205 – Coming to an arrangement

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1872-3. Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow.

Last year, in March, I wrote about Whistler’s Mother, and on Monday I will talk about Whistler’s Wife – Beatrix Birnie Philip. However, as the official title of the former is Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 1, today I thought it would be a good idea to talk about No. 2, currently to be found in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. As it happens, the best collection of Beatrix Birnie Philip’s work is not far away, belonging as it does to the University of Glasgow, on the other side of Kelvingrove Park. That they can be found in the same city is not entirely coincidental, and yet not entirely connected. I will talk about Whistler – and his Wife this Monday, 11 September at 6pm, and the following week I will be in Glasgow itself. To end my somewhat Scottish September, on the Monday 25th I will introduce the Fleming Collection’s rewarding exhibition of Scottish Women Artists. Mondays in October will be dedicated to portraiture, and particularly that of the 17th Century. I will start by giving two talks dedicated to the recently refurbished and re-opened National Portrait Gallery in London, looking at the 16th and 17th Centuries respectively (later dates, looking at later dates, may follow), and continue with introductions to the Hals and Rubens exhibitions at the National and Dulwich Picture Galleries (the latter not entirely portraiture). Information about all of this will be added to the diary soon.

When I wrote about Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 1 (see 151 – Mommie dearest) I pointed out that the title of the painting makes no mention of it being a portrait. Regardless of the ‘subject’, it is, rather, an example of Whistler’s ongoing concern with ‘Art for Art’s sake’ – but more about that on Monday. The same is not true here. Although the painting was displayed under several different titles during Whistler’s lifetime (if you want a full list, go to the University of Glasgow’s encyclopaedic website), it is now generally given the full title Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, and the fact that it was a portrait was acknowledged throughout its early history. Carlyle, the great Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher, had seen No. 1 in Whistler’s studio at 2 Lindsey Row, Chelsea (the address is now 96 Cheyne Walk). Carlyle lived just round the corner, at 24 Cheyne Row (you can visit on Wednesdays – Carlyle’s House is now owned by the National Trust), which Google Maps tells me is only 7 minutes’ walk from Whistler’s former studio.

Like Anna McNeill (Whistler’s mother), Thomas Carlyle sits in profile facing to our left, against the same grey wall with the same black wainscot, the same chair sitting on the same beige floor. However, there are notable differences. For a start, No. 1 is almost square, but subtly in landscape format, whereas the format for No. 2 is definitely ‘portrait’. Is this a statement of intent, or was it decided by the ‘necessity’ of the composition? I’m not sure we can say. An ‘oriental’ curtain hangs to the left in No. 1, which might reflect the everyday interior decoration: the critic William Michael Rossetti – brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina – said of 2 Lindsey Row that ‘Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms’. However, the black drape, speckled with grey, does not make an appearance in No. 2: maybe it is, after all, more of a ‘portrait’ than an ‘arrangement’. There is one print visible on the wall in No. 1, with the edge of the frame of a second just visible behind Mother’s head. In No. 2 there are two prints, which help to balance the vertical of Carlyle’s torso on the other side of the composition.

I don’t know whether these two prints have been identified (the one hanging near Whistler’s mother has, see 151), but Whistler decided on the imagery early on. Prints with the same format, and apparently the same subject matter, appear in a study for Arrangement… No. 2 which is now in the Art Institute of Chicago (I’ll show you the study, and other preparatory material, on Monday). Top and bottom are in portrait and landscape format respectively, with the imagery in the top print apparently contained within an oval, with an inscription running along the bottom. The lower image is a dark rectangle, but with a horizon line above which a tower projects in the centre: it is clearly a topographical landscape. They might well be Whistler’s own prints, and it might be possible to identify them. Someone might have done so already, but I suspect the University of Glasgow’s website would include the relevant images if they had.

Carlyle himself appears rather sad. It has been suggested that he was still in mourning for his wife, Jane, who had died six years previously, in April 1866. He was certainly not a happy man at this time, writing in his journal, ‘More and more dreary, barren, base and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor diminishing quack world’ (which reads like a mangled version of Hamlet’s first soliloquy in Act 1, scene 2: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!’). The melancholy aspect of the figure was one of elements of the painting that Whistler himself appreciated, saying, nearly two decades after it had been completed, ‘He is a favourite of mine. I like the gentle sadness about him! – perhaps he was even sensitive – and even misunderstood – who knows!’

The background of the painting is taken up with three bands of colour. At the top is the cool grey of the wall, stretching a little more than half the height of painting. The beige floor (a carpet?) fills the bottom quarter, with the black wainscot taking up the remainder. A brown rug, or cape, falls over Carlyle’s knees – quite possibly related to the fact that he had not been well. His niece once contacted Whistler to say that he was too ill to attend that day’s sitting, but would be there the following week. But the rug, or cape, is also there for the composition, and for the colour and tonal harmony: Whistler’s mature works are all predicated on the balance, and the perception, of closely related tones (the scale from light to dark) and hues (colours). The brown of the cape, or rug, sits half-way between the colour of the floor and the black of Carlyle’s jacket, while the wall translates the floor’s beige to grey and provides a foil to the hair and beard. Having the extra fabric draped over his knees also strengthens the triangular composition of the figure as a whole.

The cape also harmonises with the gold frame of the lower print: these echoes are what makes Whistler’s work sing. Notice how a tiny, triangular patch of the seat is visible. In tone it matches Carlyle’s left hand, which is resting on his knee, perfectly, even if the hue is not exactly the same. There is a contrast between the hands – one visible, resting on his lap, the other gloved, holding his stick, the first light, the second dark. The un-gloved hand has the same hue and tone as the face, which is above the exposed area of the seat, creating a sense of stability: no slouching here! Balancing the un-gloved hand, on the horizontal, is Whistler’s ‘signature’: a butterfly with a sting. These four light ‘notes’ form an irregular diamond, again adding to the sense of stability. Carlyle’s hat rests on his knee – he is a visitor here, certainly not at home, and not entirely relaxed. The hat overlaps the lower picture frame, thus connecting the sitter to the print: does that have any significance for his life? Or character? Unless the print can be identified, we will never know.

Carlyle liked the painting, his niece writing, ‘even my uncle is beginning to be impressed with the portrait; he remarked to me when he returned from his last sitting “that he really couldn’t help observing that it was going to be very like him, and that there was a certain massive originality about the whole thing, which was rather impressive!”’ However, he wasn’t entirely happy about the process of sitting, commenting at one point that Whistler’s ‘anxiety seemed to be to get the coat painted to ideal perfection; the face went for little.’ This is confirmed by the painting itself. There are numerous layers and alterations making up the coat, whereas the face is painted relatively thinly.

This was not the first time that Carlyle had been the subject of art. Five years before the sittings for Whistler had begun, he was photographed by one of the great, early photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron. She was so determined to take his picture that she travelled all the way from her home on the Isle of Wight to London to meet him – with her camera. Cameras were not the easiest things to transport in the 1860s. One of the resulting portrait is below, on the left. She later wrote, ‘When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.’ Carlyle also appeared in Ford Madox Brown’s masterpiece, Work – although I’m assuming he didn’t pose for this. He appears in a detail on the right of the picture, and you can recognise him as much from the signature stick, on which he leans, as from the likeness (although as a portrait – or even a face – I think it is sadly lacking: possibly the poorest passage in the painting).

This is the second, smaller version of Work, owned by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and dated 1859-63. The idea was to encompass the whole of Victorian society, from the wealthy on horseback in the background, to the manual labourers, poor, and indigent in the foreground, the latter grouping chosen from types characterized in Henry Mayhew’s book London Labour and the London Poor (1840). Thomas Carlyle stands on the right of the painting next to F. D. Maurice, one of the founders of the Christian Socialism movement. Carlyle is included as a result of his book Past and Present (1843), in which he praised the work ethic, embodied in the line, ‘On the whole we do entirely agree with those old monks, LABORARE EST ORARE: Work is Worship’. Ironically it was ideas derived from Carlyle’s theories which led John Ruskin to condemn the high prices asked by Whistler, an outburst in print which led to a notorious libel case. I’ll try and cover that on Monday, too.

However much he liked the portrait, Carlyle did not buy it. Completed in 1873, it was finally purchased in 1891 by the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, at the behest of the Glasgow Boys. Not only were the Boys the leading artists in the Second City of Empire at the time, but some of them were also Whistler’s neighbours in Chelsea. Their insistence on this particular painting was related to Carlyle’s position as one of the leading thinkers in recent Scottish history. Whistler himself was also proud of his Scottish heritage: his mother Anna was a descendent of the McNeills of Barra. However, the history of the painting, and its purchase, are far too complicated to relate here, but again you can find the intricate details on the University of Glasgow’s website.

Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 2 was the first painting by Whistler to enter a British public collection – and notably, a Scottish one. In 1903 – the year of his death – he was to receive an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. This may be the reason why, in 1936, his sister-in-law and heir, Rosalind Birnie Philip, bequeathed his estate to the University. Well, that and the fact that Whistler himself insisted that nothing be left to an English collection. This explains the University’s remarkable holdings of his – and of Beatrix’s – work. One of his paintings, for which Beatrix modelled, is entitled Harmony in Red: Lamplight (c. 1884-86). It is currently on show in the Hunterian Art Gallery, and you can see it below, on the left. Like Whistler’s Mother, there is no implication in the title that Whistler’s Wife is a portrait – although, having said that, they wouldn’t marry until 1888, two years after it was completed. On the right is a painting by Beatrix herself from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. I chose this one because I am intrigued that the colour of the wall is so close to the palette of Whistler’s painting. It is entitled Peach Blossom, giving us no clue as to its meaning or content, nor even why it has that title – presumably the reference is to the colour of the dress. As we will see on Monday, they were clearly meant for each other.

204 – From May to September…

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The May Queen, 1900. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

My Elemental August is drawing to a close: thank you to all of you who attended the talks. I will miss that particular group of women with their resonances of time and place, training and travel, but it’s time to move on to what is proving to be a somewhat Scottish Summer. First up, this Monday, 4 September (and I will try to get the month right from now on) will be Two of The Four – looking at husband and wife team Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, while also including the other two members of The Four, Margaret’s younger sister Frances, and her husband, James Herbert MacNair. The following week we will look at Whistler – and his Wife, Beatrix Birnie Philip, whose works, like those of The Four, are particularly well represented in the collections of the University of Glasgow (a small part of that talk will explain how this came about). To finish off the month, after a week in Glasgow itself, I will introduce a wonderfully rich exhibition which you can see in Edinburgh until January, Scottish Women Artists, a collaboration between the Fleming Collection and Dovecot Studios. As ever, keep checking the diary for anything new! Today, though, I want to look at one of the masterpieces of Margaret Macdonald.

The May Queen is a frieze made up of three almost square panels, painted on thick-weave hessian with gesso (effectively plaster), inlaid with twine and thread, glass beads, mother of pearl, and tin plate and painted in oils. The technique belongs to the world of the decorative arts, and indeed, this was made as part of the decoration of a very specific interior. However, when considering the art of Margaret Macdonald, or for that matter that of the Glasgow school around the end of the 19th century, and even more generally, trends in modern art at that time, it is important to remember that genres were opening out, and any technique or medium should really be seen as equivalent – and as important – as the Old Masters’ favourite, ‘oil on canvas’: you cannot consider the art of The Four without looking at their entire output.

The May Queen of the title is centrally placed, and flanked (framed, even) by four attendant maidens, symmetrically arranged with two on either side. They hold up garlands which surround the central figure and draw the entire group together.

Highly stylised, the Queen stands upright wearing a full dress which disguises her bodily form, falling steeply from the neck and reaching full width at about knee-level, where it curves in to a rounded base, hiding her feet, as if her body were made of a giant bud, or drop of water. She has dark, centrally parted hair, full on either side of her face, which then falls in long bunches of gradually diminishing width to a level just below her waist, where the two bunches join. This conjunction, and its positioning, may be intended to emphasize her sexuality. All of the preceding references to her anatomy are conjectural, though. There is actually no convincing evidence as to the nature – or position – of her body. The fastening of her clothing forms a vertical seam which runs the full length of the figure, not unlike the wing case of an insect. Overall there is the possibility of opening – of taking flight, if an insect, or of blossoming, if a bud. Inherent in this is a sense of the fertility of May, the promise of future growth, and of life.

She stands in front of a tree with a rounded canopy of leaves acting like an oversized green halo, with large pink forms of undefinable nature (but see below) framing her head, as does a series of symmetrically arranged, decorative, geometric lines. These have echoes of insects’ eyes, angular limbs, and potentially, even, a butterfly. Precisely what these elements represent is not clear, though, and indeed, one of the delights – and frustrations – of discussing the work of Margaret Macdonald and the other members of The Four is that they used a personal vocabulary of apparently secret symbolic forms which have never been fully explained. Aside from the bulging, fecund forms of the May Queen herself, the composition is defined by an insistent arrangement of horizontal and vertical elements. However, there is no danger of these looking mechanistic, as they curve, flow and flex, rather than maintaining a rigid structure. Three sets of unevenly horizontal lines scan the panel from top to bottom. A pair at the top define the Queen’s full height. At the level of her shoulders (does she actually have shoulders?) are the garlands held by the maidens on either side, and the ‘ground’ on which she stands is defined by three more lines, the upper one curving down under her feet (if she actually has feet).

If we look at the bottom section of this central panel we can see how sparse the imagery is overall – effectively a drawing made from coloured thread against the textured, buff-coloured hessian. There is no indication when looking at this detail on its own that we are looking at a human form, although there are signs of life. Along the bottom are patches of green from which the lines appear to grow. On either side of the central axis these patches are at their largest, like bulbs, or corms, from which a stem, or trunk, grows vertically. On either side there other plants which grow to the height of he broadest width of the May Queen’s skirts, each with one or two mother-of-pearl petals and sometimes a green leaf.

The focus of interest, though, is at the top centre, around the shoulders and head of the Queen. Flowers – roses, presumably – are set in her hair, and are scattered across the tree. The broad, pink, fruit-like forms are covered in other blossoms. The linear framing elements are at their densest and most complex, surrounding – and revealing – the simple, stylised, apparently innocent face, which has pale pink flesh and deeper pink, blossom-toned lips. It is entirely formal, frontally, even hieratically placed, implying that this is a figure of great importance: the Virgin Mary of medieval art is often presented in a similar way. The garlands held by the maidens are painted purple behind her, and purple and cream in front, and are strung with purple and pink blooms. The May Queen wears a pale lavender cape, reminiscent of insects’ wings, decorated around the hem with leaf- or petal-like pendants. The colour is almost all contained within the bounds of the garlands and the leaves of the tree, and the mass of lines makes it look as if she is trapped within a giant game of cat’s cradle. The increased intensity of colour and line here are what really create the May Queen’s status. At the level of the leaf-like forms the stems growing up from the central corms branch, continue their upwards growth, and become the pink shapes flanking the Queen – rose bushes, it would seem. However, some of the stems break off horizontally towards her head, where they form part of her elaborate coiffure: what initially appeared to be growing up now appears to be flowing down. She is part of the natural world, an emanation of May itself, the spirit of spring growth.

The attendant maidens are entirely symmetrically placed, although not rigidly so, and show considerable influence from the art of Japan, notably in the broad, flat areas of colour and bold outlines. Each pair shares a single green tree and paired rose bushes, if indeed that is what they are, and hold their garlands with a stilted, formalised gesture implying a dance or ritual. They have similar faces and hair to the Queen, but seen side-on do not have the same imposing demeanour. Their parted hair falls in bunches all the way to the ground, and doubles as the hem of their robes.

When looking at the top section of the left-hand panel (the same would be true on the right) two things become more evident. The first is the amount of space that Margaret Macdonald has given them: they occupy little more than the right half of the panel. The negative space to the left adds to the atmosphere by isolating the figures within a world that is clearly worthy of attention, and helps to create a sense of great calm. Also clearer here is the branching of the stems – especially that on the left, which would appear to confirm the identification of the pink forms as richly blossoming rose bushes: individual flowers are blooming along the subordinate stems. As in the central panel the vertical stems suddenly grow horizontally, even forming strict right angles. However close we are to nature, this is a formal garden, with espaliered trees and bushes.

The lower section of the right panel – symmetrical, of course, to that on the left – shows how the growing stems frame the central motif, and create the geometric, rectilinear structure of the composition as a whole. The closure at the bottom right corner is made up of the curving hem of the right-hand maiden’s robe, and a final plant, blooming with tin petals, at exactly the point where its stem becomes a tangent of the broad curve of the falling robe.

The frieze was created as part of the decoration of the White Room in the Ingram Street establishment of the doyenne of Glasgow tea rooms, Miss Kate Cranston. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was commissioned to design the room as a whole – including its furniture and decorations – but the finished product was very much a collaboration. Margaret Macdonald’s The May Queen was paired with an equivalent frieze by Mackintosh, The Wassail. For years I have been unable to distinguish the two stylistically, but writing the above description of Margaret’s work has opened my eyes and helped me to find some difference.

Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald; The May Queen; Glasgow Museums.
Mackintosh, Charles Rennie; The Wassail; Glasgow Museums.

Aside from the obvious similarities (the three panels, with identical materials, comparable background trees and differently disposed, but nevertheless equivalent rose bushes) and the most evident difference (there are two central characters rather than just one), there are also ways to distinguish the two works stylistically. For Mackintosh the outlines of the figures are far freer, looping energetically around the maidens, as if he were doodling in space. There is no ‘ground’ for them to stand on, or to tie them together, nor any espalier branches containing them at the top. This makes their bodies even more immaterial than in The May Queen. However, the heads are positioned more subtly, and more specifically. Whereas for Macdonald the heads of each pair of maidens are almost exactly the same – at the same height and turned at the same angle – Mackintosh places the heads of the outer maidens higher. This creates a sense of perspective: the inner maidens are further away. The heads are also angled differently. The outer maidens are in strict profile, whereas their inner companions twist their heads towards us at the neck, and lean the top back towards the inner shoulder: they are more naturalistically positioned, and more three-dimensionally conceived. This contradicts the entirely immaterial nature of their bodies, creating a magical, almost hallucinatory effect.

Before the two friezes were installed in their intended location, they were exhibited publicly – but not in Glasgow. The Four were invited to participate in the 8th Secession Exhibition in Vienna, held between 3 November and 27 December 1900. In 1899, the year before, Frances Macdonald had married James Herbert McNair, and in the year of the exhibition itself Margaret Macdonald followed her sister up the aisle and became Mrs Mackintosh. Although all Four contributed works to the exhibition, it was the Mackintoshes who travelled to Vienna to install the material: some of the display can be seen in the photograph above. As a result, it seems, it was Charles and Margaret who received all the adulation, with Macdonald was the overall ‘star’. Glasgow was already a noted presence on the international art scene, thanks to the work of the Boys – now known as the Glasgow Boys – whose paintings were included in various exhibitions across Europe (including Vienna) from 1890 on. The success of The Four in Vienna in 1900 confirmed Glasgow’s status on the world scene. The fact that these artists did not just paint, but also designed furniture, interior decoration, and even buildings (Mackintosh and MacNair were both architects) was an ideal match to the ethos of the Viennese Secession, with its firm belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk – all the arts working together to form a coherent whole. Within a couple of years the Wiener Werkstatte (‘the Viennese Workshop’) was founded, a direct equivalent of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and explicitly inspired by The Four, with founders Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser asking Mackintosh for advice. Even the first President of the Secession, Gustav Klimt, was impressed, not to mention influenced. In 1902, at the 14th Secession exhibition, he created the Beethoven Frieze – this is just one section:

The Beethoven Frieze, Detail: The Arts, Chorus of Paradise, Embrace, 1902. Wiener Secessionsgebäude.

Unlike the Macdonald/Mackintosh panels, this was a mural, painted onto the wall itself. This means that, like the panels, it painted on plaster. It also included three dimensional elements, gilding, and inserts: glass, as used by Macdonald, but also unexpected, ‘cheap’ materials, like curtain rings. The frieze was only supposed to last the duration of the exhibition: it’s a miracle that it has survived until now. It was explicitly, and undeniably an adoption of the techniques for which Margaret Macdonald was celebrated. It also has an equivalent use of negative space, with most of the frieze effectively ‘unpainted’ (this detail includes one of the densest areas of imagery). There are even ‘Glasgow roses’ growing on a bush surrounding the kissing couple here, with stems branching in an almost identical way to those in The May Queen.

The Four were far more important for the development of art in continental Europe than in Britain, and they were more widely celebrated away from home, however central they were to the art of Glasgow at the time. The influence on the work of Gustav Klimt is just one demonstration of this. However, precisely who was the major innovator of the group is still open to debate. If you want a better idea, I can recommend Roger Billcliffe’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art of The Four. As well as being a lecturer at Glasgow University, Billcliffe was also Assistant Keeper of the University Art Collection before moving on to become the Keeper of Fine Art at Glasgow Art Gallery – and so has first-hand experience of two of the best collections of their work. His book takes a careful, even forensic look at the evidence to hand – the paintings, drawings, prints and other materials – and has very specific, and well-reasoned opinions about the artists, which are not necessarily what you might expect. They are certainly are not what I had always thought. But if you want to know more about that – then sign up for the talk on Monday! I will try to make it as balanced as possible, and will also try to explain why it is hard to be more balanced. Then I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you think.

203 – Crivelli’s Original Garden

Carlo Crivelli, La Madonna della Rondine, after 1490. The National Gallery, London.

The National Gallery’s exhibition Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden, which I will be talking about this Monday, 28 August at 6pm, celebrates the painting which the late, great Portuguese-born artist created for the dining room in the Sainsbury Wing when it was opened back in 1991, a project relating to her position as the gallery’s first Associate Artist. I will discuss the painting in depth, looking at its origins and its relationship to both the National Gallery’s collection and to Rego’s life and work. Although influenced by many different paintings and life experiences, the composition, on three large-scale canvasses, was inspired by a very specific altarpiece by one of my favourite artists – or rather, by part of that painting – so I thought it would be a good idea to look it today. Paula Rego will bring my Elemental August to a close, giving way to what promises to be a somewhat Scottish September. This will start with A Couple of Couples: Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh on 4 September, and then James McNeill Whistler and Beatrix Birnie Philip on 11 September – the University of Glasgow has some of the best holdings of all four artists in their collection. The following week I will be in Scotland itself, visiting Glasgow for five days with Artemisia (there are still one or two places available if you’re interested: see the diary for more details, and please do mention me if you sign up), and the month will conclude on 25 September with The Fleming Collection’s superb exhibition Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception which I saw on Tuesday in Edinburgh – more details of that to follow soon. But today, as I said, we will look at Crivelli.

La Madonna della Rondine, or ‘The Madonna of the Swallow’, as it’s commonly known, has the distinction of being one of only two 15th Century Italian paintings in the National Gallery’s collection to still have its original frame. Renaissance architecture, based on Roman forms, frames the main panel, with carved, painted and gilded pilasters supporting an architrave. The two bases of the pilasters are painted, forming either end of the predella, the strip of paintings along the bottom which decorates the box-like structure which would originally have helped to support the painting on the altar for which it was commissioned. This was in the church of San Francesco dei Zoccolanti, Matelica, in the Marche, although as the building has since been restructured, the chapel is no longer there.

The swallow of the title is perched atop the back of Mary’s marble throne, its head all but silhouetted against the flat gold background. Unaware of migration, all people knew was that swallows went away in the autumn and came back in the spring. Inevitably their return became a symbol of new life, and so of Christ’s resurrection. The various fruits and flowers are also symbolic in a wide variety of ways, but, to counter my usual prolixity, I’m just going to say that I don’t have time to go into all of that right now. In this detail we see the heads of four people – the Madonna and Child, obviously (I’m assuming you know who they are), an old man with a long white beard wearing a broad-brimmed red hat, and a young man with long blonde hair (the style of the hair, and the fact that it is not dressed or covered, tell us that this is a man). All four have haloes, so we know that they are all holy. Jesus’s halo has a red cross on it, which is one of the ways we know that this is Jesus, rather than any other holy baby ,(which, in its turn is one of the ways we know that this is Mary, rather than any other holy woman…). Two of the haloes are shown as circles, flat against the picture plane, whereas the others float freely in space, foreshortened to make them look like solid, three-dimensional objects. I don’t think there is any particular meaning to this, it’s probably more of a practical consideration: I think Crivelli is simply making sure that the haloes don’t bump into the red hat and Mary’s crown. However, he often plays with real and imagined space in very sophisticated ways. Placing the bowls of fruit and flowers, which are clearly seen as if from below, against the flat gold background is just one example, the difference between the haloes is another.

The man on the left is St Jerome (c.343-47 – 420), an advisor to the Pope and so retrospectively made into a Cardinal of the church (a role which didn’t exist when he was alive). This explains the ecclesiastical robes, with broad-brimmed red hat, and red cloak. One of his major achievements was to gather all the biblical texts, learn the languages they had been written in originally, and then translate them into a coherent form of Latin, the translation we now know as the Vulgate. He was considered one of the four Fathers of the Church, along with Augustine, Ambrose and Gregory, which is why he is holding a model church. His translation of the bible, together with his other theological writings, help to illuminate God’s word – hence the tiny beams of golden light you might just be able to see shining out of the door of the church. You can read the two books in his right hand as the old and new testaments, if you like, or as the ‘original versions’ (in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin) bound into one volume, and the translation (all Latin – the Vulgate).

On the other side is St Sebastian, a third century saint martyred as a Roman soldier who not only converted to Christianity, but who also encouraged fellow Christians to go to their deaths, and therefore, their salvation. You are probably more familiar with him looking like a human pin cushion, stripped to the waist and shot with arrows, but in the Marche he is more often shown fully dressed as a young aristocrat. He does, however, hold a single arrow, which is enough to tell us who he is.

At the bottom of the painting we see more symbolic fruit tied together with string to make a garland. The string itself is tied to a nail just below the golden hem of Mary’s cloak – to the left of the saggy knee of St Sebastian’s tights (or hose, if you want the proper name). The fact that the nail has been hammered in to the step of the throne suggests that it this step is not marble, but wood painted to look like marble. In the same way, the altarpiece is painted on a wooden panel – so this element of the composition is a wooden panel painted to look like a wooden panel made into a step: one more of the sophisticated games that Crivelli is playing about the nature of art and reality. Another is represented by the coat of arms at the bottom centre, which appears to be attached to the front of the step on which Jerome and Sebastian are standing. The front of the step is carved and gilded with decorative foliage, and below it the frame is gilded. Jerome’s red robe falls over the edge of the step, and Sebastian’s bow projects across it – into our space, apparently – and both cast shadows onto it. The coat of arms also casts shadows, and is clearly attached, if this detail is to be believed, in front of the painting and frame. Of course it’s not – this is all trompe l-oeil – tricking the eye. The coat of arms is that of the Ottoni, one of the leading families of Matelica, for whose chapel this painting was commissioned. There were two patrons though, one a man of the church, and another with military connections – hence their choice of Jerome and Sebastian, a Cardinal and a soldier, on either side of the throne. Jerome is at the right hand of Jesus, known as the ‘position of honour’. The church – within religious paintings at least – had the higher status in the church and state dichotomy. Like the fruit, the lion is also symbolic: it is far too small to be a real, fully grown lion. It has a long – and surprisingly neatly combed – mane, and so is clearly not a cub. Its presence confirms that this is St Jerome. In a story which is actually taken from the classical figure Androcles – there are always more stories, and yet they keep being re-used – Jerome removed a thorn from the lion’s foot, which is why it is holding up its front right paw. You might just be able to see the thorn. The lion was so grateful that it remained with the saint for the rest of the latter’s life. Below St Sebastian’s feet and bow, there is a piece of paper.

This is a cartellino, a small piece of paper (we saw one at Flora’s feet last week), bearing Crivelli’s signature. It is apparently attached to the surface of the painting itself, rather than being attached to the fictive, carved, and so three-dimensional step – another example of trompe l’oeil. I’m delighted to see that Crivelli didn’t ‘attach’ it on a level – the detail shows that it’s at a slight angle, which I hadn’t realised before, and suggests he wasn’t being overly careful when attaching it – he’s only human after all! The tilt makes it seem just a little bit more real, stuck on after everything else was finished, even if in reality he would have known it was going to be included from the outset. Enough of these cartellini are painted elsewhere (Bellini was especially fond of them) to suggest that many artists did indeed put their names onto pieces of paper and then attach them to their work with pins, or small blobs of red wax. They would have become detached very easily, which could account for the many unsigned paintings which survive – and for our ignorance about the identity of the artists who painted them. The inscriptions states

CAROLUS.CRIVELLVS.VENETVS.MILES.PINXIT.

As ‘MILES’ means ‘Knight’, this can be translated as ‘Painted by Sir Carlo Crivelli from Venice’, giving us a rough date for the painting. Crivelli was knighted (although we’re not entirely sure by whom, or why) in 1490, and died sometime around 1495 (in that year his wife was described as a widow). Below the main panel is the predella.

In the niche on the far left is St Catherine, holding the spiked wheel which formed one of the instruments of her torture. They tried to kill her by tying her up and scraping her to death with the sharp spikes, but God intervened and broke the wheel – one of the many stories (and there are always more) which are told in The Golden Legend, which I have mentioned often. Some paintings of this show fire coming down from heaven, and sparks flying from the wheel – hence the name of the Catherine Wheel, a type of spinning firework. She also holds Crivelli’s version of the palm of martyrdom, although his botanical accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. To the right of her is an image of St Jerome repenting in the wilderness, his red cardinal’s hat tied to a tree, and a full-sized lion lying down behind him. His study, a shack in the desert, can be seen in the background on the left. The dragon slinking away in the foreground on the right is interpreted as representing the sins of which he is repenting make a final, reluctant departure.

In the centre of the predella is the Nativity – the birth of Christ – set in a stable which is precariously constructed among ruins, and painted with strong foreshortening which pulls our eye towards the walls of Bethlehem in the background to the left. Through the archway on the right we can see the shepherds looking up – as are some of the sheep – towards the angels, who are holding a giant scroll and announcing the holy birth.

To the right of this we see the martyrdom of St Sebastian. He is more traditionally dressed in a loin cloth, strung up on a tree, with his executioners – who had previously been soldiers in his own troupe – shooting him with arrows (one of them, anachronistically, is wielding a cross bow). The tree grows out of a gap in the paved floor which has a bold, more-or-less central perspective. This leads our eye through an arcade to a city wall, presumably intended to represent Rome, in the far distance. On the far right is St George on a white horse with red trappings, subtly evoking the saint’s flag. It looks as if Jerome’s dragon has slinked its way through the Nativity and past St Sebastian – most of the way along the predella – only to meet its final come-uppance here. The choice of St George, paired with St Catherine at the other end of the predella, echoes the choice of Sebastian and Jerome in the main panel, and again relates to the vocations of the two patrons. The three narrative stories between the paired saints tell us more about the people above – Jerome’s penitence below the full-length St Jerome, the Nativity beneath the Virgin and Child, and the Martyrdom of St Sebastian below the clothed representation above. This was just one way of structuring a predella. An alternative was to tell several episodes from the life of most important saint in the altarpiece, usually the dedicatee of the chapel or altar itself, but there were other possibilities.

It was the predella which really caught Paula Rego’s attention. She imagined the possibility of entering the painting, looking round the corners of the buildings, and behind the columns which separate the images, and going as a far as the walls which close off the backgrounds in most of the images. Maybe they were all connected, she thought, and maybe there were other stories of other saints to be found there, hidden away. It was this, the strong perspectives and bold constructions, not to mention the all-but barren landscapes, which inspired her in the painting of Crivelli’s Garden. She combined this with a critique of the male-orientated vision of the vast majority of the paintings in the National Gallery’s collection – but more about that on Monday. Rego’s finished work has similar proportions to Crivelli’s predella, as it happens, albeit on a far larger scale – but I think that’s merely a coincidence.

There must be something about La Madonna della Rondine: Paula Rego was not the only Associate Artist at The National Gallery to be inspired by it. As the first Associate, she was resident in 1989-1990. The fourth, from 1997-99, was Ana Maria Pacheco, who painted Queen of Sheba and King Solomon in the Garden of Earthly Delights – but that’s another story. There are always other stories, and Crivelli’s Garden is full of them.

202 – Flora, from Florence

Evelyn De Morgan, Flora, 1894. De Morgan Collection.

There have been a plethora of exhibitions of the work of Evelyn De Morgan in the past few years, but I am only now in a position to dedicate an entire talk to her (on Monday 21 August at 6pm), thanks to the exhibition The Gold Drawings at Leighton House.  I first encountered her work at the exhibition Botticelli Reimagined at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2016 – it was today’s painting which was exhibited – and then she resurfaced in the National Portrait Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisters in 2019: the catalogue of that exhibition includes what is probably the best writing about her. One of the stars of that show, as far as I was concerned, was Night and Sleep, about which I wrote on Day 41 back in April 2020. In my series An Elemental August: different vistas I am taking her to represent Water, because of the fluidity of her line – and there will appropriately water-themed works in Monday’s talk. But, apart from the four elements of the Greek cosmos, there is also her remarkable use of a very specific element – Gold – which will form the focus of the talk, with her intricate Gold drawings being put into the context of the rest of her output, not to mention her life. The week after, the final talk of the series will look at the National Gallery’s exhibition Paola Rego: Crivelli’s Garden (my rationale here being that Earth, as well as being essential for a garden, can also act as a metaphor for the fertile environment necessary to create art). The following two talks will look at artists whose work is well-represented in the Glasgow Collections, Charles Rennis Mackintosh and James McNeill Whistler, in preparation for my upcoming visit with Artemisia – but check out the diary for more information, including dates, and on-sale dates.

Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, vegetation and fertility – and so effectively, also, of Spring – is shown full-length in a suitably floral dress, scattering blooms and standing on a lawn growing and strewn with yet more flowers. Behind her is a fruit-laden tree, dark against the clear blue sky, with just a hint of dusk on the horizon. She stands in classical contrapposto, with her weight on her left leg and her right lifting off the ground as if she were walking, or even, possibly, dancing. Over her shoulder is a blood-red shawl, and her hair flies freely in the breeze.

The tree is a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica), presumably chosen as it has the rare distinction of flowering in autumn or winter, so that it bears fruit as early as spring – an ideal demonstration of Flora’s fecundity (for this and all subsequent botanical identification I am, as ever, deeply indebted to the Ecologist, who has recently been offered a chair at Liverpool University, and from January will be Professor of Ecology: congratulations, and thank you!). The loquat has its origins in China, but was known to Europeans as early as the 16th century. It may even have arrived in Portugal back then. The silveriness on the underside of the leaves is diagnostic, apparently, and is one of the many features that De Morgan captures accurately. The full moon hovers in the dusk sky, and below it a goldfinch flaps its wings. Not only is the bird colouristically related to Flora – the red on its face matches that on her shawl – but its association with the Passion of Christ, and therefore Easter, also makes it appropriate for a spring painting, a natural resurrection following the death of winter.

Further down, a second goldfinch looks up towards its mate from the right of the painting, not far from the head of a siskin, whose pair can be seen on the left, just below Flora’s elbow. A third type of bird is shown on her red shawl: picked out in gold, there are stylised swallows. Even if ‘one swallow doesn’t make a spring’ the number represented suggest that the season is well advanced. Admittedly this particular saying is also applied to summer, but I should be able to explain this confusion later on. The red colour of the shawl itself is related to the rich red roses which Flora is clasping, along with the others she is scattering – a metaphor for the way in which the arriving spring brings with it flowers. I particularly like the flick of the beaded red shawl just above Flora’s right elbow which echoes not only the curls of her hair, but also the shapes of some of the leaves and the curve of the siskin’s back and tail.

De Morgan captures the fall of the scattered roses rather brilliantly. It is as if they are frozen in time. The swirls of drapery, on the other hand, seem to have a life of their own, clinging to her bent right knee and curling behind, almost as if they are growing. All over the dress – which is modulated from cream in the light to a buttery yellow in the shadow – we see pansies, apparently growing with their leaves, which are either embroidered or printed onto the fabric. The name ‘pansy’ is derived from the French pensée, or ‘thought’, although that probably has little relevance here. They are included, like so much else, as indicators of spring, even if developments in horticulture mean that there are now varieties which will bloom all the year round. They don’t withstand the heat of summer, which could be relevant: as we shall see, De Morgan was painting in Florence, where the heat can be unbearable.

By the time we hit the ground (a final pink rose can be seen falling from the top of this detail) there is an explosion of flora. In between the left border of the painting and the figure’s right toes is a cyclamen, and to the right of the same foot are two primroses (Primula vulgaris), one the more common yellow form, the other a pink variant. There are also pinkish daisies (Bellis perennis) mid-way between the feet and below Flora’s left heel, and below the latter daisies are the flowers of another cyclamen. The rest of the flowers – whether deep blue, light blue or pink – are florist’s cineraria (Pericalis x hybrida), with the exception of some tiny forget-me-nots (Myosotis) to the left of Flora’s right foot (above the cyclamen), and a periwinkle (Vinca) to the left of the second set of cyclamen flowers.

The bottom left of the painting shows the same species, although the deep pink flower at the very bottom left corner might be ‘new’. The periwinkles can be seen more clearly (to the left of the full cyclamen plant and above a yellow primrose), and there are more forget-me-nots in the bottom right corner of the detail.

The bottom right of the painting also has the same selection, with more scattered roses, but there are also what appear to be double flowering ranunculus blooms, with tightly-packed petals in either yellowy-orange or red. The ‘new’ flower in the previous detail might also be a ranunculus. In addition, there is a cartellino – a small piece of paper, or label – inscribed with a verse and, on the underside, curled round on the right, the signature: ‘E De M. Maggio 1894’ – Evelyn De Morgan, May 1894. May is the month of spring, even if nowadays we associate its arrival with March. The Romans celebrated Floralia – the festival in honour of Flora – from 28 April – 3 May, and in Britain these rites survived with the celebration of a May Queen well into the twentieth century (there was a maypole in our playground at school, although I don’t remember anyone ever dancing around it). This ‘traditional’ celebration of spring is followed close on its heels by the arrival of summer in June (optimistically speaking – it’s still raining here in August), with ‘Midsummer’ being 21 June. This might explain the confusion over which season is ‘made’ by the arrival of an appropriate number of swallows. From 1890 until 1914 Evelyn and her husband William De Morgan (renowned potter, some of whose work I will include in Monday’s talk) spent the winter months of every year in Florence – and in this particular case at least, that could continue through to May. It was in Florence that Flora was painted. As far as I can read it, I think this is a correct transcription of the verse, for the benefit of those of you who have some Italian:

   Io vengo da Fiorenza e sono Flora
Quella città dai fior prende nomanza
   Tra Fiori son nata ed or cambio dimora
   Fra I monti della Scozia avrò mia stanza
Accoglietemi ben e vi sia caro
   Nelle nordiche nebbie il mio tesoro.

It uses antiquated Italian – even for the late 19th Century – including the medieval form of the city’s name, Fiorenza, as opposed to the ‘modern’ version, Firenze. The medieval form (like the English) is closer to the Roman name ‘Florentia’ – the flourishing city – and so to Flora herself, but also ties in with the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ ethos of the painting, influenced as it is by an artist born many years before Raphael. As a sophisticated group of cognoscenti you will have seen the parallels already, and I hinted as much when I said that I’d first seen the painting in the exhibition Botticelli Reimagined. Before we get to that, though, here is my translation of the verse (you will understand why I never became a poet). It is rough, I know, but I wanted to try and replicate the rhyme scheme, and allude to quaint archaic forms (or rather, in this case, Scots dialect – apologies to my Scottish readers).

   I come from Florence, and I am Flora –
That city from the flowers takes its name.
   Born among flowers I’m now an explorer:
   The hills of Scotland soon will be ‘ma hame’.
Welcome me well so that my treasure
   Amid the northern mists will give you pleasure.

The implication is that Evelyn De Morgan painted Flora for a Scottish patron, although precisely who that was remains unknown: the first recorded owner had no known connections north of the border. As for its visual origins, De Morgan’s love – and understanding – of the work of Botticelli must be clear. For one thing, Flora owes a great deal to her namesake in the Primavera, which De Morgan could easily have seen in the Uffizi (in Florence) during her regular winter sojourns.

Dressed as a Florentine bride, with jewelled belt and necklace turned into garlands of flowers, Botticelli’s Flora has a similar dress to that of De Morgan’s, with the draperies folding and flowing in equivalent ways, covered (whether embroidered or printed) with flowers growing complete with their leaves. Both figures also scatter roses. Botticelli associates her with the nymph Chloris, seen emerging from the right edge of the detail. According to Ovid, Chloris was captured and raped by Zephyr, the west wind. To atone for his misdeeds, Ovid tells us, Zephyr transformed Chloris into Flora – hence the flowers coming from Chloris’s mouth as she looks back up at Zephyr whose head is just visible in this detail. This myth explains the origin of spring, as the barren land is made fertile, so it was believed, by the arrival of the west wind. Flora’s dress is also exceedingly like the figure reaching over to clothe the newly born goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is also in the Uffizi.

De Morgan’s Flora has hair more reminiscent of Venus herself, though. The colour may be similar to that of this figure – reddish to fair – but the long curling locks blowing in the wind are closer to those of the goddess. I’ve cut Venus out from this detail for technical, WordPress related reasons, but you don’t need to take my word for it. We know that Evelyn de Morgan knew Botticelli’s painting: she copied a detail from The Birth of Venus, and her study has survived. Like today’s painting is owned by the De Morgan Collection.

In this small sketch De Morgan conveys the gilding which Botticelli used freely across his paintings with strokes of cream-coloured paint, but elsewhere – including in her painting of Flora – she picks out details in gold – real gold – just like her Florentine inspiration. She became especially interested in the use of this particular material, a metal, and an element in its own right, to the extent that she executed a considerable number of drawings using gold, and gold alone. It is a highly unconventional technique and one that was practiced by very few artists. As far as I know, she was the major exponent. But that’s the subject for Monday’s talk, so I shall leave further discussion of it until then. In the meantime, I’m hoping that this discussion of spring will finally herald the belated, and welcome arrival of summer.

201 – The Presence of Absence

Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, c. 1907-9. Sheffield Museums Trust.

When I saw the subject of today’s post in the exhibition Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (about which I will be talking this Monday, 14 August at 6pm), it seemed remarkably familiar to me – there was a feeling in the back of my mind that I had lived with it for some long time. And yet, the label of the painting told me that it belonged to the Sheffield Museums, and although I have been to Sheffield, and have visited one of the museums, I can’t say I remember seeing Gwen John’s work. So I want to look at this painting today not only because I think it’s beautiful, but also because its familiarity is something of a mystery. Maybe the ‘familiarity’ is part of the painting itself. The talk will be the second in my series An Elemental August: different vistas. As I said on Monday, in trying to slot these four artists into my Art Historian’s title, I have finally decided that Lucie Rie should be associated with Fire – because of the kiln – and that Gwen John will represent Air – there is certainly an ethereal, airy quality about today’s work. They will be followed by Evelyn de Morgan on 21 August, who I’m associating with Water, because of the fluidity of her style, and then, to close the series, Paula Rego (28 August). The National Gallery’s small exhibition, which opened recently, is a celebration of her mural Crivelli’s Garden – and ‘garden’ implies Earth. This has both practical and metaphorical senses, I think: major themes of the mural are nurturing and nourishing. As ever, you can find more details via these blue links or in the diary.

There isn’t much to this painting, you might think – a chair and a table next to a window in an otherwise empty room. But I should remind you – and I know that you know this – that the experience of seeing a painting in real life is very different to what you see in a reproduction. On your screen it might look like an illustration to a blog post, but when seen in the flesh it is very different. Not a large painting, but almost certainly larger than you will see it now (31.7 x 26.7 cm – a bit larger than an A4 sheet of paper), it is far more subtle than colour reproduction allows. It has a mesmerising presence, almost hypnotic.

Gwen John had an uncanny knack for painting the everyday world. Everything seems normal, everything seems real, and yet her perceptive gaze and her focussed sense of composition, combined with an ability to identify and reproduce subtle differences in tone and colour, render the banal significant. For all the world this looks as if we have opened the door to her room and found it empty, the chair, table, and associated objects exactly where they had been left by chance. But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In the brilliantly researched, written and readable book which accompanies the exhibition, author and curator Alicia Foster quotes Ida Nettleship, John’s friend and soon-to-be sister-in-law, writing to her mother in 1898, the year they both graduated from the Slade School of Art: ‘Gwen John is sitting before a mirror carefully posing herself. She has been at it for half an hour. It is for an “interior”’. If she could spend at least half an hour posing herself, how long would she take arranging the furniture? This may be an Interior, and yet it takes on the qualities of a Still Life – while still looking entirely spontaneous.

As far as I can tell – judging from the digital file on the Sheffield Museums’ website at least – this is, almost exactly, the top half of the painting. This ‘half’ is divided in two again, with the vertical between ceiling/wall and window cutting the painting more or less down the central axis. This is a dormer window: we are in the attic, which might have a connection to the romantic notion of starving artists eking out a meagre existence, especially as we are in Paris, if it weren’t for the fact that, even in this apparently empty detail, there is no evidence of poverty. All is clean and tidy, whether it is the cream-coloured wallpaper or the crisp, white curtains. Seen like this, the top half of the Interior could almost be an abstract in its own right, with one rectangle divided by a diagonal line into darker and lighter quadrilaterals, and another, equally sized rectangle, divided further into four equal rectangles in various shades of pale grey. However, this is, of course, a window, with a net curtain acting as a veil, while still revealing the buildings opposite. The muted, mottled greys, so close in tone as to be almost indistinguishable, are reminiscent of the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi, sometimes called ‘the Danish Vermeer’, and it is indeed possible that John was familiar with his work. The Nettleships – Ida’s family – knew the artist himself, and saw him when he came to London. As Gwen kept up her acquaintance with the rest of the family even after Ida’s untimely death in 1907, it is just about possible that she too might have met him.

You could argue that there is far more to look at in the bottom half of the painting – although there’s still not much. A wicker chair with the palest of pink cushions is subtly angled away from a small side table. A parasol leans against the arm of the chair, next to some blue fabric, which is presumably some form of garment – although the blue shape seems more important that what it actually represents. A lightweight jacket, maybe, to be worn in the sun, when heading out with the parasol? On the table is a small vase containing blue, yellow and pink flowers, and a few fresh green leaves. The floor appears to be made of hexagonal brick-red tiles.

The flowers form the brightest patch of colour in the painting. If you really wanted to, you could suggest that the rose pink, primrose yellow and sky blue flowers represent highly unsaturated versions of the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, and as such might speak of the art of painting itself – but I think that this is is coincidental. What I do find interesting, though, is that the vase is placed, as everything else appears to be, haphazardly. It sits above the central drawer, halfway between the knob and the drawer’s left edge. Hammershøi, in a painting included in the Pallant House exhibition (which I will show you on Monday), depicts a more formal interior, with everything arranged symmetrically. His is just one of several paintings chosen to illustrate the work of artists with whom Gwen John had interests in common. I may be biased, but John always seems to come out of the comparison well, her paintings far ‘better’ than those of her more famous (male) contemporaries in my opinion (although the Hammershøi is superb).

I really enjoy her use of negative space in the detail above. The wicker chair is placed so that one of its legs lines up with the two left legs of the side table, the three feet being equally spaced along a diagonal. The arm of the chair scoops under the sloping ceiling, and then the leg curves down towards the table, leaving the cream- or even butter-coloured eaves projecting at a right angle into the space between the table and chair: conversations like this between the elements of a composition always please me.

Returning to the picture as a whole, the table and chair look far smaller in their context: this is a large room, rather than a cramped attic (if one were making assumptions). The light from the window brightens the floor, which is cast into shadow around, and especially under, the chair. This broad, lighter area of flooring makes clear something which we might not otherwise have registered explicitly: there is nobody there. The light bounces off the pale cushion making it clearly visible, thus making an equivalent statement: no one is sitting down. Nor is anyone holding the equally visible, light parasol – there is not even anyone to pick it up. The chair has been turned out to face the empty space, and under the table we see the net curtains, which fall to the ground and part in the centre. Being able to see them clearly like this reminds us yet again that no one is getting in the way. This is absence made present. The lack of a humanity might imply that this is a sad painting, speaking of loneliness and isolation, but not so: the bright, clear, fresh colours of the flowers and the light from the window – the luminous curtains – lift the mood towards an enlightened clarity, and purposeful simplicity, a life that is ordered, balanced, and in control. Notice how the diagonal of the parasol mirrors the downward angle of the ceiling, with the diamonds formed by the overlapping diagonals of the wickerwork echoing this theme. Gwen John is showing us her room, the room in which she was free to do whatsoever she pleased, where she could entertain whomsoever she liked, without criticism, and where she could relax and be herself after the everyday performance of appearing in public. As Virginia Woolf would write in her influential book, A Room of One’s Own was what a woman needed to become a writer. That was published in 1929, but two decades earlier, when this Interior was painted, Gwen John already knew what she needed to be a painter. She is not cut off from the outside world, though – the curtains may be a veil, but the world is still visible, and the parasol and flowers tell us that she both goes out and comes back in. Far from being the shrinking violet of myth, she was a determined woman who knew what she needed in order to succeed in her chosen profession.

However, none of this explains why this painting should have seemed so familiar to me. I suspect that it could be a feature of the painting itself. The naturalistic, and yet unnervingly perceptive observation of everyday details that gives you a direct connection to what you see means that it is already ‘familiar’, while the subtle shifts of tone and colour which make the different parts of the composition look like the others, and yet not quite the same, must add towards this sense. The echoes of forms, and angles, and lines work like rhymes in poetry: when they hit home it feels like you have arrived, and, although unaware of the fact, give you the sense that you always knew where you were going. I suspect it is something akin to déjà vu. You see something, and it instantly forms a memory. But you are still looking, and so already what you see is familiar, yet the memory was formed so quickly that you can’t pin it down, and it seems like it has always been with you. It’s either that, or something more personal.

Last week I mentioned that I had originally planned on becoming a theoretical physicist, but in my second year as an undergraduate my focus turned to geology. By my third year, I had realised that I wasn’t going to be a scientist at all, and should try something new. That is when I stumbled upon the History of Art. As a hungry student of a new subject I was influenced by Jim Ede and Kettle’s Yard, not only developing an admiration of Lucie Rie, but also trying to live as Ede had done, including placing images in interesting and unexpected places. For a year or so one of those images was a postcard from the Fitzwilliam Museum of a painting by an artist a friend had spoken enthusiastically about, the older sister of a reprobate brute of a painter. The sister’s work was far superior, I was told, and showed far great delicacy and artistry. It was, of course, Gwen John, and my thoughts about her and her brother Augustus have not really changed much in the ensuing decades (an idea I will illustrate – briefly – on Monday). My post card lay flat on a small, circular table given to me by my sister. It showed a woman seated in the same wickerwork chair next to a low circular table on which were placed a brown teapot and a rose-pink teacup – the same technique of lifting the whole mood of a painting with a little hint of clear, bright colour. Next to the post card I had a small vase made by the same potter as the dish I mentioned last week, in which I arranged flowers – pinks – of exactly the same hue as the teacup in the painting. I was lucky enough to be living in the Old Court of Clare College, Cambridge, and visible above the other side of the courtyard was the roof of King’s College Chapel. Being on the top floor, in order to see it I had to look out through a dormer window. In Pallant House the painting I had a post card of – The Convalescent – is currently displayed not far from today’s Interior, but it turns out that I didn’t know the Interior at all. It just reminded me of my own room.

200 – Ede and Rie and Kettle’s Yard

Lucie Rie, Bowl (brown and white inlaid line), 1974. Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

I first fell in love with the work of Lucie Rie when I was a student working as a volunteer at Kettle’s Yard, the inspirational home of Jim and Helen Ede, and now one of the University of Cambridge Museums – but more about that later. However, it was there that I saw the touring exhibition Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery which I will be talking about this Monday, 7 August at 6pm. The exhibition has now moved on to the Holburne Museum in Bath, where you can catch it until 7 January, overlapping with either Painted Love or Gwen John, depending on when you go. This talk is the first in my ‘occasional’ series An Elemental August – different vistas, and will be followed on the three successive Mondays by Gwen John, Evelyn de Morgan, and Paula Rego. You can find more information via these links or in the diary. And if you fancy spending more time with great artists, there are still a couple of spaces available on the trip to Glasgow which I am leading for Artemisia, if you happen to be free 17-21 September and would like to join me (please mention my name!). But back to Lucie Rie, and inspiration…

This is how you would see the subject of today’s post in a catalogue – almost like one of the ‘usual suspects’, a police record of a potential criminal. The best of such photographs – like those in the book published to accompany the exhibition – can show the true beauty of the object, and when the objects in question are the delicate, sensitive creations of Lucie Rie their exquisite sensibilities are plain for all to see. But they lack a context – so the remainder of the photographs I am using today are ones that I took myself when I re-visited Kettle’s Yard some forty years after I moved in over the road, during the second year of my undergraduate degree. I was studying Natural Sciences at the time, and although I had ‘gone up’ with the intention of becoming a theoretical physicist and working at CERN, by this point I had realised that I couldn’t do the maths, and instead was intent on becoming a geologist. I confess that I can’t remember if I visited the house while I was so close, but I may well have done. As a young scientist, I was fairly arty.

This is how you would first encounter the bowl in Kettle’s Yard. Jim Ede had been a curator at The Tate Gallery (as it was then known) and had put together a collection bought from – or given by – artists with whom he had become friends. He also also had a wide range of furniture, and a multitude of objets trouvés – pebbles and dried flowers feature significantly, for example. He and his wife Helen had sought somewhere to house the collection, and settled on four small cottages in Cambridge, which they knocked together to form a single home. A modernist extension was added later, initially for temporary exhibitions. Eventually the collection was gifted to the University, which continued Ede’s practice of holding a regular ‘open house’. Every afternoon, from two to four, you could ring on the bell and be let in. By my third year as an undergraduate I had realised that I wasn’t going to be a scientist, and embraced the History of Art, still unsure what I would be ‘when I grew up’. I’m still not sure, to be honest. For that matter, I’m not sure if I’ve ‘grown up’ either. For a couple of years in the 1980s – as an under- and postgraduate, I think – I was one of the people who would be ‘at home’ – opening the door and welcoming the visitors, or on hand around the house to answer any questions. Since then a couple more extensions have been added, to allow for exhibitions (the original extension had become part of the ‘house’) and to provide better facilities for visitors – including, I was surprised to find this year, a rather good café.

I’ve always thought that the house unfolds rather like a snail shell, starting with a small entrance vestibule, where the coats of the relatively few visitors would be hung, and bags left beneath the stairs (things have changed now – there are lockers at the ticket desk in the gallery along the passage before you get to the house). From the vestibule you pass through slightly larger (but still small) downstairs rooms, a larger upstairs room, and then cross a ‘bridge’ to the fourth cottage and the extension. You can see the space and light opening out to the right in the photograph above. There is an even larger room below, with a double-height space created by a rectangular, U-shaped balcony and the white wall hung with a Kilim visible at the very top right corner of the picture.

If you pass the bowl and look back this is what you will see – the steps leading down from the ‘bridge’ are at the bottom left. Ede must have regularly rearranged his collection, but by the time I was getting to know it, the bowl was already exhibited alongside a marble sculpture by Japanese artist Kenji Umeda called Spirality, carved, it seems (although oddly they’re not sure), in the first half of the 1970s. Umeda had studied at Cambridge in the 1960s, and used to help the Edes with the cleaning of Kettle’s Yard. He started his artistic life as a painter but switched to sculpture after a visit to the Carrara marble quarry. Ede had a particular sensitivity to form, colour and tone, and everything had its place – even if, as I suspect, that place changed from time to time. It is no coincidence that the interior of Rie’s bowl, using the deep, rich, red-brown manganese glaze of which she was so fond, harmonizes with the dark wood and semi-circular form of the table. Placed just under the window, Umeda’s sculpture catches the light and shows off the marble at its translucent best, a light, convex contrast to the darkness of the bowl’s concave interior.

Going back and looking down into the bowl you can see that it appears to be etched with very fine lines. This is one of two related, but opposite, techniques which Rie used often. It is sometimes hard to distinguish between the two. This is sgraffito – an Italian word which is the etymology of ‘graffiti’, meaning ‘scratched’. Artistically it can refer to a number of different techniques in different media, but in this case it implies scratching through the glaze. The manganese glaze was applied evenly across the bowl’s interior, and then, with a fine stylus, Rie scratched through it to reveal the clay underneath before firing. Each line was scratched by hand, without the use of a ruler, and this explains the slight unevenness of the lines, quivering, and with irregular spacing, all of which brings the bowl to life: it is not a machine-made object but is subject to human frailty. For me it speaks of great focus, and yet fragility, created by a hand that is undoubtedly in control, but with nerves and blood vessels pulsing through it. The paintings of Agnes Martin hold a similar fascination for me. Although frequently grouped with the Minimalists, she was closer to the Abstract Expressionists, like a Rothko with finer sensibilities: I far prefer her work to his. Like this bowl, some of Martin’s paintings have long, hand-drawn pencil lines which don’t quite reach the edge of the canvas, creating a form of aura, even a sense of longing, or absence, which only adds to their appeal.

If you were now to crouch down to look at the side of the bowl (Jim Ede might have invited you to hold it, but, however tempting, please don’t – you might trust yourself, but I don’t trust the person coming down the steps beside you: they will probably be marvelling at the beauty of the space and light, and not looking where you’re standing…) – but if you were to crouch down, you would see the same effect, but in reverse: fine, dark, living lines against a light background. These are inlaid. After the bowl was thrown, Rie would have scratched thin lines into the exterior of the bowl, then applied a glaze over the whole surface. She would then have wiped off the excess glaze, leaving some of it in the grooves created by the scratching. Sgraffito and inlay look pretty much the same, and occasionally people fail to distinguish – not that it really matters. However, the piece is officially catalogued as ‘Bowl (brown and white inlaid line), 1974’, whereas a caption in the book The Adventure of Pottery describes it as ‘sgraffito bowl, 1974’. These descriptions are not entirely wrong, but they are not entirely accurate either. However, as I said, that doesn’t really matter: the bowl is still just as delicate – both physically and decoratively – and, to my eye, beautiful.

I love the way that the bowl and Spirality are reflected in the varnished tabletop, with the bowl’s reflection almost more like a shadow – the light form somehow looks dark. I also enjoy the echoes of the grain of the wood in the lines on the bowl – whether sgraffito or inlay. The contrast of light and dark is an essential feature of Ede’s arrangement here – a contrast which continues above the table.

Hanging just above and to the right of the sculpture is a painting: William Scott’s Bowl (White on Grey), of 1962. The whiteness of the painted Bowl not only ties in with the exterior of Rie’s ceramic, but also inverts the curving top of Umeda’s marble. This attention to detail recurs across the whole museum, in every room – as I said, Ede had a remarkable eye. The house is a work of art in its own right, constructed from numerous objects, whether ‘art’ or ‘other’, all of which are given more or less equal status. These include four pieces by Lucie Rie, as it happens. Ede and Rie had a regular correspondence, and once, after she had visited the house, she wrote describing it as ‘a unique experience… I shall never forget’. When I visited earlier this year I realised what an inspiration it had been. At home I have transparent and translucent objects of different colours on windowsills, all very carefully arranged to catch the light: woe betide anyone who leaves something in the wrong place. I thought this was my own idea, but it must have been a subconscious memory of the light flowing through glassware and around sculpture not far from where Rie’s bowl is exhibited. I’m not pretending that my home is anything like Kettle’s yard – there’s not nearly so much space, for one thing, not nearly as much art, and far more clutter. However, most of what there is was made by friends, which adds to its value for me. Sadly I don’t own a Lucie Rie – let alone four – although I do have a dish I bought as a 21st birthday present to myself from Primavera, the ‘arty’ shop on King’s Parade in Cambridge, even if I can never remember the name of the potter… It came as a great surprise to learn that that Rie’s work had been sold in the same shop. Primavera was set up by Henry Rothschild (like Rie, a Jewish refugee), and it was he who organised the exhibitions of ceramics in Kettle’s Yard which led to Ede’s acquisition of his four pieces. It’s a tenuous link, perhaps. Nevertheless, one of the results of my afternoons in Kettle’s Yard was the fascination with this wonderful ceramicist, whose work – like that of textile artist Anni Albers – persuades me that the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ is sometimes an unnecessary distraction: a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I do hope I can share my enthusiasm and fascination with you on Monday.

Day 54 – Psyche V: ‘Reawakening’

Anthony van Dyck, Cupid and Psyche, 1639-40, Royal Collection Trust.

This is another re-post, but somehow, and I really don’t know how, I managed to delete the original quite a long time ago. I was probably on a train with dodgy WiFi, and maybe even using my phone, all of which would generally result in technological incompetence on my part. But, as it is the only one of the original 100 Pictures Of The Day that hasn’t survived online, it really is time to get it back up there. It also fills in a gap in my telling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, which will be the subject of the second half of Tuesday’s talk, Myth, Allegory, or Simple Story? which concludes the series Classical Mythology in European Art. Details can be found via those links, or in the diary. Then, after ten days or so in Scotland, I will return to Monday evenings for An Elemental August, looking at four women from the late-19th to the 21st Centuries, all of whom had different vistas (the subtitle of the series), as they all spent much of their lives in countries other than the ones in which they were born. The first two – Lucie Rie (7 August at 6pm) and Gwen John (14 August) are already on sale, and the final two (Evelyn de Morgan and Paula Rego) will appear next week. Again, see the diary for more information.

As I finished Picture of the Day 53 back in May 2020, Psyche had performed the last of her tasks for Venus, in an attempt to appease the angry goddess, and win her help in getting Cupid back… Venus, more intent on killing Psyche than helping her, had asked her to go to the Underworld to collect a vial of Persephone’s ‘Beauty’. It’s as if Persephone, like so many celebrities today, had released her own fragrance – and if she had, it would have been called Everlasting Sleep. Psyche had been told that on no account should she open the vial – but what does anybody do under those circumstances? Of course, she opened it, breathed in, and fell asleep, potentially forever… at this point I’ll jump to what I wrote on the next day – this was originally posted on 11 May 2020:

Well, I couldn’t just leave her lying there, eternally asleep… To be honest, according to Apuleius, Psyche thought she was collecting Persephone’s ‘Beauty’ to take to Venus, and that is what she wanted to see – but it turned out to be ‘Everlasting Sleep’ after all. And Cupid, who had been at home all the time, recovering from the wound of the burning oil, finally crept out, only to find her, as if dead, on the road.

And that is precisely how Anthony van Dyck painted her – she could only look more dead if she were paler, I suspect. This painting is not what we, in the UK, expect from Van Dyck – he was, after all, one of the great portraitists. What our ancestors wanted from him was his ability to make them look grander, nobler and more beautiful than perhaps they really were. I say our ancestors – not mine – I’m not that posh. And so this is the only mythological painting that survives from his time as a court artist for King Charles I. It may have been part of a series of paintings illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche, to which Rubens and Jordaens would also have contributed. The series was commissioned for the Queen’s House in Greenwich, but was never completed. It might have been painted for something else, though, but whatever the purpose, it is a fantastic painting, and should be better known. It is also potentially one of the most outrageous paintings you’ll see, but we’ll come to that later. At first glance, it is a straightforward telling of the story, even if, like Claude (POTD 46), it is almost more of a landscape painting. It’s a curious format – almost square, but marginally taller than it is wide. This shape might be related to its intended location, but as we don’t know what that was, we’re left in the dark. Nevertheless, more than half of the painted surface is taken up with trees and sky. Again, like Claude, these trees are helping to tell the story. One is entirely alive, just like Cupid, towards whom it leans, while the other is profoundly dead, positioned as if emerging from Psyche’s body. Whereas she is all stillness and weight, he is fleeting and light, flying in to find her, his foot barely touching the ground. It is a wonderful painting of contrasts.

Psyche lies on the road, with a gold casket (rather than the white vase we saw yesterday) resting under her right hand, open and empty. This used to contain ‘Sleep’. Her left hand rests on her thigh, holding down the white cloth essential to stop this sensuous image descending to the obscene. Her sky-blue robe (or cloak? – it’s not entirely clear what this is) acts as a blanket beneath her. It is clasped in an entirely blatant failure to cover her breasts, and is painted with van Dyck’s very best silk technique, shiny and slick and airy. ‘Psyche’ means ‘soul’ in Greek, by the way – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that before – so airiness is apt.

Cupid, on the other hand, is entirely concerned with love – or lust – represented by the colour red, just like Charity (see 120 – The Colour of Virtue). Hence the colour of the cloth he is ‘wearing’, every bit as alive as he – while hers is equally dead. In his left hand Cupid holds his bow, although he has abandoned his quiver, full of arrows, on the floor. His nudity is surprising – it is not what we expect from van Dyck (after all, the portraits of the great and the good show the sitters in all their finery– you should see the ones he painted in Genoa!) but it exhibits a remarkable ability on van Dyck’s part to paint the human body. And this particular subject does allow him – given that he has taken some license – to show off both male and female nudes. Having said that, Cupid’s ‘modesty’ is miraculous – the red drapery flies out behind him, curving down, away from the wings, with a splendidly sculptural flourish, then wraps around his body to cover his left thigh, only to appear behind his legs, the final flourish backwards echoing his extended right leg. And yet, there is no hint how it’s held up.

He tilts slightly away from us, so that his right shoulder obscures his chin – but we see his mouth, just open in awe, and his look of love and concern. The curls of his blond hair flick back in the breeze caused by his descent. His wings, emerging delicately from his back, have the whitest of feathers, which fade away with a magical translucency. There are those who say that this painting was never finished. They may well be right, but the delicacy of Van Dyck’s touch is superb here.

And yet, let’s think about this again. Cupid’s right hand reaches out towards Psyche with a gesture, which, if this were a Renaissance painting, would look like a greeting. The Renaissance is relevant here, given his debt to Titian – just look at her legs and that white drapery. But in a Renaissance context, how would you interpret this image? It could so easily be something different. A man with wings has flown in to greet a beautiful woman in blue and white. If it weren’t for the nudity, and were she not asleep, this could be an Annunciation. And of course Charles I – one of the greatest collectors of art, with a Roman Catholic wife – must have known that. To paint Cupid and Psyche as if they were Gabriel and Mary would make a sensuous story blasphemously titillating. And my suspicion is that that would suit Charles I down to the ground. It’s entirely outrageous!

Earlier, I said that the tree behind Psyche is ‘profoundly dead’. However, there is something growing from its base. New life. Maybe all is not lost. Looking back to Giulio Romano’s image with which I finished yesterday, you might be able to see that Cupid is holding one of his arrows in his left hand, and he looks as if he is about to tap Psyche on the back with it. ‘Eternal Sleep’ is not something that a deity would have to worry about – it is a supernatural quality after all. On seeing his love lying there, as if dead, he forgave her, gathered up the ‘Sleep’, put it back in the box and shut the lid. Don’t ask me how. Then he tapped her on the back with his arrow and woke her up – which of course meant that her love for him was renewed. But will they live happily ever after? Not if mum – Venus – gets her way… 

If you want to find out what happens next, I have three suggestions. You could read the original in Apuleius‘ own words (albeit in translation). You could click on the ‘Psyche’ archive link at the bottom of this post to try and locate the next part of the story – Psyche VI (well, that’s a link to it – otherwise I’m afraid the WordPress archives aren’t the easiest to navigate). Or – and this is my preferred option – you could join me on Tuesday, 18 July at 5.30pm, when we will assess whether the story of Cupid and Psyche is Myth, Allegory, or Simple Story? There will be other stories (or myths, or allegories…) in part 1 as well, of course!

Re-telling the tale (Spinning a Yarn)

Diego Velázquez, ‘Las Hilanderas’, 1655-60, The Prado, Madrid.

Another ‘re-post’ today, as I am currently in Glasgow researching a trip which is coming up in September for Artemisia, details of which can be found in the diary (along with everything else, of course). It looks at a painting which concerns the maltreatment of a human by a deity, a theme that is perfectly summed up by Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act 4, Scene 1): ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport’. It is one of the main themes of my talk on Tuesday, 11 July, 5.30-730pm – Heroes and Humans in which today’s painting will feature. The concluding Week 3 of the course Classical Mythology in European Art will follow on Wednesday 12 July. As well as telling some more great tales, we will think about what the pagan myths meant to the predominantly Christian audience who commissioned the paintings and sculptures we will be looking at. After a short summer holiday I will be back on Monday 7 August at 6pm for an Elemental August – starting with the sublime potter Lucie Rie, who manages to cover earth, air, fire and water. Gwen John, Paula Rego and Evelyn de Morgan will follow on the successive Mondays. I’ll have more news about that next week, so watch this space… or the diary.

My lock down project back in 2020 – writing about a Picture Of The Day every day for 100 days – should have ended with today’s painting, for reasons of symmetry. However, day 100 turned out to be a Saturday, and I had developed a tradition of talking about Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel on Saturdays… so this was the first painting I wrote about after my daily ritual had ended, at which point we were finally started to come out of lockdown. That context might explain some of what I said back then – but, then again, possibly not!

This painting is, I suspect, almost as complex in its ambitions and implications as the far more famous Las Meninas. Like it’s illustrious predecessor (this is probably one of the last paintings that Velázquez completed) it is very much about the nature and power of art. I’m using the Spanish title, simply because Las Hilanderas sounds so much better than ‘The Spinners’ – and also because it doesn’t put me in mind of a 1960s folk group. There is another title – The Fable of Arachne – but neither really explains what is going on, nor is either entirely accurate. There is, after all, only one person spinning: the old woman at the front left. 

As it happens, Velázquez has illustrated three stages in the production of thread. The woman in the centre, wearing the red skirt, is reaching down to the ground for a ‘clump’ of wool. In her left hand is a carder – not unlike the working end of a broom, but with metal spikes. Carding wool is the process of separating the fibres, and lining them up.  Once done, the carded wool would be handed to the woman on the left, who attaches it to the distaff, which is leaning against her left shoulder. She is pulling out separate fibres with her left hand, and feeding them onto a thread on the spinning wheel, spinning them together to create an even, strong yarn, which will then be wound onto a reel. The woman on the right is then winding the spun yarn from a reel, or skeiner, onto a ball. It’s not clear what the girl on the far right is doing – possibly taking the wound balls of wool elsewhere, or bringing the un-carded wool for the start of the process.  The woman on the far left is pulling back a curtain. At first glance it is not clear why – but I shall come back to her later! There is also a cat, playing with one of the balls of wool, probably because that is one of the essential functions of a ball of wool – to be played with by a cat (I think that’s what’s called a circular argument). [Re-visiting this post, I wonder if the cat also represents the way in which the gods treat humans – ‘as flies to wanton boys’ – or, ‘as wool to playful cats’: a mouse would have driven the message home, but might not have been as picturesque].

Being brilliant, Velázquez manages to show us these stages in wool production while also creating a wonderfully balanced composition – with an old woman spinning on the left facing front, and a young woman winding on the right facing back. They are framed by younger women leaning in on either side, and in their turn, they frame the woman facing towards us, about to start carding the wool, in the centre. Even for Velázquez’ late style this central woman is remarkably freely painted, her face little more than a blur or blob. It’s intriguing to realise that one Spanish word for blob, blot, stain, or mark is borrón, whereas borra can be the sort of rough wool you would use as stuffing. As borrón can be used for the very painterly brushstrokes that Velázquez uses I would love to think – as several scholars have – that this is a deliberate pun.

Meanwhile, in the background, we have moved from raw material to finished product. The wool has been woven into tapestries, which hang on the walls of a brightly lit adjoining room, up a couple of steps almost as if it is a stage. The scalloped edges at the top confirm that these images are fabric, hanging from the walls, and tell us that they are held up in the corners of the room and half way across the walls. As many tapestries do, they have decorative borders and a pictorial centre. There are five people in this room, who in some way seem to echo the five women in the foreground.

The two who frame the group on the left and right look into and out of this subsidiary scene respectively, with the woman on the far right apparently aware of our presence: she looks out at us as we look in at her, past the women in the foreground. She is rather like Alberti’s ‘chorus’ figure who we have seen several times before (e.g. POTD 37), inviting us in, or warning us off. A woman in a blue dress and red shawl has her back to us, while the woman in the centre faces front. She is standing with her back to the tapestry, gesturing to a person wearing armour – a helmet and breastplate – and holding a shield. This is Minerva – Goddess of War and Wisdom – or Athena, if you prefer the Greek names. But as this is a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and he was Roman, I will stick with the Latin. In her role as Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva was also inspiratrix of the arts, and, as it happens, a dab hand at weaving. But then, so was Arachne – the woman gesturing towards her. In fact, Arachne was so good that she even boasted that she was probably better than Minerva – she certainly claimed all the credit for herself, and denied that she owed anything to the goddess. Minerva was clearly not going to be happy about this, and, disguising herself as an old woman, came down from Mount Olympus (where the gods lived) and challenged Arachne to a competition. They both wove tapestries. Minerva’s showed the twelve Olympian gods enthroned in their palace, with examples of the gods’ punishment of overreaching mortals as a warning to the presumptuous Arachne in the corners. Arachne, on the other hand, wove the loves of the gods – notably the many examples of Jupiter’s infidelities and dalliances with mortals. This angered Minerva, but she could not fault the craftsmanship, and while she appreciated Arachne’s work, she was also envious of her talent. She was, as people might say nowadays, conflicted. And this made her even more angry – she shredded the tapestry and attacked Arachne with her shuttle. The poor girl couldn’t cope with this, took a rope, tied it into a noose and tried to hang herself. But Minerva prevented her – she grabbed the rope, with Arachne hanging from it, and transformed her into a spider – an arachnid, of course – hanging from its thread, destined to spin forever.

It has been suggested that the two most important characters in the foreground – the old woman spinning and the young woman winding – are in fact Minerva and Arachne. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily the case – they could easily be contemporary workers whose activities are effectively ennobled by comparison with ancient myth. Nevertheless, the links between the foreground and background are clear, and Velázquez cleverly charts the development from fluffy lumps of wool (or was that blots, or blobs of paint?) through carding, spinning and winding, to the end product, a glorious, faultless work of art, both appreciated and abhorred by none other than Minerva. The process of moving from craft to concept, from technical skill to intellectual complexity, was one of the major developments in art during the Italian Renaissance. However, in Spain, artists had never really had the same respect. As with Las Meninas, Velázquez is making great claims for his art, the art of painting, in this particular work. From mere blobs of paint he can tell a tale – or, to put it another way, spin a yarn – which shows how dangerous art can be. It can rouse great emotions, it can teach us who we are and what we are capable of, it can stop us being complacent – which is why so many regimes have sought to bend it to their own will. I will leave you to contemplate our present government, and its current dealings with the arts.

But, of course, there is more to it than that. There’s a girl pulling back a curtain, for a start. I can’t see that the curtain has any real function in this space, so what is she doing it for? I’m sure it relates to the tale, told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, to determine who was the best painter. The rules were simple – each paints a painting, and then they decide which one is better. Once the works were completed, they went first to Zeuxis’ studio, where his painting was displayed behind a curtain. He had painted some grapes, and they were so good that when the curtain was drawn back birds flew down to peck at them – what could Parrhasius do that would be better than that? They headed off to Parrhasius’ studio, and he invited Zeuxis to go over and have a look. So Zeuxis went over to draw back the curtain, only to find out that it was a painting of a curtain. Zeuxis may have fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled a person – and an artist at that. And Velázquez has done the same to us. Why is the girl pulling back the curtain? Well, she isn’t. There is no curtain. There is no girl, for that matter, it’s just a painting. But he’s so good that we end up talking about these things as if they are real. Did he know the story? Oh yes. All artists did by the 17th Century. I can’t help thinking that by pulling back the curtain, the girl is referring to the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in order to reveal the story of another competition, the one between Minerva and Arachne – so are we to assume that Velázquez was also in competition with someone? Before I answer that question, let’s stick with the fabric. Surely there is also a comparison between the plain fabric of the curtain, and the elaborately pictorial fabric of the tapestries. And, if we wanted to take it even further, we could even stop and think about the fabric on which this is all painted – the canvas – once plain and flat, now richly decorated with unimaginable depths…

In another section of the Natural History Pliny praises a work by the artist Antiphilus called, ‘the Spinning-room, in which women are working with great speed at their duties.’ You could argue that Velázquez was trying to recreate this fabled image with Las Hilanderas – he is putting himself into competition with Antiphilus. Pliny was making the point that it takes great skill to recreate the sensation of movement in paint. He also refers to a painting of a four-horse chariot by Aristides, in which the horses were running. Inevitably, although Pliny doesn’t mention the fact, the wheels would have been spinning – and this is undoubtedly the effect that Velázquez is trying to achieve with the spinning wheel in his own work, the blurred, concentric lines creating the sensation of movement. By including the references to Pliny, and illustrating one of Ovid’s tales, Velázquez places his own work, in terms of craft and of concept, in relationship to the art of the ancients – but would he, like Arachne, be daring enough to challenge the gods? I’m just going to quote eight lines of the wonderful 18th Century translation of the Metamorphoses which I referred to when talking about Boucher’s Pygmalion (POTD 79) – and here is a link to a contemporary translation as well. We are a little way into Book VI, where Ovid describes Arachne’s tapestry:

Arachne drew the fam'd intrigues of Jove, 
Chang'd to a bull to gratify his love; 
How thro' the briny tide all foaming hoar, 
Lovely Europa on his back he bore. 
The sea seem'd waving, and the trembling maid 
Shrunk up her tender feet, as if afraid; 
And, looking back on the forsaken strand, 
To her companions wafts her distant hand. 

The first of Jupiter’s exploits woven by Arachne which Ovid mentions is the Rape of Europa, and if we look at the tapestry as painted by Velázquez, the version that Arachne has woven is the one painted by Titian for Philip II – which suggests that he was putting himself in competition with Titian as well. The Titian, now owned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, and [at the time I first posted this] in the exhibition just about to re-open at the National Gallery, was copied by Rubens. Rubens’s version is displayed next to Las Hilanderas in the Prado, just to make the point. Rubens’s own painting of The Fable of Arachne – in which he too quoted Titian’s Rape of Europa – can be seen in the shadows on the back wall in Las Meninas – with the added justification that a copy of it, by Velázquez’ son-in-law Mazo, was actually in the room in which Las Meninas is set.

Not only can Velázquez chart the development from raw material to finished product, from unformed wool to refined tapestry – using blobs of paint to spin his yarn – but he can also acknowledge and recreate the works of the classical masters, while putting himself in the same tradition as Titian and Rubens – his own ‘gods’ of painting. Like Arachne, he challenges the gods, but unlike Arachne, he wins. From a purely personal point of view, I now relish the fact that the work that he quoted is a painting by Titian which I saw just a few days before lockdown. It was one of the last paintings that I saw – and it will be one of the first that I see when the National Gallery re-opens this week. It was, as you may recall, Picture Of The Day 1.

Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Venus reborn

Alessandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1485, The Uffizi, Florence.

I want to look back to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus today as she is one of the Gods and Goddesses I will be talking about this Tuesday, 4 July (5:30-7:30pm) in the first of my three talks covering Classical Mythology in European Art. On Tuesday 11 July I will move on to Heroes and Humans, and the last talk in the series (18 July) will consider whether what we are looking at is Myth, Allegory or Simple Story? Details are in the diary, which will soon include information about talks in August – on Mondays again – about Lucie Rie, Gwen John, Paula Rego, and, possibly, Evelyn de Morgan (although not necessarily in that order). I’m still thinking about them though.

Today, though, The Birth of Venus – a post which goes so far back that it was originally uploaded to Facebook before I’d even set up this blog. I wrote it on 26 March 2020, less than a week into lockdown. At the time I was asking friends what they wanted me to talk about – and still am, to be honest: let me know if there’s anything that interests you (although, as you’ll have realised, everything now is usually connected to the talk I am just about to give). I can’t for the life of me remember who asked for this particular theme. But thank you, whoever you were. And apologies for the rant about people getting it wrong about artists getting it wrong. This is what I said, when we still all thought the pandemic would be over by Christmas… which was nine months away:

The request I’m following up today is ‘wonky people in early paintings’, and although 1485 is not terribly early from my point of view, a discussion ensued about Botticelli – and as I mentioned Venus yesterday, and talked about the idea of ‘tradition’, this seemed the perfect choice, because there simply was no precedent. When asked to paint The Birth of Venus Botticelli had absolutely nothing to go on, as no one had painted it before. In the terms of yesterday’s Picture Of The Day, no words, no melody, and especially, no ‘backing track’. How did he decide what to do?

The first choice, I suppose, would be to read the original sources, although all artists, in a situation like this, would also have received a huge amount of advice. Whoever commissioned the painting would know what they wanted, in the same way that, if you commissioned an architect to design you a house, you would tell them how many bedrooms and bathrooms there should be, and possibly even how you would like them to be arranged. Very often, the patron would also be getting advice. In this case, the patron was a member of the Medici family: the painting is first mentioned in the middle of the 16th Century, when it was in one of the Medici villas just outside Florence. This leads to the assumption that the idea for the subject matter was suggested by Agnolo Poliziano, a leading thinker of the day, and the man appointed by Lorenzo de’ Medici to be tutor to his children. Poliziano certainly wrote poetry that includes a description of the birth of Venus, including how she was ‘wafted to shore by playful zephyrs’, her hand ‘covering… her sweet mound of flesh’ while ‘the Hours’ are  ‘treading the beach in white garments, the breeze curling their loosened and flowing hair.’ You can read more about that connection here:

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Arth213/botticelli_poliziano_birth_venus.htm

Botticelli’s painting is not an illustration of Poliziano’s description though – there are too many differences. Even from the extracts above you will realise that there is only one of the ‘Hours’ present (the Hours, or Horae, were goddesses of the seasons, and so of periods of time). In another section of the poem Poliziano also mentions Venus ‘pressing her hair with her right hand’ which Botticelli doesn’t show. Titian does, as it happens, although his Venus isn’t worried about ‘covering… her sweet mound’. What this suggests is that Poliziano, who may well have advised the Medici on what paintings they should have to decorate their villa, and may well have gone on to advise Botticelli how to paint it, provided only one of the sources for this particular image. 

Another source – for both Poliziano and Botticelli as it happens – was almost certainly a classical sculpture known as the Venus Pudica – the bashful, or modest, Venus. The one I’m showing you is called the Medici Venus, because it was in their collection, although it is not know when this particular example was discovered. Either this, or an equivalent sculpture, must have been around quite early, because Giovanni Pisano used it somewhere between 1302 and 1310 for his figure of Prudence on the pulpit he carved in Pisa cathedral. You can see her in the photograph here alongside Fortitude, who is shown in full ‘trophy hunter’ mode.

In neither the classical original nor Botticelli’s painting is Venus either bashful or modest. She may be pretending to cover herself up, but fails completely. What she is actually doing is pointing and saying ‘Look at this, boys!’ Or girls, for that matter. Let’s not be too heteronormative about it. Whatever she is doing, though, the Venus Pudica was undoubtedly another one of Botticelli’s sources, even if the sculpture doesn’t have the strands of hair blowing in the breeze that we can see in the painting. 

For these, we must turn to one of the most important renaissance texts on painting, called, conveniently, On Painting. It was written in Latin in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti for Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. Alberti describes not only how to go about being a painter (although he doesn’t discuss practical technique), but also why you should be a painter, and how you can make yourself look better. It must have occurred almost immediately that artists themselves would appreciate this advice, and the following year (1436) Alberti translated the book into Italian as Della Pittura. Many artists read it, and in some cases they transcribed what they had read in the book – often Alberti’s observations on what he had seen and liked – directly onto their paintings. Take, for example, his thoughts on movement: ‘I am delighted to see some movement in hair… where part of it turns in spirals as if wishing to knot itself, waves in the air like flames, twines around itself like a serpent’. Surely that is exactly what Venus’s hair is doing in Botticelli’s painting?

Alberti does find a problem in showing this movement, though, which he explains while talking about fabrics: ‘However, where we should wish to find movement in the draperies, cloth is by nature heavy and falls to the earth’. The solution? It is one of his most bizarre ideas, and goes against the logic, the rationality and the clarity of the rest of the book. No artist in their right mind would dream of doing it – you’d have to be mad: ‘For this reason it would be well to place in the picture the face of the wind Zephyrus or Austrus who blows from the clouds making the draperies flow in the wind’. And again, that is exactly what Botticelli does. Here it is not madness, though, but an essential part of the original narrative. However, at least one other artist – Paolo Uccello – did include both Zephyrus and Austrus in one of his paintings. Admittedly, Vasari did think he was a bit bonkers.

So, there we have it – at least four sources: the original myth, Poliziano’s interpretation of it, the Venus pudica and Alberti’s On Painting. But although that might explain what he’s painted, it does not explain how it’s arranged. There was no precedent. What model could he possibly use? Someone naked in the water, someone on shore leaning over, a couple of people flying around? Surely no one had ever painted anything like this before? Again (see Picture Of The Day 4) the credit goes to Ernst Gombrich, who pointed out that the model was actually the Baptism of Christ, with Jesus wearing nothing but a loin cloth in the river Jordan, John the Baptist on the shore leaning over to baptise him, and two angels, with wings, who attend on the other side. I’ve chosen the one illustrated here because it is in the Uffizi, and not so very far from the Botticelli – even if the angels don’t have wings. It was painted by Verrocchio and Leonardo, among others. 

At this point the Renaissance has truly arrived: no longer is Christian art and architecture drawing on the classical past for inspiration, but a classical subject is drawing on Christian influence. In other words, a Christian subject is wearing classical clothes, rather than the other way around.

The more astute among you will have noticed that I’ve got this far without even mentioning ‘wonky people’, but we’ve been looking at them all the time. Botticelli is a wonderful artist, his figures are elegant, his paintings inspired. But he was rubbish at anatomy. If he was trying to paint an anatomically correct painting, then he ‘got it wrong’. At this point I would like it to be known in no uncertain terms that that is my least favourite phrase spoken about art. ‘He got that wrong’. What does it mean? In order to know if someone ‘got that wrong’ you have to know what they were trying to achieve, and in this instance, anatomical accuracy would have been inimical to Botticelli’s purpose. ‘But’, you say, ‘look at Venus’s right ankle – she has dislocated her foot!’ However, it does create a wonderful, extended, elegant, line, continuing the almost balletic pose of the right leg. Feet and ankles are rarely elegant (although, as so often, I do have a nomination for ‘Best Foot’), and were her foot at the usual angle to the shin, it would jut out abruptly, poking towards us and disrupting the stylised distancing of this deity which Botticelli creates to keep us slightly in awe of her. We don’t need to stop at her ankle. She has no shoulders, and, like almost every figure by Botticelli, one eye is higher than the other. Picasso could do it, so why shouldn’t Botticelli? It is these peculiarities, these awkwardnesses, these quirks, which make the painting so strange and elegiac – it is poetry, not prose, and like poetry the syntax is stretched, the meaning is moved. It is more beautiful than true, perhaps. Or, to put it another way, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – in the words of the poet. That’s all you need to know. 

199 – The One that Got Away

Hans Holbein the Younger, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, 1538. The National Gallery, London.

The subject of today’s portrait, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, appears in one of the paintings in the Holburne Museum’s gem of an exhibition, Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits, which, if you’re interested, I will tell you about on Monday 26 June at 6pm. Today’s painting isn’t included – but Christina is… more of that below, though. In the following weeks I will switch to Tuesdays, for three two-hour talks about Classical Myth in European Art, covering Gods and Goddesses (4 July, 5.30-7.30), Heroes and Humans (11 July), and Allegory, Myth or Simple Story? (18 July, tickets will go on sale after the first talk). Then – I’m going on holiday, so keep your eye on the diary (or the blogs) for news of what comes next… As ever, if there is anything you would particularly like me to talk about, please do let me know via the contact page. Meanwhile, let’s look at a painting which I have enjoyed for many years, partly for its sheer beauty, and partly because it is not as simple as it might initially appear.

At first glance it is ‘just’ a painting of a woman. Commanding, elegant, and serene, she stands on a tawny-coloured floor in front of a dark turquoise wall, brilliantly illuminated by sunlight. The wall is cast into shadow down the right edge of the painting, so she must be standing at a large, open door, or floor-to-ceiling window. The subject herself casts a shadow to our left: the sun is in front of the painting, above it, and to our right, somewhere above and behind our right shoulders. She looks deep into our eyes, her hands held in front of her waist. Apart from her face and a tiny amount of her neck, they are only parts of her body we can see. Other than that, she is clad in black from head to foot.

Her hat, dress and coat are all black. Just visible, but prominent because of its pristine whiteness, is the scalloped hem of the collar of a chemise, peeping out above the high neckline of her dress. The other ‘non-black’ element is the brown fur lining of her coat, rich, and soft, and opulent. It speaks of great wealth, and great warmth. Given that the sun is shining so brightly, I have always imagined that it must be the winter, or maybe early spring: a sunny, but brisk day. Before now though, for some reason, I have never stopped to pin down the date, but it turns out that I was right: it is what we would now class as towards the end of winter. Holbein made the drawings for this painting on the afternoon of 12 March, 1538.

Have a look at her face. What is her expression? I confess I’m not entirely sure… She has a clear, light complexion, evenly almond-shaped brown eyes, the shadows at the corners of which seem to go up just like the corners of her mouth. There is some hint of a smile, perhaps, and yet also a feeling of great solemnity. I would be hard pressed to guess how old she is. She looks mature, and yet not old, serious, and yet somehow fresh. The portraitist’s tendency to flatter might have come into play, though.

The solemnity is undoubtedly the result of being in mourning. It’s hard to see the dress itself in this detail: it is such a pure black that it is almost imperceptible. The dark space where it must be is framed by the fur lining of the coat, which can be seen all the way to the ground, even if it is far less evident than on the luxuriant collar. The coat itself is gloriously painted, with the black satin glinting and glowing in the sunlight, and spreading across the floor in waves. Towards the top of the detail there are some horizontal marks, running in parallel, which I take to be the remains of some folds. Another assumption of mine is that this coat was stored folded up, rather than hanging somewhere, but I could easily be wrong – the lines might be part of the structure of the satin itself (I’m not an expert in fabrics, let alone historical wardrobe practice…).

There is far more material than is actually needed for a coat. Apart from the excess fabric spreading across the floor, the sleeves are puffed to give a greater sense of grandeur and – I have to use this word again – opulence. The sleeves of the dress protrude beyond the fur trim of the shorter coat sleeves, and look softer, and even warmer than the satin: velvet, presumably. The dress has a high, black belt, and the cuffs of the chemise are clearly visible, fuller than the trim collar, framing, and giving prominence to, the hands. Christina is holding her gloves, which were a sign of elegance and sophistication. By removing them, not only do we see them – and recognise her elegance and sophistication – but we also get to see her hands, which were, apparently, famed for their beauty: delicate, pale, with long slim fingers, and without a mark. She was not a working woman. She was, however, married – there is a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Or rather, she had been married. It’s not a wedding ring, but a mourning ring – they were worn quite commonly between the 14th and 19th centuries: some are mentioned in Shakespeare’s will, for example.

This, as we know from the title of the painting, is Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan. And she was sixteen years old when this was painted. A widow at sixteen – but then (as Shakespeare has already come in to play), in Romeo and Juliet, talking of the heroine when told that she was not yet fourteen, Paris (her intended) says, ‘Younger than she are happy mothers made’. Christina was even younger. In September 1533, a couple of months before her twelfth birthday, Christina of Denmark was married by proxy to Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan. He was 28. She finally made it to Milan the following May, and in November 1535, by which time she was nearly 14, he died. Let’s have a look at that expression again.

I have to be honest: she doesn’t look that upset. OK, so it’s 16 months later, but, while she is dutifully dressed in mourning, there is that barely suppressed smile. It’s almost like that situation when you want to laugh but mustn’t – there’s a real sense of control, gritted teeth. She was young, single, and fairly well off – enough to be happy, and, of course, entirely eligible. And – of course – there was someone in Europe looking for an eligible young woman at the time. He often was. He got through five in the end (the sixth, famously, surviving). Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, had died in October 1537, and in March 1538 Hans Holbein was packed off to Brussels to paint Christina of Denmark, the widowed Duchess of Milan. He only got three hours with her – between one o’clock and four o’clock in the afternoon – before heading back to England. He would have made sketches, and, in all probability, a coloured chalk drawing with annotations, which sadly no longer survives. Many others like it do, though, and one is in the Holburne’s exhibition (I will show it to you on Monday). Holbein completed some sort of finished image, if not this full-length painting, fairly quickly, and Henry VIII was enormously pleased, ‘in better humour than he ever was, making musicians play on their instruments all day long’ (Shakespeare again: ‘If music be the food of love…’). He proposed marriage: which eligible young woman could refuse? However, Christina is supposed to have replied, ‘If I had two heads I would happily put one at the disposal of the King of England’. I so wish she had said that, but I’m afraid I can’t believe it. Let’s face it, Henry had only had one of his wives beheaded at this point (the first wedding had been annulled, and the third bride died) – so it was hardly a reputation. Still, she didn’t marry him. In 1541 she married Francis, Duke of Bar instead. He succeeded his father as Duke of Lorraine three years later (so Christina became the Duchess of Lorraine), and then died the following year. Christina basically went on to live happily ever after, reaching the ripe old age of 69, having been widowed twice with a total of less than six years married.

After a long-drawn-out diplomatic failure, Henry eventually gave up on Christina, and fell for another portrait, that of Anne of Cleves – who, in one of those bizarre twists of diplomatic fate, was betrothed to Francis, Duke of Bar. The King of England was a better catch though, so Anne married him, thus leaving Francis unexpectedly available… and free to marry Christina. In person, though, Anne didn’t live up to Holbein’s artistry, with Henry famously calling her ‘a Flanders Mare’ (or ‘Belgian horse’, in modern terms – although that’s another one of ‘those stories’, this one dating to the 17th Century). Luckily for her she was divorced fairly quickly, and, as a result, like Christina, she also lived happily ever after.

Painted Love – the Holburne’s exhibition – revolves around the portraits of eligible youths and maidens, of potential matches like Christina, of happy brides and grooms, and of the desired result: heirs, and even spares. And even if Holbein’s Christina of Denmark hasn’t made it to Bath, Christina herself has. One of the paintings, lent by His Majesty King Charles III, was painted by Jan Gossaert (artist of The Adoration of the Kings which I discussed detail by detail during Advent a few years back). Dating to 1526, it is entitled The Three Children of Christian III of Denmark, and the four-year-old Christina is on the right. You can never tell how someone will turn out.