Anthony Powell at the Wallace Collection in London--


"It's possible, for instance, to imagine Powell's Barnby enlivening a portrait session much as Henry Lamb did when he enlisted his sister-in-law, Lady Violet Pakenham, to talk to Powell while he was being painted. Lamb's portraits - of Powell, of Lady Violet, of Evelyn Waugh - are the most assured and historically significant in the exhibition. Perhaps there is some correlation between Powell's at times curiously subfusc prose and the sober Camden Town colour and gestural reticence of Lamb's portrait of him."