Barley and Swans
Miss Dog looks very beguiling walloping through the barley. The barley has reached its early summer state where the whiskers have grown but the whole plant is bright green, so the field looks as if it is sown with green fur. It stands slightly taller than Miss Dog, and her approach to this is strongly reminiscent of a someone doing the butterfly stroke; she proceeds in bounds, and so at regular intervals, her coal-black head, neck and upper chest appear at an angle, and then vanish beneath the susurrant green waves. The sky was bright, luminous blue this evening, exactly the same colour as the Tibetan poppies. There are so many larks now you can’t hear yourself think. After an absolutely miserable week, summer has returned.
The other thing which happened today was the arrival of yet another intaglio. This one is of Leda and the Swan, and it’s probably a nineteenth century copy. There are various approaches to the iconographic treatment of Leda and the Swan which run from the coy to the pornographic; this one strikes a bold note of individuality: Leda is behind the swan, which is standing bolt upright, wings flexed back, apparently holding it round the neck; the impression is roughly as if they are figureskating like Torville & Dean, one of those manoeuvres where the couple go rapidly backwards in close conjunction. But there are no Roman figureskaters: the first skater I know of in European history is a perfectly barmy saint called Lidwina of Schiedam who took to her bed after an accident on the ice and became rather holier than anyone might reasonably have thought necessary. So what is going on here? Nude swan-upping?