CULTURE AT CHRISTMAS

Another mark of age is the discovery that an event that you think of as quite recent actually occurred thirty-five years ago. This happened to me on Saturday when I visited the current Stubbs exhibition, "George Stubbs: all done from nature", which announced itself as the first major show of the artist's works for thirty-five years. "Surely not," I said, "I went to the last one, at the Tate, and the catalogue is in the sitting room. It wasn't that long ago." So I checked from the catalogue when we got home; the last Stubbs show was indeed at the Tate in 1984 and in Yale in 1985. You may not have noticed the current show, because it is at MK Gallery, the municipal art gallery in Milton Keynes, but make no mistake about it, this is a serious show, put on in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it moves in a month's time. Sadly, the MK Gallery doesn't seem to have a publicity budget, so the gallery was virtually empty when we went, for a show that in London would be attracting thousands. It's ridiculous, it's only half an hour from Euston on the train (and admittedly a stiff walk up Midsummer Boulevard once you get there) and it's a brilliant show. Go while you can! They've even got the skeleton of Eclipse, the first great racehorse, which I think used to be in the horseracing museum in Newmarket, and which belongs to the Royal Veterinary College. Stubbs painted Eclipse at least twice and as they are showing a lot of the material from his "The Anatomy of the Horse" it is particularly appropriate to have the skeleton in the show. I still remember the impression that the Tate show made on me all those years ago, a great sense of wellbeing flowing from those serene embodiments of Whig Britain, and this show did much the same on Saturday. Stubbs is still a really top-notch artist, persistently undervalued because he painted so many dogs and horses, but he's so exciting with his bold plain backgrounds and radical compositions. Those are classical friezes there. And how on earth does he get aerial perspective while painting in enamels, for goodness' sake?  His people are usually convincing portraits, too, but I suspect he found animals rather better company than the Whig landowners he was working for. In the end, a lot of those pictures are just absolutely ravishing, and it will enhance your life to spend a couple of hours looking at them.

Milton Keynes, on the other hand, is not so life-enhancing. It's a demonstration of how far we have come that this place, which seemed so progressive and futuristic in the 1980s now seems like a dinosaur. I remember passing through it by various different routes in the years when I used to take the bus from Oxford to Cambridge (and vice-versa); the bus company seemed not to have settled on the best route, and so you saw different bits of Beds and Bucks each time, but I remember pausing outside Milton Keynes Central more than once. Now the whole place seems hopelessly dated and very uncongenial, totally lacking a human scale, and devoted entirely to the motor car. I would have supposed that it would be a good place for cycling, being flat and spacious, but there was no evidence of that when we were there.

"Rembrandt's Light" at Dulwich was the other recent show. Another excellent piece of work, brilliant curatorship, making something quite special out of quite a small show. The highlight is the Queen's "Christ and Mary Magdalene", which is shown on its own under changing light conditions. The picture of course depicts dawn, and so they bring the lights up to replicate dawn. You see a tremendous amount that way, not least because the lights end up being brighter than you would normally have in a gallery, and so you see things you wouldn't otherwise notice. It's one of my favourite pictures anyway, but I loved that. My friend John painted an "hommage" to it, in the style of Van Gogh, which now hangs in our Sacristy at Mary Mags, as his thank you to us for giving him a show.

Our other Christmas treat was "La Traviata" at Covent Garden, beautiful. Simon Keenlyside on good voice as Germont, and two young Armenians as Alfredo and Violetta. Terrific music, beautifully played, and a great staging (by Richard Eyre, twenty-five years old). I reminisced about seeing the Zeffirelli film, with Placido Domingo as Alfredo, but I knew that was back in the eighties, 1982, as it turns out. We treated ourselves to dinner in the opera house restaurant, and I was amused to see that the menu is ten pounds more for the opera than it is for the ballet. Of course they will be able to justify it, but I rather suppose it's just more expensive because everything connected with opera is routinely more expensive.