Mixed company

The visitor to the depressing subterranean galleries of Tate Britain might be forgiven for feeling a trifle bewildered in the first room of an exhibition unashamedly titled Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. To the left is James Tissot and to the right a vast canvas of Paddington Station by the little-known Sidney Starr (1857–1925), who departed these shores for America in 1892, and perhaps made good. (Certainly, his dreary expanse of platform could profitably have been left undisturbed in Durban Art Gallery, rather than shipped over specially for this exhibition.) There’s even a large George Clausen in this first room, but where are the brand leaders? On the far wall a trio of smallish canvases of dancers by Degas is the only sign that this is a display devoted to three giants of the French (and English) art world.

Actually, the title of the exhibition is downright misleading, and, though there’s a fair bit by Degas and Sickert spread out through eight rooms, there’s hardly anything by Lautrec, but lots and lots of stuff by other painters who happened to be around at the time. Nothing by Frith or Holman Hunt or Augustus Egg, some will be sorry to learn — for what an interesting comparison could have been made with Degas — but good things by such varied talents as Charles Conder, Jules Dalou, William Rothenstein and William Tom Warrener. In the other half of that first gallery, there’s an exceedingly strange (but not wonderful) Fantin-Latour of a bearded cove and his wife that must have been lurking in the Tate’s cellars for decades, together with Whistler’s resonant ‘Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander’, and the sublime ‘Little Dancer’ in painted bronze with muslin and silk, by Degas. It’s a bizarre mix: neither William Quiller Orchardson nor even Tissot are anywhere near the same weight as Degas.