Somerset Maugham wrote of Gerald Kelly’s series of paintings of Burmese dancers: ‘His Burmese dancers … have a strange impenetrability, their gestures are enigmatic and yet significant, they are charming, and yet there is something curiously hieratic in their manner; with a sure instinct, and with a more definite feeling for decoration than is possible in a portrait, Mr Kelly has given us the character of the East as we of our generation see it.’  (Hudson, 1975)