A question of taste

WHEN IT WAS OPENED IN 1927 the restaurant at Tate Britain was located in what was fatefully called the “most amusing room in Britain”. I was taken there as an undergraduate by a Yale professor of liberal views who loved wine. It had in those days an exceptional wine list, with excellent vintages offered at tempting prices, which could be sipped in agreeable surroundings.

The walls were and remain decorated with a continuous mural painted by Rex Whistler, an extraordinary production of the Slade who was 21 when he began. Whistler became famous for a style that ignored Cubism and Surrealism to evoke an imagined past, part Rococo, part Regency, very English, whose nostalgia seems doubly poignant because of his death