The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural.
The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. Hamish Anderson, compiler of the former, began with the advantage of a famous cellar; Rex Whistler, creator of the latter, began with the blank walls of a dingy basement previously referred to as a ‘dungeon’.
Whistler was only 20 and still a student at the Slade when he won the restaurant commission in 1926. His rare gifts of draughtsmanship and imagination had persuaded Henry Tonks he was the man for the job, and the Professor’s faith in his favourite pupil was rewarded. In place of the usual trompe l’oeil panels, Whistler came up with an ambitious, continuous scheme: the travels of a party of epicures ‘In Pursuit of Rare Meats’ through afantasy landscape dotted with architectural capriccios. On the restaurant’s reopening, the press pronounced it ‘the Most Amusing Room in Europe’. ‘If only we can save him from the Pit,’ sighed Tonks, ‘because directly he is launched he will be an amazing success.’
If Whistler needed saving, it was not from the pit of artistic fashion that awaits so many brilliant art school graduates — his love of narrative and rococo decoration was not designed to appeal to fashionable critics. ‘A storytelling picture,’ sniffed Virginia Woolf, ‘is as pathetic and ludicrous as a trick played by a dog.’ No, the pit awaiting Whistler was a well-lined one, a long way from the boho funk of the Fitzroy Tavern. His decorative genius won him an immediate and loyal following among the cultivated aristocracy, who commissioned his murals, admired his stage designs and subscribed to the expensive limited-edition books he illustrated so inventively.
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