In October 1927 Cecil Beaton contrived a photograph of “the bright young things”, as they styled themselves, to which he gave the laconic title On The Bridge, Wilsford. Seven young men and women pose for the camera, all dressed up, in ruffs and frills, patterned silk waistcoats and faux-rustic breeches, as courtly versions of the shepherds and shepherdesses of Arcadia. Beaton himself is there, along with Georgia Sitwell, Zita and “Baby” Jungman, Stephen Tennant, the composer William Walton and the painter-illustrator Rex Whistler. Soon afterwards Osbert Sitwell took the whole group to visit Lytton Strachey at nearby Ham Spray. In characteristically acerbic fashion, Strachey pronounced them “perfectly divine … strange creatures with just a few feathers where brains ought to be.”

 

 

 

Several of Whistler’s drawings of the 1920s and early 1930s, in particular a delicate profile portrait of William Walton, and a series of exquisitely misty miniatures of far-off places, Venice and New York among them – done as illustrations for Edward James’s book of poetry, The Next Volume – suggest that this was not just empty hyperbole. By contrast, the paintings that Whistler did while still at the Slade cannot be said to have shown vast promise. He apparently won first prize for Painting from the Life for an appallingly desultory oil of a sleeping nude, which suggests that his fellow students in his must have been more or less completely devoid of talent. Little better, although at least more imaginative, is the complicated historical costume set-piece, Trial Scene from the Merchant of Venice, of 1925, which won him the annual Composition prize at the Slade. A crowd of misshapen figures with curiously pallid faces gesticulate histrionically, on a terrace tiled like a chessboard, before a palazzo that looks as though it has been directly, albeit somewhat wonkily, transcribed from an early Renaissance painting. Above, a blind personification of Justice, sword in hand and accompanied by a pair of flying putti, hovers unsteadily in the air.

 

In the same year as that painting was completed, the dealer and patron of the arts Joseph Duveen put up £500 – a considerable sum at the time – to pay for a set of murals to decorate the Tate Gallery’s dreary tearoom and restaurant. Henry Tonks lobbied vigorously and successfully on behalf of his protégé. Whistler, who was only twenty when he secured the commission, spent the next two years working away at his magnum opus, a continuous frieze telling the story of a mock-epic quest, In Pursuit of Rare Meats. The result was a work that does not stand up to close inspection, but was not really meant to - an eccentric but entertainingly exuberant pastiche of the celebrated frescoes by Francesco del Cossa that encircle the fifteenth-century Palazzo Schifanoia, in Ferrara, given a gastronomic twist. In Whistler’s neo-Quattrocento world, a group of indescribably feather-brained individuals set off on a largely fruitless quest for exotic edibles, wandering through a predominantly lime-green landscape dotted with temples and pagodas, urns and statues, where they encounter all manner of pantomime trolls and monsters. Whistler’s friend Edith Olivier wrote an account of the mural cycle, for a booklet produced by the Tate in the mid-1950s, which perfectly captures its flavour: “The Duke and Duchess of Epicurania are waving goodbye to the party. It consists of the Crown Prince Etienne, seen kissing the Dowager Duchess, and the Princess Claudia driving the little red cart … Krol Dudziarz, the son of an impoverished Polish nobleman, rides ahead on his bicycle.” The latter is a portrait of Whistler himself. His distinctively aquiline features can easily be made out by anyone – as long as they are sitting at the right table – in Tate Britain’s restaurant today.

 

At the opening of the restaurant, in 1927, Tonks said “I fancy there will be a boom in Whistler”, and for a few years, at any rate, he was proved correct. From the second half of the 1920s, to judge by the flurry of drawings and designs assembled at Brighton, Whistler was permanently busy – kept so, principally, by the beau monde to which he had been introduced by his fellowship of “the bright young things”. He painted murals for Sir Philip Sassoon and the Marquis of Anglesey, as well as designing a toile de jouy fabric to which he gave the cheerful name Clovelly. He designed a pair of ornate wooden urns in a playful neo-Rococo manner for the niches of Sir Samuel Courtauld’s Palladian drawing room, also providing the same patron with a large chinoiserie panel, to go over a mantelpiece, leaving a blank rectangle in the middle at the request of his patron – it seems, bizarrely, that Courtauld intended to hang a painting by Picasso in the empty space. In addition, he designed a huge mock-Baroque carpet, woven at the Wilton factory, for Edward James, who was at the time one of the principal patrons of the Surrealists. Piled thick with Whistler’s characteristically boneless nymphs and deities, all afloat on an emerald sea of wool, it is perhaps the crowning oddity of the exhibition.

 

Whistler took no interest whatsoever in the avant-garde art of his time, preferring to bathe his patrons in a warm bath of whimsical nostalgia for the pictorial styles of a distant, courtly and aristocratic past. At its worst, this meant furnishing the beau-monde of the inter-war years with portraits of themselves painted in an indigestible amalgam of styles pastiched together from Gainsborough, Reynolds and innumerable other, inferior painters of the eighteenth century. His little known Portrait of Miss Angelica and Miss Penelope Dudley Ward, of 1933-4, is an astonishingly unpleasant and inept daub. A watery sun casts its beams across a stage-set landscape where the young misses in question pose and simper, resembling encephalitic dolls. Their attendant, a grinning black servant in salmon pink livery, looking like a horribly out-of-place black-and-white minstrel, busies himself about their picnic, which appears to consist of a bowl of fruit, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a rubber chicken.

 

It is hard to imagine Whistler creating art that people in the years after the Second World War might have wanted to look at. As it was, he did not survive the conflict. He joined the Welsh Guards and trained as a tank troop leader. Billeted in Brighton, before embarkation as part of Operation Goodwood, he decorated the communal living quarters with the hilarious painted cartoon now known as Allegory: HRH The Prince Regent Awakening the Spirit of Brighton. Within weeks he was dead, killed outright by a mortar on his very first day of active service, 18 July 1944, as he dismounted from his tank to clear away a tangle of barbed wire. The most memorable of his self-portraits shows him in full army uniform, with a gin-and-tonic in his hand and his paintbrushes lying in a bundle by the drinks tray. For once, he looks less than carefree. His face his shadowed, his expression clouded with a look of apprehension.