An English Aesthete and Lover of Regency

Robert Harling was brought up in Brighton by a relative after being orphaned at a young age. This stylish seaside resort was the perfect environment for a young flaneur with a discerning eye, browsing the famed antique shops of The Lanes and internalising the aesthetic of its splendid Regency architecture. He also loved the sea and was attracted to the pleasure boats pulled up on the shingle, fascinated by their names picked out in decorative script. These no doubt had some bearing on his abiding interest in lettering and typography.

A Christmas card designed by Robert Harling. In the mid-1940s he and James Shand published Alphabet and Image, a journal of graphics and typography.


Harling's daughter in a charming piece about her late father (World of Interiors May 2009) remembers that he and his wife Phoebe would generally hold their lively dinner parties midweek because Friday evenings and Saturdays were spent at The Sunday Times both designing the news pages and as architectural correspondent. He spent four days a week as editor of House & Garden from 1957 to 1993. Harling must have had extraordinary energy because he was never happier than when he was designing and beautifying houses.

Robert and Phoebe started married life in a Georgian mill house in Suffolk but moved to an 18th C Sussex rectory called The Glebe House in 1952. He immediately set about restoring its original purity by demolishing an attic floor and mansard roof added by a Victorian rector to house his numerous children and servants.


The wide hall, originally built to accommodate waiting parishioners, was furnished with black and white marble tiles that Phoebe bought at a Suffolk auction with no expense spared; and in the 1960s an ochre/greeny blue Puginesque Gothic wallpaper was installed. A set of ten birch Regency dining chairs were bought with an inheritance from Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and a fine Biedermeier bow-fronted coat cupboard came from Rupert Cavendish's shop on the King's Road.




The sitting-room decor has remained unchanged since 1953. Yellow Regency-style 'Medallion' wallpaper from Cole & Son is in exuberant contrast with the cherry-red chintz and ochre curtains. The chandelier of turquoise glass was added in the 60s, the result of an afternoon's stroll down Mount St.

A gold-on-gold paper in the Harlings' bedroom gave the room a lustrous glow in the evening sun. The curtain fabric, a wool toile, dates from 1953. A decade later the swags and tails and the carved and gilded trim were added.



A 19th C bedcover, formed from tiny gathered lawn rosettes and on the chest a pair of green obelisks flanked by a quartet of 17th C pietra dura architectureal landscapes.


I love this image for what looks like an Edward Bawden pelican along with a collection of prints very reflective of Harling's era and enthusiasms. Below: over the Aga is a print by Eric Ravilious (see my earlier post), a contemporary of Bawden. These were quintessentially English artists and illustrators of the early 20th C and I am crazy about them. Edward Bawden designed the wrought iron bench in my first image.





Robert Harling died in July 2008 at the age of 98. He had a distinguished wartime career in the Royal Navy being in charge of a whaler at Dunkirk, serving in the convoys and getting involved in Naval Intelligence where he worked for Ian Fleming. He launched a series of ten interior design books under the auspices of House & Garden, wrote novels and a memoir entitled Amateur Sailor. What an extraordinary life. I would love to have met him.

The Glebe House's contents will be auctioned by Christie's South Kensington on 9 September.



As drawn by Nicholas Bentley, Harling was a natty dresser renowned for his drainpipe trousers


All images from World of Interiors May 2009 Text drawn from Amanda Harling's article and Robert Harling's obituary in The Independent 8 July 2008

The White Horse in the English Countryside

In February it was announced that Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger had been awarded the £2million public art commission to mark the Ebbsfleet International station in north Kent. It is expected that his giant sculpture of a white horse standing 50 metres high will be seen by 60m people a year and will eclipse Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North in Gateshead. It will be twice as tall as the angel and a man standing next to it will be no taller than one of the horse's hooves. The picture above is the artist's impression of how it will appear.


The artist and maquette of White Horse © Mark Wallinger



Kent County Council which commissioned the project wanted a rearing horse, which is part of the county emblem, but Wallinger made it a resolutely unheroic representation blown up in scale. It will however resonate with local history since Ebbsfleet marks the end of the horse-rearing downland country; and this was where the Anglo Saxon heroes Hengist (Stallion) and Horsa (Horse) arrived to fight the Picts around 455 AD.

Wallinger's white horse also follows the English tradition of carving such images into hillsides.


There are or were at least twenty four of these hill figures in Britain. Most of them are chalk hill carvings and Wiltshire, being the most ideal landscape, can boast thirteen of them.
Contrary to public belief they are mostly not of great antiquity. Only the Uffington horse not far across the border in Oxfordshire is certainly prehistoric, some 3,000 years old. The rest were mostly made in the last 300 years and their dates and origins are impossible to establish with certainty.

The Uffington Horse


The Vale of the White Horse 1939 - Eric Ravilious' image of the Uffington Horse


Eric Ravilious ( b. 1903) a quintessentially English artist, illustrator and designer painted these figures in watercolour in the period before and after the outbreak of the Second World War.


Train Landscape 1939 - A view of the Westbury white horse from the Vale of Pewsey


The Westbury Horse 1939


Chalk Figure near Weymouth 1939 - cut on the downs at Osmington to commemorate the visit of George III to Weymouth

The Imperial War Museum in the introduction to the exhibition Imagined Realities 2003/2004 wrote this: 'Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) is now one of the most popular artists of his period. He was a painter of watercolours and murals, a book illustrator in wood engraving and lithography, and a designer of transfer-ware pottery. He applied a dry and precise style of working to imaginative and romantic subject matter form the world around him. From 1940 he was an Official War Artist, painting memorable pictures of ships, aircraft and coastal defences, until his tragic death in a flying accident off Iceland in 1942.'


Check out the IWM's impressive site and the online exhibition here.

Image Top from The Times Online
Ravilious images from Ravilious in Public: A Guide to Works by the Artist in Public Collections Foreword by Lloyd Grossman and Introduction by Frances Spalding pub. Black Dog Books Norfolk 2002