Portland Gallery 3 Bennet Street, St. James’s London SW1A 1RP

BIRD GARDEN

tinted lesson on canvas& painted wood frame 45 × 55 inches

with Bonino Gallery, NYC

Filmed at the Fresh Art Fair 2024

Earlier this year marked the bi-centenary of Byron’s death and whilst reading a review in the Times Literary Supplement, I spotted a paragraph that said, whilst a student at Cambridge, Byron kept a bear as the rules forbade the keeping of dogs (but not bears). On further research I discovered that the poet always loved animals and kept an ever-growing menagerie, which Percy Shelley lists as comprising ‘ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it…PS I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective…I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.’ Added to which there were mentions by others of a crocodile, two geese he saved from the butcher’s block when living in Pisa, a goat with a broken leg, a tame wolf, a fox and a parrot.

Details of the book and film starring Toyah Willcox as 19th century painter Rolinda Sharples and PJ as herself

Diary up to end October 2024