Mick Hartley

And so to the Geffrye Museum, for their exhibition Home and Garden, 1914-1960.

What a great place the Geffrye Museum is. Maybe because, being buried out of the way in deepest Hackney, it manages to keep out of the metropolitan glare. Or maybe it’s just the modest subject matter – the changing face of English domestic interiors. You can wander through the rooms and lose yourself in the atmosphere of a Victorian parlour or a 30s-style suburban front room without bothering too much about the actual details of, say, the design of the chairs or the style of flooring – though of course you can focus in on the specifics if you want.

If you can ignore the schoolkids, that is. The place seems incredibly popular with school parties, and it’s easy to understand why: much more entertaining for kids to imagine what it was like to live in London in the past than to look at paintings hung on a wall and be lectured on how important such-and-such an artist was in breaking away from the rules of blah blah blah.

The exhibition itself is delightful in a way that these small exhibitions often are. The pictures are unfamiliar – at least for someone like me who’s not particularly up on early to mid 20th Century English painters. And the commentary on the pictures is to the point without being patronising or hectoring, as is so often the case in, say, Tate Modern. Instead of being told that such-and-such challenges traditional conventions or subverts our preconceptions, we’re informed that the crossed hands may be an allusion to the crucifixion, that the dark clouds over a garden painted in the late Thirties may well hint at the gathering storm-clouds in Europe and their threat to the English way of life, or that the house of cards in front of the child is probably meant to symbolise the fragility of a happy family. Like one intelligent adult talking to another, in fact, which comes as a pleasant surprise.

In his review in the Telegraph, Richard Dorment goes so far as to suggest that the show chronicles the “disintegration of a whole class”, ie the middle class, who over the course of two world wars lost their self-confidence. I can see what he means, though the gallery introduction suggests that the fact that most of the individuals in the paintings don’t look boldly out at you, as they would have done in earlier times, reflects rather an increased interest in psychological states and the social interactions being portrayed than any loss of confidence. The days of aristocrats gazing down haughtily from the security of their social position are long gone.

Dorment cites Charles Burleigh’s “The Burleigh Family Taking Tea at Wilbury Crescent, Hove”, c1947, as an example of his loss-of-confidence theory: “In one sense, this is a classic family conversation piece, as Hogarth might have painted it. But instead of Hogarth’s exuberant celebration of material prosperity, here the atmosphere is subdued. Each family member is lost in his or her own world.”

Superficially it’s a delightful and redolent picture, but as you look more closely the atmosphere does seem, as Dorment suggests, muted and rather sad. But then, as the commentary informs you, Burleigh’s son, the figure on the left, had a disability which severely limited his mobility, and his wife, on the right, was seriously ill at the time, so we don’t really need to draw on sociological factors to explain the sense of melancholy. But it does provide a peculiarly English kind of poignancy: summer, teatime, windows open on the garden, a sense of repressed feelings, isolation….