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Art Historian, Dr Jim Harris

In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge there’s a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of some people walking on a beach.

Last year, the painting went to be cleaned and, as she started to remove the old varnish, the conservator, Shan Kuang, noticed something unusual about the surface.  It turned out that not only were there people on the beach, but also a whale.  Really.  An enormous whale that someone in the eighteenth century had painted over.  Shan was the first person in over 200 years to look closely enough to see it.

When I’m teaching in my home Museum, the Ashmolean, I encourage people to look carefully at objects and ask questions. What is it made of?  How is it put together? Has it been changed or damaged?  Once the physical facts are established it’s easier to analyse: What is it for? What does it mean?

The trouble is, at Oxford, most of my students are pretty smart and sometimes they like to get straight down to saying what they think they know, without really looking at all. 

And although I’m the one teaching them, I often find that I’m the same, with people, with the news, with the world. I mutter at the TV and the paper. I bark at disingenuous politicians, without stopping to look properly or ask sensible questions.

Now I like to think my prejudices are of an acceptable sort: I’m a liberal-minded academic who doesn’t want to hurt or offend.  But I’m as knee-jerk and thoughtless as anyone.  I listen to the arguments, but I shut out the bits I disagree with.  I get the picture.  But I don’t see the whale. 

This isn’t a new problem.  In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah complained about the Israelites, ‘You have seen many things, but you pay no attention’. When Jesus was trying to explain about himself to his friend Philip, he said, ‘at least believe on the evidence’.

Jumping to conclusions about things means skipping over vital evidence, sometimes just below the surface that might help us understand the world and each other better. It allows me to pander to my prejudices.  And I reckon it means we sometimes miss the point completely.  Or the truth.  Or even the whale.