The Nation’s Painted Follies

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12465, 5 June 1926, Page 12

The Nation’s Painted Follies

The Office of Works, that queer Government department which ordains the brand of soap to be used in washing the equestrian statue of King Charles the Martyr, has come into the limelight again -over a series of beautiful hand-painted pictures which it has planned for the refined adornment of St. .Stephen’s .Hali, in Westminster. Tlie title of this set of panel paintings in itself is a masterpiece—“ The Building of Britain.” The subjects which tlie artist is to be told to depict are of the patriotic type usually termed “stirring.” Unhappily (says a writer in “Cassell’s Weekly”) they have stirred Dr Tout, president of the Royal Historical Society, past president of the Historical Association and president of the International Historical Congress, to some pungent observations on the history accepted as fact at the Office of Works. It is highly unlikely, he points out, that Sir Thomas More, Speaker of the House, did refuse, in a spectacular or any other manner, “to grant Cardinal Wolsey a Royal Subsidy, Without Debate, 1523.” The evidence is quite to the contrary, and tends to , show that Sir Thomas actually got a douceur of £IOO from the Cardinal for arranging the deal. Dr Tout invites the Office of Works to jeopardise its dignity by deigning to explain wh“ratifying” the Magna Charta means, and stresses the unsuitability of a picture purporting to show “Tlie Wycliffe Bible Read in Secret Meeting” as an historical record, for if the meeting had been secret it stands to reason that its details had not been recorded. “No one,” he adds, “can imagine King Alfred defeating the Danes in a storm off Swanage.” Only a few months ago Sir Charles

Oman, the distinguished professor of modern history at Oxford, complained publicly that a picture of King Alfred in the House of Commons showed that energetic and unconventionally attired monarch., daintily clad in “some sort of tights. Sir Charles has drawn attention to many an amusing case including the picture in the Taylorian Gallery of the death of Julius Caesar, in which Caesar wears a broadbrimmed hat and Brutus red tights, 1 wbile_ Casca sports a very dressy pair of bright blue Russian boots, in addition to red tights like Brutus’s. Not the least comical aspect of the picture is the mildly, deprecatory gestures- of the phlegmatic array of senators at the stabbing.: jjf Caesar in this underbred mannepp Until after tHe time of Elizabetfepir Charles declared, practically Wr >4he costumes, of bygone historical worthies were wrong. Monks are frequently shown in robes that were not adopted until long after their time. In an art gallery in Petrograd I found many amusing anachronisms, including Herod, consulting his watch—a large, mediaeval “turnip” affair! Herod’R “massacre of the innocents” at snn-haked Bethlehem inspired Pieter Breughels the Elder to naint that pet. picture of Sir Charles Oman—it hnn"s, I believe, in the. gallery at Hnmn’ton Cmirh—in which Herod’s troops, at a distinct disadvantage in their heavy, and surely horribly cold, armour, are chevying about in the deep snow little Jew hoys well muffled up. as one is in a rigorous Dutch winter I