Meanwhile, Jonathan Jones in The Guardian was trying to be slightly less comprehensive in his disdain. No doubt inspired by one of the exhibits, a cat that appeared to be stuffed but apparently was handmade.
Jones applauded the exhibition for its 'somnolence'. Well, you know what they say about damning with faint praise. For him, it was relaxed. He described it as:
'A show happy in its own skin as a random jumble sale of mostly anodyne art. Yet the silliness is threaded through with brilliant works by terrific artists. In the middle of a wall of forgettable pictures of pots, dogs and fried eggs, a pristine cabinet by Edmund de Waal raises the tone.'
How had he found that? I wonder. Although I saw the wall it was on, a nearby portrait of toilet rolls had entirely distracted me from it. He managed to find something else I had failed to notice:
'In another dull room, three pots by Lindsey Mendick call you over with their luscious shine…'
Not me, they didn't.
I was beginning to suspect that Jones had been tipped off. However, he also complimented a piece by Paula Rego, who is all the rage these days.
This one I had spotted. It was hard to ignore, as it occupied an entire wall of its own. I didn't like it, which was some consolation for having missed the other pieces he raved about.
'Her work Oratorio is a heavy old wooden cabinet opened up to reveal violent, sexually charged, unresolved scenes painted on its interior and doors, while a gang of grotesque dolls within stare you down. It's Rego's answer to a medieval polyptych, and to installation art: a 3D horror show with paintings that burst out of their flatness to pull your hair and throttle you.'
Yup! In lavishing compliments on this work, the Guardian critic managed to say everything I would have said about it. That's one of the nice things about art, I suppose. Owing to its almost complete subjectivity, any work can inspire equal and opposite reactions without any need for disagreement.
So let me cordially beg to differ that this was a 'dirty treasure and unnerving modern masterpiece'. It wasn't even as good as some smaller pieces of hers, elsewhere in the gallery.
That's the thing though. In surroundings like this, where sheer sensory overload can render the mind numb to all pleasure, it's entirely understandable that these busier critics fail to see the masterpiece.
If someone wanted to hide such a thing – for a bet, say, or simply because they couldn't afford to rent a Swiss warehouse – there could be no better place to conceal it than here, on a wall of the Academy.
Take this wall, for instance: a heaving mass of pet dogs lovingly depicted by their owners. Who would ever notice if a Landseer was sneaked in among them?
Or this wall, including one of the show's many cats: would anyone notice if the kitchen utensils underneath were from the Dutch Golden Age?
And these walls in another room, so wantonly miscellaneous that it's hard to say what they're about. You could easily sneak a late Mondrian in here. No one would be any the wiser.
The effect of all this superabundance was that I had to go through the rooms four times (I was in no particular hurry) before anything began to swim into view. At first, it was the oddities that grabbed me, like the squashed head of Donald Trump, or a visual joke such as this toaster, good enough to eat.
Or this, well, thing:
But then I saw it, the masterpiece I'd been vainly seeking, the one that had eluded both the critics, hanging on a wall as inconspicuous as a purloined letter.
Exhausted, and gently informed it was time to leave, I took a photo and set off home. Only when I got there did I realise, I had no idea what the piece was called, nor who had painted it, having failed to take note of the number.
I slept on it. Fitfully.
The next day, I lost a further couple of hours solving the mystery. You can't rush a connoisseur. Eventually, I discovered a Scottish artist called Kaye Donachie. She was neither a member of the Royal Academy nor a doting pet owner, but an artist of some standing.
It turned out that Jonathan Jones's colleague at the Guardian, the more attentive Adrian Searle, had reviewed one of her exhibitions, praising her images of women, yet noticing how 'the paintings also seem to have built-in flaws and glitches'.
My anonymous picture shared the same blotchy technique. He also noticed how her women looked askance, thinking of other things. Bingo! Well, no, they probably weren't thinking of bingo, but you know what I mean.
The picture in Burlington House, entitled 'But the clouds roll on,' is beautiful for all the reasons Searle describes. She has the kind of serene self-possession that could drive men mad.
