Old wine into new skins

In its 150th year, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has unveiled a new display of 10 galleries devoted to British furniture and decorative arts, with 700 objects on show. Clive Aslet is impressed

- Clive Aslet

THEY used to be called the English galleries. Now, after a closure of four years and a $22 million refit, they have been reimagined as the British galleries. This is not the only shift in the display and interpretation of the Metropolitan Museum’s splendid collection of decorative art from this country (largely, it has to be said, English ). The principle remains the same, however: a narrative walk-through, celebrating the quiddity of British furniture, ceramics, glass, silver, textiles and objets d’art, from 1600 to 1900. This is serious stuff, object-focused and without a hint of dumbing down. We should be flattered by the undertaking. France is the only other foreign country whose decorative arts are so honoured; there are no Spanish galleries, for example. When one hears that a reason for the redisplay of the British collection is that the previous presentation, dating only from 1995 (COUNTRY LIFE, August 17, 1995), was not well visited, one is doubly grateful for the Met’s courage in doing it. Brown furniture is out of fashion. Time to realise not all Georgian furniture was brown.

Indeed, despite the gloom in which fugitive textiles must be displayed, one of the first things to leap out of the show is its colour. The tapestry Don Quixote Tilting at Windmills, from a series that shows Quixote’s adventures in grotesque, is in a remarkable state of preservation; made in 1674, under the direction of Charles II’s arras-maker Francis Poyntz, it is a lively and humorous composition of reds, blues and greens. This is one of several new acquisitions on display.

This is a journey through British taste, all the richer for being undertaken abroad