When it comes to art these days, it seems that any talentless charlatan with a gift for self-promotion and a head for figures can arrange to be lionized by the enemies of meaningful culture, those desecrators of taste and tradition who collect the work of living artists, run our galleries and dispense Arts Council grants to people who can’t paint or draw but do a mean job of handling a video camera, dirty sheets or their own excreta.When our valueless age becomes too much for me, I like to be reminded of our true European cultural and religious tradition, the one based on talent and genius and sensitivity, the one that speaks to our yearning for beauty, grace, elegance, harmony and order, the one that, like our religion, shows us what we might be. And the best place I know to scrape one’s psyche clean of the base, defiling muck that counts for art these days is the Wallace Collection, just north of Oxford Street - In particular, the astonishing Great Gallery, a room which makes this committed enemy of European integration proud and grateful to be a European.
I won’t even try to compete with the distinguished art historian and critic,Roderick Conway Morris, by attempting to describe the merits of the paintings on show - “I knows what I likes” represents the limit of my critical abilities when it comes to pictures – so, in the event you aren’t intimately acquainted with the Great Gallery, I’ll just reproduce a handful of its many glories without marring your enjoyment with a hamfisted commentary, including Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Nelly O’Brien, Gainsborough’s Mrs. Mary Robinson (Perdita), Rembrandt’s Titus, the Artist’s Son and Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier.
You can also feast on of Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time, Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of George IV, Rubens’s The Rainbow Landscape, and Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda.
As you’ll recall, the rest of the collection is almost as wonderful - it’s stuffed with French and Dutch masterpieces, as well as porcelain and furniture s and exotic weaponry. But it’s the Great Gallery that represents London’s supreme inner sanctum of civilisation - our civilisation.
A visit always leaves me feeling grateful to the various Marquesses of Hertford who put the collection together - especially the 4th Marquess and his son, Sir Richard Wallace - and Sir Richard’s widow, who bequeathed it to the nation in 1897. Thanks, Lady Wallace.
It doesn’t just make one proud (for a change) to be European - it makes one quite pleased to be a human being.
Entrance is free - which always strikes me as bizarre.
I started what was intended to be an satirical comment by asking which of your Old Masters had the imagination to pickle a sheep and stick it in a display cabinet. I then realised that, as with your piece on Benjamin Zephaniah, there are some issues to which my sense of humour no longer runs.
ReplyDeleteFor all the stuffiness of the arts establishment in Vienna, where I lived for 4 years, there is a pride in their culture which is instilled into them as soon as their children start school. It was astonishing to me how many of the children at my daughters' school played musical instruments to a standard which would have them termed child prodigies over here. I was reminded of this when I heard Simon Cowell telling some warbling fat woman on the X Factor that her performance was "genius".
Sunday, October 24, 2010 - 10:45 AM
I’ve tried to adopt an indulgent attitude toward TV talent contests, but I find myself utterly bemused by what is supposed to constitute “talent” nowadays.
ReplyDeleteAs for the attitude of other countries towards their own cultures, I was chairing a conference in Oslo a few years’ back when I informed a client of mine who was also attending (another big hairy middle-aged Norwegian) that I was going to spend our extended lunch break at the National Gallery round the corner. Instead of rolling his eyes or saying “Have fun!” he asked if I’d mind if he accompanied me. He proceeded to point out his favourite pictures and give me some of the background, and then got very excited (well, as excited as a Scandinavian ever gets) when he came upon some pictures by Norwegian artists he’d never seen before. It was all of a piece with the profusion of Norwegian flags everywhere and their evident respect for their own folk culture. Similarly, I’ve often been impressed by the relish with which German-speaking teenagers in the Dolomites learn instruments so they can play in their local oompah band and quite happily dress in those alarming Tyrolean short-shorts and perform dance routines where they do actually smack each other’s bottoms. I’m not advocating mass Morris Dancing in state schools here, but any attempt at passing on British Folk or High Culture to counteract the ubiquity of American and Jamaican ghetto culture would surely represent an improvement.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - 03:07 PM