Martin Gayford

Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous

It’s possibly why Tate Britain’s Artist & Empire exhibition is so thin — and why the Queen’s Gallery display of Dutch masters is so rich

issue 28 November 2015

‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing and portrait-painting.’ This doesn’t sound like a bad set of cultural baggage, even for those who don’t care for the races. There is clearly a lot to be said for trial by jury, and portraits make up the most enjoyable — in fact, downright humorous — section of Artist & Empire, a curious new exhibition at Tate Britain.

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