Cuyp

While I was pottering round Kenwood with the 3CC (see previous post), I was keeping an eye open for paintings by Cuyp. He's a Dutch painter, I think, eighteenth century, who painted mostly pastoral scenes of cows standing in fields. Albert Cuyp.

One of my first bosses was an elderly lady who was utterly entranced by Cuyp and said she could stand and look at his paintings for hours. I never heard her mention any other painters. She was very old-fashioned, and proper, and it was all Miss This, and Miss That, no Christian names ever to be used in the office. I vividly remember her explaining to me that it was the duty of all the senior staff to keep an eye on the juniors at Christmas and make sure that they didn't take too much sherry. She was quite serious, and I am sure that she said this from the best of motives and out of the kindness of her heart. (I am also sure that the juniors not only could, but did, take a great deal more alcohol than she ever did and none of it was sherry).

She was enormously kind, and encouraging, and supportive and, in my youth, while appreciating and understanding her goodness, I neither cared nor knew how to acknowledge it. I thought she was rather foolish, and that she had little idea of what the world was really like. When I left my job for what I was sure was a much more exciting one, I didn't keep in touch.

She probably wasn't as old as I thought she was, but this was thirty years ago and more, and she will certainly have retired and is probably dead. I don't think she had much in the way of freinds or family, and I doubt she is remembered.

But I still look out for Cuyp.