Oswald Birley’s painting-saturated diary written in the winter months of his year abroad in the Mediterranean which records his obsession with Velasquez who would go on to inspire the artist’s enormously successful practice, as well as offering an eye witness account of the Friday ceremonial of the penultimate Ottoman Sultan.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Small quarto manuscript book bound in half roan over marbled boards - rubbed but sound. All edges marbled; marbled endpapers. At one end of the MS is written ‘Diary 1905 Jan 10-’ followed by 19 pages of diary entries, January 10th-Jan 25th. At the other end is written ‘Oswald Birley 1905’ on the second flyleaf and as-if inadvertently Birley picks up in media res on January 26th - at least one page stub precedes this section. Birley continues the narrative over 38 pages, ending with increasingly sketchy entries up to February 28th when he had succumbed to his Velasquez obsession in Madrid - and lost interest in his diary. We can find no record of any institutional holdings of Birley’s diaries. A small collection of archival material is held at the Frick Museum.
NARRATIVE: Birley’s journey began in London, travelling on board the Princess Alice to Genoa, arriving Jan 18th, 1905, after being held at sea overnight during a storm, waking to find ‘the Italian Riviera all covered with white’. Birley toured Genoa’s palazzi but ‘the best pictures are in the Palazzo Pallavicini: the best represented Van Dyk, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto: there is also a very fine Paul Veronese in the Andrea Doria Palazzo’, continuing via Naples and Pompei, thence to Rome by train, visiting the Villa Borghese where ‘the great thing of course being Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love’ and called on ‘Sir E[dwin] Egerton our Ambassador’.
In Rome Birley made a special visit ‘to see the Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria - it’s in a room by itself and is a marvellous arrangement of colour in different tones of red in the background, cap, chair and clothes with only his grey collar a warm white skirt to set if off & the head is beautifully modelled’ (Jan 24). On the way to Greece Birley visited the Empress of Austria’s villa on Corfu and in Athens ‘the Acropolis... so wonderful: everything of Pentelion marble but which has become almost golden with age, colour must be far finer now than it was when it was quite white’. Birley returned to the Acropolis two days later ‘and sketched another bas-relief’, making one more visit to photograph the scene.
Continuing to Istanbul (staying at the Pera Palace hotel) Birley found himself slightly overwhelmed by a performance of the ‘howling dervishes’ but having gained permission from the British envoy was fascinated by viewing ‘the Sultan’s procession which he makes every Friday to his mosque there. There is a sort of terrace reserved for foreigners and one has an excellent view of everything... all the generals, dignitaries in their war paint on the road... Everything very well stage managed... The Sultan appeared about 12.30 and went down to the mosque. He looks more than 62 - and has a most evil looking face - pale unhealthy face - a long beaky nose and he has dyed his beard a reddish colour.’ Birley’s European apotheosis came when he arrived in Madrid (Feb 23, 1905) instantly visiting the Prado where ‘the Velasquez are quite marvellous: much finer than anything I had ever imagined. There are about 35 collected in one large Room with the Surrender of Breda at the end and by itself. In a small room leading out of it Las Meninas which is simply marvellous. Absolutely alive. Had no difficulty in getting permission to copy and settled on one of the dwarfs’, an experience Birley repeats until the diary ends: ‘Working all day in the Prado’... Spent all day drawing in the Velasquez Copy.. Working all day in the Prado... El Prado with the Henrys’ - Birley had arrived where he needed to be and here the diary ends.
Born in 1880 and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, this diary dates from the year after he had begun studying at the Academie Julian in Paris and St John’s Wood School of Art. His career-defining debut solo exhibition in London had to wait until 1919 and his reputation made he would go on to paint Mahatma Gandhi, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill in an oeuvre that combines ‘aesthetic and psychological realism’ (Philip Mould). Birley kept the copies of Velasquez that he made while in Madrid and they can be seen in photographs from the 1920s of his studio in St John’s Wood. Thanks to Philip Mould’s Power & Beauty: the Art of Oswald Birley,
