Patronage at Piers Court Mr. Evelyn Waugh, who lately intervened
in The Times correspondence about the difficulties confronting young artists with the suggestion that patrons still had a part to play in this context, has set an example which might well be followed by those who are deterred from ever commissioning a picture by not quite knowing what to commission a picture of. Mr. Waugh possesses a pair of paintings done by Thomas Musgrave Joy in 1850 and designed to show how the amenities of travel had been improved; the first picture shows a mid-eighteenth- century coach being held by highwaymen, the second a mid- nineteenth-century railway carriage with ladies doing embroidery, gentlemen reading the public prints and a bearded ticket-collector invigilating benignly over all. Mr. Waugh has now got Mr. Richard Eurich to bring the sequence up.to date with a painting, done in the same vein and style as Joy's, of passengers meeting with disaster in a mid-twentieth-century aeroplane. Anyone wishing to verify Mr. Waugh's claim that the result is a striking success could not do better than go to what I hope he calls his seat—Piers Court, near Dursley in Gloucestershire—on Saturday, August 14, when his pictures and library will be open to the public view for the first and probably the last time. Receipts from admission fees will go to the repair of St. Dominic's Church at Dursley.
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