relied upon for the less usual is the King’s Road dealer Hatchwell Antiques. Here, there are two offerings from Denmark: at £14,000, one of the designer Poul Henningsen’s remarkable pianos—an upright with an elm and leather case by Andreas Christensen Flygler of Copenhagen dating from 1931—and, with a price of £22,000, a pair of historically interesting swivel guns—bronze falconet one-pounder cannons (Fig 1).
Following the British bombardment of Copenhagen and the destruction of much of the Danish fleet in 1807, the Gunboat War, or Kanonbådskrigen, continued until 1814 between Danish privateers and British shipping in the Baltic. As Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) romanticised it in The Supper at Elsinore, one of her neo-Rococo Seven Gothic Tales, ‘there were cannons singing once more in the Danish fairways’. Among the heroic Danish captains and their boats, Dinesen places her hero Morten De Coninck and his ‘Fortuna II of Elsinore with a crew of 12 and four swivel guns’.
Denne historien er fra September 09, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 09, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
