Casson’s best-known building remains the Elephant House at London Zoo. There is his banqueting work (Royal Academy, Buckingham Palace) and his bread-and-butter work (Sainsbury’s in Chichester, Waitrose’s Beaconsfield store.) A request comes in for a doll’s house. He accepts commissions for postage stamps and for fantasy stage-flats for the opera at Glyndebourne. The only thing better than a morning’s drawing was a morning with partners and colleagues arguing around the office drawing boards. From home, to Burlington House, to his architectural practice in a Kensington mews. Seeing Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre, Casson, a former journalist and witty critic, reports: ‘As usual get lost in the foyer, where the staircases follow you about in a funny way.’ Casson, who at 5ft 4inches would draw his own caricature waving from the top of a towering plinth, often sketched from the bottom of a staircase looking up. The panelling, the too-tall doors, the tiny handles spring instantly to life.Īt Phaestos in Greece, he captures the broad-bottomed tourists, in sunhats and slacks, trudging a flight of ruined steps. Waiting for his annual audience with Her Majesty the Queen, he spots a footman, bending at the tail-coated waist to squint through a keyhole to assess royal progress. So as not to be noticed, he often draws from behind. He has his recurring favourites: the corridor loiterer, the gallery handyman in cross-backed suspenders, the stoutish matron in an up-to-Town hat. He draws with a giddy, infectious interest in people (and pets) as they move through buildings. The Hounslow Public Library is as worthy a subject as Somerset House.Īt Hartlebury Castle, home of the Bishop of Worcester, Casson draws the sweep of the staircase in the Great Hall, and at its foot, a corgi, tail turned to the artist. His snapshot sketches of courtyards, interiors and streets are amused and unprecious. In his preface, he notes that ‘a diary is seldom literature.’ In his case, the diary is something different: a work of art. Are they more or less assiduous? Do they ever skip or miss a day? In 1980, Casson – strictly: Sir Hugh – was 70 and entering his fourth year as President of the Royal Academy. I know the date because I wrote it in my diary. On Friday 2 January 2016, I bought a second-hand copy of Hugh Casson’s Diary at Brixton Bookmongers.
#HAND MADE DRAWING IN MINI DIARY FULL#
Funny how guilty one feels about feeling buoyant.’ On Tuesday 23 December: ‘Spent all afternoon drawing my local parish church for a charity auction.’ His diary is full of such entries, though not perhaps as full as Casson would have wished. ‘A couple of short meetings,’ he wrote in his diary for Tuesday 22 January 1980, ‘the rest of the day at the drawing board.’ On Wednesday 23 January: ‘Miraculously, the same as yesterday.’ On Sunday 8 June: ‘Lovely day to myself at the drawing board. At prize judgings, he catches his fellow panellists poring over drawings, debating, deciding, perhaps dozing off, weary of the whole gold, silver and bronze medal business.Ībove all, Casson drew because to draw was a pleasure. A quick scribble in the corner, a lightning sketch in the margin. Sitting in dull selection meetings or on duller committees, Casson scratched the inky itch.
Turning the pages of his swift-nib studies, you share his delight in every ogee, every onion dome, every oriel window, you feel the spill and thrill of brush and sponge. On finer days, he lifted the lid on his watercolour box. A squiggled cornice, a rushed-job portico, a façade abandoned because it had started to rain. He drew to keep his eyes keen and fingers nimble. Wherever he went, whatever he saw, he drew. He did it in Goa, Mykonos and at Loughborough University. He did in in the Opera House, in Westminster Abbey and at the Buckingham Palace Garden Party.
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