Inside Cliveden's new Belle Époque

There was no pressure for the four founders, Natalie Livingstone, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, Simon Sebag Montefiore and me – to come up with a programme for last weekend’s Cliveden Literary Festival that matched HM the Queen’s words from last year, when she described it as ‘a perfection of a literary festival.’ Add to this the ‘Hailey’s Comet likelihood’ as Roberts put it, of all four of us having the distraction of books out this year, preparations at times felt like an extra scene from The Producers (apologies to one of our favourite guests, its director, Patrick Marber, who would have fired all of us on the spot). Yet with a dazzling autumnal sun, just enough coffee and the beauty of the Italianate house and Arcadian garden onsite, and the sparkling support and constant restorative elegance of our sponsor, Chanel, the show achieved the impossible, in perhaps excelling all that had gone before it.

How appropriate then, to have on the Clock Tower Stage on Saturday afternoon, a talk about Renoir, his art, and his subjects – the Impressionist who painted for the last years of his life in the warmth of the French Riviera, so near to Gabrielle Chanel’s beautifully restored house at La Pausa. Who better than Yana Peel, President of Arts, Culture & Heritage at Chanel, to chair (resplendent in blue and red, pictured above) ‘Renoir’s World… the painter of light, his subjects and the shadows behind the canvas’, which covered not only my book on the lives of some of those he painted, The Renoir Girls, but also the glorious new exhibition at the National Gallery, ‘Renoir & Love’, courtesy of its brilliant curator, Christopher Riopelle.

How suitable to recognise Renoir as a superlative painter of fashion, as seen in the glowing sashes of the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, or the light afternoon dress of Dance at Bougival, which forms the poster painting of the exhibition. We discussed the artist’s milieu, the century of France since the revolution, which saw the devastation of the Franco-Prussian war and the miraculous rebuilding of the Belle Epoque; the position of the Jewish families in Paris; and the particular genius of the artist, courtesy of Riopelle, for painting relationships, sociability, flirtation, and love. Were the unknown subjects of ‘Leaving the Conservatory’ (never before seen in London), suggested Riopelle, entering into an arranged engagement?

Meanwhile over in the Chanel salon for the young, the popular subject was: ‘Mind over Media: how to focus in an age of digital distraction.’ James Cahill (author of The Beverley Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool), suggested that the stillness and beauty of art was the perfect antidote to mindless scrolling, a focal point in a swirling world.

This year being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there was a stellar American line-up, including Candace Bushnell of Sex and the City fame, the novelist Jay McInerney in conversation with his friend Julian Barnes, Michael Connolly of the ‘Bosch’ thrillers, and man of the hour Patrick Radden Keefe (of London Falling acclaim)…the old world and the new, art, fashion, history and modernity, from the Chanel speakers’ dinner on Friday onwards, for forty-eight blissful hours, writers, books, and ideas, shone like stars. Its very own brief Belle Epoque, on the Bucks/Berks border.