“Keep buggering on” (K.B.O. for short) was the gruff motto of Winston Churchill, who understood that in times of strife and adversity the best way to keep personal fatigue and social paralysis at bay is by simply pushing forward, doing one’s bit to keep things going. With the coronavirus hitting the pause button on culture and turning everyone into stay-at-homes, London’s Chris Beetles Gallery is K.B.O.’ing for Britain with “Spirit of England,” which it describes as “a weekly series of online exhibitions of works for sale that celebrate aspects of our particular personality, and our pleasures and preoccupations.”
For sale, yes, but suitable for browsing. The drawings and cartoons range from the urban and rural scene-scapes of Georgian-era Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), with their pastry-puff maidens and gnarly-nosed tradesmen, to the plucky insouciance of Arnold Roth (born in 1929 and still with us), whose True Brit shows a whiskery gent, complete with rolled-up brolly and derby hat, striking a what-ho Terry-Thomas pose on a summery beach. No illustration in our period of corona confinement could be more ironic than The Monthly Overhaul, which is taken from William Heath Robinson and Cecil Hunt’s How to Run a Communal Home (1943), and shows an assembly line of occupants descending a stairway for their doctor’s checkup and medicine bottles. (The bathrobed, pajama’d man at the foot of the stairs bears an uncanny resemblance to humorist and Algonquin Round Table regular Alexander Woollcott.) Along with its archival riches, the Chris Beetles Gallery also presents a daily cartoon to keep viewers ever so au courant. —James Wolcott
