Taking the Tour

There is a play by Peter Shaffer, who is most famous for Amadeus (big hair and harpsichords) and Equus, (that one with horses in which Harry Potter gets his kit off).  This play is a lot less well known.  It is called Lettice and Lovage, and it holds a special place in my heart.  Lettice Douffet is a lady of a certain age whose job is as a tour guide around a fairly dull stately home.  As the play progresses and we are witness to several of Lettice’s tours, it becomes clear that Lettice is so utterly bored by the dreariness of the true facts of the history of the house, that she is freely inventing things just to spice up her life, and entertain the crowds.

I have always been enchanted by this idea, and my partner in crime, Andrea and I, had an idea that one day we will run Lettice tours of London in which we embroider the facts freely and with great verve and vim.  It will be great.

On Sunday morning, when I was in London all alone, I happened to find a place called The Wallace Collection.  It is in Manchester Square at the back of Marylebone High Street.  It is, and I quote: ‘ a national museum in a historic London town house.’  It is free to get in and open 7 days a week.  It houses a rather eclectic collection of oil paintings, bronzes, armour and enormously scary pieces of furniture.  None of this is particularly my thing, but it was a) free, b) previously unvisited by me, and I am nosey, and c) had a lot of chairs where people of a fragile health can sit and quietly cough their lungs into a napkin whilst pretending to like ‘big art’.  I went in.

If you like majolica plates with overblown paintings of hydrocephalic youngsters on them, Dutch paintings of windmills executed in brown on brown, and big fuck off scimitars, this is the place for you.  It is stuffed to the rafters with these things.  There are famous paintings in amongst all the windmills.  There is The Laughing Cavalier, there are a few Rembrandts, quite a lot of fat cherubs which looked familiar and a several paintings by Fragonard.  More of which, later.

So, I was crawling about woefully, looking like something the cat dragged in whilst doing a lot of sitting and the occasional bit of leaning, when I caught wind of a voice drifting through the rooms.  It was the dulcet, North London tones of a very posh lady of a CERTAIN AGE.  The little snippets I was hearing led me to stagger nearer, and I caught up with her in a rather grand drawing room affair.  She was holding forth at an escritoire the size of a small bungalow, with her group of bemused and bewildered tourettes around her.

She was fantastic.  I am not saying that she was embroidering the facts, far from it, but her delivery was exceedingly eccentric, wonderfully droll and had me in absolute stitches.  She was dressed in a rather Barbara Woodhouseish style, i.e. a Sloane Ranger who has been let loose in a tweed factory.  She wore a headband.  Need I say more?

I paraphrase wildly now:

Mrs Tourguidehouse: ‘Now then my dears.  Gather round, do.  Yes. That’s it.  Now cosy up to this magnificent writing desk.  Yes. It IS rather large isn’t it?  And might I just say, frightfully, frightfully vulgar…Oh, you think it’s quite tasteful do you? Well, yes. Mmmm. Of course it wouldn’t have looked just like this back in the day you see. Oh heavens, no.  You see this inlay here?  Well it wouldn’t have been these dull colours you see before you.  No. No. No! It would have been bright as day.  Well, positively garish in fact.  Not AT ALL THE THING.  I very much suspect ladies and gentleman, that if you had been given this frankly monstrous piece of furniture that you would have had to put it in the garage it would have been so frightful.  Oh yes! Well…If any of you had a garage that big, obviously…

You see, now just pop your head in here (she rams a poor man’s head into the workings of the escritoire, sideways and with great vigour).  Can you see now? Can you? Hmmmm? Can you?  Yes.  Those would have been the colours on the outside too don’t you know?  Dreadfully vulgar.  Quite too bright…

Ahhh…ummmm…Is anyone here an expert on wood?(huge, whistling silence) No? Well, my brother is ladies and gentlemen.  He is a world expert on wood.  Although he lives in America now.  Good thing really, he’d have been a crashing bore about the whole thing, and if we’d gotten out in under three hours it would have been a miracle.  Anyway, yes. Well.  There’s lots of different types of wood in this writing desk.  He’d be able to tell you all about them.  Still, as I say, probably better he’s not here.

At this point I decided to move on as I could not keep my face straight any more.  I caught the odd sentence as I shuffled with great decrepitude about the place:

‘…I’ve been working here for twenty three years, or is it twenty two?  Maybe, twenty one.  Anyway, twenty something.  And in the beginning I used to have to get my mother to come over with me and bring me sandwiches at lunch time.  A marvellous woman, ninety three years old you know…’

etc.

Eventually I caught up with them properly in a room housing their most famous painting, Fragonard’s The Swing, which if you click on the link will take you to a picture of it.  If you can’t be bothered, it was painted in 1767 and shows a young, aristocratic woman, dressed to the nines in a pink frothy confection, being pushed on a swing by a bloke who looks a bit cheesed off.

Here is Mrs Tourguidehouse’s take on things:

‘Yes! Well! Ladies and gentlemen, doooo gather round and admire our most well known picture, Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’.  It was commissioned by X (I can’t remember what she said), and was considered a rather risque commission.  Shocking in fact dear ladies and gentlemen, positively shocking.  It was of his mistress you see.  Oh yes, indeed.  Not only that my dears, but the man pushing her on the swing is her husband, a vicar no less.  Yes! X didn’t like the man or the church and basically decided to commission this painting, not only to show everyone how lovely his mistress was, but how little he cared for the church or marriage.  Shocking isn’t it?  He offered the painting job to Y (I forget) who turned him down on the grounds that the subject was far too immoral for him, but he suggested that Monsieur Fragonard, who had all the morals and scruples of an alley cat would do the job.  And he did, ladies and gentlemen.  He did!  And a lovely job he did of it too.

Now then.  As you may know, in those days ladies did not wear knickers.  The eighteenth century ladies and gentlemen, was a knicker free zone.  And now when you look at the angle the painting was painted from, and where that naughty Fragonard would have stood, and what an eyeful he would have had, you can see why he might have had quite a jolly time painting the picture.  I’m sure he was concentrating more on seeing the knickerless state of the beautiful lady than anything else.  Now isn’t that the most marvellous fun?

And it is.

When I am well, I am going back to take the full tour, but only on a day when that lady leads the party.  And I shall donate at least twenty pounds, because that’s as good a performance as any I’ve seen on a stage in the last few years.  Absolutely first class.

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