requiscat in pace

 Christopher Gibbs

mercurial aesthete

(July 29, 1938- July 28,2018)

in his rooms—Albany, London

in Tangier

photograph by Miguel Flores Vianna from Haute Bohemians

"I rather like the idea of a whole new phase of life, with fewer possessions.''-Christopher Gibbs

Schuyler Samperton: Christmas Giving

Schuyler Samperton's list of Christmas Giving this year centers around her discoveries on Instagram. In putting it together she wrote to say, "I wanted to celebrate my creative friends - either those I’ve already known or those I’ve met through Instagram."

Let it SNOW! 

Schuyler accompanied by her constant companion Tricky—an Instagram star!

1

I adore these necklaces from my friend Liseanne Frankfurt – they’re found at her Venice, CA store LFrank and are made of a selection of antique African and Indonesian beads, shells, and 18K gold beads, each strung on an adjustable leather cord. I love the idea of layering them with abandon! Find the collection here. 

2

Of course, I got this book, here, the second it came out but I love it so much I want a copy for every room in the house.” Miguel’s exquisite eye makes everything look sublime from Carolina Irving’s divine Paris apartment to Umberto Pasti and Stephan Janson’s magical home in Morocco.

3

 Gardenias. For me, they’re an unexpected alternative to the poinsettia or the amaryllis. The packaging is also gorgeous – it comes in a very glamorous, glossy black box! Send them from High Camp Supply here

4

I love the simple, elegant lines of the SAC 2 – it’s a modern classic that’s good for both men and women. It will be great for carrying our fabric samples! here

5

Each skirt that Jen Walsh of Emerge Designs here on Instagram, creates custom and handmade skirts from African or Dutch Wax printed cotton.

Jen Walsh in one of her creations.

Schuyler was in Dallas recently and wore her Walsh skirt. I saw her post on Instagram and WOW! It was an IG sensation & a hit to the JAMES Showroom in Dallas where her collection of fabrics is available. This has been an incredible year for Schuyler—launching her collection, & seeing antique fragments or patterns in her mother's scarves.

Schuyler wearing her Jen Emerge Designs skirt standing alongside a skirted table made from her Calendonia fabric, the color—Grasshopper. 

HAUTE BOHEMIANS~ MIGUEL FLORES VIANNA

I've been anxiously awaiting this book from photographer Miguel Flores Vianna. Appropriately, Vianna named it, Haute Bohemians, as he's divined with his crystal clear lens today's interiors that defy the slightest whip of trend or kitsch.

These rooms, through this wonderful book, will remain long after trends are gone and forgotten.

Miguel could be considered a happy wanderer-the book finds him traversing four continents to find Alexander Twombly's Italian farmhouse, Madison Cox's 1930's Tangier house, Carolina Irving's Paris apartment, & to the Hudson River Valley cottage of Marian McEvoy. There are twenty interiors in all with each one totally unique.

Authentic is a word batted around incessantly these days to the point that we sometimes wonder if it's lost its meaning.
Haute Bohemians renews our belief in the word.

Carolina Irivng~ Paris

Vianna an elegant, yet down to earth man, introduces each of his Haute Bohemians with brief but insightful storytelling, giving us a glimpse of the inhabitants living their bohemian lives. Cleverly, Miguel hasn't photographed any of these haute inhabitants-we see them through his prose, but more importantly through his keen and magical eye.

Madison Cox~ Tangier

Never styled-at least not so that we know-the rooms appear to be captured as if someone just walked through, the faint presence of its creator. That's no coincidence, it's all just part of Miguel's genius.

Alexander Twombly~ Italy

"...It is the geography of a life, that renders them unforgettable because they, like unforgiving mirrors, reflect who their owners are in a most personal way. They are like maps of their desires and like images of how they see themselves. All the houses in these pages are poetry." 

~MFV

Marian McEvoy~ Hudson River Valley

These interiors can be studied, put to a fine tooth comb-but can't be copied.
Inspiring us---Yes!

And should you begin your quest for finding what makes your interiors tick...Haute Bohemians gives hours of inspiration, and pages for study.
Individualism is the underlying message from Vianna. This book might just make you get up and start moving things around, pulling things out, and celebrate your creative mess.
There's an Art to it of course, and that's what makes Haute Bohemians so remarkable.

all photographs are from Miguel Flores Vianna and used with permission

thank you Vendome Press for this wonderful book!

New Old World

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me. PROUST

I asked world traveller, photographer Miguel Flores -Vianna to gather his favorite instagram photographs for little augury. The photographs he sent are varied-on instagram his followers get to live vicariously through Miguel's schooled eye.
Nothing seems to get past him-at least not the most evocative.  His blog's title -which he's less inclined to update- MFV'S NEW OLD WORLD-seems to have aptly captured his moods, and on instagram, Miguel's my star.

 Miguel's Diaries

I follow other people on instagram too, but rarely post my own photos because I've consciously limited them to my house & garden, nor do I think people are too much interested in what I eat-there's lots of that sort of stuff to be had there. But Miguel's photographs stand out from all the rest quite brilliantly- while yes-he is a noted photographer,there's such joy and consistency to his pictures! Sometimes he adds descriptions-but on instagram it seems less important-so here I've intentionally omitted any descriptions- letting his photographs, along with my selection of quotations move you through-
Proust said, Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”


I've selected my favorites from Miguel's work-while his countless instagram photographs are varied-these are in perfect accord.

The wise man goes back to the origins of ancient time. Honore de Balzac

The seeming simplicity of a masterpiece is sure proof of its grace. Chanel

If one could stretch out a hand into the strip of light that falls on the floor, one could feel its warmth. These watercolors so accurately preserve the taste of that age that you would almost say the doors and windows depicted in them have never been opened since then, and that we breathe the spirit still enclosed there like—the comparison is perhaps overworked, but it is certainly appropriate here—the scent of perfume that lingers in an ancient phial. MARIO PRAZ-The House of Life

The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit, but during its moment all that is remembered joins and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. Eudora Welty

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced. Andre Gide

The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires. William Hazlitt

Miguel's work can be found in Elle Decor, The World of Interiors, Veranda, and at T Magazine. Always he can be found HERE, and on instagram HERE.

 

 

 

 all photographs are from and used with permission by Miguel Flores-Vianna

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in a gallery with Miguel Flores-Vianna

.
One can be instructed in society, One is inspired only in solitude. Goethe

A glimpse into the photography of Miguel Flores-Vianna takes Us on a journey-to observe -oft times we are asked to come quietly. In my experience- photographers are reluctant to "explain" there work and there's a reason. The beauty of photographs-or paintings is multitudinous-
but along with their Beauty we as observers are asked to see for ourselves.

 MVF in Berlin

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, 
or a clamor of tracks in the snow. Edward Hoagland

 MVF in Sweden

The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's. Shelley

MFV in Marseilles

I haven't delved into these photographs of Miguel's with him-but  I see Beauty-and I see a reverence for Solitude. I believe we can never know ourselves without knowing Solitude-some might call it Isolation-whatever it is-it is required. An invitation to have Miguel share some of his work-or observations, it's no surprise he preferred to introduce little augury to English painter. After looking at the paintings of one Algernon Newton-I immediately see their Beauty and see what Miguel saw in them-and what he sees in his Lens.

Here is Miguel's story of  how he saw Algernon Newton.
Observe.




I have been spending a lot of time by myself in a small cottage in Sussex. Although I am an hour train ride away from Central London, the cottage feels as far away from anything urban as I could possibly imagine. Once a week I overnight in London, mainly to see friends. Early last December I was on one of those weekly visits having lunch with a chum at a restaurant off Piccadilly. I had agreed to go with her after lunch to Bond Street around the corner,to pick up a gift-although I was of two minds about it: I wanted to get back to Sussex before the commuting crowd invaded all trains bound out of town.

"C'mon, I will drive to Waterloo Station afterwards," she enticed me.

It was only after three in the afternoon, but daylight was almost gone when we left the restaurant. Walking to the shop, I got an inner confirmation that I have become a country bumpkin. I was entranced by the lights of the shops, the street Christmas decorations, all the passerbys wrapped in cashmere and furs. I simply could not believe my eyes and I was charmed! 

Once on Bond Street, because the street is so narrow, the explosion of all those visual stimulants was potentiated by the hundreds. It was as though I had never been to a big city before. I made my poor friend stop at almost every shop window, my excuse to look at the merch, but mainly to see the lights and people inside, this country bumpkin did not want to miss a beat. 
And that is how I came across Algernon Newton.

His name was on a gallery poster announcing an exhibition. 
Have you ever heard of him? I didn't have a clue who he was either, but something in that poster made me say, as we walked by, "Let's go in."

I have never heard of the gallery before either - which, now, makes me feel ashamed, later you will see why.

First things first: the name Algernon. 
I had only come across it in literature - Wilde, Fleming, but had never met or heard of a living person actually called Algernon so I was intrigued. And of course, I had never heard of Algernon Newton (1880-1968). As we climbed the stairs to the gallery's second floor to see the exhibit, I was still sparkly eyed by all the outside stimulation and was not prepared for what I was about to discover. I have always been a fan of the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864 - 1916), the master of those muted, haunted Nordic interiors. Hammershoi was the first person that came to mind when I first set my eyes on the canvases by Newton exposed in the gallery. His vision, like Hammershoi's, is of the everyday life, what we see all the time and do not notice, of the silent moment, of the anonymous. But unlike his Danish counterpart, Newton's world is far larger, they are not rooms, but cityscapes and "vedute" of the country side, but just as devoid of the noise of human life, eerily subsisting as if on air, still air. 
I was captivated.

The quiet in the gallery dimmed my Christmas fizz and I found that looking at his work was centering. I won't say more about it, I am not an expert and to continue would bring out my personal views more than I would like. But I would ask you to see what else you can find about my new friend Algernon as I think he has real talent. 

Later I did some research and I found out that the name Algernon means "one who wears a mustache", it first appears in France at the beginning of the first millennium: a lonely name I presume as, at that time, the French did not like facial hair on themselves . And how appropriate for the creator of my new favourite canvases as they are such a mirror of loneliness.

And, yes the gallery... Daniel Katz Gallery.  
I asked friends about it and everybody rhapsodized about its namesake owner, mainly a sculpture dealer, one of the majors in the world who, surprise, amongst other achievements, made Hammershoi fashionable in London. (text by Miguel FLores-Vianna)

Obvious- Newton had great admiration for Canaletto, and was often referred to as the "Canaletto of the canals." For all his personal disappointments-you must read of those on your own-his brush caresses even the most somber of scenes-not so much a lonely artist-rather an artist observing his world alone-in Solitude.

 MFV

Miguel observes his world with the same acute eye-no mere passerby-much as Canaletto and Newton did- one where man overlooks what the artist must forever contemplate.




LINKS:

Miguel FLores-Vianna Photography

MVF's New Old World

Daniel Katz Gallery
13 Old Bond Street
London W1S 4SX

The Telegraph on Algernon Newton at the Daniel Katz Gallery here
The paintings of Algernon Newton  here & here



(all works by Miguel Flores-Vianna and images of the Algernon Newton paintings courtesy of Miguel FLores-Vianna)



.

three times the charm

with

Lisa Fine   +    Charlotte Legge   +   Miguel Flores Vianna

&

DINNER at DONOHUE'S

in New York

.