Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, 1732 by one of Italy's masters of perspective Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765).

The Dying Gladiator, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Henry James describes Isabel Archer's visit to see the sculptural treasures: 'The blinds were partly closed in the windows of the Capitol, and a clear, warm shadow rested on the figures and made them more perfectly human. Isabel sat there a long time, under the charm of their motionless grace, seeing life between their gazing eyelids and purpose in their marble lips . . . An occasional tourist came into the room, stopped and stared a moment at the Dying Gladiator, and then passed out of the other door, creaking over the smooth pavement.'

The art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent: some believe her to be the inspiration for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.

A close-up of Michelangelo's staggeringly beautiful Pieta, sculpted when he was just 23.

After a weekend in Rome, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) and his 1849 masterpiece Amours de Voyage are very much in mind.

And finally...

So the women did the chair-caning: not such unpleasant conditions but very hard work. And we can imagine from, say, Round about a Pound a Week what they had already achieved at home before coming to the factory.

A bit of realism today. Sitting on a Aeron chair databasing, cup of coffee to hand, as well as lemon cake from Tom's if we're lucky, is the cushiest job there is – compared with working in a Thonet (bentwood) factory. For added realism think sauna/Turkish bath/being horribly hot ALL DAY – because of the steam needed to bend the wood. This photograph is probably late nineteenth-century. 

It's probably libelous to declare in public that although this is indeed a miracle of comfort –  we still cannot warm to it aesthetically... And just think of all the beautiful objects we could have bought for the price... But the new Biannually will be going out in April and long before then we must have caught up on the databasing. So it's worth it.

We (roughly) take it in turns, week by week, to do the post, at home before we leave for the shop. Last week Lydia used Regent's Park, Londoners' favourite park, as a theme; this week Nicola is following on from the sentence at the beginning of The Heat of the Day - 'The rows of chairs down the slope, facing the orchestra, still only filled up slowly' - to focus on - chairs! (This will give me the excuse to have yet another bentwood chair, perhaps as a Friday finale.) We are slightly obsessed with chairs at the moment because, in order to try and cheer on the workers, ie Lydia, Fiona and Miki, who are having to catch up on the heap of pre-Christmas databasing, we have indulged in an Aeron chair. It looks slightly odd among the wooden tables and the bentwood but, it is true, is infinitely more comfortable than the latter. These women filing at the Washington DC headquarters of the National Woman's Party in c. 1920  (photograph courtesy Library of Congress) look comfortable enough. (And so beautifully dressed.) 

Another of Elizabeth Bowen's novels opens in the park: The Heat of the Day (1942) begins with an encounter in the open air theatre. This is a publicity photograph of her taken when she was living at Clarence Terrace.

The jacket from the 1939 American edition of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938); its famous opening chapter is about a winter walk around the frozen Boating Lake at Regent's Park.

In 1885 Anna Alma-Tadema (1865-1943), daughter of the Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema RA, painted this watercolour of the exotic drawing room at her family home Townshend House in Regent's Park. © Royal Academy Collection

An 1833 map of Regent's Park, seven years after the London Zoological Society was founded and 100 years before Lubetkin's buildings.

The Gorilla House at London Zoo in Regent's Park, designed by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990) and completed in 1933. In 1935 Elizabeth Bowen moved in to 2 Clarence Terrace which had a view of the park.

Food as art: photograph by Irving Penn who, alas, died in three months ago.

Breakfast in Bed (1897) by Mary Cassatt © The Huntington Art Collection, Los Angeles. The curator comments that Cassatt contrasts the 'mother's protective action and gaze with her offspring's curiosity with the world beyond her reach' and thus 'evokes the subtle tensions implicit in the relationship of parent and child.' Hmm.

Still on the food theme - here is Ellen Terry's dining room at Smallhythe Place (cf. the Post for 30 December). Photograph © National Trust Photo Library.  

Julia Child's kitchen, on display at the Smithsonian.

More housework, this time of a companionable sort: as depicted by Carl Larsson.