Flower paintings at Kettle's Yard (July 2026)

 

Doron Langberg, Hibiscus I, 2022

Painting flowers is one of the most obvious subjects for painting, so you wonder why there are not more flower painting exhibitions. Perhaps the organisers – and the public – have been put off by the practice followed by many galleries, including the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam, to group all the flower paintings together in a single room. This practice might make sense if the gallery had a wide ranger of flower paintings, but both galleries choose to display all their 17th-century Dutch flower paintings together. My heard sinks when I see so many similar works together, all with a black background.

Today, the situation is very different. There are many kinds of flower-inspired paintings, and what could be simpler to curate than an exhibition of them? Except that the Kettles Yard team seems to have extended their brief to include works primarily about people (Kay Donachie), or not including any flowers at all (Howard Hodgkin). Limiting ourselves to those works that are of flowers, what struck me was the difference between the skill of the 50 or so artists included (the show only contains one work only from each artist, so the judgements below apply only to these works).

I would imagine a trawl of amateur art exhibitions would reveal thousands of flower painters: flowers are easy to obtain, they typically last a few days (with some exceptions), and are typically colourful, so it should be easy to get a result. Most importantly, they raise little problem of perspective being largely in a single plane.

For me, the magic of flower paintings is that they represent a kind of pure painting. They aren’t about anything other than the flower being depicted. So when the catalogue tells me that a painting honour's the painter's father, I don't get it.  

Nonetheless, a few paintings stood out very clearly in this show. 

David Jones: a lovely demonstration of watercolour without, as far as I could see, any preparatory drawing, with light flowing, as it were, through the leaves and petals. 

Cass Namoda: a dramatic close-up of part of a single flower, with not enough space within the picture to display the whole. 

Doron Langberg: very rough daubs of bright pink, against green, give a powerful suggestion of hibiscus. The image is representational, but only just. 

William Nicholson: always one to provide a witty commentary on the ostensible subject, Nicholson includes a dramatic shadow that almost obscures the foliage below the peonies. 

Cedric Morris: the viewer appears to be in the middle of an almost exploding bunch of flowers, filling the rectangular canvas with bright, living colours. This man can paint the essence of flowers better than anyone else in the show! His paintings of people are never as good. 

Judith Tucker: A very dramatic view of sea asters against a dark background. The leaves especially are a vivid orange, yet the background is dark, so the effect is somewhat surreal. Undeniable is the power of the piece. Looking up sea asters in Wikipedia suggested their flowers are not that different to any other aster, and not very dramatic: the focus here is on the leaves.

What did I dismiss? Any artist who included human figures, since, in my opinion, the human figure directs the viewer how to interpret the image. Thus, Caroline Walker, whose naturalistic depictions of home life complete with child are not, I think, flower paintings. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is included for a fritillary sketch, but it looked too small-scale in the context of an exhibition gallery.

In summary: great show, but it would have been better to have included a few examples from earlier centuries, especially the 17th century. 

The Bill Gates of the 15th century?

 

The picturesque remains of Chichele College

The town of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, perhaps a little larger today than a village, with a population around 8,000, is not so different to many other small towns in the Midlands: an old church, a market square, a few old buildings, some small-scale industry (shoemaking). But in the centre is the intriguing Chichele College, the ruined remains of a religious institute set up in the 15th century for canons. Today, the property is owned by English Heritage, and is open to the public, courtesy, it would appear, of volunteer curators. I was intrigued by the idea of a “chantry college”, and how it came to exist.

On the site there were a few information boards, but these seemed more interested in the building over the more succeeding centuries following the dissolution of the monasteries (according to Wikipedia, Henry VIII seized the college in 1542). There was no guide, and Pevsner, as usual, focuses on the buildings, rather than about its purpose. What was a chantry college? Wikipedia has an entry for the founder and benefactor Henry Chichele (pronounced “Chichly”) which, although a poor entry, gives some idea about his career: a rapid rise to the top of the English Church, partly as a result of his wealthy connections, notably, his brother. In the town of Higham Ferrers, Chichele also built a grammar school and a “Bede House” (an alms house), both in the grounds of the parish church.

What was a Chantry College?

That, to me, is a mystery. I was aware of Chantry chapels, founded to say masses for wealthy donors, but Chichele College appears to have had at least partially an educational function. Its responsibilities included teaching grammar and song. It appears to have been abolished because it was not part of a university or school.

What was the motivation behind Chichele’s philanthropy?

Clearly, Chichele was wealthy. In addition to Chichele College, founded 1422, he also founded two colleges in Oxford, one for Cistercians in 1437 and one, All Souls, founded 1438, which still exists, as well as Chichele College, and the impression comes to mind of a 15th-century equivalent of Bill Gates or Howard Hughes – whatever was spent on philanthropy only amounted to a small proportion of their total wealth. But is that assumption correct? Chichele’s money came from multiple benefices – at one point, he had at least eight, and was instructed to give them all up except one. Owning more than one benefice was, of course, one of the complaints by reformers against the established Church. English law prevented a bishop having multiple benifices, but nonetheless, Chichele appealed to the Pope, and was granted an exemption in 1407 on being made bishop of St David’s in Wales, enabling him to keep them.

 

Was Chichele corrupt?

According to the Wikipedia entry for Chichele obtained clerical benefices (that is, the position of rector as well as the income from the parish) via his wealthy brother (at least initially). It also mentions how, as archbishop of Canterbury, he investigated and condemned heretics who complained about the corruption of bishops and archbishops. Complaints about corruption in the senior clergy were clearly already widespread in the 15th century, even before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517.

So my questions are: how corrupt was Chichele (compared with other clergy in the Church of England in Chichele’s time)? Was the founding of the College at Higham Ferrers motivated by genuine altruism or simply face-saving? The Wikipedia entry for Chichele, although over 3,000 words long, gets too involved in trying to arguing with scholars to give a good summary (“The struggle between them [Chichele and Pope Martin V] has been represented as one of a patriotic archbishop resisting the encroachments of the papacy on the Church of England. In point of fact it was almost wholly personal, and was rather an incident in the rivalry between the Duke of Gloucester and his half-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, than one involving any principle.”, but no citation for this claim). The Wikipedia entry uses the term “diplomatist”, an outdated term today replaced by “diplomat”, and which suggests that much of the Wikipedia entry was lifted from an earlier source, probably the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edition (acknowledged in the references).

It will require some detective work to try to establish, if the sources are sufficient, the real background to Chichele’s philanthropy.  

The house with no kitchen or fireplace

 

The facade of Paycocke's House: built 1509, but all the oriel windows, and much of the highly detailed carving, date from early in the 20th century

Paycocke’s House in Coggeshall, Essex, is one of the best-known Tudor houses in England. It was owned by a wool merchant, Thomas Paycocke, who made his fortune from selling undyed wool. So I was fascinated to see this demonstration of a wealthy Tudor merchant’s lifestyle. But on arrival, my response was a number of questions. 

Like many old houses, this one had been altered. I’ve nothing against adapting old houses to suit current needs, but the biggest alterations took place around 1900, when Noel Buxton made a lot of changes, including adding fireplaces to the main rooms, and moving the main staircase, and more or less rebuilding the front of the house, adding oriel windows, for example. All of these changes were made to give the appearance of putting the house back to its original state. To the present-day visitor, it’s difficult to imagine the house in its original layout, and at a first glance, the front looks all of a piece. But, of course, the reality is, as with so many English parish churches, that what you are looking at is as much a Victorian restorer’s idea of what medieval (or Tudor) looked like, rather than the original. None of those oriel windows existed in 19th-century photographs. Inside, there are beautifully carved bressummer beams, usually found over a fireplace – but none of them is in the original position. All the fireplaces are new.

Those fireplaces intrigued me. Thomas Paycocke used this house as his main showroom, where he met clients, many of them from continental Europe. Indeed, in the main room, visitors can see the table is set for a meal. Yet we learn that Paycocke’s house had neither a kitchen, nor any fireplaces! Records of tenants in the early 20th century report how cold the house was, and it must have been similar for Paycocke in his day. How did he not have a fire, or any kitchen? How can you live in a house with neither? According to the National Trust website, Thomas didn’t live there, but had another house in the town. Nonetheless, he let his son, John, live there. There was originally a third storey, but it’s difficult to imagine fires at that level and not on the ground floor.

Medieval halls had a central fire with a hole in the roof, but I don’t imagine any newly built Tudor dwelling trying to replicate that heating system. So what did Thomas Paycocke do for heat, and what did he do to provide food for his clients? He certainly had the money – he left the equivalent of over £500,000 in bequests in his will.

Sadly, Paycocke’s House raises more questions than answers, and it doesn’t seem to offer a very good example of what everyday Tudor living was really like. Although the later inhabitants are certainly of interest, the reason we visit the house – to get a glimpse of how people actually lived – is not, sadly, something the current house can provide.

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, by Robert A. Johnson (1974)

 

Parsifal and Kundry, from the 1889 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Parsifal

With a title like that, perhaps it was asking for trouble for me to try reading this bookHe was. But I was struck by the idea of using a medieval epic to present views of masculinity. The author, Robert Johsnon, “a Jungian analyst in private practice in San Diego”, proposes to use the Grail myth, interpreted via Jungian psychology, to explain how men behave. Specifically, he uses the Chretien de Troyes version of Parsifal. I couldn’t resist reading about Parsifal, so I sat down to read this short book (just 84 pages, just 25,000 words). I should have realised it was an unlikely achievement. In that short space, Mr Johnson proposed to use Jungian psychology to explain the male psyche via the Grail story, and to do it in a contemporary Christian context (the book originated as a series of lectures at an episcopal church in San Diego in 1969).

I can’t deny, I am fascinated by the medieval tales such as Parsifal. They tell such a simple yet unintelligible story, so that they cry out for an explanation, and

There is no denying, the prose has a kind of comfort about it. As readers, we enjoy being carried along with the author’s argument, when it appears so sensible. One trick is that the author occasionally interjects a common-sense aside, for example, on page 24 he wonders where Parsifal got his sword from “I am very curious. I would very much like to know where Parsifal’s first sword came from.” That seems a very straightforward question, just what we would ask.

Yet this book sold in such astonishing numbers – over 100,000 copies sold, states the cover. How do you sell so many copies? Well, don’t let the reader have any doubt. The Bible, medieval chivalric epics, the nature of the psyche, have multiple interpretations, but despite the multiplicity of subjects tackled in this short book, the author remains sublimely confident that his interpretation is right. His text mixes therapy, Jung, the Christian Bible, and medieval epics, and, do you know, they all have the same message! It’s remarkable. In fact, in reading the book, I was gobsmacked. Have attitudes changed so much in the last 50 years? But let’s go through the book and identify just where my jaw dropped.

Here are some examples of the author’s tone of certainty:

•  “All men are Fisher Kings” (p10)
•  “Read a typical modern novel and you will find that it revolves around the subject of the lostness and the loneliness of the alienated man … We are all wounded and it shows” (p12)
•  “It is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him. A man must consent to this.” [p15]

One imagines Mr Johnson the practising psychiatrist is always right: “In my consulting room a man will sometimes bark at me when I prescribe something strange or difficult for him. ‘What do you think I am? A fool? And I say, ‘Well, it would help.’ For it is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him.” [p15]

And, surprise, Jung is also always right. According to Johnson, every boy goes through a “Fisher King” moment, when he blunders into something that is too big for him. Except, in Jung’s case, his Fisher King moment was not his fault at all – his teacher didn’t believe that Jung could have written the assignment he submitted in class. “There’s one paper here that is by far the best, but it is obviously a forgery.” That’s not a Fisher King moment, that is a piece of hagiography.  This anecdote could have come from the Bible: Jung as Christ.

Everywhere, there is the astounding confidence of the author. He tells us he uses the Chretien version of Parsifal, not the version by Wolfram von Eschenbach, because it “is simpler, more direct, and nearer to the unconscious”. What enables him to make such a judgement?

Another curious technique of the author is to assign unusual meanings to common words. He makes a distinction between “emotion”, “feeling”, and “mood” (which he uses as a synonym for depression). For the author, “enthusiasm”, means “filled with God”. This reassignment of natural language demands a kind of compliance from the reader: if I say it means X, it does so.

But the Parsifal story, you say! It cries out for interpretation. The Fisher King (Amfortas in Wagner’s opera) has been wounded, but his wounds will never heal. He seems to have been wounded sexually – somewhere in the thigh.  His wound will only be healed by the intervention of a fool.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s interpretation of the story is highly questionable. For example, Parsifal covets the Red Knight’s armour and horse, and so he kills the Red Knight. Is this wrong? Certainly not, according to Johnson. “The Red Knight represents that strong, virile, masculine stuff a boy needs so desperately … That is the fierce competitiveness of adolescence and masculinity in general. Almost every boy has to win from somebody else.” [p25]. This is enough to send half or more of the male population into a nosedive because they were not victorious in their last fight.

Even stranger, Johnson mingles the Christian fixation on chastity, with the knightly ideal: “the only proper pursuit for a  knight [is] he must never seduce or be seduced by a woman.” [p28] I seem to remember that the chivalric epics accepted and acknowledge sexual passion – but not in this interpretation. In Johnson’s book, “it is terribly important to make this distinction between the outer, flesh-and-blood woman and a man’s inner feminine quality, and to keep inner laws differentiated from outer laws” [p31]. Whatever that means.

The book is a farrago of “masculine” and “feminine” behaviour. The author repeatedly talks about the need for men to discover their feminine side. To be honest, I’m more interested in identifying my overtly male side and noticing in 2026 how many males seem incapable of relating to other males except by a handful of acceptable male encounters (football, the gym, the  pub).

In the introduction, no fewer than four women are credited with turning the author’s talk into a text for publication. Clearly, the author himself, who presumably wrote some notes for his lecture, couldn’t do the work. He was hard at work writing the sequel to this book, called (inevitably) "She". Or perhaps he was just too busy acknowledging his masculine side to do the feminine work of typing and transcribing.  

A visit to Bath

 

A view from the Holburne Museum: a nicer view outside than in?

Everyone looks forward to a visit to Bath! We all know that for a few years, notably when Jane Austen was writing, Bath was the English centre of pleasure and entertainment. Yet, somehow, that moment of grandeur last for less than a century. John Wood, the architect, created his plan for the development of Bath in 1725, and apparently, already by the 1790s building had slowed; Bath was being replaced by Brighton and Cheltenham as a destination for the rich.

But a visit at the weekend showed that Bath today is again a highly popular place for pleasure. I lost count of the number of weddings and hen parties being celebrated in the streets. We walked in Sydney Gardens, which, apparently, are the only remaining pleasure gardens in Bath, and there were plenty of people around, but the looked more like residents than visitors; the visitors were in the centre, seeing the attractions.

My visit was of course limited. I mostly saw museums (the American Museum, the Holburne Museum, and the Victoria Art Gallery), and had dinner at the former Empire Hotel, now rebranded as The Architect. But there was no doubt that the centre was very lively. Cambridge, where I live, is a city full of tourists, but few of them visit the city for entertainment in the evening. In contrast, Bath seems to come alive as the sun goes down.

What was also noticeable was the absence of traffic in the largely pedestrianized centre. But perhaps Bath was not entirely cosmopolitan: at 10 o’clock in the evening, our formal restaurant was almost empty.

Is Bath a centre of taste?

If there was taste on display, it was from many years ago, and with very different attitudes. The Victoria Art Gallery, despite its fascinating collection, looked as though it hadn’t had any funding for the last 50 years. Paintings were stacked three-high in the one big room. There were some children’s activities laid out, but I didn’t see any children doing them. The ‘shop’ was dedicated to selling tickets to a paid exhibition on the ground floor (the permanent collection is free access, although this isn’t made very clear).

 

The American Museum

The premise of the American Museum, founded by (American) Dallas Pratt and (Briton) John Judkyn, was, to coincide with their vision of American history, based around the Founding Fathers and white settlers. Pratt and Judkyn were antique collectors and dealers, so they had every reason to enjoy celebrating American-made furniture and objects.

But, of course, that comfortable, long-established vision of US history, taught to generations of schoolchildren, has been completely side-stepped by the belated recognition of colonialism and slavery, the admission that Native Americans, and African Americans, were almost entirely written out of the history presented in the Museum. This raises a fundamental problem: history books are rewritten with each generation, but the Museum’s collections are almost entirely what how the white settlers lived and what they collected. Now, the collections don’t tell the story the curators would like to tell, and worse, what is on display is offensive simply by what it leaves out. Overall, this is a disaster for the museum organizers: a tone of almost self-congratulation has switched to a place for apology. Unsurprisingly, the permanent collection is full of apologetic captions (which are easier to change than the objects themselves) mentioning, for example the Native Americans who once occupied the lands shown in the Puritan and Shaker rooms, for example. Temporary exhibitions, of course, are much easier to change, and the exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts is a stunning contrast to the permanent collection. These quilts were made in Alabama by descendants of slaves. Not only that, the quilts are quite simply stunning.

 

The Holburne Museum

The permanent collection at the Holburne Museum has never been very exciting. Perhaps it’s my taste, but large-scale portraits, even by Gainsborough, to enable the rich visitors to Bath to congratulate themselves are not very exciting – even when dressed up as a Bacchante:

 

Perhaps part of the problem is that the spectacular house that houses the collection was not designed as an art gallery, and, despite all the changes made to accommodate visitors, the space still works very poorly. The ballroom was converted to a gallery by Reginald Blomfield, but the main room has too many windows to make it suitable for pictures. You can’t see the pictures, and the view out of the window is too good; I chose the view. Unfortunately, the 2011 extension, by Eric Parry Architects, an ostentatious building, simply adds more small rooms that aren’t connected to each other. Now there are two separate staircases and two separate sets of small rooms on the second floor.

Sadly, the permanent collection isn’t much to write home about, even after the addition of the Schroder collection of Renaissance objects. Holburne and Schroder both collected in many different art forms, with the result risking being an incoherent muddle. The museum administrators acknowledge this when they created a display of lots of the Holburne collection in one “room”. 

There is no attempt to tell you what each of the pieces is; it’s just an impression of lots of stuff. If it were my grandmother’s house, that I had to deal with after she had died, I’d get rid of everything and start again. Worse, it turns out that Holburne was heavily involved in slavery.

You pay £16.50 to enter the museum, with no concessions for pensioners. For that, you are treated to the collections of two very rich families. You also get a glitzy website and lots of marketing (invitations to become a member on most screens). In the basement, a £2.5m development has the Schroder family collection of Renaissance objects – the vast majority of which are shiny. The main idea behind this collection is, apart from a handful of exquisite portraits, to display the Schroder family’s wealth. Admittedly, the Renaissance loved rare stones and expensive objects, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow the Renaissance slavishly and simply admire this family’s wealth.

There was an interesting exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century prints, which in highlighted the  lack of excitement from the permanent collection.

 

Is Bath worth a visit?

Galleries and museums are stuck what the collection they have. Probably a better experience of how it felt to be in Bath during its heyday could be obtained by visiting different locations, such as the Royal Crescent, and Roman baths, and the Assembly Rooms. Nonetheless, I think more could be done with each of the three venues I visited.  

Miss Marjoribanks, by Mrs Oliphant (1865-66)

 

Margaret Oliphant: a photograph from 1860 (public domain

My first impression was how accomplished a writer Mrs Oliphant is. Highly complex sentences, very precisely described scenes; but further reading suggests there might not be much behind the artful syntax.

What people will say about the book today is that it is by a woman writer and features a largely female cast. Lucilla has the ability to twist all the males she meets around her little finger; she is certainly the most dominant character. At the same time, you could reduce the plot to one sentence: which man will Lucilla choose to marry? After all her efforts to become the centre of the social universe of the small town of Carlingford, it appears she will dutifully take her place as a second-rank citizen. There are vague references to good work that she will do after her wedding, but it is acknowledged that the married state is the only truly desirable outcome.

The lack of characterisation for the two main male characters is astonishing. We know nothing about Mr Cavendish or Mr Arbuthnot, the two prospective suitors, nor of Tom, her cousin. Very strangely, he is dismissed at the start of the book as hopelessly uncoordinated and incompetent, yet at the end he is, remarkably, the most suitable choice of husband – an immense about-turn that is never satisfactorily explained.

One of the major characters is an archdeacon, but his speech and manner suggest anything but a clerical background. Perhaps he is an imposter – he does not appear to wear a dog collar, but a shirt and tie. When confronted for details of his dealings with Mrs Mortimer, he shows anything but Christian charity. Yet a few pages later, he is dutifully lined up to marry her. As for Mr Cavendish, it is never quite clear what the nature of his “crime” was.

When I read the word “pre-Raphaelite”, I was impressed, but it would appear that Oliphant uses the word to mean any painter. There is similarly loose language with the terms “Broad Church” and “Low Church”. It’s clear they are used to distinguish social levels, which is fine, but the term Broad Church is used very frequently, without, I think, always being clear about what is implied.

Oliphant drags out the plot – many pages go by without any precision about what actually happened in the past. At the same time, some events happen so fast they are difficult to believe. The book is organised in two parts, separated by some ten years. The first (Iarger) part comprises Lucilla establishing her reputation, which seems to take place within a couple of years, making her no older than 19. During that time, she has been able to set up a school for the poor, with a school mistress, and a well-established garden, as well as being the major society hostess of the town.

There is a lot of repetition, not simply like Dickens as a kind of leitmotiv, but repeating details of story and attitude. It wouldn’t be difficult to cut 50+ pages and make the novel more powerful.

There is some resemblance to E F Benson: small town society and its controversies, determinedly removed from politics and current affairs, and of little interest to anyone outside the town. Unlike Benson, Oliphant has less humour, so the going it slow, at times, but the rise and rise of Lucilla, the doctor’s daughter, as she creates her salon, is enjoyable to follow.

Keeping out of politics by saying “he is the right man for Carlingford” makes it easier for the writer but convenient for the novelist – no need to take sides. If you believe Mrs Oliphant, the choice of MP was made without reference to any party politics.

 All in all, an interesting a readable novel, but not much of an assessment of the society around her, and a woeful plot.

Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.