The curious cancellation of the Rex Whistler restaurant

We laugh at how the Victorians put plaster fig leaves on nude statues; but when the annals of the strange new puritanism that has been sweeping the British Isles come to be written, then the latest debacle over Rex Whistler’s mural at the Tate must surely comprise a central chapter. As Macaulay once wrote, ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.’

In 1926, Rex Whistler was commissioned to paint a mural around the Tate’s basement restaurant. He was only 20 and still a student at the Slade, so a bold choice but one he amply justified. The resulting mural, In Pursuit of Rare Meats, shows a party of epicures travelling across a fantasy rococo landscape dotted with architectural capriccios. Just as with Evelyn Waugh’s first novels written at much the same time, along with the brio of Bright Young Things, Whistler gives us a tart reminder of the horrors of the First World War – we see a gravestone for Whistler’s brother – and of slavery: a young black child is led by a length of string.