Friday, June the 25th, 2004
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A recent survey of British tastes in art announced that “the nation's favourite painting” was a work called, I think, The Singing Butler by Jack Vettriano. Mr Vettriano is a self-taught painter whose often whimsical realism is, of course, execrated by conceptualist noodleheads and the Saatchi-financed “Britart” mafia.
I wondered if a similar survey were to be conducted in Hooting Yard what the result might be, so I contacted the polling agency run by a sister of suburban shaman Joost Van Dongelbraacke and asked them to find out. The methodology they used was perplexing, so much so that it gives me a splitting headache just thinking about it. In fact I think I am going to go and lie down in a darkened room, with a dampened medicinal bandage wrapped around my forehead. [Pause.] That's better. I am pleased to inform you that this morning's post included the agency's definitive result of the poll, scribbled on a piece of blotting paper by Clytemnestra Van Dongelbraacke herself.
In third place is Allegory of St Bonaventure & The Poolside Attendants, by Sir Gordon Sumner, RA (no relation to that “Stig” person, thankfully). In second place is Some Wheat And A Couple Of Hens by Hattie Le Mesurier. But a clear winner as the favourite painting of all time here at Hooting Yard is the second official portrait of ex-President Richard Milhous Nixon, reproduced below. I think all our readers will appreciate the justice of this choice.
In an addendum to the result, Ms Van Dongelbraacke noted that several thousand proxy votes, by which Mrs Gubbins had sought to influence the outcome in her charmingly malign way, had been discounted. And not only discounted, but incinerated in a big cast iron pot.