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

Apollo, July, 2004 by Denys Sutton

The Seicento and Settecento obviously offered opportunities to a young man eager to make his mark and to tackle unfashionable subjects. Sitwell was unusual in so far as he could have easily then become one of the crowd which settled in Paris; the 1920s was the epoch of the Boeuf sur le Toit and a time when to be in Paris was to be in the movement, as Clive Bell used to say. Of course, the city delighted him and he enjoyed such privileges as attending the first night of Stravinsky's Pulcinella on 15 May, 1920, and sitting in the same box as Boni de Castellane and Picasso, who was responsible for the decor. Yet it was a sign of his individuality that he struck out on his own and found 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 much that appeals in Southern Baroque Art (1924), such 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 book is the appendix, which, for Sitwell's generation, must have seemed wondrously exciting with its references to Cimarosa, Pergolesi, Porpora and Vanvitelli, and to places such as Lecce, 'the Florence of Rococo art', as Gregorovius called it, and Noto, that superb Sicilian town of which Sitwell was the virtual discoverer and where there is now a restaurant called 'Le Sitwell'. In these years he enjoyed the opportunity of seeing buildings which have now either disappeared or fallen into disrepair, such as the fantastic Villa Palagonia. Sitwell's discoveries may well have helped to stimulate the adventurous buying by some American museum men at this time, such as Chick Austen, the Director of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, who was a ballet- and music-lover and did much to make Americans aware of modern trends.

Sitwell played a vital part in founding the Magnasco Society; the two other main promoters were his brother Osbert and Tancred Borenius. This club held its first exhibition at Agnew's in 1924 and continued to arrange shows 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 Magnasco for some thirty years before identifying the artist by name, owning some fifty examples of his work; Campbell Dodgson, he remembers, did the same with Constantin Guys's drawings ...

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