When the mosaic floors at the National Gallery designed by Boris Anrep were completed in 1952 there was much excitement and extensive press coverage. A formal gathering at the Gallery was initially thought a fitting celebration but in the end it was left to Anrep’s friend Maud Russell to throw a party. The invitation list is an inventory of the crème de la crème of 1950’s society; T.S. Elliot, Somerset Maugham, Augustus John, Ben Nicholson, Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward were to rub shoulders with Winston Churchill and the Sitwells.
Catering was provided by ‘Searcey Tansley and Co. Ltd. Highest class caterers’, supper for 100 guests at 28/6d a head, 58 bottles of Perrier Jouet, 11 bottles of beer and 300 Turkish and Virginian cigarettes. Hire of ash trays for cigarette ends 7/- 6d.
Acknowledgements from grateful attendees seem to indicate things went well, “Thank you very much indeed for a wonderful party. I have seldom seen so many people so happy for so long. No one wanted to go away” writes Duncan Grant
Vanessa Bell, replying on the back of a Rubens postcard is equally effusive, “I must thank you for such a perfect party last night, absolutely delightful in every way. I did enjoy it – especially the moment when we talked of the parties given long ago in South Audley Street”.
Maud Russell kept many of these papers herself, as an art patron and society hostess she had a wide acquaintance, but she was also given letters and cuttings by Anrep ‘for the Museum’ as he referred to the scrapbook.
A series of letters and notes from Lytton Strachey provide an interesting insight into his friendship with Anrep, “You were not de trop I was probably looking rather glum that evening because I wasn’t very well”.
Later, when Dora Carrington is watching her great friend Strachey slowly die, even an offer of help from Anrep seems to be more than she can bear, “you will understand how melancholy it is to sit by the ghost of a person one loves day after day”.
Maud Russell and Boris Anrep clearly took pleasure in this scrapbook, a little surprising perhaps given the company they routinely kept, but newspaper cuttings, personal letters, business correspondence, drawings and photographs were all assiduously glued-in.
Diane Spaul Boris Anrep’s scrapbook NAL 38041800856171 ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London
