The print was for sale for about £30 and I bought one. There is a chapter on roundabouts – ‘Demountable Baroque’ – and the first of its plates is of taxidermists preparing a record-breaking Tunny fish for preservation. This became my favourite of all her books. Unknown to us the gallery had been selling over the telephone and everything that we wanted had a red dot, but £50 bought me ‘Photographer’s background,’ her little sketch from The Unsophisticated Arts. When the Katherine House Gallery held a sale of her studio contents in 1999 we got up at dawn to be first when the doors opened. She had painted a mysterious landscape dotted with temples and follies enshrining birds, including a penguin, but I took no photographs and that is all I remember about it. I found the damp gothic gazebo at Marston Hall in Lincolnshire with her mural inside, invented for the antiquarian Squarson the Rev. I hung about in Crickhowell (the little town in the Usk valley where she owned a cottage with Clifford Barry whom she married and lived with intermittently), noticing what she must have seen and liked there. I wonder whether she drew this very beautiful SHUT sign for the pottery on the opposite corner of the street, where the shop door makes a mirror for the house where she lived? Barbara Jones’s house at 2 Well Walk in Hampstead, a solid five storeys in red brick.
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