Vikenti nilin biography of albert

Wind, weather and time has reduced Daniel Day’s gravestone to an almost featureless slab of lichen and moss encrusted rock.  All trace of his name has been eroded away but if you look carefully enough you can just about make out the letters AIRLO, all that remains of the word Fairlop. Day was buried here in Barking church yard in 1767. Because he had developed a horror of horse drawn transport after being thrown from his carriage, even in death he refused equine assistance; he was brought by barge from Wapping, along the Thames and up Barking Creek and then carried the short distance to St Margaret’s by six journeymen block and pump makers. His coffin was made from a gigantic branch of the Fairlop Oak, a tree he had made famous by founding Fairlop Fair.

The Fairlop Oak was an ancient and monstrously huge tree; “at three feet from the ground it measured 36 feet in girth, it was divided into eleven vast arms, and overspread an area of 300 feet in circuit. This pride of the forest, which for so many years overshadowed with its verdant foliage the thousands who crowded under it, and the antiquity of which the tradition of the country traces to about the ninth century - this gigantic wonder gave shelter the first Friday in July the well-known Fairlop-fair.”  In the 1720’s Daniel Day of Wapping would ride out to the small estate he owned in Fairlop on the first Friday of July to collect his rents. According to G Woodgate in a letter to the editor of East London Observer in 1867 he “invited many of his friends to a bean feast and bacon, which he doled out to them from the hollow of the tree. Much bacon and several sacks were consumed this way. In the course of a few years other parties came, these increasing, booths were erected, and various articles brought to sale.”  The Fair became a great East End

Second session in a six week course at the National Gallery on Renaissance painting which focused on how paintings were produced and how science can help us find this out. The first lecture was given by Gill Hart, Head of Adult Learning at the gallery and looked at under drawings and their role. There was nice emphasis on Raphael, linking to the second talk, and examining different pictures and infra red scans of them to look at Raphael’s technique. I loved the fact the pounced cartoon for the galleries Allegory still exists. The second talk was by Ashok Roy, Head of Collections at the gallery, who talked about the work he had done in the galleries laboratory when he was head of science to help to authenticate Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” by analysing the paint. It was interesting to hear that he had been unable to take samples from the picture as the gallery did not own it at the time and had to use others methods instead. I was also interested to hear when different pigme...