Vilnius: Old Town, New Town

National Gallery of Lithuania

I travelled to Vilnius to deliver some of my Dad's prints for auction in the New Year with Simona Makseliene's Vilniaus Aukcionas www.menorinka.lt. It was clear and crisp but bitterly cold. Three years of living in London and I've forgotten how to wear a shapka. Vilnius was much changed since I was there in 2006. More and more it resembles a contemporary Scandinavian city, with the towers rising across the river from the Old Town. What tremendous luck, and no small measure of determination, that paved the road to independence for this little gemstone of a country. The city centre was pristine, cleaner than the tidiest corner of Mayfair. And yet, stroll a few hundred metres from the centre and you stumble on dusty wooden buildings straight from the pages of Dostoyevsky. The splendidly renovated National Gallery shares a riverside slope with modest houses from another time.

There will be a few of my Dad's prints on auction in April, and we're looking at putting together an exhibit of his early work next September, ahead of the publication of a monograph in due course. Check out www.viesulas.com for a glimpse of his later work, the stuff we grew up with at home. I think some of the finest work he did, through the 1970s.