Lunch Out: the Rex Whistler Restaurant at the Tate Gallery

The Tate Gallery Millbank.  Triple P's meeting was, handily, in the building in the background

Agent Triple P had a meeting on Millbank the other day and ran into an old friend, the luscious M, in all of her Mediterranean glory, coming out of the same building afterwards.  Having just both finished somewhat tedious all-morning meetings, and given it was a nice sunny day (it's been our hottest April since records began with 26 degrees Centigrade or 79 Fahrenheit), we decided to repair to the nearby Tate Gallery restaurant for lunch.  Now, the Tate (or Tate Britain, as it is now annoyingly called; to distinguish it from the Tate Modern) was one of Triple P's favourite galleries and used to be Triple P's favourite in London, but more on that later.

First let us go into the Rex Whistler restaurant.  The restaurant is named after the artist Rex Whistler (1905-1944), who painted the murals adorning the walls.  Having been thrown out of the Royal Acadamy, Whistler went on to study at the Slade Art School.  Whistler became famous for his murals and trompe l'oeil works and painted the mural in the Tate Gallery restaurant in 1927 when he was only 22.

The original bright young things:  left to right: Zita Jungman, William Walton, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Georgia Sitwell, Teresa Jungman, and Rex Whistler. Photographed by Cecil Beaton

Whistler was one of the original "bright young things" and is believed to have been the model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; required reading for a certain type of young lady when Triple P was at Oxford.  The great love of his life was Lady Caroline Paget, daughter of the 6th Earl of Angelsey. It seems that his love was unrequited but he did numerous drawings and paintings of her including one nude, whether from life or imagination is not known but she did have something of a racy reputation.

Lady Caroline Paget by Rex Whistler

It was at her family home, Plas Newydd, in Angelsea that Whistler painted his greatest work, a 58' by 12' painting which is the largest canvas painting in Britain.  Like the Tate mural the picture is of an Arcadian fantasy landscape. 

Whistler's immense canvas at Plas Newydd

Whistler was paid £5 a day for the eighteen months it took him to complete the Tate mural.  The subject of the mural was devised with the novelist Edith Olivier (1872–1948), a friend of his.  It was at Edith Oliver's house that Whistler first met lady Caroline Paget.  The story of the mural relates an expedition by seven people who leave the Duchy of Epicurania in search of exotic meat, to relieve the diet of their own people who subsist solely on dry biscuits. 

The Tate Gallery in January 1928.  Sandbags attempt to keep the flood waters at bay

The mural survived the Thames flood on January 7th 1928, when the Thames, swollen by melted snow, burst its banks at Hammersmith.  Despite being under two feet of water, Whistler's mural was robust enough to be largely undamaged.

Self-portrait of Rex Whistler (1940) in his Welsh Guards uniform,  This picture is now in the National Army Museum in Chelsea, just a couple of miles from the Tate

 

Whistler joined the Welsh Guards at the outbreak of World War 2.  Commanding a Cromwell tank he became the Guards Armoured Division's first casualty in Operation Overlord when his tank's track became entangled with wire.  As the crew tried to free the track they came under heavy machine gun fire. 

 

 

 

 

Whistler sprinted 60 yards to another tank to call in supporting fire but was killed by the concussion from a mortar, after completing his task.  There was not a mark on his body but his neck had been broken.  He was buried in Normandy and his brother, the famous glass engraver Laurence, designed a wonderful memorial prism to him which is in Salisbury Cathedral.

The Whistler memorial prism in Salisbury Cathedral

Anyway, on to lunch.  Triple P hasn't eaten in the Tate Gallery restaurant (the appellation "Rex Whistler"is comparatively recent) for some time.  In fact it could be over twenty-five years!  It was really famous, not so much for it's food but for its wine list.  It was, as it still is, unusual in that it maintains its own cellar rather than buying wine in as its needed, like most restaurants.  This meant that it was able to buy fine clarets en primeur and cellar them; meaning that they could sell them in the restaurant at a good profit but keep the prices far below other restaurants who would have to pay market price. 

Rex Whistler Restaurant

Triple P thinks he has been thee times before, back in the eighties.  Firstly with HMS and Agent DVD, secondly with his former work colleague and on-off girlfriend SA and finally with Stinky C, the paratroopers daughter.  Stinky C worked as a graduate trainee at one of Triple P's previous organisations.  She was very posh and had gamine short, brown hair which reminded Triple P of Leslie Caron (who Triple P once saw shopping in Guildford, whilst she was performing in a play at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre).  Several of her fellow trainees complained that she stank and Triple P was nominated to break this news to her.  Deciding that it was best done over dinner we were not prepared for the fact, that evening, that she had changed out of her smelly work clothes and presented herself in a tiny, very low cut little black dress which displayed her quite awesome bust to distracting effect.  Taking her to the Archduke winebar she promptly hammered her way through several bottles of claret and half a bottle of port, displaying, along with her cleavage, a thorough knowledge of Bordeaux wines.  Much impressed, Triple P and C embarked upon a quite inappropriate relationship for someone who was supposed to be mentoring her and her fellow graduates (we have a horrible feeling that it actually started that very night).  Anyway, a Saturday lunch followed where we sampled the Tate's extensive wine list during a very happy afternoon (it tends to be one of those restaurants that you linger in).

Anyway, back to the other day, rather uninterestingly, we both had the same lunch.  The restaurant does a good value set lunch or you can go a la carte.  With the set lunch each possible choice is accompanied by an optional  recommended wine.  Two courses is £16.50 and three is £20.50.  Wine is £3.75 for one glass, £7.25 for two or £10.50 for three.  We started with a potato and watercress soup.  This was excellent and not as heavy as we might have imagined.  It was a substantial bowlfull, however, and given that on the set lunch you can pay for two or three courses  you could easily have had just this with some cheese for a light lunch.  A good excuse to access the wine list!  With the soup the recommended wine was Quinta de la Rosa Branco 2009 from the Douro.  Made  from the same grapes that go into white port (60% viosinho) it balanced the thickness of the soup well and had an unusual English-style, grapefruit finish with the viosinho giving it a floral smell.

To be fair we had already eaten one of the slices of beef before we remebered to photograph it.  Still...


The main course was rare roast beef with devill sauce, fat chips and carrots.  This was, we have to say, not a full-sized course but after the soup that was less critical. If you had opted for a main course and a dessert you might feel a bit short changed, however.  The beef, however, was meltingly good and the sauce was only mildly hot and quite subtle.

To accompany this, we decided against the recommended wine, Château Bernadotte 2007, and went for the rather more splendid Château Prieuré-Lichine 1995, at a very reasonable £52 a bottle (given that we were charged £40 for a bottle of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc in a wine bar last week).  A this sells over the counter in the UK (if you can get it) for around £40 a bottle we didn't think that this was an unreasonable mark-up. 

Even though the days of Chateau Lafite for £11.00 a bottle are long gone at the Tate (at least now they take credit cards, for a long time it was cash only) there are still some bargains to be had in the fifty page wine list and we need to arrange some further visits.  The selection of Bordeaux is still impressive with an average of four to six châteaux per Bordeaux region (the list is very French heavy).   For example they have six wines from Margaux, from Château Labégorce, a cru bourgeois at £21.50 for a half bottle, up to a Château Margaux itself for £370 for a 1989 vintage.  The key thing about the restaurant's cellaring policy is it means that you get access to older wine than you usually can find in restaurants. The list also contains a very wide selection of wines by the half bottle.

The restaurant decants wine properly which, with one like the Prieuré-Lichine really is necessary.  In fact, it probably could have benefited from another hour in the decanter.  Although a nice deep garnet colour still it is probably at the end of its life and wouldn't be worth keeping much longer.  However, it was still a very nicely balanced claret which was still very fruity and even slightly herbal. 

We finished the wine with a rather paltry, but delicious, serving of mature cheddar cheese.  We ordered a another serving to split between us.

All that's left of the permanent collection on display

All in all it was an excellent lunch in a very pleasant restaurant and, in fact, the only slight negative about the afternoon was the gallery itself.  This used, as we said earlier, to be our favourite gallery in London but now, other than the Turner wing, most of the permanent collection has been removed to be replaced by trendy one off exhibitions of inferior art or schools' areas, leaving the glories of the Tate largely confined to one room.  Save us from trendy curators!
.

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Frederick Catherwood

Archway, Casa del Gobernador, Uxmal by Frederick Catherwood

There are few more romantic subjects for a painting (if you are Triple P anyway) than ancient ruins.  One of the things we rediscovered with our purchase of the book Archaeology by CW Ceram last year was the name of the artist of one of Triple P's favourite paintings of ruins, which was reproduced in the book. If there is any picture that captures the exotic thrill of the discovery of lost cities deep in the jungle it is this picture of Uxmal by the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood.  The most notable modern spin on this is, of course, the opening temple scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

Idol at Copán

 

Interior of the Principal Building at Kabáh

Studying architecture at the Royal Academy, from 1824 until 1832 Catherwood travelled extensively around the Mediterranean drawing ancient Egyptian Phoenician and Carthaginian ruins.  He became fascinated with the stories of  ruins in Central America.  In 1836 he met, in London, the American lawyer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) and having read the account of the ruins of Copán published by Juan Galindo they resolved to travel to Central America and produce an illustrated account of the ruins.

Pyramidal Building and Fragments of Sculpture, at Copán

They travelled in the region from 1839 (Stephens had just been appointed special ambassador to Meso-America by US president Martin van Buren) to 1840 and their subsequent books  Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (arising from a further visit in 1843), became best sellers and, essentially, reintroduced the world to the Mayan civilisation. 

General view of Kabáh John Lloyd Stephens is in the blue shirt

 

They fought their way through almost impenetrable jungle to unearth these lost relics of a great civilisation, the existence of which had essentially been forgotten.  Excavating relics, in over forty sites, from the grip of foliage that had long covered them, they discovered things that even the few locals had not realised were there.

 

Broken idol at Copán

Sadly, many of his original drawings were destroyed in a fire at the building where he was exhibiting them in New York.

Las Monjas, Chichén-Itzá

Teocallis, at Chichén-Itzá

Later, Catherwood moved to San Francisco and ran a store selling equipment to miners and prospectors of the Californian gold rush in 1849.

Fortress at Tuloom

In 1854 he was travelling on the American liner the SS Arctic, one of the most luxurious ships of the day, from Liverpool to New York when it collided off Cape Race, in poor visibility, with the smaller French ship Vesta and sank with much loss of life, including Catherwood's. 

The sinking of the SS Arctic from an eyewitness' sketch

The sinking of the Arctic was a huge scandal at the time as although there were 84 survivors nearly 350 lost their lives including every woman and child on board.  The evacuation of the ship was carried out amidst panic and utter disorginisation and lifeboats were launched with hardly anyone on board.  Such was the outcry over this that the tradition of "women and children first" on sinking ships was developed.  The Vesta stayed afloat, despite having lost her bow, as she was steel hulled and had watertight internal compartments but the wooden-hulled Arctic sailed on only to sink shortly afterwards.

 

Temple at Tuloom

In order to achieve his extraordinarily accurate pictures he often used a camera lucida.  The picture above contains the only known portrait of Catherwood or, rather, a self-portrait.  He is the figure on the top right in the yellow.

Idol and Altar at Copán

As archaeologists have subsequently discovered, Catherwood's illustrations were extraordinarily accurate; he used no artistic licence on the detail of his subjects at all.  Where he did use his artistic ability was in his use of light on the buildings and objects, such as this menacing idol, to give them the maximum visual impact.

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A Christmas present by Vargas

Agent Triple P hopes you all get to unwrap something nice tomorrow...

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Visual Flashback: The Old Stage Coach by Eastman Johnson

Sketch for The Old Stagecoach (1871) by Eastman Johnson in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

When time allows there is nothing Agent Triple P enjoys more than visiting an art gallery in one of the cities he has travelled to. As Triple P has been know to do the occasional drawing or painting himself we always like the opportunity to examine works of art closely. Particularly drawings; as they tend to reproduce poorly in print or digitally and the full subtleties of them can only be appreciated in person.

It is always exciting to be faced by a familiar image in a gallery, particularly unexpectedly, and in our other blog, Venus Observations, we often examine those featuring the female nude. Agent Triple P's taste in art is, as one might expect, rather conservative. He enjoys nineteenth century Victorian Military paintings, female nudes from any period, Victorian neo-classical and pre-Raphaelite works, nineteenth and twentieth century European and North American landscape paintings and maritime paintings. He does not like Late Mediaeval and Renaissance painting, still life, animal paintings, portraits, abstract art, most twentieth century art (save post impressionists). Anything between the two he will certainly look at with an open mind.

The painting illustrated here is not on the blog because it is the sort of painting that Triple P likes as such but because it provides a flashback to another period in Triple P's life. Occasionally, when he wanders around a gallery he is faced by a painting that brings him up short because it is so familiar. Oddly, before he started to acquire his large collection of art books, one of the most common ways that he experienced art was from record covers. Those who are only used to recorded music coming in cds do not appreciate the visual impact that a 12" x 12" record sleeve could have. Much of the music that Triple P had on record when he was younger was classical and much of it was illustrated by paintings.

Triple P acquired two classical records to start his collection back in 1968. These were given to him by his aunt, who had recently got married and was disposing of duplicates with her husband's collection. The two were both Angel Records of Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. One was Beethoven's 3rd (now replaced on CD) and the other was Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. This, at the time, was very much Triple P's favourite piece of music and on the cover featured a painting called The Old Stage Coach by American artist Eastman Johnson (1824-1906).

Sketch for The Old Stagecoach

So we were surprised, when walking around the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts earlier in the month, to see a sketch for this very painting (the original is in Milwaukee Art Museum). It immediately took us back to our childhood (our original LP is long gone) and, indeed Dvorak's music. Such is the wonder of technology today that we could instantly listen to the New World on our iPod whilst contemplating the painting. Whoever said that nostalgia isn't what it used to be?

The Old Stagecoach (1871)

Eastman Johnson, painted portraits and genre paintings of New England life in a way that reminded many of the approach of the Dutch masters (he had studied in Holland). He would later go on to be a co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Despite the open-air spontaneity of The Old Stagecoach it was actually painted in his studio although the children were drawn from life posing on a platform in Nantucket, where Johnson used to spend much of the year. The coach was based on a sketch he made of a wreck in the Catskills. Nevertheless he has pulled these disparate elements together into one of the life enhancing paintings he produced which were so popular after the American Civil War, when the country was looking to renewal and a new beginning.

Eastman Johnson

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Pomegranates

Pomegranate terraces in Oman

Agent Triple P has recently returned from the delightful country of Oman. Whilst there we were served a bowl of fresh pomegranate at the home of a leading Omani government figure. The pomegranates of Oman are considered some of the very best in the world and are grown on precipitous terraces in the Al Jabal Al Akhdar (Green Mountains) situated inland from the capital, Muscat.

This is all very apposite given Lady Rosemary's item on them in her Time for Food blog.

http://timeforfood.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/the-pomegranate-is-here/

The pomegranate I had was very different from the rather dried up specimens I have had in the UK, with large and juicy seeds. The trees there can grow up to 25 feet tall and in the mountains the temperature varies from as low as 6 degrees to 38 degrees Celsius, so they have to be hardy trees indeed. Pomegranate trees are some of the oldest cultivated trees on earth with eveidence that they have been specifically farmed for over 5,000 years.

Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

As Lady Rosemary's blog mentions pomegranates are inextricably linked with the Greek myth of Proserpine (Persephone). It was her eating six seeds of the pomegranate (the fruit of the dead) that destined her to live for six months of the year in the underworld. Lady R is a woman of Pre-Raphaelite demeanour herself and it is her fate as well to spend half of her time in her own subterranean underworld, no doubt because she ate her pomegranate seeds in the past.

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A new blog for Agent Triple P: Venus Observations

The title of this new venture in the blogosphere is down to HMS, with whom we had an enjoyable few days in Aquae Sulis recently. The lovely J having set upon creating a food blog, HMS felt that he might be persuded to contribute "vinous observations" (he has long talked like a nineteenth century scientist from an Arthur Conan Doyle novel).

Needless to say, Agent Triple P's mind instantly transliterated this phrase to Venus Observations and an image of a nicely curvy torso sprung into his mind (or perhaps that was something to do with the presence of the lovely J).

So on this new site we will place some of our favourite images of women in art, photography and sculpture. Some of them may even have clothes on, but we wouldn't count on it.

http://venusobservations.blogspot.com/

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Aphrodite Kallipygos

Thoughts of Stephanie Seymour and her beautiful bottom ( I read an article in a French magazine where the jovially racist French writer said that Stephanie had a bottom to outshine even African women) also brings to mind an incident described to me by HMS during a recent lunch. He had described observing the phenomenon where a girl wearing a short skirt can find that her shoulder bag causes the hem to gradually ride further and further up in a display made all the more tantalising by is assymetry.

This also brings to mind one of my favourite classical sculptures: The Aphrodite Kallipygos, or the Venus of the beautiful buttocks.

There is some nonsensical Greek story to explain the statue but it is far too tedious and unlikely to go into (something about sisters comparing their bottoms in the street and brothers falling in love with them etc etc.) The most famous version of the sculpture is a Roman copy of a Greek original (now lost). Originally on show in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome she found her way to the archaelogical museum in Naples where she was considered too racy for early nineteenth century eyes on account of her partial nudity. She was condemned to the infamous Secret Cabinet which was designed to house the more erotic finds from Pompeii. If you were a rich, educated male you might be allowed to view the contents of this room which even in the sixties had very restricted access. Indeed, it did not open properly to the public until 2000!

The partial nudity is the secret of her attraction, of course, as the Victorians (or whatever their Italian equivalents called themselves) realised. It is very much the effect generated by the World's most published photograph, Martin Elliott's Tennis Girl for Athena posters, of the eighteen year old Fiona Butler posing on a tennis court in Edgbaston in 1976.

The clothed top half and the naked bottom half speak more of illicit sexuality than the other way round as demonstrated by Karolina Kurkova in this picture.

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William McGregor Paxton

Agent Triple P has become rather fond of naked American women this month (more of which in due course). Given the women in question were rather camera shy we thought we would, instead, display this rather fine picture by William Paxton called Glow of gold, gleam of pearl. Paxton, who was mainly a portrait painter, (born 1869) produced this rather fine study in 1906.

Baltimore born Paxton died of a heart attack literally on the job whilst painting a picture of his wife in 1941.

But he has left these two nice nudes for posterity: obviously the same woman and a very fine woman at that. Perhaps it was his wife!

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