The Arts Council Collection is responsible for the UK tour of the tapestries and the British Council looks after

The progress of Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell seems to have been influenced by his miserly father and in the course of his adult life women are simply an appurtenance. In Tim Rakewell’s progress, women are the dominating force, and the chief influence on his personality, and that influence is rarely benign. Why does Perry represent men and women in this way? And why does he do so with what some might interpret as a kind suppressed anger? Published by Particular Books, the accompanying book for Perry's show at the Serpentine Gallery (8 June – 10 September 2017) contains all his latest works. The exhibition (14 September – 3 December 2017) tells the story of studio pottery in Britain, from the early twentieth century to the present. Lincoln Museum is delighted to host Grayson Perry’s 'The Vanity of Small Differences', which tells the story of class mobility and the influence that our social class has on aesthetic taste. The processes at work in this story are complex because there is a part played by the grace or influence of God and a part played by our own free will. The complexity resides in the fact that we find it difficult to distinguish between the roles played by God and by ourselves. The easiest (but perhaps not the most helpful) way of making this distinction has been to say that whatever is good in my life is brought about by God’s grace, and whatever is bad is the result of my free will. Nevertheless, while we cannot say that God is ever the cause of evil, we might not want to see ourselves simply as puppets doing whatever good God chooses for us to do. Such a view can for example lead to the corresponding idea that whatever I do that is wrong has been caused by the manipulation of an evil force – the devil or a demon pulling the strings.

Church Times/RSCM:

William Hogarth’s set of eight paintings The Rake’s Progress (1733) is a tale of moral descent and personal failure, in which the protagonist, Tom Rakewell, dies debt-ridden in a madhouse. Taking inspiration from Hogarth, Perry invents a character Tim Rakewell , whose ascent of the ladder of social mobility – from working class boy to British Bill Gates – is depicted in six great tapestries. Tim does not end in the madhouse, but at the roadside, having sped his Ferrari into a lamppost, not wearing his seatbelt. Of course the irresponsible driving suggests, as in Hogarth’s tale, a moral lesson. Yet Perry’s point is not to moralise, but to open our eyes to the phenomenon of class difference, to which we are on some levels blind. With an inventive and elegant design from Pony Ltd, this fascinating publicationincludes an extensive array of full-colour reproductions of Perry’s tapestries,complete with photos of the artist’s sketches and preparatory material for thetapestries themselves.

All of these mixed emotions surface when I see Grayson Perry's work. I loved my mum, I hated our house; I couldn't wait for a room of my own, yet now I see how, though I escaped, so much of her remains with me. I see her social position against mine. I hate the word "journey"; rather, these tapestries are a bracing walk through that taboo subject: class. Stephen Willats and Grayson Perry feature in Do I Have to Draw You a Picture? at Heong Gallery, Cambridge Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden (Brancacci Chapel) is a parallel to Tim’s rejection by his family (3) overseen by Jamie Oliver, ‘the god of social mobility’, and raises the perhaps unforeseen question, ‘Is moving socially upwards a kind of fall – something from which we need saving.’ Three different paintings of the Annunciation provide elements of ‘The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal’: Crivelli (National Gallery) for the vegetables (though in his work they are symbolic) Campin (The Cloisters N.Y.) for the jug of lillies (again symbolic in Renaissance art) and Grunewald’s altarpiece (Colmar) for the face of Tim’s colleague (though she is also given angelic wings whereas in Grunewald her face is slightly similar to that of Mary). There are no religious connotations to The Upper Class at Bay (though see The Stag at Bay by Landseer and Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, and the reference described above to St Hubert). Six large tapestries exploring the British fascination with taste and class by one of the UK’s best-known and best-loved artists – Grayson Perry. On the whole, then, as we have seen, the echoes of Old Masters are, in Perry’s hands, obscure, perhaps ironic, perhaps playful, and bearing little obvious reference to the actual meaning of the Old Masters’ work, unless the whole story of Jesus’ life is meant to stand in judgment over that of the unfortunate Rakewell and his family.You can imply a fake past – the distressed leather sofas of the gastropub – but what if something is so bad that it is not good but simply bad, and you have made a tasteless joke? These stunning large-scale works are rich in both content and colour. They depict many of the eccentricities and peculiarities associated with life in the UK, and are at the same time moving, amusing and thought provoking.