Simon Blow

Thursday

Simon Blow

My family’s better days

From our UK edition

The Sargent painting reproduced opposite suggests the wealth and comfort that these three sisters, Mary, Madeline and Pamela, were born to. Their father, Percy Wyndham, was the younger son of Lord Leconfield of Petworth, Sussex. He was his father’s favourite, and was left by him as much of the immense Wyndham riches as was possible. With his inheritance Percy bought a 4,000-acre estate in Wiltshire, romantically named Clouds, where he built a vast country house, designed by Philip Webb. Pamela, the youngest sister (and my great-grandmother), is seated on the sofa, flanked by her two siblings.

Thursday

Simon Blow

Why Rubens should go

From our UK edition

The Blow family has had its disasters. There has been madness, murder and suicides. But before those mishaps there was a good man, my grandfather Detmar Blow. In the 1900s he was at his height as a young architect. His practice was large. Larger, I was told by Sir Edwin Lutyens’s daughter, Mary, than that of her father. Blow designed for the aristocracy and the newly enriched tycoon. But early on he was a travelling architect doing repair work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — vide his repairs to the ancient manor house in Tintagel, Cornwall, known as The Old Post Office. His mentors had been John Ruskin and William Morris. He had driven and decorated with vine leaves the funeral cart that took Morris to his last resting place at Kelmscott.