Whistler

Yesterday I finally made it to London for a much postponed lunch with an old friend and a visit to the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain ('the Tate', as it will always be to me). Arriving in London from Lichfield is always a shock: the noise – and the people! Not to mention the traffic fumes. En route to lunch I stepped into Westminster Cathedral, that great unfinished masterpiece, for some peace and quiet among the faithful. Those Eric Gill stations of the cross really are quite wonderful... The Whistler exhibition turned out to be on a larger scale than I expected, but not large enough to be exhausting, and the sheer variety of works on show – from tall vertical portraits to small-scale prints, drawings and sketches, from meticulously detailed etchings to bold, semi-abstract sweeps of colour and light – kept the interest from flagging. There was even a reconstruction of the famous Peacock Room, a dramatic make-over of his patron Frederick Leyland's dining room, done in complete…