Feast and Fast at the Fitzwilliam: A dog's breakfast?

Is this an exhibition (full title is Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800) on “the art of food”? Not really. It is more, as director Luke Syson states in the Foreword, “the story of food in Cambridge, Britain and Europe between 1500 and 1800” in a visual display – not at all the same thing. The exhibition is the result of a partnership between the Museum and the University History Faculty, which explains (although doesn't justify) the intensely didactic tone of the catalogue. The result is a hotchpotch, spectacularly good in places, but indigestible as a whole, for example, "Eating in early modern Europe was a performance in which the diners were both audience and actors." 

The Introduction makes bold claims for the exhibition. This is not just “who ate what when … This new interdisciplinary history of food has become a rich and important field through which topics such as religion, class, gender, globalisation and the ‘everyday’ can be explored through food and integrated into wider historical perspectives”. [p8] That’s quite a theme! Because food is ephemeral, the exhibition concentrates on “visual and material culture relating to food”.  In other words, there may be some art, but the link to food is the main point. And what links! There is a recreation of a Baroque feasting table of around 1650, with a full-size swan gracing it. 

As for fasting, you might as well call the exhibition “Feast and Plate”, or “Feast and China” rather than "Feast and Fast" – there is a handful of objects relating to fasting, but the presence of fasting in the title as more for alliteration than for a description of the exhibition as a whole.

Moreover, from the very first sentence of the catalogue, about the Neapolitan cuccagna, or triumphal arch made of cheeses and other foods, you can see the exhibition is based on quite specialised knowledge - and it is made quite clear that this is text for teaching you. Melissa Calaresu (clearly Italian from her name) has written on aspects of Neapolitan food history, and there is a strong injection of detailed knowledge whenever objects relating to Naples and Cambridge are mentioned.

Given that the exercise is written by academics, it’s perhaps not surprising the catalogue is full of academic-speak. Few concessions are made for ordinary gallery-goers. Twenty-four contributors are credited for the many entries, which are grouped into eight main sections (although trying to tackle such a vast subject will always result in gaps). The argument continues in several of the footnotes (but you don’t know in advance which of the footnotes contain additional material). Examples of overly academic writing include:

The ever-present need for food dictated the rhythms of life for people in early modern Europe, and knowledge of the ways of nature was essential to produce enough food for the perpetuation of humanity.  (p11)

I assume “ways of nature” means “knowing how to grow things”, while “the perpetuation of humanity” means "to keep you and your family alive". Nobody then or now produces food for the perpetuation of humanity. 

Whether as potent metaphor or simply representing itself, the familiar qualities of food helped to domesticate the unknowable forces behind the mysteries of nature. [p12]

 One engraving [Bosse, Taste, c1638] has a dog in the foreground, described as follows: “the dog’s stylisation as at once both fat and thin, luxurious furry head combined with bony hindquarters, would seem to enshrine the struggle between indulgence and restraint – the bestiality of gluttony versus the civility of the human experience” [p17]. I’m not sure how a dog, or any part of a dog, represents “the civility of human experience”. I have a dog, and I love it, but it is canine, not human.

The challenge of the exhibition is its sheer range. One or two objects introduce a vast topic, such as the slave trade, or food theft, but then the viewers are swept off to something entirely new. An indication of the vast ambition of the exhibition is seen in part one: “food cycles and systems”. It contains sections on The Four Humours, the Five Senses, the four elements, and the four seasons. We have already broken the boundaries of food. And if these, why not other groups? Why not the Twelve Months, which is included in the exhibits, for example in a Book of Hours, and is described in the introduction to this section as part of the iconographic tradition of depicting the months, for example, a baker making bread in December. I see less connection, however, between food and the Four Humours, or the Five Senses. Here, as elsewhere, the catalogue is reduced to a simple exercise of “where can I find a link to food in all this?” Three of a series of prints on the Four Elements mention food, while one (Fire) does not. Where does that get us? 

There is a magnificent embroidery of Arcadia from 17th-century England – and, surprise, surprise, it includes animals, which can be construed as food! Beyond that, all that is stated is that “both the embroidery, with its varied threads and stitches, and the composition are complex”.

Despite the seemingly all-embracing topic, there are still many items in the exhibition that seem to me to have little relation to food. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Panoramic view on the Amstel is just that, a landscape, albeit with some windmills, which would enable the inclusion of most 17th-century Dutch landscapes.

There are very interesting sections on individual foods, such as the pineapple and ginger, and some good points on how food was brought to the table, (sugar), and finally, some magnificent recreations of floral decorations: a confectioner’s shop window, a sugar banquet, and a baroque feast. But silver plate from Cambridge colleges, and eighteenth-century candlesticks, while readily available for display, do not advance our knowledge of food much further. How people ate in Cambridge colleges in the eighteenth century is always going to be of limited interest in the history of Food. You could describe the Cambridge plate an opportunistic way to fill the exhibition with some readily available artwork that usually gathers dust in the archives. That plate tells you little about food but quite a bit about silversmithing.   And as for the image below, just what is that woman telling us? Is she contemptuous of the vast display of ingredients in front of her, or full of anticipation?               

Is this the kind of exhibition the Fitzwilliam should be doing? Ambition is good, and the exhibition suggests the vast range of topics that can be considered under the heading of “food”. Moreover, the the mainstream premier-league museums such as the National Gallery will stick much more to fine art. This exhibition resembles some recent thematic British Museum shows more than purely art-historical exhibitions. But if it means that the common viewer has to struggle through an academic survey of a vast topic, and one that wasn’t primarily designed for general consumption, then the result is, in a word, indigestion.

Looking at Barcelona with fresh eyes

Barcelona is one of the great cities of the world  - at least, so the Internet claims. More specifically, it is admired for the built environment. Certainly there were crowds outside the Modernista palaces in the centre, like the one above. I’ve been to Barcelona several times, mainly to the centre, Monjuic, and Gracia, but never reflected much about it. Even more disgracefully, I have not yet seen some of the major sites. Of course, I have the books about the city (Robert Hughes, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto) but reading about and actually seeing a city are two different things. Perhaps there is a value in recording first impressions of the city - even though I've been there many times.

So after a day of walking so much that we had blisters, we took the tourist bus and saw the city as a visitor. We went once round the extended city – not the medieval centre (you wouldn’t get a bus around that), but Sagrada Familia, the Hospital of St Pau, and the Monastery of Pedralba, all buildings that I had heard of but not yet seen, for the simple reason that they are some distance out from the city centre. Of course, the bus only goes past these buildings (and doesn't even go past the entrance of the Park Guell or attempt the vertiginous climb to Tibidabo), but a bus tour does give some idea of the layout of the city - and in Barcelona's case, the hills surrounding it. Much of the present-day city is built on serious slopes; the bus was struggling on some of the inclines. The bus also takes you past other landmarks such as the football ground.

Even without reading about the city, any visitor will recognise at least four main zones. First, the medieval centre, with narrow streets barely wide enough to take a small car. This centre is remarkably unchanged; it seems to be built on top of the Roman city, on the basis of the excavations visible in the local museum. 

Next, the much larger-scale, regularly planned, central squares and monument-sized buildings (the Generali Insurance building is typical, imposing from any angle, ostentatious and bloated, but memorable). This is where many of the luxury shops are found and, not by chance, some of the best Modernista buildings. This is the largely 19th- and early 20th-century zone, such as Eixample, a series of rectilinear blocks with little to distinguish individual streets.

Similarly uniform, although built to a much less lavish scale, are the blocks of working-class apartments in Barcaloneta. 

Further out from the centre, there are vast swaithes of post-1945 apartment blocks, with occasional traces alongside of the earlier villas with their own gardens, with the resulting very messy appearance of different styles and heights beside each other. The area of Gràcia, where I was staying, was full of these flats. It looked like the flats were around six storeys in the residential streets, and up to nine storeys along the bigger thoroughfares. For many (most?) inhabitants of Barcelona, this is everyday reality: flats and traffic. Without the palm trees, it could be anywhere. 

What does this very superficial tour reveal? The very dense concentration of buildings, and then the traffic. Barcelona has several large multiple-lane one-way streets in the centre, with mopeds and scooters, cars and buses engaged in what seems an endless race. Crossing the road is not for the faint-hearted and would not be easy outside the pedestrian crossings.

Barcelona is clearly a very crowded city, lacking in green open spaces in the main urban area. There were a few positive initiatives, for example urban gardens from reclaimed housing land (above).

The life of the city is seen at its best in some very animated squares often next to wonderful covered markets, where high-quality food was available. In the markets, wonderful displays of food.

The squares, although lacking green, usually had trees and were surrounded on four sides by high buildings. The people living in the surrounding buildings were clearly tolerating a high level of noise from the busy activity around. In summary, there is a pell-mell feel to much of the city, with rich and poor, lavish and run-down, often jumbled up. Outside the commercial centre, there seems to be a motley collection of small shops, offices and workshops, usually with graffiti on every available wall or door. Someone told me that while commercial property is cheap to rent, the licences for selling food are very expensive, so perhaps many of these small shops are handed down over generations within a family. 

What is distinctive about Barcelona? It gives the impression of being more visibly socially mixed than, say, London, with its clear distinction between the City and the West End, and lack of a medieval centre. A fancy restaurant, a run-down corner shop, and a simple bread shop may appear within a few doors of each other. In some way the medieval crowdedness has extended to the surrounding areas like Gràcia. For me, that small bread shop in the photo sums up Barcelona: a medieval feel persisting in a 20th-century urban layout.

Trying to make sense of Montaigne

Where to start with Montaigne? The sheer bulk of Montaigne’s essays, in the monster single-volume translation by Michael Screech, is forbidding enough - some 1280 pages. But let’s be a little more realistic: the essays are certainly readable, which is a good start. This post is about first impressions of reading Montaigne – although I’ve looked at the essays before, I can’t say I’ve ever really engaged with them. How do they appear on an initial read?

·       First of all, they are the writings of a thinker, someone willing to attempt to examine just what they think, unlike the complacency of, say, James Woodforde (I don't get the impression he ever examined his own ideas critically). You couldn’t imagine a greater contrast.

·       But Montaigne’s essays are a hotchpotch. They vary widely in length, from just over a thousand words (‘On Idleness’) to book-length (‘An Apologie for Raymond Sebonde’, which is nearly 200 pages in the Penguin edition. The title and the length of each essay don’t appear to be related.

·       The title of each essay often seems to be bear little relationship to what is discussed within. Moreover, some of the titles look to have little relevance to a man trying to determine his own views (‘Ceremonial at the meeting of kings’).

·       On first reading, it seems the essays represent many years of rethinking. But the three editions of the essays, which editors by convention label A, B, and C, were written in 1580, 1588, and after his death in 1592 – a period of only twelve years. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to see evidence of a writer changing his mind, or at least his approach. Many writings contain multitudes, as Whitman said, but not always as visibly as here.

·       Most importantly, I can’t help seeing the vast number of quotations, mainly from classical authors. It’s as if Montaigne couldn’t look at the weather without quoting a classical writer on the subject. Now I know the Renaissance was fixated on ancient Greece and Rome, but it’s still a shock to see how frequent Montaigne’s quotes are. Did he never disagree with classical authors? What if their opinions were so cryptic that they offered no guidance, a bit like Vitruvius describing the classical method of architecture, which has remained unintelligible from his time to the present day? Nonetheless, it is certainly true today that an accepted style for non-fiction writing is to state an opinion and to follow it up by an authority who states in writing a confirmation of that opinion. So the pattern still exists today; we just don’t use classical authors so often as our exemplars.

·       Of course, Montaigne uses the classical authors for his own ends. The selection of a quote from a classical author is to an extent the construction of your own ideas. We can’t say that Montaigne had classical attitudes. But we can look in the classics to see if there is a correspondence between Montaigne’s ideas and those of the Classical writers he read most frequently.

·       A fundamental problem of the Essays, a problem shared with all writings of the time, is that they combine formulaic views, which were the accepted opinions of the day, with unconventional and perhaps radical ideas. I’m no expert in Renaissance thought, so I inevitably depend on authorities to point these opinions out. At least initially, then, the commentators are looking at the text with rather different criteria to my own. For a modern reader like me, many of the commonplace views are surprising; I am fascinated (at least initially) by what was probably unexceptional to Montaigne’s contemporaries. I can’t (initially) get excited by Montaigne’s scepticism, as I am so fascinated by his everyday opinions and how different they are to those of the present day.

·       Thus, for example, in ‘To Philosophize is to learn how to die’, Montaigne talks about the importance of being ready for death at any moment: “As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.” What a strange attitude! How different to the present-day, where death is largely suppressed from our thinking. Of course people die, but for the most part we can ensure that death is painless and predictable. Usually, in the modern world, we can ignore death and pretend that it will never happen.

·       What about a present-day Montaigne? What if someone were to read Montaigne and to try to assemble the modern assumptions and expectations, and then to analyse themselves to show which of those assumptions he or she didn’t agree with? That would be a project indeed!

James Woodforde: the complacent cleric

James Woodforde was a parson of a Norfolk country church for 27 years. In principle, his diary could be a unique insight into rural life in the 18th century, but I found it an excruciating read.  In a word, Woodforde is complacent. For example, pretty much every entry in the diary begins as follows:

I breakfasted, supped and slept again at home.

The reader might think, because the author has not moved house, that such a detail is not worth recording – at least not repeating the same sentence thousands of times. For Woodforde, it seems a significant guide to his character. Habit, repetition, the daily round, is good. He records:

·       How much money he gave away in charitable donations - but he doesn’t mention the much larger sums he received in tithes from his parishioners. According to Wikipedia, the living of his parish was worth £400 per year.

·       How much money he won or lost playing at cards

·       How much he spent on travel.

·       What he cooked or ate.

Does anything else motivate Woodforde? Not religion. Woodforde’s faith is of the “minimal folk superstition” variety. Religion is only mentioned when someone dies, is born, gets married, of if something exceptional happens. There is no questioning or investigation of faith. Typical references to religion are:

I got to Ansford, I thank God safe and well this evening about 6 o’clock [Feb 1st 1764]
I … married my Sister Jane and Mr Pouncett by license. Pray God send Thy Blessing upon them both, and may they be happy in each other. [May 24 1774]
Thank God Almighty, for preserving us all safe from so violent a Tempest. [Aug 10 1787]

As for positive aspects of the diary, they seem to be an excellent depiction of the unthinking life at Oxford in the 18th-century: Woodforde records drinking, competing for livings, and disciplining undergraduates who drink too much, but no mention of any learning. These are the words of a complacent fellow.

The Buildings are grand at Cambridge but few of them [May 22 1776]

Quite a Summer’s day and exceeding fair.

Had a letter this evening from my Sister Pounsett.

Had another from Dr. Oglander, Warden of New

Coll: Oxford, in answer to mine, and very satis-

factory it was. Five poor unhappy young men were

hanged this day at Norwich, for divers misdemeanours,

at the last Assizes they were condemned — Bell, Boddy,

Bridges, Partridge and Gryfin, none of them but

what were quite young, but Villains … [April 3 1778]

The effect of the diary is smug and soporific. Worse, it brings into question the whole nature of diary writing. Must writing a journal be as egocentric and complacent as this? What makes a good personal diary or journal? Montaigne’s writings are a fierce self-examination, carried out over many years. Sartre describes his childhood with merciless condemnation of the people about him. Boswell’s journals are a masterpiece of self-assurance accompanied by the less comfortable reality he encounters. He is enthusiastic. Where is Woodforde’s excitement?

Did you know Rigoletto was Charlie Chaplin?

Glyndebourne Touring Opera production of Rigoletto: Rigoletto (R) and Gilda (L)

No, I didn’t know either, until I saw the Glyndebourne Touring production of Verdi’s Rigoletto (Norwich, December 2019). The opera was now set in a film studio, with Rigoletto himself dressed in the distinctive guise of the little tramp. Except that the singer playing Rigoletto happened to be about 20 stone and as unlike Charlie Chaplin in physique as you could imagine. The director, Christiane Lutz, appears to be responsible for this interpretation. She states, in the programme:

“We then thought about Charlie Chaplin, an iconic comedian, someone with enough charisma to fill the huge figure of Rigoletto, who worked within the studio system at this time, as the starting point for our staging… When you say ‘Charlie Chaplin’, everyone has an image, an idea in mind, and that richness of association was what we wanted.”

But the more you think about it, the more unlikely the analogy becomes. Chaplin was famous in films as the victim, the little man who suffers from an impersonal and cruel society, and at others’ hands. Rigoletto, in contrast, is someone who is clearly very successful, surrounded and protected by rich people, many of whom resent him for his success. There is nothing the two characters have in common.  Lines such as this would sound very strange coming from Charlie Chaplin:

Rigoletto

Who could harm me? I’m not afraid of them.
No one dare touch someone protected by the Duke.

Gratuitous videos are a commonplace of modern opera productions, and this production has a good example. Glyndebourne shows the three-act opera in two parts, with an interval between. Before the start of each part, there is a short video in which someone (I assume an elderly Chaplin, although uncredited) talks about the importance of moving forward, not looking back. These videos, together with the amateurish mime of an actor writing the word “forwards” in a circle, do not help us understand or appreciate the plot. In what way does Rigoletto look forward? It seems to me he spends most of his time worrying about the curse put on him - not very forward-looking.

There were other aspects of this production that left me guessing. For example, whose daughter is Gilda? The Count of Monterone, according to the synopsis, “confronts the Duke for seducing his daughter”. In this production, the daughter is seen on stage with a baby – and Rigoletto is seen to take the baby. So who exactly seduced the Count’s daughter? Or is Rigoletto acting honourably in taking responsibility for the Duke’s transgressions?

One problem with this production was that I didn’t get much of an idea of Rigoletto as evil. Perhaps Nikoloz Lagvilava, the baritone playing Rigoletto, simply doesn’t do nasty very well. In this production, he appeared as the wounded bear: a big, ungainly animal ridiculed by his peers. Theatre is supposed to deal with archetypes. I was lost by the archetypes depicted here.

Complexities of the story

To be fair to the production team, Rigoletto is a rather confused opera. Some of the story makes perfect sense, and can be readily grasped by the audience. The coup de theatre when Rigoletto discovers he has had his own daughter murdered is stunning; the moment he hears the tune of La donna e mobile in the background, he realises the dead body in the blanket in front of him is clearly not his intended victim, the duke. But other key points are not at all clear. Is the Duke a good or a bad man? At the start of the opera, he is the archetypal seducer:

Duke

If today one woman pleases me

Perhaps it’ll be another one tomorrow.

Constancy, tyrant of the heart,

We detest like a disease.

Yet later in the opera, the Duke appears in all sincerity as a man converted to constancy for love of Gilda:

Duke

She who first kindled in my heart

The flame of a constant love

She so pure, whose modest expression

Almost convinced me to a virtuous life!

The opera, and this production, would suggest the Duke is entirely sincere in his affections towards Gilda. Later in the opera, he is seen trying to seduce Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena. Perhaps it was just me, but I interpreted this not as the actions of a serial seducer, but as the ravings of a man who has just lost his true love. However, it's something of a condemnation of the plot that it's still not clear after I have seen Rigoletto performed several times. Of course, Verdi’s operas are melodramas, which means there is little room for complexity of character; it is perhaps trying to fit an over-complex plot into the opera format. I would see this as a limitation of the opera itself, not of this production.

Unnecessary action in this production

There are two actors in this production whose job it is to swan around and ‘interpret’ the music in some way (apart from singing - they are silent roles). Only one actor is credited in the programme, so perhaps the second actor appeared, like the extras in Noises Off, just in case the first one didn’t manage to appear on stage at the right time. Helpfully, the two of them killed each other off just before the final curtain. Otherwise, we could have been there all night.

Those barren leaves: barren indeed

Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) is his third novel. I chose it because, having enjoyed Crome Yellow, I thought, mistakenly, that the later novel would also be a light-hearted social satire. Light-hearted it is not; the last incident with any humorous interpretation takes place at least 50 pages before the end, and the tone could be described as unremittingly sombre. I can accept Jeeves and Wooster as figures of fun because I am never invited to take them seriously. Mrs Aldwinkle, in contrast, is at the start of the novel a satirical fabulously wealthy but insensitive villa owner, but by the end of the novel her heavy-handed behaviour towards would-be lovers makes us feel distinctly uncomfortable about her.

Those Barren Leaves could be called, a novel of ideas, but while  that term is not usually intended as a negative comment, in this case, the ideas weigh down the action and left this reader yawning. Huxley’s novel is overladen with ideas. What little action there is pauses repeatedly, interminably, with lengthy meditations on such unlikely topics as the human hand (about which more below). From David Bradshaw’s introduction to the Viking edition of the novel, Huxley described his aim as a novelist was ‘to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay’. For that approach, you have to be convinced that Huxley’s ideas are interesting. In this novel, at least, the ideas give the impression of someone who (as Huxley admitted) takes pleasure in reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica: disconnected chunks of learning, seen as an end in its own right, disconnected from any kind of social vision.

In this post I will reveal details of the plot, because I really can’t imagine anyone wanting to read this novel for themselves. I hope I might be able to dissuade others from struggling through it.

This novel of ideas could be described, perhaps uncharitably, as the idle writings of an Etonian, who has studied excessively and can’t stop himself churning out great slabs of erudition, for nobody’s benefit, and with little political vision outside his own rather complacent class . All the characters have the vice of talking to themselves. Not only that, but the only characters it seems that the novelist considers truly worth are the males with the right kind of philosophical pondering. Most of the characters are from the leisured classes, and even if they are not rich (and Chellifer is not), they comply with the unstated house rules that money is not mentioned and practical action scorned.

One chapter of the book (Part Five, Chapter One)  is devoted to the human hand. The lovers Calamy and Mary Thriplow appear to be in some kind of post-coital reverie. Calamy is thinking about his hand.

‘About your hand? Said Mary incredulously. ‘That seems a queer thing to think about.’

‘But interesting if you think about it hard enough.’

That is, Calamy implies, a hand is interesting if he, Calamy thinks about it – not Mary. Now the sex is over, it is time for some real thought.

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it … He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment …  ‘I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing – this hand, for example … one might… really get at something – some kind of truth.” … But it would be a slow laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.

Implied here is freedom from the woman he is with. In this novel, women tempt, women love, they may even be novelists, but they don’t think, at least, not the way that men think. In fact they get in the way for much of the time. Calamy has no problem thinking about multiple meanings of a hand, but only when not interrupted.

Later, Mary Thriplow makes a note of this extended meditation on the human hand, clearly intending it for her next novel. No original thinking, then; the ideas in her novels are derivative. This is heavy-handed, misogynistic satire.

Not only does Huxley depict a world where women don’t think, he posits a universe where we, the readers, are fascinated by his thought. Reading this novel is a bit like attending every lecture in a University Extension course for a whole term. The novel concludes with a lengthy chapter where the three male characters – Cardan, Chelifer and Calamy discuss ideas openly.  Remarkably, they all seem to agree – the novelist’s usual trick of interrupting a lengthy digression with some disagreement is here abandoned. This is lazy writing, with characters not easily differentiated - there is no plot; the novel ends in chat. Nothing happens.

But the most horrific aspect to the novel is a subplot that is completely at odds with a satirical novel. Cardan accidentally spends the night with a brother and sister, who put him up for the night, and hatches a plan to marry the sister, who has some kind of disability, for her money. Accordingly he in effect abducts her for the remainder of the novel, where she is tolerated (but not accepted) by the main characters, until conveniently she dies horribly of food poisoning after failing to take the men’s advice on eating local fish. Is his action condemned? Nobody in the group questions what Cardan is doing. The satirical tone of the novel has been well and truly lost. How Huxley could mix up his genres in such a way is disturbing

So there we are: leaden satire, vague worries by the leisured classes about the effect of democracy on the masses, women as objects of temptation but who are not capable of systematic thinking like the men: here is a novel of the dying upper classes. When the bomb drops, this lot will still be considering the human hand and its many simultaneous meanings.

An Orientalist Painting

Antinous in the form of Osiris, c1790-c1820

At the Fitzwilliam Museum there is a small exhibition entitled The Great Belzoni, occasioned by the donation of a portrait of Belzoni to the Fitzwilliam. The authorities have marked the occasion by setting up a small exhibition of items from the permanent collection that are linked in some way to Belzoni. “In some way” is a rather broad term, since the single room devoted to the exhibition includes a miscellany of paintings, drawings and objects loosely linked to Egypt in the 19th century – a rather broad area. However much (or little) Belzoni knew about ancient Egypt, and it seems unlikely he knew very much, given his career history as a circus strongman among other activities, he certainly participated in, and was perhaps partly responsible for, a mania for all things Egyptian and Oriental during the period. One example is the ludicrous small statue of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, depicted as the god Osiris. Although this porcelain statue is from Belzoni's time, it is derived from a Roman original. Clearly, the fashion for Orientalism - dressing up the everyday in the costumes of another civilization to make it more exotic - started well before the eighteenth-century in Europe.

I’m not complaining that the exhibition was a hotch-potch, because its loose nature has enabled some things from the permanent collection to be shown that would otherwise be left gathering dust. Most wonderfully, it reveals at least one magical work, John Frederick Lewis’s The Siesta. The Fitzwilliam has Lewis's first version, in watercolour.

Lewis, The Siesta (Fitzwilliam, c1876)

Lewis (1804-1876) was an English painter who lived in Cairo for ten years (as well as spells in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East). On his return to England, he used items collected from his stay abroad to suggest an Oriental theme in many of his paintings.  According to Wikipedia, he would often use his (British) wife as a model for the many ‘oriental’ works he painted for the rest of his career. His works often have exotic titles such as “The Harem”, but the figures depicted in many of them have faces more characteristic of Victorian drawing rooms.

In other words, what is “oriental” about his paintings (by "oriental" I mean exotic and sensuous for a Western viewer) above is largely anecdotal and imaginary: a state of mind rather than an accurate record. It could have been a room in Walton-on-Thames (where Lewis lived after his return to England). But in this painting, what is displayed is less about the figures and more about patterns and colours. In any case, the representations of objects and figures are less than detailed: the woman is wearing some kind of long green gown, but beyond that it would be difficult to be specific. The impression left in the viewer is of areas of varied and contrasting colours: the colours of the woman’s clothes and the fabrics on which she is reclining; the flowers on the table; the light shining through the translucent green gauze across the window; the light shining through the grille that seems to make up the outer wall of the space viewed; the patterned carpet. The rich juxtapositions of patterns, the grill that seems to make up the wall of the room, and the low kind of divan in one corner of the room, make up the exotic feel to the picture space. The woman asleep makes this a slightly voyeuristic act on the part of the viewer: we are accessing a private world. In a few words, this is exotic, reclining, relaxed, inviting, sensuous; a space we would like to inhabit. The painting is all the more successful because the human forms only a small part of the background of the painting; other works by Lewis have an exotic location but a main figure with an all-too obvious and everyday face. I prefer my fantasies more suggested than intrusive.

Lewis painted the same work again in oil (now in the Tate Britain).

Lewis, The Siesta (Oil version, Tate Britain)

However, I think the oil version is slightly more composed, and loses some of the exquisite freshness of the watercolour version. It also lacks some of the lovely pinks and blues of the watercolour.

Orientalist or not, The Siesta (in either version) is a magnificently evocative picture, and a match for (say) Tennyson in using a remote civilization as a vague suggestive backdrop to turn a mundane subject into a kind of dream: The Siesta is a wonderful example of the art of suggestion.