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All roads lead East

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient

Has the Tate forgotten its primary role to care for and promote art? We don’t go to an art gallery for a history lesson or a political harangue. Sometimes history and politics are inextricably bound up in art, as in the great works of Goya, but these aspects remain secondary. (Rather as the study and collection of British coins can familiarise one with the sequence and dates of the country’s monarchs.) If you’re interested in the historical context of art, well and good, but don’t force it on the public who come to look at pictures. Historical theories change their spots almost as quickly as fashions in clothes; they are only temporary and often very personal interpretations. But the paintings remain the same whatever theory is spouted in their direction. Look at the pictures then, and marvel.

The show begins with a room of portraits, mostly of intrepid travellers in Eastern dress. The first picture is a strange little watercolour portrait by Richard Dadd of Sir Thomas Phillips reclining with a hookah. (It sounds more reprehensible than it is.) One of this exhibition’s strengths is its showing of poor mad Dadd, such a talented draughtsman and painter, who famously murdered his father and died in Broadmoor. It’s difficult in this section to avoid the evident charms and flashing eyes of that great blue-stocking, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose views on the harem as a liberating, exclusively female space, with its own culture and rituals, are distinctly refreshing. On the far side of the room is that tremendous portrait of Lawrence of Arabia by Augustus John, wonderfully played down for so dramatic a pairing of artist and sitter. Not too far away is Byron looking Byronic, wearing the costume of a Suliot or Albanian Christian. Also here is heftily bearded Holman Hunt’s self-portrait wearing a Palestininan robe, palette in hand, as frank and engaging as ever a Victorian artist could look.