Focus on The Breakdown and explore the Legacy and influence.
English writer Evelyn Waugh attended the exhibition in its first week. The controversy over the painting may have inspired him to include a mixed-race relationship between his fictional characters of the white Margot and black Chokey in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall.According to Gemma Romain, a historian and researcher focusing on black history in Britain, Souter's now-destroyed Jazz Age work retains considerable legacy as a landmark in British culture:"Although the original work no longer exists, the removal of The Breakdown from the walls of Burlington House was a significant moment in the history of the Academy Summer Exhibition and inter-war Britain. It provoked much discussion in relation to art and race, and ideas of British 'decline' and the concurrent General Strike, while revealing that other institutions of the British establishment, such as the Colonial Office, could exercise their influence at the Academy to remove exhibits from public view."
Jazz Age Jazz Evelyn Waugh Colonial Office Decline and Fall