At the National Gallery 
Peter Campbell
One’s feelings about having one’s appetite tickled by pictures depicting food are at best ambivalent. Willem Kalf’s mid-17th-century painting in the National Gallery of a lobster, cooked to a brilliant scarlet and accompanied by glasses of wine, bread, a peeled lemon and an elaborate silver-mounted drinking horn – the original horn is in a museum in Holland – is perfect in its detail. But the insistent surfaces, the glitter of the crustacean’s shell and the luxury of it and its trappings, are so meticulously described that you can feel, as you can looking at the perfect photographs in a recipe book, that it is too good to be true. This is a pin-up of a lobster. It may look lovely, but it’s not really meant to be eaten. It rouses only to disappoint.
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Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Hayward and the British Museum · With Goya and Rembrandt
At the National Gallery · Pisanello
At the Musée Galliera · Children’s clothes
At the Atlantis Gallery · the Survey of India
At Tate Modern · Like a badly iced cake
At the Royal Academy · Rodin
At the Saatchi Gallery · London’s new art gallery
At Tate Britain · Thomas Girtin
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