Rex Whistler, determined that the Second World War shouldn’t be left to young boys, worked hard to become an officer and lead troops into battle, but the naivety of early courage cost him his life on his very first day of battle, as Allan Mallinson reveals. Rex Whistler was up a scaffold with his portable radio in the saloon at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire when he heard the news. Dipping his brush, he wrote a message on top of the cornice by the bay window, before hurrying to Salisbury to be with his parents on their way to the cathedral: ‘I was painting this Ermine curtain when Britain declared war on the Nazi tyrants.
Sunday, September 3rd, R.W.’ Whistler — Reginald John, but always ‘Rex’ — was then 34 and comfortably off.
At the Slade School of Fine Art, which he’d entered in 1922, his professor, Henry Tonks, had been in no doubt of his talent: ‘Directly he is launched, he will be an amazing success.’ And he was. In 1925, the Tate Gallery wanted to revamp its gloomy basement refreshment room.
Tonks championed his protégé and, over 18 months, Whistler would create a 55ft narrative mural, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats , depicting a party of eccentric gastronomic adventurers travelling through exotic landscapes searching for unusual delicacies to eat. Tonks declared it ‘the most amusing room in Europe’ when it reopened in November 1927. Although now considered problematic, at the time, the mural, with its ‘frivolously gallant style’,.