29-06-2025
Hanging photos on the wall and 16 other signs you're common
Nicky Haslam has a new tea towel out. He's released six of these tea towels over the past few years, listing items and habits he finds common, and it's become quite a long list including but not limited to: bottled water, James Bond, side plates, being teetotal, speeches at weddings, podcasts, festivals, loving one's parents, and breathing. Only joking. I made the last one up. But he probably does think breathing is a tiny bit common.
They're usually unveiled towards the end of the year, just ahead of Christmas, but now Nicky's done a collaboration with the Saatchi Yates Gallery and released a very funny, more specific tea towel listing 'art things' he finds common. These include the Sistine Chapel, silent auctions, children painted by Renoir, hanging photographs, the Mona Lisa, buying art at weekends, and oil paintings of big game.
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Hanging photographs is a particularly good one because it's such an eagle-eyed observation. Nobody properly grand would ever hang a photo. Instead, they fritter them around their drawing rooms and studies in frames. Wedding photos, christening photos, photos on hot holiday in Tuscany and Lamu. If the posh person has met royalty, there may be a discrete photo of them and said member of the Royal family together, guffawing together in the box at Ascot, perhaps, or at another race meeting. This won't be prominently displayed but definitely visible.
What Nicky didn't say is that it's a different matter entirely in the downstairs loo. Confusingly, here you are allowed – in fact, positively encouraged – to hang photographs. If you went to a public school, especially if you went to Eton, all the team photos ever taken of you will be on the wall – rugby, cricket, football, fives, or lined up as part of the rowing team. Although there may also be subtle royal boasting in here, too. I once interviewed a very grand lady at her house in Oxfordshire, and her downstairs loo was festooned with framed shooting cards. These are the cards handed out to the Guns at the beginning of every shoot day, listing everyone taking part, and hers were very grand indeed – various TRHs of varying generations among them. It's deemed ironic and funny to stick things such as this in the downstairs lav, vaguely hidden but with it being highly likely your guests will still see them.
There are various other ways you can avoid falling foul of Nicky's list, or in other words, various other 'art things' that are grand instead of monstrously common. He doesn't approve of children painted by Renoir, but having one or more of your children painted by someone who went to one of the current Florentine art schools is pretty smart. Also, portraits of a relation, ideally at least two centuries old. As one character drawls in Saltburn while showing his university friend, the oik, around his family pile, 'This is the Long Gallery – dead rellie, dead rellies, Daddy's old teddy, Shakespeare's folio…'
The more hideous the better when it comes to dead rellies. An ugly relation, or at least a face full of character, is much more interesting on the wall than a ravishing young woman in silk by Sargent. My mother has an old relation on the wall who's a woman (we think), but could easily pass for a man, with a rotund face and prominent nose. This portrait has a hole in it from a bow and arrow accident some decades ago. History doesn't relate which naughty relation shot an arrow at the poor woman's face in the manner of Just William, but everyone since has quite understood.
Busts, ideally of a relation, are another signifier. I have one in the corner of my sitting room, draped with my three marathon medals and a trilby. If you don't have a marble bust of a relative, rotten luck, but you could always buy one in an antiques shop and claim it's a great-great-uncle. Just make sure you don't have a tiresome classicist over for dinner. 'Really? That's astonishing. He looks exactly like Marcus Aurelius,' they'll cry in wonder, whereupon you'll have to double down and insist that it really is Great-Great-Uncle Rupert.
How do you feel about dead animals? Some years ago, I visited Somerleyton, an estate in Suffolk where they have a couple of stuffed polar bears in the hallway. Controversial to have trophies of empire on display, nowadays, but at least there were only two. The house's current owner told me his ancestor, the first Lord Somerleyton, had shot 57 of the bears on an Arctic expedition in 1897. Those Victorians, eh? Why couldn't they go on holiday and read a nice book like the rest of us? If you can't track down a stuffed animal for your living room, perhaps you have a beloved pet on the way out. The Duchess of Northumberland has her family pets stuffed when they snuff it so they can forever remain at Alnwick Castle. I practically sat on a terrier when I interviewed the Duke.
Alternatively, certain people choose to remember their past dogs with charcoals or paintings – labradors mingling with the dead rellies. It'll largely be dogs, when it comes to animals, although obviously horses crop up, along with pheasants, grouse and the odd owl. You won't find many cats on the walls of grand houses, unless it's a kitten in a bustling 17th-century market scene by an old master.
If you fancy something more modern to break it up a bit, how about a Gary Bunt? He's the wonderful East Sussex-based artist who paints whimsical, cartoonish, colourful scenes, largely in the country, of an old man and his dog. At his private viewing at the Saatchi Gallery in March, there were red stickers on nearly everything and some very posh sorts clamouring to buy what was left. My mother and sister, sweetly, plotted beforehand to buy me one for my 40th, knowing that I liked them. 'Could I enquire about buying one for my daughter's birthday?' Mum emailed his office, whereupon she discovered that they started at several thousand pounds. I bought us each a packet of his postcards instead, and have framed several of them for my kitchen. Nearly as good and the postcards cost only a tenner. But let's keep that between us.
