In Florence

Sunday, April 3rd., Pension White, Piazza Cavalleggieri, Florence.

Wet morning. Uffizi. Great struggling crowd at the vestiaire. I only went in to get a first impression of the gallery, not of the pictures. Immense staircase to climb: it corrects your inadequate notion of the size of the building. A general impression of carelessness and povery in the housing of the collection. Irregularity of rooms etc. One feels that such a collection ought to be housed if not with grandeur and splendour, at any rate with a conventional distinction. But those are my conventions, not the Italian.

Irregularity of the rooms is confusing. And the climax is reached in the section of painters' portraits of themselves. The portrait of some supreme artist with an elaborately worked shirt made me understand the desire that every artist has to be a dandy in something. How rotten and vulgar the portraits of Tadema, Herkomer etc. Holman Hunt and Watts pretty good. Also Sargent. Some of the rooms in this section are really ridiculously proportioned and small. The two pictures that most diverted and interested me this morning were a Virgin immensely enceinte and a big, badly lighted 'Prima Notte', with a waiting husband, that was charming. Some of the pictures are simply not lighted at all. Great crowds in the principal rooms. In this house of pictures, all turns and corners, some of the pictures are absolutely in the dark.

I took the covered gallery to the Pitti. Too tired, when I reached there, to look at anything. I went out into the rain. Called at S. Trinita during a Mass, made a sketch, and walked home in the rain. There is only one word for the courtyards of the palazzi - noble.

This pension shows that it is run exclusively by women. Little tickets in each bedroom stating day of the week when the room is 'cleaned'. Little bookshelves about, in any case hung in the worst place in the room - just over the wash-stand so the books can be well splashed. Embroidered or chintz covers for things. Everything little and neat in the arrangements. No provision of writing material. No spectacular quality at all anywhere. The Italian manageress has almost become English in her very soul. The great quality of the place is the meals. A really A1 dinner last night when we came home at 11pm. The whole place was shut up. A female servant opened. The bonnes are dressed in English fashion, but better. All white in the morning; black and white in the evening. All sorts of details I shall put direct into my article for English Review.