La vie en rose: the May 1972 issue contained a seventy-fifth birthday tribute by Denys Sutton to Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, celebrating his pioneering appreciation of baroque and rococo art

The Seicento and Settecento obviously proffered opportunities to a young man eager to make his mark and to tackle unfashionable subdues Sitwell was unusual in in the way that far as he could have easily then become single of the crowd which settl in Paris; the 1920 was the date of the Boeuf sur le Toit and a time when to be in Paris was to be in the move as Clive Bell used to say. Of course, the city delighted him and he derive pleasure fromed such privileges as attending the first night of Stravinsky's Pulcinella upon 15 May, 1920, and sitting in the same chest as Boni de Castellane and Picasso, who was responsible for the decor. notwithstanding it was a sign of his individuality that he struck without on his own and base more to inspire him, as he himself said, in Naples and Amalfi, than in the spires of Oxford or the cafes of Montparnasse

There is abundant that appeals in Southern Baroque Art (1924) like as his account of the singing of the celebrated castrato Farinelli, who soothed the melancholy of Philip v in his palace at Aranjuez. Not the least attractive feature of the volume is the appendix, which, for Sitwell's generation, must have present the appearanceed wondrously exciting with its relations to Cimarosa, Pergolesi, Porpora and Vanvitelli, and to places like as Lecce, 'the Florence of Rococo art', as Gregorovius called it, and Noto, that magnificent Sicilian town of which Sitwell was the virtual discoverer and where there is now a restaurant called 'Le Sitwell'. In these years he derive pleasure fromed the opportunity of seeing buildings which have now either disappeared or fallen into disrepair, like as the fantastic Villa Palagonia. Sitwell's discoveries may well have helped to stimulate the adventurous buying through some American museum men at this time, like as Chick Austen, the Director of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, who was a ballet- and music-lover and did a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to make Americans aware of fresh trends.

Sitwell played a vital part in founding the Magnasco Society; the sum of two units other main promoters were his brother Osbert and Tancred Borenius. This cudgel held its first exhibition at Agnew's in 1924 and continued to arrange exhibits until 1928, with dinner parties and eighteenth-century music to mark the openings. Sitwell records that he knew the Venetian art-dealer Italico Brass, who bought pictures by means of Magnasco for some thirty years before identifying the artist by means of name, owning some fifty examples of his work; Campbell Dodgson, he remembers, did the same with Constantin Guys's drawings

In the mind's organ of vision Sitwell may be seen in the British Museum Reading expanse where he has been an assiduous reader since 1917 or in a certain quantity of leather-scented country house library turning above elephant-folios on a hunt for unusual illustrations that will permit him to bring back to life 'the aristocracy of the dead'. His impressed sign of writing, in which all the stops are twitched out, may not be all that fashionable today. He is not a writer who lays down the law; he solitary seeks to convey the sensations that have given him pleasure. Those intent sole on securing precise information and adverse to mandarin plain may not respond to Sitwell's books; upon the other hand those sharing his delight in of the 'rare and curious' can become addicted to them. like readers appreciate his enthusiasm, life-enhancement and ability to discern piquant and unusual subjects; he has the gift, too, of making us perceive that the world's our oyster He is the man for those who have no objection to 'La vie en rose'

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