Gutters of gold

In 1925, Stephen Tennant (1906-1987), perhaps the most intriguing of England's 'Bright Young Things', contemplated a novel about "high life with a capital H and full of crude impossibilities". He favoured amongst other titles 'The Monkey House', as well as 'Gutters of Gold'. Despite his elaborate preparations, this book, like so many others imagined by Tennant during his life in a sequestered Wiltshire manor house, was never to materialise. Volker Eichelmann has resurrected 'Gutters of Gold' as an intriguing visual essay, where his own paintings, collages and photographs overlap and underlie Tennant's drawings and personal ephemera. Reflections on landscape gardens and water-features, Greek antiquities and ruination, horticulture and eighteenth century découpage emerge as joint preoccupations that shift and expand in proximity as they unfold in a succession of scenarios conceived by Eichelmann under evocative cconceived by Eichelmann under chapter headings such as "Weekend in Valmouth”, "Mme d‘Arpajon gets Drenched” and "Dinner at van Storck‘s”.