It was only when I got lost trying to find my way from Victoria Station to Tate Britain that I realised how long it is since I was last there. Not that I mind being Lost in Pimlico. Wandering around London's posher areas, Notting Hill, say, or Chelsea, is one of my favourite pastimes. All those elegant Georgian terraces, mysterious mansions half hidden behind implausibly high walls (who lives there?) and small enclaves of enticingly expensive boutique shopping, cafes and restaurants with eye-poppingly pricey menus. It's one of the things that makes living in London worthwhile.
But I digress. After twenty minutes or so of fruitless rambling, I admitted (humiliating) defeat and fished out the mini A-Z I keep stashed in my backpack. I wasn't far off, as it happened, and a brisk five minutes later, found myself in sight of the venerable Thames-side institution. It's a big old neo-classical pile that still has bomb pockmarks on its western wall and is currently entered via a basement on the side, rather than through the original, river-facing grand portico. A 'reshaped' main entrance is due to open later this year. Apparently.
So why was I here? Well, I had hoped to visit the Patrick Caulfield show, and/or the Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, but as both charged heftyish entrance fees, I decided to give them a miss. I'm not a huge Caulfield fan, anyway (although I'm open to persuasion), and I don't know about you, but I'm a bit pre-Raphaelited out. I love a lot of their stuff. Holman-Hunt's The Haunted Manor, a tiny oil dominated by exquisitely rendered foliage and running water, with said manor glimpsed (paradoxically, in sunlight) in the background, is one of my all-time favourite paintings. But there is something relentlessly overwrought and contrived about a lot of the PR oeuvre. Why (after being out of fashion for a century or more) do they now receive such attention? Could it be because there was nothing else 'radical' happening on this side of the channel at the time, so we have to 'big up' the PRs just so we can say, 'Look, we were revolutionary too.' Well, yes, if drawing your inspiration from five hundred years ago is 'revolutionary'. Certainly, the PR movement was 'out there' in terms of its reaction against established Royal Academy norms. But viewed against the wider momentum towards modernism, it's little more than a diversion.
Are you getting the feeling I'm putting off writing about what I actually did end up seeing at the Tate? You're right. Having decided not to part with £14 a shot for either the Caulfield or the PRs, I opted for the pocket-friendly (ie.free) BP's A Walk Through British Art. Though feted by some, this turned out to be a bit of a slog. Too much of it. Too many rooms. Too sombre. Too much brown. And too much art that is just there because it is 'representative' of a certain time and place. Some of it shockingly bad (the apotheosis of 'bad art', John Martin's high kitsch Plains of Heaven, for instance, shrieks bad taste in a riot of incadescent colour). Some brilliant stuff, too, inevitably. Tucked away, and almost unnoticeable, two tiny but magical Samuel Palmers, Coming from Evening Church (1830) and Gleening Field (1833), for instance. Some wonderful, lifesized portraits of aristocratic beauties of yesteryear, too. Lely's frankly saucy-looking Countess of Kildare, in daringly low-cut satins and silks (1679), for one. Likewise, Joshuah Reynolds' Lady Charlotte Hill, memorable for her knowing half-smile and casual way with a symbolic offering, and Thomas Lawrence's portrait of 18th century Welsh tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who cuts an imperious figure in her drawing room, magnificent in voluminous black velvet dress (brilliantly realised by Lawrence's trompe d'oeil brushwork) and a bustline that appears to have a life of its own. How dare we interrupt her?
Best of the bunch though: George Romney's Lady Hamilton as Circe (c.1782). Fresher, and less formal than most studio works of the time, this image of Ms Hamilton as a teenager, doe-eyed and eager, loose shift falling from her shoulders in a cascade of fluid brushstrokes, makes it immediately obvious why she left a trail of broken hearts and besotted lovers across the late 18th century. But more than that, here is the image of a decidedly 'modern'-looking young woman, almost photographic in the directness of its engagement with the viewer. A snapshot, in other words, an 18th century Polaroid that appears to sense a new world, and a new way of interpreting the world, just around the corner.
More to follow, artsters!
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