It is both a condition of, and a thematic current connecting, the works on
display here, from Noël Coward's monogrammed dressing gown, to the
overwhelmingly beautiful fan Charles Ricketts made for Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley (aka Michael Field), to Laura Knight's Self - portrait (1913), which a reviewer for the Telegraph at the time found repulsive on grounds of its combination of «dullness» and «something dangerously close to vulgarity».