TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

How ironic that, during all the years Diana Mosley spent locked up in Holloway as a danger to the nation, her portrait remained on public display in the National Gallery. All the paintings had gone, and Dame Myra Hess was playing the piano for the people in those desolate rooms.

It happened because Boris Anrep, in creating his witty mosaics for the floor of the grand staircase, decided to feature the faces of his friends in “The Awakening of the Muses.’ Hardly surprisingly they all agreed to be muses. Among them were Greta Garbo, Virginia Woolf and Lydia Lopokova, star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. As far as I know they are still there, reclining gracefully on the first landing. And there among them is the portrait of Diana, cemented into the floor.

I like to think of other ways we’re tied to those mosaics, if perhaps less concrete ones.

We could claim that our Lisle sisters inspired the work; after all, they’d created a famous grotto to the muses at Crux Easton, long before Boris, and they’d also used portraits of themselves as the muses. Their grotto was a shrine for tourists for more than a hundred years, celebrated in poems by Pope. And then Diana, the muse from the National Gallery, turns up here, quite by chance, to find her shrine shrunk to just a name on the map: Grotto Copse.

Then there’s George Bissill, our Ashmansworth artist: George and Boris were both in London during the 1920s. George was then a pavement artist, struggling for recognition. When Boris saw those artists outside the National Gallery, he said it made him determined to get his own work inside the Gallery, in the warm. This he did, spectacularly. Odds are that George was one of those left outside when Boris walked in.

Margot Fonteyn is on the staircase too, also in mosaic. We remember her up here because she lent her house in Knightsbridge to Jackie du Pré for seven years, when Jackie could no longer cope in her own place. On Jackie’s first official appearance in her wheelchair, it was Margot who wheeled her into the Crush Bar at Covent Garden.

I went to see Stubbs’ “Whistlejacket” once. He wasn’t there. “He’s out on loan,” they said. Thanks to Boris, you’ll find Diana and Margot are always there.

 

 

Agricola, May 2026