Town mouse at Tate Britain
A visit to Tate Britain gets our town mouse wondering whether he wants to be told what to think about pictures


We had a wonderful visit to Tate Britain on Sunday. First, there was a fascinating little exhibition of Sylvia Pankhurst's gouaches. Sylvia was the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst's second daughter. A trained artist, she designed emblems and china for the Women's Social and Political Union and used her skill as a painter to record the miserable working lives of female workers in the Potteries and elsewhere.
* Subscribe to Country Life and save
She wasn't a scintillating talent, but the images are more powerful than her technique. Then we wandered through some of the main galleries. I'm in two minds about the new fashion for not overburdening the visitor with information.
I like it in principle. Reading somebody else's opinion is easier than looking and forming one's own, but perhaps it's better not to be tempted by interpretative labels. However, couldn't the curator have told us something about the buildings that Samuel Scott shows us through An Arch of Westminster Bridge in about 1750? And what is the globe in a flaming heart that William Style of Langley points at in his portrait of 1636?
Mind you, one would rather not have some of the interpretation offered. At the feet of the 17th-century Irish chieftain Sir Neil O'Neill is a suit of Japanese armour, apparently there to remind us that oppression in the world was not only visited upon Catholics. Come off it.
* Follow Country Life magazine on Twitter
Exquisite houses, the beauty of Nature, and how to get the most from your life, straight to your inbox.
Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by His Majesty The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
-
The garden created by a forgotten genius of the 1920s, rescued from 'a sorry state of neglect to a level of quality it has not known for over 50 years'
George Dillistone’s original Arts-and-Crafts design at Knowle House, East Sussex, has been lovingly restored and updated with contemporary planting. George Plumptre tells more; photography by Clive Nichols.
-
21 of the greatest craftspeople working in Britain today, as chosen by the nation's best designers and architects
We've persuaded some of the most celebrated names from our Country Life Top 100 to name the craftspeople they have in their own personal little black books.