Laura Freeman | The Spectator columnists & writers

‘Sides to middle’, that’s the cry. When your foot goes through the flat sheet in the night, there’s only one thing for it: scissors down the centre, then sew it edge to edge. Good as new – for as long as your stitches hold up. If you’ve paid for Egyptian cotton, you cannot cut your linen into dusters the minute the thread count wears thin. Besides, call it eco-activism, call it penny--pinching, mending things is fun. From time to time, when my husband is washing up, a plate will crumble like a biscuit in his hands. Seeing his ‘it wasn’t me’ expression, I’ll tell him that the plate, glued and glued again, was beyond salvation. Then I’ll glue it together again. My mum saves her shards believing I have some magic Bostik touch.

Spectator Out Loud

Jonathan Miller, Cindy Yu and Laura Freeman

21 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Jonathan Miller, Cindy Yu and Laura Freeman

21 min listen

On this week's episode, Jonathan Miller says that whoever wins France's election on Sunday, the country is going to the dogs. (01:00) After, Cindy Yu says that China's online censors are struggling to suppress critics of the Shanghai lockdown. (07:47) And, to finish, Laura Freeman reviews a Walt Disney exhibition at the Wallace Collection. (12:06)Entries for this year's Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Disney’s rococo roots

Extensive research went into the writing of this piece. First, I lay on the sofa watching Disney’s Cinderella. Then, Beauty and the Beast. Then, because I’m assiduous about these things, Frozen. The singalong version. I wish I could tell you that the sofa was a rococo number with ormolu mounts and a pink satin seat, but that would upholster the truth. My excuse – who needs one? – was the Wallace Collection’s delightful exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. It’s not often that I leave a show smiling, humming and near enough twirling my way through the West End. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. What a clever and original exhibition this is: an ingenious pairing of the Wallace’s 18th-century collections with rococo flourishes from Disney’s classic films.

The cult of the extortionate ‘English’ kitchen

A house around the corner is on its fourth kitchen in a decade. Every two or three years, the house changes hands, the pristine kitchen comes out and a newer, pristiner kitchen goes in. They are always white, they are always shiny, and when I peer through the basement windows there is nothing in the way of signs of life. I reckon I can predict the next kitchen. Think homespun, think rustic, think scullery maid in mobcap and pinny. What the rich want now is a plain old Plain English kitchen. Hand-crafted cabinets, antiqued brass, Delft tiles with authentic craquelure. Starting at £34,000 and going up to… well, how much have you got? Don’t you dare put Dulux on your artisan doors. Plain English has its own bespoke paint chart.

The Edition

The politics of war crimes

42 min listen

The Edition

The politics of war crimes

42 min listen

The art of the Christmas card

It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It is the first week of December and I still haven’t started my cards. My friend Charlotte was at it in October. She signed up for a lino-cutting class, cut holly boughs and robin redbreasts and printed her own cards. She sent me photos of the fruits (berries?) of her labours and very merry they were, too. Usually, I am a Charlotte. By November, I have made cards, addressed envelopes, applied thumbs to 80 stamps. But after an illness in the autumn, I’m feeling as uncreative as a turkey. Could I cheat and send emails with a pious little homily about how, for the sake of the planet, I’m forgoing paper cards this year? But if the stalwart Charlottes (and formerly Lauras) of the world don’t keep it up, who will? The first commercial Christmas card was produced in Britain in 1843, two years after the creation of the penny post.

Why do we kiss under mistletoe?

Give us a snog. Pucker up at the Christmas party. Kiss me quick at the Nativity play. Will you be snogging this season? Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for Work, Pensions and Office Passion, has spoken. ‘I don’t think there should be much snogging under the mistletoe.’ she told Robert Peston on ITV. Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health, weighed in: ‘I’ll certainly be kissing my wife under the mistletoe — it’s a Javid family tradition.’ Not just a Javid tradition. Mistletoe is a pale green shrub which grows on the branches of broad-leaved trees. It is hemiparasitic, which means that it draws water and mineral nutrients, but not synthesised foods, from its host. Shakespeare thought it more dismal than cheerful.

The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but doesn’t bark like a coffee-table book. On first flick through, I found the pictures desultory, even depressing. I was expecting more of a Condé Nast vibe. Glossy and glossier. On second approach, taking text and pictures together, it became a more interesting beast. Prodger is a former head of photography at the National Portrait Gallery and the founding Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

The joy of a cluttered museum

On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s held the Royal Warrant from 1841 until 2012, when it lost the crown due to ‘changing tastes’ in the royal household. I blame Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits. Inside the museum is a display of Carr’s covetable vintage biscuit tins and, on a satin hanger, the brown velvet waistcoat worn by Jonathan Dodgson Carr himself. The fabric is printed with ears of wheat and the tiny slogan ‘Free’. Carr, a supporter of the repeal of the Corn Laws, used to wear his waistcoat to public meetings.

Absurd and amusing, solemn and scholarly: Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House reviewed

An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets, having spent a fortune on the atrium, the concert hall, the galleries, spent pennies on the bogs. The smallest rooms at Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House are among the loveliest loos in London with windows on to the garden and a ‘Jencksiana’ mirror over the sink. This was the Baltimore-born writer, critic and landscape designer’s take on the ‘Serliana’ window devised by the mannerist architect Sebastiano Serlio and it recurs throughout this mad and marvellous post-modern house. Jencks died in 2019 leaving his house on Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park as a stucco memorial. From the pavement, there isn’t much to distinguish No.

The daring young man who gave his name to the leotard

Jules Léotard was blessed in his name. It might have been quite different had he been called, say, Jules Droupé. As it was, his family name was lithe, elongated, taut. It was a name with stretch. Léotard was born in Toulouse in 1838, the son of a gymnastics teacher. The young Jules might have become a lawyer. He passed his legal exams, but twisting words wasn’t enough. He wanted to be twisting, turning, falling, flying. At 18, he began to practise with trapeze bars, ropes and rings over a swimming pool. He joined the Cirque Napoléon, and on 12 November 1859 performed its first flying trapeze routine. He became the subject of a popular song of 1867, ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’, by the British lyricist and singer George Leybourne.

The National Trust has lost the language of architecture

Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is. But my complaint isn’t bullying or slavery or LGBTQ+ery or even chocolate Easter eggery. It is more single and specific: the National Trust does not speak architecture. Or if it does, it’s keeping shtum. Since the great May reopening, I’ve dragged my husband around half a dozen National Trust properties, landscapes and gardens (he hardly ever protests, always pays for tea). We’ve done Stourhead, Oxburgh, Ickworth, Lacock, Cobham Woods and Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor. In the gap between lockdowns last year, we did Sissinghurst and Knole. I cannot fault the car parks, the rhododendrons or the second-hand bookshop in the Oxburgh potting shed.

Glorious: Bernardo Bellotto at the National Gallery reviewed

Rich and strange: Eileen Agar at Whitechapel Gallery reviewed

Heads turn, strangers gawp, matrons tut or look in envy. A man doffs his bowler hat knowing when he is outdone. The model walking imperturbably along a London street is Eileen Agar, her headwear the ‘Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse’, encrusted with crustaceans, spangled with starfish. If the Little Mermaid,in her leggy period, had been invited to Ascot, she might have worn something like this. A British Pathé newsreel of Agar wearing the same hat plays on a loop in the Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. (You can also see it on YouTube.) About 50 seconds in you catch her trying not to smile. ‘Life’s meaning is lost without the spirit of play,’ Agar wrote in one of her notebooks.

The art of politics: what ministers hang on their walls

On the walls of the Chancellor’s office hangs a print of Eric Ravilious’s lithograph ‘Working Controls while Submerged’ (1941). Two engineers in blue overalls heave the levers of a submarine. A third slumps asleep on a bench. An image, perhaps, of the ship of state, several hundred feet underwater, but by no means sunk yet. We might picture Rishi Sunak in the Treasury control room, changing the gears, working the pumps, keeping the country bumping along even at the bottom of the economic ocean. Or perhaps Sunak looks at his four framed screen-prints by the artist Justine Smith — ‘Pound’, ‘Euro’, ‘Dollar’, ‘Yen’ — and thinks: if only it were so easy just to print money. Maybe he turns to the portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone (after Millais) and asks: ‘Well, chaps, what would you do?’ Eric Ravilious’s ‘Working controls while submerged’ (1941).

What does your wedding reading say about you?

Arts journalism, like crime, doesn’t pay. So I’ve been thinking of getting a side hustle. ‘You know about books and stuff,’ say friends who are getting married. ‘What should we have for our readings?’ If I can advise friends, why not strangers? By the laws of wedding economics — pick a number and add some noughts — I could make a marital mint. We’d start with a couple’s questionnaire. No good my offering Rainer Maria Rilke if they’re more of a Purple Ronnie pair. Then a consultation over Zoom, before proposing something old, something new, something sonnet, something haiku. It is, tentatively, wedding season again. Boris and Carrie kicked us off last weekend. I wonder what they went for? Catullus for him, Rachel Carson for her? When my husband Andy and I were married two years ago, we worried more about the readings than just about anything else.

The Edition

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

The Edition

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

Bricks and pieces: the blight of London’s fake facades

‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.’ So Augustus is supposed to have said. What would an emperor of London say today? ‘I found the capital a city of bricks and left her a city of rubble’? London bricks are falling down. Across the capital, brick facades are coming off in chunks. Like the Cadbury chocolate Flake, this is the crumbliest, flakiest brickwork. I was all for the new brick city. I’m a brickwork bore. Away with glass, away with steel! Build back better, build back brick. When I saw brick buildings going up in new developments I cheered. I will bang on to anyone who will listen (most don’t) about fitness of materials, our vernacular heritage and the handsome nobility of London stock brick.

The bizarre art of Scottie Wilson deserves to be better known

The Edition

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

26 min listen

The Edition

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

26 min listen

Why should art have ever been considered a male preserve?

‘I’m a lady,’ insists the improbable damozel in David Walliams’s Little Britain sketch. I’m a lady, I kept thinking, reading these two books. More: I’m a lady art historian. Oughtn’t I to like books by other lady art historians about lady artists and ladies in art. Why don’t I? Why so out of sync with the sisterhood? Start with the positive. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette follows an interesting, original line: ‘If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face and, by extension, her place in the world.’ Higgie, editor-at-large at frieze magazine and the host of the (excellent, enjoyable) art history podcast Bow Down, considers the lives and ambitions of a series of women artists in the light of the self-portraits they painted.

Spectator Out Loud

Carlo Rovelli, David Abulafia and Laura Freeman

26 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Carlo Rovelli, David Abulafia and Laura Freeman

26 min listen

On this episode, writer and physicist Carlo Rovelli, ponder time and space in a world were the meaning of both has shifted. (01:00) Then, David Abulafia talks about the need for conservatives at universities. (07:29) Finally, Laura Freeman gets us ready for easter with the stories and the art depicting St Veronica. (15:27)

The first-century saint who went viral

Earlier this year, Saint Veronica went viral. A tweet observing that every painting of the saint made her look like a merchandise seller at the Crucifixion was liked more than 35,000 times and retweeted more than 6,700 times. Not bad for a first-century saint. I disagree slightly. Veronica doesn’t strike me so much as a proto T-shirt tout, more as an early Christian super-fan. ‘I touched the hem of his garment.’ ‘Yeah? Well, I literally mopped the sweat from his brow.’ The Sudarium of Saint Veronica is one of art history’s more peculiar subjects. While some saints and their attributes are easy to confuse (Tau? Sword? Saw? Tongs?), if there’s a lady in a painting holding up a square of linen scrim printed with the face of Christ, there’s no doubt she’s St V.

The stifling cult of self-care

Baby, it’s cold outside. It’s dark. It’s January. It’s Lockdown III. There’s only one thing for it: stay home, snuggle up, save lives. Cocoon yourself in cashmere, treat yourself to silk pyjamas, invest in a lambswool throw. Lay the fire, warm the cocoa, watch Love Actually for the 30th time. Practise self-care. Be sure to put you first. You’ve heard of safe spaces and The Coddling of the American Mind. Well, this is the safe space as interiors trend, coddling as lifestyle choice. Call it the blanket cult. If the message of wellness was ‘My body is a temple and I shall make it strong with avocado, green juice and yoga’, then the message of self-care is ‘My body is a china doll, and must be wrapped in cotton wool and sheepskin slippers’.

The Edition

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

36 min listen

The Edition

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

36 min listen

Paint in the bloodstream: The Death of Francis Bacon, by Max Porter, reviewed

Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon is a book about painting to the end. It is about art, rags and the restless artist’s eye. Porter, the author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny, has called it ‘my attempt to write as painting, not about it’. In this he brilliantly succeeds. The writing is matted and clotted and thickly impastoed. Each page has the ridge and texture of paint; the paper is like scabby canvas, the words are like drying oil. There is a sticky, tacky quality, as if the author has only just stopped and stood back to look at his work. The book feels unfinished and that seems right. Bacon painted till the end of his life, but not to the end of his creative energy.

Every page of this astonishingly beautiful ode to the citrus is a treat

There’s an episode of Yes Minister called ‘Equal Opportunities’. Minister Jim Hacker is under pressure to recruit more women to the civil service. The hunt is on for female mandarins. ‘Ah,’ says principal private secretary Bernard. ‘Sort of… satsumas?’ At this time of year, I can’t help thinking of Bernard as I hover in the Co-op over nets of tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas and ‘easy peelers’, whatever they are. ’Tis the season for citrus. For oranges at the bottom of stockings, for Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning, for smoked salmon blinis with slices of lemon, for Milanese panettone with candied parings of peel, and for J.C. Volkamer’s The Book of Citrus Fruits, an astonishingly beautiful reprinting by art publishers Taschen, too huge to fit down the chimney.

Will our churches ever reopen?

There used to be a joke, repeated by English tourists in deserted piazzas, that the Italian for church (chiesa) and for closed (chiusa) were almost the same. Whatever the orari on the door, you were always several hours out. And so you would consult your guidebook, admire in miniature the Ghirlandaio, the Lippi, the really very special fresco — and go for a consoling ice cream. The joke was told with the smug Anglo-Saxon certainty that our churches were open to all-comers from before breakfast until after vespers. Not so now. And not during the months we weren’t in lockdown — for all the bishops are protesting about the new one. But even before the latest lockdown, it was hard to find an open church. Over the summer, my husband and I managed walking weekends in five counties.