Around The Hague, 2006. Part 1

Margreet, being summoned to a conference in The Hague gave me a chance to tag along and to amuse myself while she listened to power point presentations.

So, with our car, we slid through the Channel Tunnel and drove over the flat and barely-interesting countryside of France, to bear left after Belgium to reach The Hague, in Holland.

It was arranged through her work that we would stay in a five star hotel. I expected a lot - probably never having slept in such a grand establishment before. But the furnishings of our room were dun-coloured, there was no chair and mirror for ladies to do their make-up, it was impossible to spit into the basin when cleaning our teeth because a shelf intervened, and the brown-tinted window glass allowed only brown-tinted light to reach the room. It was not a particularly pleasant place.

Before leaving London I packed my usual writing notebooks and, this time, a packet of plain postcards and a handful of crayons. Now, with Margreet at work, I was free to roam.

The Hague is a duller place by far than Amsterdam. But it does have the huge advantage of being near to Scheveningen by the seaside, and Delft inland. Both are easily accessible by the number 1 tram, and paid for by folding and inserting into the tram's red box one ticket from a 'strippenkaart' per zone. The red box stamps the date and time, allowing the passenger to travel through the chosen zone(s) for the following hour.

But, first of all, when in The Hague, I walk through the smart shopping streets to find my favourite venue - the Panorama Mesdag.

In 1881 Hendrik Willem Mesdag, with his wife and helpers, was commissioned to paint a 360 degree panorama from a sanddune by the sea in Scheveningen.

Although the panorama was painted where it now stands in The Hague, Mesdag stood beneath a sort of bandstand on his sanddune, poked his head into a cylinder of, I suppose mica, and on the inside traced the landscape that he saw all around. This gave him the correct dimensions.

It was a major undertaking, the panorama canvas being 14 meters high and a 120 meters around.

To view it, you enter through a rather dreary and ordinary museum building, pass through grey galleries, enter a dark passage, and climb some wooden steps into the middle of a bandstand perched on a fake "dune" of real sand.

And there, all around you, with the "dune" marrying imperceptively with the painted scene, is exactly what you would have seen there in 1881. You are there, really there.

Outside light reaches the scene through unseen glass above the bandstand. So, as scudding clouds pass overhead, the changing light from the sky passes over the painted scene.

Below are fishing smacks lying on the sand, floating in the foreshore water, or out at sea. Along the coast on sanddunes to the south is a church, lighthouse and domed building. Inland, beyond more sand, is The Hague in the distance. A canal abruptly ends beneath the dunes. The small town, with a pavilion of delight belonging to a Prince of Orange, leads the eye back to the shore again, where ladies dip their toes into the water from bathing machines, and a troop of cavalry, with gun carriages, ride over the sands for exercise.

This panorama in The Hague gave its citizens a chance to be beside the seaside in days of poverty and poor transport.

It was one of some 300 panoramas around the world, most to be abandoned with the advent of photography. This one is not only one of the very few remaining (the others often having a religious or military scene), but remains in the very spot where it was painted.

To give you an example how "real" the scene is, I saw a viewer take out his binoculars to look at something in the distance, when "the distance" was only fourteen paces away from him on canvas.

Out came my packet of blank postcards so that I could record people as they stood to be taken in by this magical illusion.

In later blogs I'll tell you about Scheveningen (the real one this time), a sordid sexshop, Delft, a redlight district, and Dutch food.

potted history

Without prejudice

A blog, however useful a medium to replace letter-writing and as a vehicle for parting with ideas, has come at just the wrong time for me. Let me explain why through a potted history.

I suppose from schooldays and before I have been a painter.

From the wartime years of flying in the RAF (obtaining my wings at the very end of the war) to recuperating from TB, to medical student, art student, theatre design student, and then on to designing in the theatre (given up as I was not gay or had influence), I now, at last, became a full-time painter.

After one-man exhibitions in London's Cork Street, Bond Street, Japan and elsewhere, with pieces of sculpture creeping into my shows to make my point, I was becoming, and became, a full-time sculptor - working in wood, sometimes very large pieces of it.

Then I broke my wrist in a car accident, could no longer sculpt, and turned to writing.

This I did for some 27 years writing over 700 articles for newpapers and magazines, and 14 books - on subjects as diverse as gardening, vine-growing and vinification, travel, the London Docks, cooking and wine, etc. In my computer (really word processor) is an on-going 250.000 words autobiography and a third (130.000 words) cookery book.

Now it so happens that I admire the paintings of Matthew Smith. I had a lovely example that went with my ex-wife. So I wanted another (wife and painting). A pastel came up for sale at Christie's salerooms. My new and lovely wife and I decided to go halves and put in a bid for it. A buyer paid four times more than our offer.

I was so upset that I decided to use pastel colour to create four tributes to Matthew Smith, using my own modest skills and Matthew Smith's favourite still-life objects. And to make sure they would never be mistaken for the genuine article, boldly writing on them "Homage to Matthew Smith". Because of this I had suddenly become a painter once more (after the break of 27 years).

Whereas as a writer I would have welcomed the blog and had time for it, I now have the taste for painting. And, as a man, I am really only able to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Already, in 2006, I have "painted" in pastel, eight A1 startlingly colourful geometric views of my garden. But I will add to the blog when I feel like it. And the cycle has come around once more to confirm that I really am a painter, with a two foot by four foot painting that I did on the spot of Chelsea Football Ground in 1954, coming up for sale at Christie's salerooms, South Kensington, on 7th December 2006 at 10.30 am. It is described in their catalogue as:

The Shed, Chelsea Football Ground
signed with initials 'P.R.' (lower right), signed again and inscribed 'NEIGHBOURS ON SATURDAYS/JAMES PAGE-ROBERTS (on a label attached to the reverse) and with studio stamp (on the reverse) oil on canvas laid down on board 24 x 48 in. (60.9 x 121.9 cm).
Painted in 1954.
Exhibited:
London, New Burlington Galleries, Daily Express Young Artists' Exhibition, April - May 1955, as 'Neighbours on Saturdays'.

The present work was painted in the season which led to Chelsea's first major trophy success - the league championship. The early 1930s saw the construction of the southern part of the ground with a roof that covered around a fifth of the stand. This was eventually to be known as the "Shed End" - the home of Chelsea's most loyal and vocal supporters.

Page-Roberts, an artist who, among others, frequently exhibited at The Redfern Gallery and Leicester Galleries in the 1950s painted this work on the terraces.

Anthony Eyton, R.A. comments, 'This work is an historic document and a brilliantly conceived picture. An essential piece of Chelsea Football Club History' (private correspondence, 14th October 2006).