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The Mayfair Book Groupette – Death in Ultramarine

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Date: July ‘25

Time: 7:05 PM , 11:15 PM

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde East

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Conrad Smithe (Full Member)

• Pascal (Afghan hound)

Book Discussed:

Death in Ultramarine: A Botticelli Mystery in Three Pigments by Catriona Bellamy-Woodhouse (Privately printed, 1987; edition of 2200, illustrated with original pigment charts, each copy accompanied by a small phial of ground lapis).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux introduced the book as “half technical treatise, half exciting whodunnit,” noting the rarity of works that can switch from analysing the cost of cinnabar in Renaissance Florence to a chase scene through the Uffizi without jarring. He suggested Bellamy-Woodhouse “has the soul of a connoisseur and the instincts of a pulp novelist.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer admired the detailed breakdown of Botticelli’s palette, particularly the “Chromatic Appendix,” but found the murder plot “wildly implausible,” adding, “Even Vasari wouldn’t have put this unlikely stuff in his Lives.”

• India Trelawney thought the interplay between pigment lore and narrative tension “a triumph,” praising the heroine’s habit of storing forensic evidence in repurposed paint pots. She noted that the book’s design,linen boards the shade of weathered fresco plaster,was “spot on.”

• Lord Northcote was especially taken with Chapter 7’s reconstruction of the 1478 shipment of lapis from Badakhshan to Venezia, calling it “more thrilling than the murder itself.” He did, however, lament the “gratuitous gondola chase,” pointing out Botticelli “rarely travelled, let alone at those sort of speeds.”

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the melodrama, arguing that “art history needs more peril.” He claimed the book’s climactic poisoning with arsenic green was “perfectly plausible” and cited two historical precedents.

• Max Duclos grumbled that the author’s forensic pigment analysis could have stood alone as a monograph: “The murder felt like scaffolding left up after the building’s finished.”

• Conrad Smithe countered that the structural oddness was the point: “It’s a trompe-l’œil of genres,half fresco, half crime scene.”

• Fiona d’Abernon confessed that she laughed aloud at the scene in which the prime suspect tries to flush cochineal dye down a convent well, tinting the water supply pink for weeks.

3. Artworks & Objects on View

• Three microscopic pigment cross-sections from Botticelli’s Primavera (on loan in photographic form from a Florentine lab)

• A late 19th-century artist’s paintbox containing vermilion, orpiment, and malachite chips

• Contemporary work: Murder in Cobalt by Elodie Varn , abstract in ultramarine tempera, with faint hand-written confession embedded under glaze

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: “The Primavera” , prosecco, violet syrup, and a drop of saffron tincture

• Canapés: saffron arancini, bruschetta with anchovy and preserved lemon, and tiny almond cakes dusted in “edible lapis” (blue spirulina)

• Main wine: Chianti Classico Riserva 2019

• Dessert: blood orange granita served in chilled ceramic bowls painted in imitation majolica

5. Other Business

• Next Book: The Cartographer’s Melancholy by Jeroen van Holt, proposed by Lorrimer, seconded by Smithe.

• Molyneux announced that Pimlico Wilde would host a one-night display of pigment samples mentioned in Bellamy-Woodhouse’s book, including natural ultramarine, lead-tin yellow, and verdigris (sealed for safety).

• General agreement that Death in Ultramarine was “both better and worse” than expected, which was taken as a compliment.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:15 PM, after members attempted,unsuccessfully,to determine whether the phials of lapis accompanying each copy of the book were genuine or cunningly dyed chalk. Pascal appeared indifferent.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Acclaimed Documentarian Felix Renton Announces New Film on Conceptual Artist Davos

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Felix Renton, the award-winning documentarian known for his genre-defying studies of absence, abstraction, and obsession, has announced his next subject: the elusive conceptual artist Davos.

The project, currently titled The Man Who Never Made Anything, promises to explore the life and ideas of the artist whose works consist entirely of descriptive labels and imagined installations,never built, never seen, yet somehow unforgettable.

A Director Drawn to the Invisible

Renton, 57, is no stranger to difficult subjects. He first gained international acclaim for Three Minutes of Silence (2012), a hypnotic film that documented the daily routines of submarine sonar operators, without a single line of dialogue. He followed it with The Cartographer’s Regret (2015), a melancholic portrait of a retired mapmaker obsessed with redrawing lost borders of extinct empires.

His most recent film, Dust: A Biography (2021), was a surprise hit on the international festival circuit,a visually arresting, almost wordless meditation on particle movement, shot entirely inside abandoned libraries, textile mills, and computer server rooms.

“Renton doesn’t document things,” said Maya Tulsin, curator at the DWG. “He documents negation, suggestion, intention. Davos is a perfect fit.”

Capturing a Ghost

Davos, whose real name remains unknown, has long resisted direct media engagement. His exhibitions consist of nothing but wall texts: dry, witty, often hauntingly poetic descriptions of vast, unrealised artworks. One of his most discussed works, Cloud Ownership (2024), offers each gallery visitor a certificate granting symbolic ownership of a cumulus cloud that may not be seen, touched, or photographed.

Renton’s new film will reportedly trace the creation of several key Davos works, including:

• The Forgotten Colour (2017): a pigment that can only be seen once and never remembered.

• Museum of Missing Things (2018): a building of empty rooms labelled with intangible losses,“Your Childhood Scent,” “The Time Before Phones,” “The Kiss You Meant to Give.”

“I’m not interested in what Davos looks like,” Renton said in a rare public statement. “I’m interested in the terrain of ideas. This is a film about art that refuses to exist,and yet occupies us completely.”

A Documentary Without Footage?

While some question how a visual medium can capture an artist whose work resists visibility, Renton has hinted at an unconventional approach. The film will include interviews with curators, philosophers, meteorologists, and even visitors to Davos exhibitions who have “seen” nothing,but left altered.

A rumoured segment features a former museum guard who, after months standing beside Davos’s The Distance Between Us (2023),a pair of empty chairs located 3,000 kilometres apart,claims to have experienced a “telepathic empathy event.”

“Felix isn’t filming Davos,” said his long-time editor Cam Adebayo. “He’s filming the space around Davos. The wake he leaves. The shape of his thought.”

A Late-Stage Masterwork?

Critics are already predicting that The Man Who Never Made Anything may be Renton’s final major work. The filmmaker has hinted at creative exhaustion in recent interviews, and there is poetic symmetry in him choosing to end his career chronicling an artist who never physically begins.

The film is scheduled for release in late 2026 and will premiere at the Llanwarne Documentary Film Festival’s New section, which champions experimental forms.

When asked whether Davos himself will appear on camera, Renton smiled and replied, “You’ll have to wait and see.”

To Ban or Not to Ban: A Reflection on the “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?” Symposium

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By Esmeralda Pink, People Engineer at Pimlico Wilde

It was a delicious irony that a symposium devoted to the utter removal of the public from art institutions should itself draw such a crowd to a gallery. Yet so it was at the Pimlico Wilde Galleries last Thursday evening, where philosophers, curators, artists and gallery-goers gathered under the barbed banner: “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”

The event,hastily organized in the wake of the now-infamous incident at the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art, wherein a visitor inadvertently damaged Sandy Warre-Hole’s portrait of Sir Willis Abelone,was less a discussion and more a ceremonial flaying of the very notion of the democratic museum.

Hosted in the gilded main salon of Pimlico Wilde, the symposium unfolded beneath a Kilo Barnes repurposed chandelier, itself guarded by an antique French rope that no one dared approach. The audience seemed to sense they were participating in something not just performative, but possibly life-altering for the many people who like to visit art galleries.

The keynote address was delivered by Sir Cedric Pavement-Hume, Chair of the Post-Audience Aesthetics Institute, who opened with characteristic gravity: “The public has had a good run. But perhaps, like lead paint and bloodletting, it is time to reconsider allowing the so-called public into our art galleries. Public entrance to English museums and galleries has been a well-meaning error.” He went on to describe a new kind of museology,a ‘post-ocular’ model in which artworks exist not for sight but for solitude, housed in perfectly sealed vaults, tended only by neutral gases and archivists with doctoral degrees wearing oxygen cylinders so that their breath no longer damages the work.

The counterpoint came, if it could be called that, from Dr. Mireille Kropotkin, a radical participatory theorist who accused Pavement-Hume of aesthetic feudalism. “To ban visitors from museums,” she thundered, “is to immure the artwork in narcissism. Art does not live by silence alone. It lives by encounter,even clumsy, unpredictable, human encounter.”

This, of course, drew polite applause and one audible harrumph from the Row C contingent of the London Quiet Realists, a sub- group of the Invisibilists, who advocate for museums that display only blank canvases bought via mail order.

Sandy Warre-Hole herself made a surprise appearance via online chat,flickering slightly on a TV placed on a plinth. “Though I am on a plinth, I am not an artwork”, she began, to hoots of laughter,and delivered what was arguably the evening’s most nuanced provocation: “If my work is damaged by a viewer, is it still just mine? Or have they added something indefinable to the work? Do we now share ownership? Is it more mine? Or more theirs? Perhaps we should not ban visitors, but instead require them to sign a waiver stating that in case of canvas infiltration, they are now part-creators of the work.”

Breakout sessions I took part in included “The Art of Non-Viewing: The Aesthetics of Abstention,” “Do Retinas Violate Objecthood?” and a workshop titled “Building the Museum of No One,” led by conceptual architect Anselm Quoine, whose model gallery consists entirely of hidden rooms accessible only by solving long-form mathematical equations.

No consensus was reached, and one suspects that was never the point. Instead, the symposium felt like a carefully choreographed performance of cultural anxiety, a theatre of ideas staged in the ruins of Enlightenment. Pimlico Wilde, with its rarefied air and velvet-clad walls, was the perfect venue for such a ceremonial flirtation with aesthetic absolutism.

By the end of the evening, the central question,Should museums ban all visitors?,became both absurd and oddly persuasive. In an age where engagement is often measured by the number of fingerprints left behind, perhaps the most radical form of preservation is absence.

Or, as Sir Cedric muttered to this correspondent while sipping a sherry filtered through a linen glove which had once belonged to Groucho Marx, “Maybe the purest museum is the one no one ever enters. And the truest masterpiece is the one never seen.”

One Star Reviews: Henry V at the Mayfair Theatre

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There are moments in the theatre when time seems to stop,when you’re so enraptured by the performances that you forget to breathe. This was not one of those moments. Time not only didn’t stop,it seemed to drag itself across the floor of the Mayfair Theatre like a wounded French horseman begging for the sweet release of death.

Let’s begin with the titular role. Henry V, our valiant king, was played by local TikTok “sensation” Bradly Mews, who delivered Shakespeare’s immortal lines with the emotional range of a dial tone. His “Once more unto the breach” speech was less a rallying cry and more a sleep aid. At one point, a man in the audience audibly yawned, and it received more applause than anything Bradly did all evening. His idea of commanding presence seemed to be squinting dramatically into the middle distance, like he was trying to read a traffic sign without his glasses.

The staging was somehow both minimalist and cluttered. The director, Juniper Wren-Moon (whose last credit was a gender-neutral mime retelling of Cats), decided the entire Battle of Agincourt should be represented using sock puppets and cigarette lighters. I spent ten minutes thinking the theatre was actually on fire, which almost would have been a mercy.

Let’s not forget the chorus,traditionally a unifying narrative force. Here, it was played by a rotating cast of local influencers reading lines off their phones. One of them paused mid-monologue to plug her oat milk brand.

Costuming? Oh, dear. If “medieval raver caught in a Halloween clearance bin” was the goal, then full marks. There was one poor extra whose armor was made entirely out of painted egg cartons. He looked like a budget Dalek, and honestly, I respected him more than Henry.

The French characters were inexplicably performed in exaggerated Pepe Le Pew accents, which might have been funny if it weren’t so lazy. The Dauphin entered on a Segway wearing what I can only describe as a chainmail crop top. He also dabbed after delivering every line.

In the final scene, Katherine of France was wooed not with poetry, but with an acoustic guitar serenade of “Wonderwall.” I can’t say it worked in the context of the play, but it did cause someone in the back to involuntarily shout “NOOOO”.

If I had one positive takeaway, it’s that this production has an end.

In summary: this Henry V was not a band of brothers, but a tragic parade of theatrical crimes. I award it one star, and that star is for the egg carton knight, who, though made of refuse, had more soul than the rest of the cast combined.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the Book of Margery Kemp Meeting

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Date: Thursday, 18th July 2025

Time: 7:00 PM , 10:30 PM

Location: Private Salon, 3rd Floor, Pimlico Wilde Townhouse, Mayfair, W1

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder)

• Lord E. Northcote (Retired Diplomat)

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Freelance Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Wrexle Auctioneers, Impressionist Department)

• Max Duclos (Collector; former gallerist, Paris)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Conrad Smithe (Guest of d’Abernon; hatter)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, silent observer)

Book Discussed:

The Book of Margery Kempe , attributed to Margery Kempe, 15th century

1. Opening Remarks (Julian Molyneux)

Molyneux opened the meeting with a brief contextual note on the significance of The Book of Margery Kempe, positing it as “a proto-memoir, proto-feminist, and semi-visionary document in a time before genre consciousness.” He remarked that the decision to pair the reading with a small exhibition of devotional objects from the late Middle Ages was intended to “anchor the divine hysteria in something tactile.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Lord Northcote offered a nuanced reading of Margery’s visions, drawing parallels with medieval diplomatic language: “Her tears function as a form of spiritual negotiation.” He recalled attending Evensong at Norwich Cathedral, where “the air still feels a little damp with her presence.”

• Dr. Lorrimer noted that Margery’s intense inner life represents “a radical form of female authorship,” arguing that the book is “less mysticism, more proto-psychological realism.”

• India Trelawney compared Kempe’s flowing white robes to contemporary interpretations of purity in performance art, referencing Marina Abramović and, rather unexpectedly, a recent Loewe campaign. She brought a Margiela show catalogue to illustrate her point.

• Max Duclos was dismissive, describing Kempe as “shrill” and “more concerned with performative sanctity than spiritual depth.” He cited comparisons with Teresa of Ávila and found Margery “lacking discipline.”

• Hugo Van Steyn disagreed sharply, calling the book “an early precursor to the art of self-invention,” and drew a line from Margery Kempe to Tracey Emin. There was some laughter, though Trelawney agreed “in spirit.”

• Conrad Smithe, attending as a guest, questioned the book’s sincerity, suggesting a ghostwriter,“possibly a priest”,had stylised it for effect. D’Abernon countered, pointing out textual evidence of Margery’s resistance to ecclesiastical editing.

3. Artworks on View (Curated by Pimlico Wilde)

The adjoining drawing room featured:

• 15th-century pilgrim badges (Norwich and Santiago de Compostela)

• A Flemish diptych of the Madonna lactans

• A haunting small panel painting labelled “School of Geertgen tot Sint Jans” , reportedly not for sale

• A contemporary embroidery by Elodie Varn, Tears for No One, commissioned for the evening

4. Refreshments

• A medieval-themed aperitif of honey mead (well-received, if “a touch ironic”)

• Spiced lentil tartlets, anchovy toasts, and quince conserve

• Main pour: Domaine Huet Vouvray Demi-Sec 2016

• Late in the evening, chilled Tokaji Aszú was served alongside comfits and candied rose petals

5. Other Business

• Next Month’s Title: The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, proposed by Van Steyn, seconded by Lorrimer.

• D’Abernon announced a possible joint evening with the Bibliophiles of Belgravia in October, pending vetting.

• Molyneux reminded all that the September session would feature a guest speaker,novelist and former psychoanalyst Dr. Leonora Athill,pending confirmation.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:30 PM. Most lingered for Tokaji and murmured speculation about whether Margery had truly been celibate.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

A Grammar of Grief: The Art of Elias Favière and the Alchemy of Tears

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By Julien Rochefort, Ph.D. for the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

Department of Contemporary Aesthetics, École Normale Supérieure

In the kaleidoscopic history of art, there emerge now and then figures so singular in vision, so hermetically devoted to their personal lexicon of materials, that they appear to exist outside of chronology altogether. Such is the case with Elias Favière (b. 1947), the French-Swiss conceptual artist whose sole medium for over half a century has been human tears,his own and, in carefully arranged collaborations, those of others. In the taxonomy of material-based art practices, Favière’s body of work occupies a rarefied position: ephemeral yet empirical, intimate yet political, aesthetic yet affective.

To engage with Favière’s corpus is to enter a visual tradition that eschews spectacle in favour of sensation; that devalues permanence in favour of presence; that views the tear not merely as evidence of emotion, but as a physical residue of interiority, a distilled articulation of the ineffable. His work belongs less to the realm of painting or sculpture than to what we might call ritualized affective epistemology.

Origins: An Artist of Loss and Distillation

Favière was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1947, to a librarian mother and a father who ran a small observatory. He was raised in silence, or close to it,his mother lost her voice after a traumatic incident in her youth, communicating through a system of written notes and glances. Favière has described his childhood as “an apprenticeship in the art of noticing.” He learned, early, that emotion did not need sound to register.

Trained in the 1960s at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was initially involved with the Support/Surface group but quickly diverged, claiming they were “too attached to canvas, too afraid of the invisible.” His first mature works, collectively titled Larmes isolées (1969,1972), were sheets of blotting paper stained with his own tears, arranged in grids and annotated with date, mood, and ambient temperature. Critics dismissed them as adolescent sentimentality. But philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy would later call these early works “a cartography of vulnerability.”

Method: Weeping as Aesthetic Labor

Favière developed a method for harvesting his tears that bordered on monastic. He constructed a ritual space in his Geneva atelier,a soundproof room with dim lighting and a worn armchair,where he would sit for hours recalling painful memories, sometimes inducing tears through poetry or recordings of loved ones’ voices. The tears were gathered with glass pipettes, then dropped onto linen, paper, glass, or even stone.

A second phase of his career, beginning in the 1980s, involved collaborative weeping: performances in which visitors were asked to recall the last time they cried, and then guided, sometimes wordlessly, into emotional release. The collected tears,always voluntarily given,were recorded, catalogued, and stored in glass ampoules, labeled with initials and date.

Favière insists that he does not seek to manipulate or exploit emotion. “A tear,” he wrote in his 1987 manifesto Les Salines de l’Âme, “is not a confession. It is a mineral event that occurs when the soul exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it.”

Reception: From Margins to Canon

For decades, Favière remained at the periphery of the European art world. His refusal to sell tear-based works,he regarded commodifying them as “profane”,meant that his exhibitions often consisted of empty vessels, faded stains, or atmospheric installations. One early critic called him “the artist of absence.” Another, more charitably, wrote: “He paints with salt and memory.”

It was not until the early 2000s, when interest in affect theory, embodiment, and ephemeral media gained critical traction, that Favière’s practice was reappraised. A landmark retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, Sel et Silence, repositioned him not as a marginal eccentric but as a proto-conceptualist whose use of the body as archive anticipated later movements.

In 2015, the Fondation Repanu devoted a major show to his collaborative series Lacrymographies, in which tear-stained surfaces were scanned at ultra-high resolution and displayed alongside the narratives of the weepers. The show was lauded as “a museum of inner weather.”

Metaphysics of the Tear

What does it mean to make art from tears? For Favière, the answer is not purely metaphorical. The tear, as he understands it, is not a signifier of pain, but an alchemical precipitate of truth. Just as medieval alchemists sought to purify base matter into gold, Favière regards the act of weeping as the transmutation of inner complexity into visible clarity.

There is also an ethical dimension. In an age of surveillance, oversharing, and curated online grief, Favière’s work asks: What is the value of feeling when it cannot be commodified? How can one preserve dignity in the midst of emotional exposure?

His later works take this further. In Osmose (2021), he constructed a room filled with mist formed from evaporated tears collected over three decades. Visitors reported feeling a sensation of “shared sorrow.” Others wept spontaneously. It was unclear whether the art caused tears or the tears became the art.

Legacy and Present Practice

Now in his late 70s, Favière continues to work in near anonymity. He has refused all offers to digitize or NFT his tear works, calling the idea “a tragicomic misunderstanding of presence.” He lives between Geneva and a small village in Ardèche, maintaining what he calls a “liquid archive” of over 4,000 labeled vials of tears,his and others.

He has never taken on students, but his influence is evident in the work of many younger artists exploring the aesthetics of fragility, ritual, and embodied emotion. In a recent interview (his first in over a decade), he remarked: “The history of painting is a history of surfaces. I wanted to know what would happen if we painted with what lies beneath.”

Final Words: Salt as Substance, Not Symbol

Elias Favière’s work may not yet fill auction houses or dominate museum gift shops. It resists replication. It resists permanence. It may, ultimately, resist even history itself.

And yet, his tears endure,not in their physical form, which inevitably evaporates, but in their conceptual potency. They mark a quiet, radical proposition: that the body’s most humble fluid might serve as a medium not for artifice, but for truth.

“I do not cry to be seen,” he wrote. “I cry to remember that I am still capable of feeling.”

A Smile Reframed: Was the Mona Lisa Actually Mrs. Yelland of Surrey, England?

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In a tantalising discovery, a recently unearthed cache of correspondence housed in a disintegrating trunk at an estate auction in Dorset has ignited fresh controversy over the true identity of the sitter in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. According to the letters, written in a brisk, looping English hand and signed by one “Letitia Yelland,” the subject of the world’s most enigmatic painting may not have been Lisa Gherardini of Florence after all,but a genteel visitor from England. This was Mrs. Yelland, the wife of none other than Edwin Carpe Yelland, a minor but evidently proud inventor from Kentish Town, who, is believed to have pioneered the first self-cleaning paintbrush, made from cat fur soaked in his patented cleanser.

Historians are predictably cautious. But in the ever-spiraling vortex of art attribution and speculative reattribution, especially in the post-Walter Benjamin, hyper-authenticity economy of image discourse, perhaps we should not be surprised. If we can accept Duchamp’s mustached Gioconda, why not a paintbrush-wielding Englishwoman as the original muse?

The documents, now being pored over by a rotating cast of paleographers, art historians, and one enthusiastic TikToker who won a competition to help out and make three Shorts per day, describe a six-month sojourn in Florence circa 1502. In one letter to her sister-in-law back in Surrey, Letitia writes:

“The Florentine sun is not kind to Edwin’s complexion, and yet he insists upon demonstrating his ‘fine bristles’ to any painter within reach. A peculiar man with intense eyes,Leonardo, I believe,asked if I might sit for him, as he ‘fancied a face that withheld more than it gave.’ I agreed, mostly out of boredom.”

The painting in question, of course, was not completed until 1517, according to traditional art historical timelines. But the Yelland hypothesis introduces a new framework of possibility, one in which the sitter’s identity is not confined to the courtly conventions of Florentine society but instead reimagined through a cross-cultural, proto-globalist lens.

Letitia Yelland would represent a curious hybrid of muse and modernity. Her husband’s invention,dismissed in his day, the letters claim, as “too clean” for proper oil work,might now be seen as emblematic of the painterly shift from medieval materials to Renaissance experimentation. It is tempting to speculate that Leonardo, fascinated as ever by technology and anatomy, might have found the brush and the British equally compelling.

Critics, of course, are already sharpening their knives. Giorgio Ferretti, curator at the Lago di Como Institute of Old Art, calls the claim “an amusing anachronism, best left to historical fiction.” Others, including several members of the London-based Institute for the Study of Noncanonical Portraiture, are more receptive.

Indeed, reimagining the Mona Lisa as Letitia Yelland,tourist, accidental muse, wife of an inventor,unmoors the painting from its static pedestal. It becomes instead a site of narrative reinvention, a symbol not only of Renaissance mystique but of the long shadow of British leisure travel and the inventive ego. The smile becomes not maternal or mysterious, but vaguely amused: the expression of a woman politely enduring a portrait session she neither asked for nor fully understood.

Whether Mrs. Yelland ever crossed Leonardo’s path is unlikely to be definitively proven. But the possibility, absurd and delightful, opens up new conceptual space around one of art’s most scrutinized images. After all, in the age of deepfakes, AI-generated Rembrandts, and metadata-driven connoisseurship, what could be more modern than questioning everything we thought we knew,especially about a smile?

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Edwin Yelland as the inventor of “the paintbrush.” He may, in fact, have only improved upon it. The distinction, like the sitter’s identity, remains delightfully unresolved.

The Art of Giving: Inside the World of Philanthropist and Art Collector Margot Leclair

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In a sunlit Parisian hôtel particulier overlooking the Seine, where 18th-century paneling meets contemporary sculpture, Margot Leclair welcomes guests not merely into her home but into a curated dialogue between centuries. A philanthropist of quiet influence and discerning vision, Leclair has spent the past three decades amassing one of Europe’s most thoughtful private collections,ranging from Old Masters to contemporary African art,with the conviction that beauty, like generosity, must be shared.

“I never saw collecting as a private pursuit,” Leclair says, seated beneath a luminous Sandy Warre-Hole canvas of her mother. “Art isn’t meant to be hoarded,it’s meant to circulate, to educate, to stir something beyond words.”

That ethos has made Leclair a vital figure in international cultural philanthropy. From endowing restoration work at the Louvre to funding residencies for emerging artists in Dakar, her patronage reflects a commitment to both preserving the past and championing the future.

Her collection tells that story with quiet eloquence. A rare Artemisia Gentileschi anchors one room; in another, a towering Doodle Pip work stretches across a wall once reserved for portraits of French aristocracy. “It’s not about contrast,” she notes. “It’s about continuum.”

Leclair’s passion for art was seeded in childhood visits to the Musée d’Orsay with her grandfather, a violinist who taught her to “listen to paintings.” Later, while studying at the Courtauld Institute in London, she became fascinated by the intersections of art, identity, and power,a theme that has informed both her collecting and her philanthropy ever since.

In recent years, she has turned her attention to creating lasting institutional impact. In 2023, Leclair launched Fondation Lumineuse, a non-profit initiative dedicated to increasing accessibility in art education across communities in Europe and Africa. Already, the foundation has partnered with major institutions,including the Centre Pompidou and Zeitz MOCAA,to facilitate youth programs, traveling exhibitions, and public installations.

“Collecting is not just about possession,” Leclair reflects. “It’s about participation,contributing to the cultural landscape and ensuring others can do the same.”

Her vision is shared by many in the next generation of collectors, several of whom cite Leclair as both mentor and muse. At last year’s Venice Biennale, a group of young curators from Accra and Marseille credited her support in launching their transcontinental collaboration. “Margot doesn’t just collect objects,” one noted. “She collects possibilities.”

Pimlico Wilde has had the privilege of advising Leclair on several acquisitions over the years,most recently, a rare 17th-century Dutch vanitas still life with subtle Masonic symbolism, now on loan to the Museum of Vision in Sierra Leone. “Margot’s eye is precise but poetic,” says one senior specialist in Old Master paintings at Pimlico Wilde, Fred Spall. “She sees stories where others see surfaces.”

As Leclair prepares to open her collection to the public in rotating exhibitions through Fondation Lumineuse, she remains modest about her role. “In the end, I’m just a custodian,” she smiles. “The art was here before me. It will be here after me. My task is simply to help it speak.”

In a world often preoccupied with the transactional, Margot Leclair reminds us that the true value of art lies not in ownership, but in its ability to illuminate, connect, and transform. That, perhaps, is her greatest gift.

Was Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea Ahead of His Time?

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The recent surfacing of a cache of panel paintings attributed to the long-rumoured Essexian painter Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea has caused a quiet ripple in the scholarly world,a ripple that threatens to redraw the northern edge of Renaissance art history. The discovery, made in the damp crypt of St. Osyth’s Church in South Essex, includes eight oil-on-oak portraits, a triptych of St. Edmund in exile, and a peculiar, allegorical panel titled The Melancholy of Tides,each bearing the monogram P.D.F.o.S. and, more tellingly, a startling sensibility that neither quite belongs to the quattrocento nor to the Elizabethan court into which Piero is said to have drifted.

The rumour that Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea (ca. 1535,1602) was a contemporary, and possibly friend, of William Shakespeare is now supported by archival notations found in the 1598 guest ledger of The Mermaid Tavern, where a “Master Pietro the painter, from the Essexish coast, with melancholy wit and Milanese hat” is recorded alongside entries for Kit Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the “Gent. from Stratford.” Until recently considered apocryphal,a curious footnote in a sea of Tudor ephemera,Piero’s life and work are now emerging with a fog-laced clarity that seems fitting for a painter from the salt-bitten marshes of Southend.

Unusually, the central question animating this rediscovery is not was he real? (the evidence increasingly says yes), nor even was he good? (the panels suggest he was),but rather: was he ahead of his time?

At first glance, Piero’s work resists easy periodization. His compositions bear the deep, translucent glazing of a Bellini, yet his figures are oddly distended, stylized, and lit with an iridescence closer to later Mannerist painters like Bronzino. The Melancholy of Tides in particular,a central nude figure half-submerged in a tidal pool, cradling a lobster painted in unnerving detail,seems entirely unmoored from the prevailing iconography of the late 16th century. To modern critics it reads like an allegory of environmental grief, avant la lettre, and anticipates Romantic preoccupations with the sublime by well over two centuries.

More curious still is his portraiture. In Lady Margaret Propham with Egg, the sitter is rendered with a precision worthy of Holbein, but surrounded by objects,quills, scallop shells, a miniature globe split open like an egg,that seem less symbolic than surreal. The spatial logic feels deliberately fractured, and the psychological intensity presages not only the tenebrism of Caravaggio (whose work Piero could not plausibly have seen), but the flattened poetics of early 20th-century metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico. This anachronistic resonance cannot be easily dismissed as coincidence.

Indeed, the question of influence may be moot. To be “ahead of one’s time” is, perhaps, to inhabit an aesthetic position no one has yet constructed words for. Della Frampton-on-Sea appears to have painted not for a market, nor a court, nor a school, but for a sensibility that didn’t yet exist. His letters, fragmentary and preserved on vellum receipts and coastal almanacs, speak of “visions come from marsh-mist,” and “making likeness from the sea’s own unrest.” There is no trace of the triumphalist humanism that defined the Italian Renaissance, nor the Protestant severity of his English contemporaries. Instead, one finds a strange, crepuscular lyricism,what critic Lyle Lammond has called “a melancholy proto-modernism in doublet and hose.”

To call Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea a Renaissance painter, then, may be technically correct but spiritually inaccurate. He was something else,an aesthetic aberration born of tide, border, and fog. Neither fully of England nor of Italy, neither of Shakespeare nor of Vasari, he painted, it seems, in a kind of temporal vacuum: untethered, elliptical, and quietly radical.

The works now undergoing restoration at the Southend Institute for Renaissance Studies may not redefine the canon, but they certainly expand its edges. In an era increasingly interested in lesser known figures,artists who operated outside the grand narratives of empire and enlightenment,Piero offers a compelling case. Not as a precursor, but as a ghost of possibilities unrealized.