Inside a low, brightly lit case sits an old wizened man in a white shift spinning (middle of bottom row here). For our permanent entertainment and instruction he is bottled up, fated never to complete his task. It gave out the same sort of shock as Degas' glassed up petite danseuse aged 14, stretching in exercise but perhaps also in pain. I find these contained narratives very powerful for their pathos, their threat and their sheer spectacle. Remember that Degas exhibited the Glass Case alone the previous year, as if preparing his audience for the challenge of the less than life size girl in wax and human hair.

Of interest here is the model of the explorer's clothes as Invisible Man. There is a glory of multiplicity throughout, a sense of throng, of cases struggling to contain their contents whcih is so easily thinned out by designers more concerned with their own modish aesthetic philosophies than with the inter-reaction of the objects.