Ballet, and steak and oysters

On Sunday we went to see Matthew Bourne’s modern ballet/dance/thriller, The Car Man  (based on Bizet’s  opera) at Sadler’s Wells, near Angel. Carmen’s 19th Century Spain becomes a 60s garage-diner in the midwest. It’s a rather raunchy affair, and the dancing is quite formidable; it’s great fun and I enjoyed it far more than I though I would. We stopped off at Fish Shop on St John Street beforehand which, though perhaps a little pricey, I thought had  a really nice feel to it. We sat outside and shared a dozen oysters, making the most of the only unbroken sunshine of the weekend. Somewhat unusually for us, we ate out on both days of the weekend, having dined at Chez Gerard on Charlotte Street on Saturday evening. I feel I should make mention of the steak that I ate there.  Chez Gerard is not somewhere I would immediately think to go for an evening meal. To me their restaurants always have had a business-lunch appeal to them (I had hitherto experienced only those in The City).  The one on Charlotte Street was, however, a revelation. The steak that I opted for was a French cut, an Onglet, that I had not tried before. I ordered it rare and it arrived cooked to perfection. Apparently, this steak is known as ‘butcher’s steak’ because butchers would often keep it for themselves rather than offer it for sale. It’s obvious why; I have never eaten meat so succulent or so intensly flavoursome.  I should add, for no other reason than to dispel myths about cheaper cuts, that it was the least expensive steak on the menu. It is the steak attached to the last rib and the kidney and apparently often ends up just being minced! The oysters I had to start were also excellent, although the following day’s perhaps had the edge, if only for the accompanying sunshine. 

Prosperine, Freud and Turner

I headed out to Tate Britain on Saturday to see the new Turner exhibition. I got off at Westminster and was rained upon very heavily near parliament. By the time I got to Millbank I wasn’t really in the mood for it any more. Nevertheless I persevered, and am glad I did so. The Turner exhibition is very good indeed. Turner is not an artist who has ever particularly excited me. I think his oil paintings are awe-inspiring – a painting like The Fighting Temeraire , for example, thoroughly deserves its vast hordes of admirers – but they don’t make me want to seek out everything by him and read everything about him. But these watercolours, and in particular the colour studies (he called them ‘beginnings’) chosen by David Hockney, are fantastic. Turner was obsessed by colour and light (the interactive section of the exhibition explains this well) and the beginnings strip away everything else, leaving what I suppose Turner saw as colour ‘ideas’. Some of them are hauntingly beautiful, like the ghosts of his finished watercolours.

Anyway, after a relatively fleeting tour of the rest of the exhibition, I headed for Prosperine. Back in 2003 there was a Rossetti exhibition in Liverpool’s Walker art gallery. I was writing my MA thesis on Oscar Wilde at the time, and reading a lot about the Pre-Raphaeilites. The exhibition was a revelation, and I have loved Rossetti ever since. The Walker was, I seem to remember, widely praised at the time, and most of his great works were on display; Prosperine, however, wasn’t there. I knew from books that Prosperine was a gorgeous painting, but it’s not until you stand in front of it, or rather her, that you realise how astonishing a work it is. Eveyone talks about pre-raphaelite hair and lips, but look at her hands; Rossetti, was by this point, becoming obsessed with hands.

The model for Prosperine is Jane Morris (nee Burden), wife of William Morris. It’s not entirely clear whether she was Rossetti’s mistress, but she was certainly his muse. She was by no means conventionally beautiful, but she so inspired Rossetti that one can only imagine how mesmeric she must have been.

If you haven’t done so, I’d urge you to pay her a visit.

I’d not seen the new (well, newish) BP British Art Displays, and there is an excellent display in room 25 with some Lucien Freud and Stanley Spencer nudes. It seems a shame that there is not more Freud on display in London. I was lucky to catch the 2004 exhibition at the Wallace collection before I moved down here, but didn’t see the 2002 Tate exhibition. I hope there is another one soon, because as enjoyable as flicking through Freud in books is, it hardly does the works justice.