Whistler

 Yesterday I finally made it to London for a much postponed lunch with an old friend and a visit to the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain ('the Tate', as it will always be to me). Arriving in London from Lichfield is always a shock: the noise – and the people! Not to mention the traffic fumes. En route to lunch I stepped into Westminster Cathedral, that great unfinished masterpiece, for some peace and quiet among the faithful. Those Eric Gill stations of the cross really are quite wonderful...
  The Whistler exhibition turned out to be on a larger scale than I expected, but not large enough to be exhausting, and the sheer variety of works on show – from tall vertical portraits to small-scale prints, drawings and sketches, from meticulously detailed etchings to bold, semi-abstract sweeps of colour and light – kept the interest from flagging. There was even a reconstruction of the famous Peacock Room, a dramatic make-over of his patron Frederick Leyland's dining room, done in complete defiance of Leyland's wishes. 
  The exhibition begins with the bravura self-portrait above, in which Whistler consciously references Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting that haunted him, as it has haunted practically every artist ever since it was made. He was clearly 'in conversation' (or in competition) with Velázquez in those portraits he painted in which the subject emerges from a near-black background. The famous, indeed iconic, portrait of Whistler's mother, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, seemed larger than I was expecting, and fuller of interest. Its title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1 – nature, for Whistler, being something woefully deficient that had to be 'arranged' if art was to be made out of it. One of the Whistler quotations that pepper the exhibition is 'To say to the painter that Nature must be taken as she is, is to say to the player than he may sit on the piano.' Well, his 'arrangements' are certainly beautiful to the eye, and many, particularly the Nocturnes, display a quite miraculous delicacy of touch, texture and colour. 
  I particularly enjoyed Whistler's pastel and crayon studies of Venetian subjects, any one of which I would happily have taken away. In the end, I made do with a postcard of this one, The Palace: White and Pink – 

The homeward journey went wrong, as so often, at Milton Keynes, into which station (of evil memory) the train limped, already late, only to be held there for best part of an hour while a gas leak was investigated. A gas leak on a train! This was a new one on me. After two and a half uncomfortable trainbound hours, I disembarked at Lichfield, glad to be back.
  The Whistler exhibition, by the way, is on until 27 September – get there if you can; it will likely be many years before there's another chance to see so much of his best work gathered together in one place.