The works on display are tropical scenes, painted during his recent two-year sojourn to Mexico and Central America. The episode of the “unhealthy pictures” unfolds while Charles Ryder is holding an exhibition of his newest paintings. “Take me,” he says with such whimsy, “to Charles’s unhealthy pictures!” Blanche desperately wants to see the paintings and determine what they mean. The brilliance of this remark comes to life when Anthony Blanche repeats it with relish, as he has an enormous desire to see these “unhealthy pictures.” Anthony Blanche, a secondary character from Brideshead Revisited is memorable for his stutter insight and wisdom trip over themselves in Blanche’s speech when he expresses opinions, both high and low, about art, culture, and ways of life. Stuyvesant Oglander (a lady of society) declared Charles Ryder’s paintings were, for certain, “unhealthy pictures”. By turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling.What makes a picture “unhealthy”? Evelyn Waugh is the author of this turn of phrase, and the setting for this description is a conversation regarding his protagonist’s paintings in Brideshead Revisited (1945). Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh’s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one’s life. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle-class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo-Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s and Sebastian’s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles’s life. Opens July 2008.Įvelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth. Soon to be a major motion picture from Miramax Films, starring Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Ben Whishaw, and Matthew Good, and directed by Julian Jarrold.
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