280 – “Amo” I love!

Edward Robert Hughes, Study for a Picture: Fra Lippo Lippi, 1893. Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead.

I am only just starting to get to know the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead. It’s a little bit out of the way for me, on the Wirral, but only 20 minutes to drive… However, I prefer walking, or going by public transport – so the Lady Lever in Port Sunlight, or the Walker in Liverpool are more convenient. Nevertheless, as my talk this Monday, 13 July at 6pm will demonstrate, it has the most fantastic collection. They don’t have enough wall space to display all of their paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures – there are about 6,000 works altogether – and so they focus on different aspects of the collection by arranging temporary displays. This week I will talk about one of these, Beyond the Brotherhood: The Legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites – which I introduced all too briefly two weeks before. As well as a few familiar names there are the most fantastic paintings and drawings by artists I had never heard of. Some are local to Merseyside, and were inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites – becoming known as ‘the School of Liverpool’ – whereas others had connections to the artists who were at the heart of the movement. Edward Robert Hughes is one of the ones I was previously unaware of. I find his drawing style quite breath-taking – so why haven’t I heard of him before? Today’s drawing is just one example of the fabulous material on view – so I do hope you can join me on Monday.

There will also be a superb array of media, techniques and imagery to see in the following two talks, both of which are dedicated to a fantastic exhibition I saw in Ghent earlier this year. Sadly, it closed at the end of May, but I still thought you might like to see the extent of the material it covered – or rather, I really think you should see it! It was a thorough exploration of the many women working in the low countries – the Netherlands, and what later became Belgium – between 1600 and 1750, and, like the Williamson exhibition, there are familiar names and brilliant new discoveries. You can book either talk separately, or both together at a reduced price, on the following links.

Unforgettable I & II: 3 and 17 August at 6pm
Unforgettable I – Building a Career: 3 August at 6pm
Unforgettable II – The Community of Artists: 17 August at 6pm

I will then talk about the Courtauld’s current exhibition, Hepworth in Colour, on 24 August, and am hoping to keep the summer colourful on 31 August with the Scottish Colourists, who are currently on show at the Arc in Winchester. However, I’ll post these on the diary as soon as I have confirmed, as I’ve just realised that I may not be able to get to Winchester when I had planned to…

This is how Hughes’ drawing is displayed at the Williamson, where it seen as part of a wall of faces, portraits, and character studies. It could almost be a portrait itself, and that was probably the intention. The subject is standing in a walled garden, holding a white rose, and appears to have been caught unawares. He looks towards you with a calm, well-mannered expression – but more as if he is waiting to see what happens next, rather than wanting to instigate conversation himself. He has something on his mind, I think. Drawn in red chalk on paper – the medium which perhaps best approximates to the texture and colour of White European flesh tones – the image is of a young monk or friar, wearing a white habit with a cowl or hood. The colour of the drawing is set off by the simple, gold-coloured frame, with the image itself given extra impetus by the plain black border around the inner edge. There is a reflection from the glass at the top of this photograph, but I have a clearer version below.

The artist’s signature appears in the bottom left corner – ‘R HUGHES 1893’. Edward Robert Hughes was the nephew of Arthur Hughes, who joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1847, the year before the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by older students in the Schools. However, it seems that he didn’t meet Millais, Hunt and Rossetti until 1850, after he had read their journal, The Germ, which only stretched to 4 issues, all of which were published that year. He never officially became a member of the group, but was enormously influenced by their stylistic innovations. Arthur’s nephew, Edward Robert, was at an even greater remove – but he did go on to assist William Holman Hunt, who late in life was suffering from glaucoma. His most significant contributions were to the third and final version of The Light of the World (c. 1900-04) in St Paul’s Cathedral, and The Lady of Shallott (c. 1888-1905) at the Wadsworth Atheneum – which was one the last of my 100 ‘Pictures Of The Day’ towards the end of lockdown (see 97 – The Mirror Crack’d) – in retrospect, the perfect pandemic painting.

Hughes was 42 when he drew today’s image, and had forged a career in portraiture. Notably, from the point of view of Monday’s talk, from the 1870s he regularly spent several months every year painting portraits in Birkenhead – which might explain how two of his drawings found their way into the Williamson (I will include both in the talk). He was also well known for fantastical watercolours, and in the year that this drawing was created he came to the end of a two-year term as Vice-President of the Royal Watercolour Society.

I think it is the delicacy, subtlety and precision of the drawing style which really grabbed my attention. In this detail the white rose shines out, each petal differentiated, the top edges curling back to catch the light which appears to be falling from above, so that the curls cast shadows on the outside of the petals themselves. The forefinger of his left hand is crooked, and appears to be about to pluck one of the petals, as if he were playing what would be a fairly lengthy game of ‘she loves me, she loves me not…’ – there are a lot of petals to go. The thumb is out of sight, and the remaining three fingers are bent, lying alongside one another and separated by the subtle shading of the red chalk, which also models the knuckles and the veins running across the back of the hand. The fingers of the right hand – holding the rose – seem more tightly pressed together. Is there a symbolism to the rose? Possibly – and its brilliance suggests that it is, at least, important to the drawing as a whole. It is white, so it could refer to purity – but it might just be an artistic choice, matching the friar’s habit. It might refer to the Virgin Mary – a pure, white, rose without thorns – but I’m not sure that Hughes would have been aware of that particular aspect of the rose’s symbolism. Mind you, given the Victorian love of ‘the language of flowers’, it is possible. The lower hem of the cowl crosses behind both hands, and on the right of the drawing it flexes out over the crook of the subject’s left elbow, allowing Hughes to show off his ability to modulate the red chalk and create a superb sculptural effect. The dark shadow underneath this curving section of the hem creates a real sense of depth.

This young man is undoubtedly the most handsome member of a religious order I have ever seen. Hughes delights in the subtle variation of tone which defines the depth of the eye sockets, the curve of the chin, the slight hollowing of the cheek next to a slightly protruding mouth, with its full, soft lips. The subject has a healthy head of brown hair, short to medium-length and slightly tousled, framed by the thin white hood of the cowl, which falls, translucent, on either side of the neck. It seems to glow from behind, once more enhancing the sculptural nature of the depiction, and creating space around the columnar neck. His deep-set brown eyes look out, maybe slightly distracted by something over your right shoulder. Behind him is an urn, with a plant growing around it – possibly the rose from which he has plucked the bloom – and above that is a balustrade, implying that this is a garden set on more than one level.

He belongs to the Carmelite order – known in Britain as the White Friars, after the white cloak and cowl worn over their brown habits. Originally hermits on Mount Carmel in Palestine from as early as 1150, they moved to Western Europe around 90 years later as a result of conflict in the ever-warring ‘Holy Land’. They were friars rather than monks – a mendicant order – so they were not expected to live an enclosed life. The most significant Carmelite convent for the History of Art is quite possibly Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence – as that is where Masaccio and Masolino painted the Brancacci Chapel, often referred to as ‘The Cradle of the Renaissance’.

Just to make the point, here is St Peter Enthroned by Masaccio – from the Brancacci Chapel. Unexpectedly, perhaps, it shows a number of Carmelites as witnesses, despite the fact that this event – if it ever happened – would have been over a millennium before the order was founded. But Carmelite myth, not to mention artistic license, would suggest otherwise. However, our subject today is a very specific Carmelite – as is made clear by the drawing’s title, not to mention the words written in a reserved section of white paper in the top right corner:

All the Latin I construe is, ‘Amo’ I love!

Some of you will, no doubt, have been thinking of this already. The clue is partly given by the name in the title, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, as art historians nowadays almost always (well, always, as far as I am aware) refer to this man as Filippo Lippi – or Fra Filippo Lippi – who was indeed a friar of the Carmelite order. But the quotation above is from Fra Lippo Lippi, the title of a poem by Robert Browning – who lived for a while on the Oltrarno in Florence, close to the Palazzo Pitti, and not so very far from Santa Maria del Carmine. As Lippi says in line 7 of the poem, ‘The Carmine’s my cloister: look it up’. Both his father, a butcher, and his mother had died by the time he was two, and as his aunt could not afford to look after him, she placed him in the convent at the age of eight. It was hardly a calling – and he wasn’t always entirely saintly. He left the Carmine in 1432, but did not renounce his vows… nevertheless, commissioned to paint for an Augustinian nunnery in Prato, he had an affair with the young novice Lucrezia Buti, the result being ‘little Filippo’ – Filippino Lippi, the artist who, with no little irony, completed Masaccio and Masolino’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel.

Filippo would have been about 50 when Filippino was born… so the younger artist would not even have been a glint in his father’s eye when Hughes imagines this ‘portrait’ as having been taken: I would say he looks in his mid-20s, but I’ve never been a good judge of people’s ages. Nevertheless, as the quoted line suggests, there does seem to have been some sort of a glint inended…

The poem is one of the dramatic monologues which Browning made his speciality. At the beginning of the poem, Fra Lippo has been taken by the police – perhaps Browning was thinking of the Ufficiali di Notte – the ‘Officers of the Night’ – who had been established in 1432 (when Lippi would have been about 26) to keep an eye out for sexual activity between men, clearly deemed to have been a problem at the time. But that’s not what Lippi has been up to. As he says towards the beginning of the poem,

What, ’tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar…

However, precisely what he was doing there we only gradually discover. He tells us of his parent’s deaths, and about his aunt taking him to the Carmine, and then, how the other Carmelites treat him:

“Let’s see what the urchin’s fit for”—that came next.
Not overmuch their way, I must confess.
Such a to-do! They tried me with their books:
Lord, they’d have taught me Latin in pure waste!
…
All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!

The implication is that he didn’t see himself fit to be a friar, and learning Latin would have been no use. The line quoted in the drawing implies as much… he knows what love is, but little more, and Hughes shows us a young man in love, or looking for love, or longing…

But what is it, specifically, that attracted Hughes to this poem, and to Browning’s version of Filippo Lippi? Is the romantic notion of a lovelorn cleric enough? More specifically, Lippi’s discussion – in the poem – of what art is, and what it should be, was probably more important. Browning imagines Lippi’s superiors being sceptical of his naturalistic depiction of humanity, the flesh and bones, as if this were all too worldly, not nearly spiritual enough. They claim that he would never match the ‘old masters’ Fra Angelico and Lorenzo Monaco – a Dominican friar and Calmaldolese monk respectively. Lippi tries to explain his ideas, but,

The heads shake still—‘It’s art’s decline, my son!
You’re not of the true painters, great and old;
Brother Angelico’s the man, you’ll find;
Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:
Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third!’

Keep going with your naturalism, they say, and you’ll never rank with the greats. You should be more spiritual. How has Lippi tried to justify his work? It’s quite simple, really.

If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents…

I find it hard to disagree with that. It’s also clear that Lippi believes in naturalism, the depiction of details, as that brings us close to the truth – as opposed to a spiritual idealism that has little to do with the world we live in. In many ways, his views are those expounded by the Pre-Raphaelites, who very often concentrated on the minutest details of the natural world – as we will see on Monday. And maybe it was this that inspired Edward Robert Hughes to make this Study for a Picture. The ‘picture’ itself was never painted – perhaps he never meant it to be – but I can’t regret that. The drawing is perfect… the painting may have let it down.

Hockney, retrospective

David Hockney, My Parents and Myself, 1976. The David Hockney Foundation.

I first posted today’s blog just under two years ago, when the National Gallery was showing a closely related work in a rather wonderful 3-painting display. It seems apt to repost it today, though, as I look forward to this week’s talk (at 6.00pm on Monday 6 July) inspired by David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie, which is currently on show, with some other paintings, at Serpentine North in Hyde Park. Little did I know when I went to see it that it would be his last exhibition as ‘Britain’s most famous, and successful, living artist’ – which is how I described him two years ago. I will give a very brief overview of his long and varied career before concentrating on the exhibition – and will consider how the works on display, some of his last, are related to what came before.

The following week, at 6.00pm on Monday 13 July I will dedicate an in-depth talk to the display Beyond the Brotherhood: The Legacies of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead. I gave it the briefest of introductions on Monday, but the quality of the paintings, drawings and work in other media is superb: I wanted to spend more time with it. The exhibition brings together work by artists who were inspired by, or related to, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in different ways, and shows just how rich the holdings of the Williamson – my second closest art gallery on the Wirral – are.

After what I hope will be a reasonably cool, but invigorating holiday in Shetland I will give two talks about an exhibition which took place earlier this year in Ghent. Unforgettable was very successful, but did deserve to be seen more widely – which is why I want to dedicate two talks to it, in order to cover the ideas behind it more fully and to see as many of the excellent paintings as possible. The title was ironic, given that so many of the artists – Women between Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1600-1750, to use the exhibition’s own subtitle – have indeed been forgotten. Some are only just being rediscovered, and, as well as now well-known names – Judith Leyster, Rachel Ruysch, and Michaelina Wautier, for example – there are many more who were entirely new to me. I will split the themes covered by the exhibition into two talks, on 3 and 17 August. You can book for either separately, or both together at a reduced price, on the following links:

Unforgettable I & II: 3 and 17 August at 6pm
Unforgettable I – Building a Career: 3 August at 6pm
Unforgettable II – The Community of Artists: 17 August at 6pm

For any talks or tours after that – please do keep checking the diary!

There were only three paintings in the NG’s ‘capsule exhibition’ back in 2024, but they formed a perfect triptych. What follows is a somewhat convoluted exploration of the origins, and implications, of just one of the three paintings, David Hockney’s My Parents (1977). Above is an earlier version, My Parents and Myself, which was started in 1975 while Hockney was living in Paris, but then abandoned – much to his parents’ distress. Unfinished, it languished for decades in his Los Angeles home until seen in public for the first time in 2020. Hockney’s mother and father are seated to our left and right respectively on what looks like a square platform, with curtains slung on a rail above as if they are on a stage. In between them is a bright green cabinet with a vase of yellow tulips on one side, and a mirror, reflecting the face of the artist, on the other: this is a triple portrait.

The yellow lines you can see rising behind Mrs Hockney’s head, above the tulips, and to the right of the mirror are remains of masking tape which was left in place when the painting was abandoned. I can’t for the life of me think what he would have been masking here, but he might have been planning to overpaint the background and leave a geometrical framework of the underlying layer: there is a similar geometric structure in another version of the painting (there were three) which we will see later. As you will find out, I am especially interested in the curtains at the top. They are not particularly detailed, but then, this is an unfinished painting. As a result it is not at all clear how they are attached to the pole, which stretches from one side of the painting to the other with no visible means of support. The light brown colour suggests that it is made of wood, but given the weight of the curtains, and the slim profile of the pole, it is surprising that it does not bow in the middle. The curtains are a jade green, or very light turquoise, and serve to frame the images of mother and father below. The curtain on the right is slightly more open, with the lower end brought forward and slung over the back of the pole further to the right. The bottom edge and corner of the curtain are visible to the right of the other folds. It spreads further than its equivalent on the left, which is slung over the pole in a more compact way: it isn’t stretched out as much, and the lower end is hidden between the folds of the front and back sections. The curtains echo the placement of the figures.

Mrs Hockney faces directly towards us, her shoulders parallel to the picture plane, while her husband is at an angle, in three-quarter profile, with his body aligned on a diagonal from back right to front left. As a result, like the curtain above, he is more ‘spread out’, while Hockney’s mother is more contained. In a similar way, there seems to be an equivalence between the objects on the cabinet and the human figures. The vase has the same light colouration as Mrs Hockney’s hair, and both have swelling forms which narrow towards the feet, with a neck and shoulders (or equivalent) at the top. The mirror is framed with wood, and could be swivelled, not entirely unlike the diagonals and verticals of Mr Hockney’s wooden chair (Mrs Hockney’s chair is only just sketched in, but looks as if it would have had a slim metal frame).

Mum’s feet are crossed over, while dad’s rest flat on the ground (I mention this as the finished painting of 1977 is different). They are on a mottled blue and red carpet, with a dark blue band at the front, one of the things which creates the appearance of them being on a platform or stage. In between them, the lower shelf of the bright green cabinet is stacked with books. A large, thick tome and several slimmer volumes taking up the same width of the shelf lie horizontally on the left, while four smaller, light blue books stand upright, if slightly leaning, on the right.

The David Hockney Foundation has a study for My Parents and Myself which was drawn in coloured pencils in 1974. It shows that the original idea for the composition was fundamentally the same, with his mother on the left facing front with feet crossed, and his father on the right, at an angle. The green cabinet is there – though on wheels, and slightly angled – with the vase (which is darker) and mirror standing on it. Hockney’s reflection is there, although his face takes up more of the surface: the intention was definitely to have all three members of the family given an equivalent presence. The curtains are very different, though. They still hang from an apparently wooden pole, but have black curtain rings clearly visible. They are a yellowy-orange, and hang the full height of the back wall of the room. Why did he change the colour, and the way they hang?

A photograph of the sitting (also in the David Hockney Foundation) suggests that there weren’t any curtains there at all – although they are present in the painting which has been placed behind Mrs Hockney (this is clearly a highly staged photograph). The light vase contains the yellow tulips, and the mirror reflects the artist – though at a far smaller scale than in the Study, given his distance. The reference to Old Master Painting should be clear. With a mirror, reflecting an otherwise unseen presence, seen between a married couple, one looking towards us, one at an angle, he can only have been thinking of the Arnolfini Portrait. In addition to Jan van Eyck, at least two other artists have influenced this painting. The books on the cabinet (which is nowhere near as brightly coloured as in the painting) are in a different arrangement. There are now five vertical blue books on the left, and fewer large, horizontal volumes to the right. The one at the top is clearly titled ‘Chardin’, and is a monographic study of the 18th Century French artist famed for his timeless still life and genre paintings. Both parents sit on the same type of chair – the wooden, angled form that the father uses in the unfinished painting – and they are both half on and half off a very specific rug.

It is a woven version of Piet Mondrian’s unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44, Kunstmuseum, The Hague). Not an ‘old master’ perhaps, but another artistic reference, and also one which speaks of timelessness and balanced, careful composition.

I mentioned that there were three versions of the painting. Unlike the one we are looking at today (on the right) the version to the left was completed, and exhibited, but no longer exists: Hockney later destroyed it as being ‘too contrived’. This is the version I referred to which has a geometric structure: a triangle, rather than the implied rectangle formed by the masking tape. The base cuts behind the heads of Mrs Hockney and her son (in the reflection), with the bottom right corner pointing toward Mr Hockney. It binds the family together. However, given my interests in religious art, and Mrs Hockney’s profound Christian faith, I wonder if there was something else? The relationship between Mother, Father and Son is clearly important, but is there also a nod towards the Holy Trinity? There is an implied reference in a painting seen in the third iteration of the composition – even if I’m not sure that Hockney would have been interested in that aspect of the work in question. Mrs Hockney seems to be sitting in a metal-framed chair – the one planned for the unfinished painting, perhaps – while Mr Hockney sits in the one seen in the pencil Study, rather than that in the photograph. The carpet stretches the full width of the painting, and the green cabinet, on wheels, is at a slight angle, as in the Study. There are no curtains.

The completed version was finished in 1977 after Hockney had returned to England. By now you can pick out the themes and variations for yourselves, but I will point out that the arrange of books is the same as in the photograph (although the Chardin monograph is now at the bottom of the pile, and there are six vertical books), and that the rug, scrubbed clean of the Mondrian, is neatly placed within the frame and on a wooden floor. As a result there is no sense that they are on a platform. The chairs, as in the photograph again, are half on and half off the rug, and it’s curtains for the curtains. Or is it? They are there, but hidden in plain sight. As you will have realised, there are a number of other differences. Mrs Hockney’s feet are not crossed, her husband’s are raised at the heels, and he bends over to look at a book lying on his lap. But something else is missing, which is reflected in this version’s title: My Parents, rather than My Parents and Myself. We do not see Hockney’s face in the mirror. However, he is reflected there, albeit symbolically.

Two images can be seen in the reflection. One is a print of Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ – the painting exhibited alongside My Parents in the National Gallery’s 2024 exhibition Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look. The other shows a green curtain. The catalogue entry on Tate’s website suggests that this is a reflection of Hockney’s Invented Man Revealing Still Life (1975, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) which I’ve illustrated on the right. However, the National Gallery’s catalogue for the current exhibition implies (but doesn’t state explicitly) that the curtains are those from the unfinished version of My Parents and Myself. What do you think? My personal feeling is that we are seeing a reflection of the unfinished painting. In any image of Invented Man… that I have come across, the curtain at the right (seen at the left of the reflection) is at the very edge of the painting, to the extent that it is slightly cropped in the image from the Hockney Foundation website I’ve used above. However, in My Parents and Myself there is a gap between the curtain and the side of the painting – as there is in the reflection. Not only that, but in Invented Man… we can see the black curtain hooks which Hockney had shown in the Study for My Parents which are not in the unfinished painting. They are not visible in the reflection – suggesting that it is My Parents and Myself, which must be propped against the back wall of Hockney’s studio in London. The National Gallery catalogue suggests that the reflection of the unfinished My Parents and Myself seen in the finished My Parents suggests an idea of spiritual renewal which is not entirely unlike the act of baptism. I would further suggest that the ‘missing’ figure in Piero’s Baptism – God the Father – would complete the Holy Trinity implicit in the figures of Jesus and the dove (the Holy Spirit). This would be the connection with the red triangle in the destroyed version of the painting. There is a profound sense, therefore, that Hockney is associating himself with Piero and his work. He is subtly making us aware of his heritage, as the product both of his parents, and of his artistic forefathers, his physical and artistic ‘families’. [In retrospect I realise that there is a profound connection with Murillo’s The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities, but I’ll have to leave the explanation of that for another time].

However, none of this explains my interest in the curtains. Where do they come from? Somehow I know, but I don’t know how I know. I suspect that I’d have to read everything I’ve ever read about Hockney to find out, but I really can’t remember what that was. Nevertheless, have a look at the next two images.

The first is a detail from My Parents and Myself. The second has all the black curtain hooks in Invented Man… – and sketched in, even with different curtains, in the Study for My Parents and Myself. It also has the vertical support from which the un-bowed pole hangs in Invented Man… It is a detail from a predella panel from Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece, painted for the eponymous church in Florence and now in the eponymous museum. David Hockney discusses his love of Fra Angelico in an interview in the National Gallery’s catalogue from the 2024 exhibition, and picks out the Annunciation frescoed at the top of the stairs in the former Dominican friary which now houses the Museo di San Marco. However, the borrowed curtains are not mentioned, so I’m very glad I remembered them.

[After I first wrote this post I found a reference to Fra Angelico’s Miracle of the Black Leg on the David Hockney Foundation website, on a page about the year 1975, when Invented Man Revealing Still Life was painted – but that’s not where I know it from… However, after several visits to the Fra Angelico exhibition in Florence last year, the connection is even more obvious]. These curtains form just one element which recurs across a few of his paintings, but even on their own, they are a testimony to his love of looking, and his love of art: this great love was with him to the very end – as we will see on Monday.

279 – Honeysuckle A and B

May Morris, Design for Honeysuckle wallpaper, about 1879-83. The William Morris Society.

I spent the weekend with a very slow WiFi connection trying to get my laptop back up to running order. If you’re reading this now, I have clearly succeeded. However, the whole process has given me plenty of time to look at my diary, think about the exhibitions I have seen, and plan my talks up until September – and a little beyond. This coming week, on Monday, 29 June at 6pm, I will deliver my talk May Morris, the Reading Bayeux, and the Post-Pre-Raphaelites, which will take a thorough look at the exhibition May Morris, Crafting a Legacy currently on show at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, just round the corner from me on the Wirral. This exhibition has interesting connections to the replica of the Bayeux Tapestry in Reading, which I will elucidate. I will also give a brief introduction to a second exhibition on the Wirral, Beyond the Brotherhood, at my second-closest museum, The Williamson in Birkenhead. However, working over the weekend – with plenty of time to look at the material while I waited for the WiFi – I realised how good both of these exhibitions are, and I don’t want to sell either of them short – so on 13 July I will dedicate an additional, in-depth talk to the second show, Beyond the Brotherhood: The Legacies of the Pre-Raphaelites. This includes artists who were inspired by, or related to, the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) in different ways, and so, by definition, must have come after them. This is why I’ve coined the absurd term ‘the Post-Pre-Raphaelites’ for the earlier talk. In between these two, on 6 July, I will give my second ‘Pre-Bayeux’ talk, inspired by the exhibition of David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie – inspired by the topotypical tapestry – at Serpentine North in Hyde Park. I’d planned to see how this exhibition relates to his earlier work even before his recent death: now it will be more obviously a retrospective – although it will only give the briefest of outlines of the development of his long and productive career. Any more detail and I’d have to deliver an entire series of talks!

I’ll be on holiday – somewhere cooler – at the end of July, and when I get back I want to have a good look at an exhibition that I saw far too late to be able to talk about it while it was still on. Unforgettable, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, was undoubtedly the best summation of recent research into women in the visual arts that I have yet seen. The title, of course, is ironic, given that so many of these artists were forgotten. The subtitle, Women between Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1600-1750, suggests its focus, but despite the geographical and temporal limits it was both comprehensive and intriguing: it definitely deserves to be thoroughly explored. Consequently, I will split the themes it covers into two talks, on 3 and 17 August. You can book for either separately, or both together at a reduced price, on the following links:

Unforgettable I & II: 3 and 17 August at 6pm
Unforgettable I – Building a Career: 3 August at 6pm
Unforgettable II – The Community of Artists: 17 August at 6pm

Although I know what’s coming after that it’ll take me a while to get it all online – so keep an eye on the diary!

May Morris grew up with art and design. Her parents, William Morris and Jane Burden, met in Oxford when Dante Gabriel Rossetti took both under his wing while painting the Oxford Union between 1857 and 1859. Married that year, their first daughter, Jane (known as Jenny) was born in 1861 and her sister, Mary (known as May) the following year. William was an artist turned designer, and effectively the founder of the Arts & Crafts movement. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. – the interior design firm – was founded in 1861, and it would subtly evolve to become Morris & Co. in 1875. Jane was an expert needlewoman, and famed beauty – a popular model for the other artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. It’s not entirely surprising that May Morris also grew up to be a superb designer and seamstress – she had an early start. The Honeysuckle wallpaper is probably her most famous design, and she may have been as young as 17 (according to the dates given in the exhibition) at the time of its inception. Most sources date the design precisely to 1883, though, by which time she would have been 21, and working officially for Morris & Co. – however, that is by no means certain. It’s not entirely clear when she started working for them, for one thing. As daughter of the boss, I suspect it would initially have been an unofficial involvement that only gradually evolved into her becoming a full member of the workforce. However, it was certainly formalised by 1885 when, at the age of 23, she was appointed manager of Morris & Co’s professional embroidery workroom. Nevertheless, when her father died eleven years later she left the company almost immediately, determined finally to strike out on her own.

For a while, it wasn’t even clear who had designed Honeysuckle. An article published in 1890 in the magazine The Woman’s World (published between 1887 and 1890, and edited by none other than Oscar Wilde) attributed the design to William Morris. However, this wasn’t an act of misogyny, or the dismissal of ‘cheap labour’ from his daughter: work by the chief designer Henry Dearle was also credited to William Morris. No one was interested in Dearle wallpaper, but many wanted Morris: it was a purely financial arrangement. In medieval terms (one of William Morris’s main areas of interest), these designs were all products of the Morris workshop, and the firm’s guarantee of their authenticity was what the customers were really interested in. However, May Morris’s name was given as the designer in the Morris & Co. wallpaper catalogue from around 1909, and her authorship of the design is also confirmed in one of her letters which survives in the archives.

There are a certain number of conditions you have to meet in order to create a viable wallpaper design – one that will work, that is, regardless of whether or not it is successful. The most important – and arguably the only important condition – is that the pattern must repeat both horizontally and vertically. This detail is cropped to include the repeat (54cm in the finished product), with some ‘excess’ material – repeated elements – on all four sides. The design features seven different honeysuckle blooms, with two sizeable flowers (a third of the way down on the left, and at the bottom right) and five smaller specimens. These are surrounded by a tangle of stems and leaves which fill the space between the blooms evenly. Judging by eye, they also seem to cover the same amount of the surface area as the white background – thus giving an even balance between light and dark, helping to keep the design balanced across the surface of an entire wall. The pattern is contained within a grid of black drawn lines, just within the edges of this detail. The vertical lines left and right mark the edges of the planned wallpaper (56 cm wide in the completed product). If you look at the small flower top left, its petals project to the left of the line, at which point, in the design, the imagery becomes more diffuse. However, if you now look at the top right of the design, on a level with this bloom, you will see that those same petals are fully realised on the right side of the paper. One of the conditions for a working design is that it must match on a sharp vertical line – the edge of the wallpaper. May has created a pattern which repeats at the same level, although often the design is offset, with the left-hand side matching the pattern half-way down the right, for example. This helps to create a diagonal flow across a wall, the movement helping to create the mood and energy of the design. However, a diagonal is already introduced here by the inclusion the two similarly sized, large blooms on a diagonal. They are not the same flower, but nevertheless create the same effect, with a subtle variation in appearance.

The grid line at the top of the detail goes through the ‘heart’ of one of the ghost blooms – the larger one, which is also seen fully realised at the bottom right. Curiously there doesn’t appear to be an equivalent line going through this complete version – but my guess would be that she wanted to leave the image clear so that the design could be easily and precisely transferred to the wood blocks used to print the paper by hand. Tying the design together vertically – in addition to the repeated flowers – is a woody stem, thicker than the others, which undulates from left to right on either side of the central axis. The two larger blooms grow on slightly thinner stems which grow from this central ‘trunk’, forking to the left and right alternately. The smaller flowers grow on a complex network which is both irregular and inventive. Altogether there is a sense of order and balance, combined with a sense of natural profusion.

May Morris only designed three wallpapers (we will see samples of them all on Monday), and in the two which followed she did not extend the design beyond the basic repeat in the way that she does here. The full extent of the design is mapped out in the bold colours, while the more diffuse, paler sections suggest that she is checking that the repeat will really work. However, there is also a sense that this was the very piece of paper on which she created the final image, rather than it being a ‘fair copy’ she had transferred from a developmental model. If you look at the large sketchy flower on the right, the pencil outlines of the final design can be seen, freely filled with light brushstrokes of watercolour. However, there are more curves and arcs of pencil lines, suggesting that this is one of the places where she was working out the final form that the flower would take.

The design evolved from her direct observations of the motif: the flowers and stems of the honeysuckle. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has a rich collection of her work, including at least three drawings of honeysuckle – I’m just showing you two. On the left, even if the flowers are given some colour, there is a greater interest in the shapes of the stems and leaves. The curving forms of the left-hand stem could have inspired the undulating axis of the final design. The watercolour on the right has a more careful observation of the shape and form of the individual petals and sepals, an understanding necessary to know how they should be foreshortened, in order to make a convincing three-dimensional form. Let’s face it, this isn’t the easiest flower to draw. I think the wallpaper design is a triumph in this regard. It manages to create a convincing, naturalistic image of honeysuckle which is, at the same time, suitably stylised and entirely decorative.

Having produced the design, the paper then went into production. Below are two photographs – the design, and the finished product, as mounted and framed for the exhibition. Have a close look and see if there have been any changes!

I think the most obvious difference is in the colours. However, there are several reasons for that. First, the design was hand coloured, and the paints may have darkened. Second, and almost more likely, my phone might have responded differently to the lighting conditions, even if the two exhibits are right next to each other. And third – it is probably an aesthetic choice, choosing three green inks – light, mid- and dark green – which would make the design easy to read. A pale or mid-green fills in the body of each leaf, while the mid- or darker green (depending on the base colour) creates the outline and marks the central rib. The other lines on the leaves are effectively hatching, helping to define the three-dimensional form of each leaf. However, the main difference between the two details is in the framing. The sample (on the right), has its vertical edges covered by the mount. The image you see would not work as a wallpaper, as the pattern does not match up from right to left. Most notably, you can only see half of the small flower a third of the way down on the left – there are no matching petals to complete the bloom on the right-hand side. But that is only a matter of framing: underneath the mount, the paper is all there!

As I mentioned above, the Morris & Co. wallpapers were hand printed, using wood blocks. Having finalised the design, it would be transferred to the block as a line drawing. Specialist carvers cut the design into pear wood – or the wood of another fruit tree – as that is soft enough for delicate detail. However, this is relief printing: it is the raised, uncarved areas of the block which create the image. Any lines – whether outlines or hatching – require thin ridges of wood, which wouldn’t last long given the pressure applied during printing, so they could be reinforced with metal. The printing was carried out by specialists, and Morris subcontracted this work to another company. For Honeysuckle – and many other wallpapers – they went to Jeffrey & Co. Each colour in the design needed a separate block, and each block had to register exactly with the others – but, given the hand-made ethos, if they were slightly out from time to time it wasn’t a major issue. Starting with the broader areas of lighter colours, the pattern would gradually be built up, working towards darker colours and finer detail. Honeysuckle needed eight blocks. Just looking at my photographs, I think there are three greens, three pinks, and two browns, but I could be wrong. Eight was not the most that could be used, though: one of William Morris’s own designs, Chrysanthemum, from 1877, used as many as 30 – which needed 30 blocks to be hand cut… Morris famously exhorted people to ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ – but hand printed wallpaper is labour intensive, and consequently enormously expensive: not everyone could afford this standard of enlightened living. Nevertheless, there was enough money in Britain to make it a viable concern. Below is just one of the blocks which survive in the archives of the William Morris Gallery. This one was used to print his Larkspur wallpaper, and was produced by Barratt’s of Bethnal Green Road.

In theory, having cut the blocks, they could be inked with any colour. One of the jobs of the designer is to decide which combinations of colour will work. Each different combination is called a ‘colourway’. There are four different colourways for Honeysuckle, two of which can be seen in the Lady Lever exhibition.

The image on the left is a detail of the framed sample I showed you above, while that on the right is from a wall in the third room of the exhibition. As far as I can see, the main difference, if not the only difference, is in the background. In the first version, I believe the background colour is the natural colour of the paper. As so often, I could be wrong, though! Maybe it is necessary to print the background this light colour to make the design and surface texture more consistent. In the second, darker version, the main difference is that the background appears to be black. It looks as if the lines of the stems, and the outlines of the flowers and leaves are the same black, though, which could, theoretically, reduce the number of blocks needed to print this particular colourway.

If a wall in the exhibition is papered with this design, it does beg an interesting question, the answer to which is ‘yes’! It is still possible to buy these wallpapers. Morris & Co. is still a going concern, even though it has passed through different hands in the last century: it is currently owned by the Sanderson Design Group. No, the papers are no longer hand printed, but yes, they are still remarkably expensive. I have, in the past, considered using a couple of rolls for a feature wall, though! However, May’s other designs – her embroidery, dress-making, and other ventures – are harder to come by, which is what makes the exhibition so valuable… and that is why I am talking about it on Monday!

278 – Heading for a Fall

Henri Matisse, The Fall of Icarus, 1943. Private collection.

You know when someone says, ‘I’m having one of those weeks’? Well, that’s me. For a while I even thought I would have to postpone Monday’s talk, Matisse because on Tuesday night (well, Wednesday morning) at about 12:30am my laptop locked me out. However, I got it back from the laptop hospital today after some delay, I’m giving it all the tender love and care it deserves, and I will get it fit and ready for this Monday, 22 June at 6pm… I blame the British Museum, but that’s another story.

By the following week, 29 June, I will be more relaxed, and ready to unravel the tangle of threads that link May Morris, the Reading Bayeux, and the Post-Pre-Raphaelites. This will cover two exhibitions on the Wirral, where I live, and my recent work on the Bayeux tapestry (yes, I’m still blaming the British Museum) which have all fortuitously coincided: this talk will be the result. Expect fantastic paintings, skilful embroidery, and even wonderful wallpaper. I will then return to Bayeux via David Hockney’s work inspired by the tapestry, A Year in Normandie, on 6 July. I planned this before the news of his passing, and now, of course, it will be more of a retrospective than I had imagined. What a remarkable career! Details of these talks are on the diary, of course, and I will add more as I pin them down.

(In case you’re wondering why I blame the British Museum – well, my laptop seems to have burnt out after spending over 12 hours in the queue to book tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry this coming September. At least I’ll be going. And I will probably have paid for the repairs by then… I’m going to dedicated at least two talks to it in October, if not three: that depends on how much ‘exhibition’ surrounds the tapestry itself. And no, it’s not a tapestry…)

Two and a half weeks after his 71st Birthday, on 16 January 1941, Matisse had emergency surgery for cancer, which was followed by a post-operative pulmonary embolism – an operation that both saved his life and nearly killed him. Granted a ‘second life’, as he saw it, his outlook was unbelievably positive, and his work increasingly inventive. The example I want to think about today was one of the early examples of his paper cut-outs – in many ways an entirely new way of creating imagery – but we’ll discuss that further on Monday. Against an intense blue sky, dotted with sharp, angular stars, a white body appears suspended against a black diagonal. A burst of red appears in front of the figure’s chest. The work is named after the classical myth in which Daedalus and his son Icarus escape from prison by flying, using wings made of wax and feathers made by Daedalus himself. Failing to heed his father’s warnings, Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, the wings fail, and he plummets to his death. The black diagonal gradually tapers from top to bottom, the only thing that indicates the downward motion – apart, perhaps, from the upward splash of red. The blackness is almost the negative of a spotlight, or searchlight: rather than illuminating the most important figure, it casts him into a void, making his white form shine out against the darkness, darker even than the blue of the night sky.

Matisse called this work The Fall of Icarus, but, as ever, it isn’t that simple. To mention the most obvious things, there are no hints of either wings or feathers, and the myth makes no mention of Icarus being injured as he fell, although I can only assume that the red is blood spurting from his chest. Let’s look more closely, though, to get a better understanding of what this is.

Ceçi n’est pas un collage – to misquote René Magritte. This is not a collage. ‘Collage’ comes from the French word coller, ‘to stick’, or colle, ‘glue’, and refers to an image made from elements that have been made, or sourced from elsewhere, which are brought together and stuck on the same surface. But not everything here is stuck down: the stars, and the splash of red, are held in place with pins. In English we call Matisse’s innovative late works ‘paper cut-outs’, whereas in French they are ‘gouaches découpées’ – cut-out gouaches. White paper was prepared with gouache – an opaque, water-based paint (sometimes called body colour, or more recently ‘opaque watercolour’) – and the shapes cut from that. From then on, the work could be very flexible. Matisse would move the shapes around, pinning them in place, then rearrange them until he was happy with the composition. He might pin them onto other pieces of gouache-prepared paper, as he has here – you can see the pins quite clearly, I hope – or he might pin them to the wall. The next day he might rearrange the motifs again, or remove some altogether. Later they might be used in a completely different composition. However, this transient and fluid way of working was not the most sturdy, and eventually, for the purpose of exhibiting the works, most of the ‘finished’ cut-outs were glued down – for purely practical reasons – and later also mounted on canvas, which made them easier to handle. Today’s image is one of very few that still has at least some of its pins. As a result it maintains some of its spontaneity, not to mention its three-dimensional form. Notice how the ends of the beams shining from the star on the left lift away from the paper, and cast shadows. There is a sense of flexibility, the possibility of change, and potentially, even, movement. If breezes were to blow across the image, the stars would twinkle in the sky. There are also marks in the intense colour of the background where pins have been inserted and then removed. These subtle punctures reveal traces of earlier compositions, the ghosts of potential artworks. What we see is an image that evolved across time, and what we are looking at is only one of its possibilities.

Much of Matisse’s concern was to simplify things as much as possible, and by simplifying them, to get to their essence. We read this as a human form simply because the arrangement of elements is so familiar: in this section we see a head and two arms. There is not much detail, though, partly because the shapes were cut with tools varying from large tailors’ shears, to smaller, more precise embroidery scissors. The lack of detail creates a sense of floundering, though: Icarus is not in control. The arms terminate not with hands and fingers, but with points, almost like flippers, which again gives a sense of helplessness. As I see it, Icarus is facing us – but only because I see the blood as spurting from a wound in his chest, as I mentioned above. However maybe, given how low the source is, it comes from the abdomen. This is not an abstract image – it clearly represents a human body – but it is, at least, abstracted, and with abstraction, the precise placement of every form becomes even more important. The curve of the right arm (on our left) never gets too close to the border between the black and the blue, and is comfortably surrounded by darkness. However, the tip of the left hand touches the edge of the black. Somehow this imbues it with a greater energy, even a sense of danger, which is only enhanced by its apparent contact with the twinkling star.

Matisse seems to enjoy how slim Icarus is, his torso curving to a narrow waist, then out again around the hips to very solid legs: his thighs are wider than his waist. At the bottom of the cut-out we get a wonderful sense of the physicality of the work. Rather than being stuck to the mount, or having a frame on top of it, cutting off the edges, the base, blue-coloured paper is held in place with transparent corner mounts, the sort that I have always thought of as photo corners. This allows the base to flex, and as a result it casts shadows on the white surface beneath. The black diagonal has been stuck onto the blue surface beneath – but it has not been trimmed to fit. It reveals a sliver of blue at its bottom left corner, whereas the bottom right projects over the edge. This emphasizes the physicality of the material, something which is all the more evident if we get just a little closer.

The projection of the corner of the black over the edge of the blue is clearer, I think, as are the shadows cast on the white background. There are small white dots in the corner of the black: these are the traces caused by the pins as Matisse shifted the black-painted section to find its most satisfactory position. The materiality of the pin in the star is also clearer, its head to the top right, the pinpoint at bottom left. The star wrinkles in the middle as a result of being pinned, and casts a thin line of shadow on itself. This physicality is one of the ways in which Matisse’s use of paper in the cut-outs is so different to traditional approaches. Most artists treat paper as a surface on which to draw or paint, whereas Matisse used each piece of painted paper as a three-dimensional object, material to be cut into and moulded. He even said that ‘cutting into colour reminds me of the sculptor’s direct carving’ – he is carving with paper. Rather than works on paper, like drawings or prints, the cut-outs are works of paper, incredibly thin sculptures.

We can also see his signature more clearly in the detail above: ‘Henri Matisse’, and just above the final ‘e’, ‘6/43’ – he made this work in June 1943. Starting from the very first issue, Matisse regularly provided illustrations for Verve, a journal published between 1937 and 1960 by the mononymic publisher Tériade. The Fall of Icarus was published as a lithograph in Verve, Volume IV, number 13 six years later. Here is a comparison between the original, which some would call a maquette, or ‘model’ (but that’s one of the things we will consider on Monday) and the published lithograph.

In the year that The Fall of Icarus was made and published Tériade managed to persuade Matisse to write a book about colour. It would take the name Jazz, and was eventually published in 1947, although most of the work was done in 1943. It was at this point that he really perfected the technique of the paper cut-outs. The colours were exactly the same in both the originals and the printed versions because the ink for the books used the same range of pigments as the gouache for the cut-outs (if they aren’t above, it is because the photos come from different sources). Nevertheless, Matisse was ambivalent about the printed versions, as they no longer had that three-dimensionality, or, for that matter, the possibility of change. They became fixed, slightly dead, like a butterfly pinned to a board… but I still think they look superb. As an Art History student at Cambridge I thought the pictures for Jazz were simply the best thing – and if you want to know more, one of my friends from those days, Louise Rogers, has written a fantastic book, Matisse: The Books – which of course, includes Jazz. Click on that link for more information.

But what about the title, The Fall of Icarus? Is this really an illustration of the myth? As ever – as we discovered last week (277 – How do you know that?) – context is everything. I’ve mentioned the dates of Matisse’s operation (1941), and of the execution of this cut-out (1943), and I’m sure you must have been wondering about both. What else was going on in the world, after all? It becomes slightly more obvious if we turn to another of Matisse’s associates, who, like Tériade, is usually known by only one name: the Surrealist poet Aragon. Writing about Matisse in 1971, he said that Icarus looked ‘like a corpse, and, from what Matisse said himself, it seems that the splashes of yellow—suns or stars if you want to be mythological—were exploding shells in 1943’. The Fall of Icarus was made in June 1943, nearly four years into the Second World War. Young men were regularly being shot out of the sky by shells, often wounded by machine guns… Is this the reason for the blood? Do the shells explain the sharpness and angularity of what we have read as stars? There is no reason to doubt it.

But – again, as ever – there probably is another layer. In January 1941 Matisse had been operated on for bowel cancer, and this was followed by a blood clot blocking his lungs. Is the image, perhaps, also a form of self portrait? The origin of the spurting blood – from the abdomen – might confirm this idea. Without wanting to belittle the possibility of its relationship to the war (and remember, I would always go for ‘and’ rather than ‘or’), a young airman falling tragically to his death does not have the same cause, or implications, as Icarus’ fate, the result of overweening self-confidence. Was Matisse worried that he himself was heading for a fall? Was he worried he might fail? One of the themes of Jazz is the circus, and one of the interpretations of Icarus – a version of which is included in the book – is that he is like a trapeze artist risking a fall, the stars being like spotlights in the big top… Matisse believed that, as an artist, you have to risk everything – like a trapeze artist defying gravity. And sometimes there isn’t a safety net. When they were first produced, the cut-outs were treated with scepticism, if not outright dismissal – but Matisse needn’t have worried. It was the audience that faltered, not him. Now they are seen as one of the triumphs in a remarkable career. Rather than falling, they are more like flying – which is exactly how he described the sensation of the scissors slicing through the painted paper.

277 – How do you know that?

Francisco de Zurbarán, A Cup of Water and a Rose, about 1630. The National Gallery, London.

Zurbarán at the National Gallery has been open for some time, but I’m only just getting round to talking about it this Monday, 15 June at 6pm. There are various reasons for that, not least of which was preparing for what turned out to be a rather enjoyable visit to Strasbourg and Colmar with Artemisia – so enjoyable, in fact, that we are planning to repeat it next year in April (keep your eyes peeled for more information). Zurbarán is a fantastic show, with beautiful, striking, and occasionally surprising paintings – really one of those ‘not to be missed’ experiences. The following week (22 June) I will talk about the monumental exhibition Matisse: 1941-1954, currently at the Grand Palais in Paris. It charts the extraordinary productivity of the modern master’s final years. Far rather than going gently into that dark night – to misquote Dylan Thomas – Matisse created some of the most joyous, colourful and vibrant works of his long career, and, as well as other masterpieces, the exhibition includes many of the major cut-outs, from Jazz to The Snail, and even some examples of his stained glass.

The day after I talk about Zurbarán, Friends of the British Museum will be able to book tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and tickets for others will go on sale on 1 July. On either side of the second of these dates my talks will also be looking forward to this momentous exhibition. On 29 June I will deliver a talk inspired by two exhibitions on the Wirral, at my two nearest museums. I’ve called it May Morris, the Reading Bayeux, and the Post-Pre-Raphaelites – but if you want to know how those things fit together you’ll have to click on the link! The week after (6 July), my second ‘Pre-Bayeux’ talk will be David Hockney: A Year in Normandie…, during which I will look back, in bullet-points, at his whole career from the perspective of the Bayeux-inspired frieze of the same name which is currently on show at Serpentine North in Hyde Park. Details are all in the diary, of course. And, in case you were wondering, I will be talking about the Tapestry itself, but probably not until October.

If you do book for any of these talks, Tixoom will send a confirmation, with a link, straight away. It should arrive within minutes, but if it hasn’t reached you by the next day – and if it’s not in your spam folder – then let me know: it would be easier to deal with it then than five minutes before the talk. Tixoom will then send you reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and both will include the link to join the talk. Of course, these might be delayed according to the efficiency of your own internet provider… but they will be on their way!

One of the questions I was asked most often over two decades of delivering guided tours to the general public at the National Gallery was ‘how do you know that?’ Admittedly there are times when I have to stop and ask myself the same question. There are ideas floating around in my head and I’m not always sure where they come from. Today’s painting is a good case in point, but one for which I can definitely answer the question. Although its title is entirely accurate – describing the painting as A Cup of Water and a Rose – it does not, as it might do, say that it is a Still Life – which it most certainly is. The title also doesn’t list every element of the composition: the silver plate, for example, or for that matter, the table, or shelf, on which the plate is resting. I suppose you could also mention the dark background. A ‘full’ title could be Still Life with a Cup of Water and a Rose on a silver plate on a shelf against a dark background. You can see why they only mention the two most important features. As I’ve said before, titles – for paintings prior to the 19th century at least – are most likely to be simple descriptions of what you can see – or at least, the most important elements of the composition, as is the case here. But maybe there is more to this painting than meets the eye.

I’m using a couple of different digital files: this is a detail from the National Gallery’s website, the last photograph was my own. The cup of water is remarkably simple. Wonderfully thin, it flares from the circular base to its rim. Two slightly uneven handles are attached opposite one another, and two parallel grooves circle the top. Light comes from the left, so that the handle on the left casts a shadow between its two points of attachment. The transition from light to dark, which models the cup in three dimensions, falls vertically more or less half way across the cup.

The rose’s outer petals, near the stem, are a pale pink, but deepen to a richer, deeper shade as they are more shadowed. We can see the reflection of the flower in the rim of the plate, and the sepals – the dark green, petal-like forms which originally formed the outside of the bud – appear at the bottom left of the blossom, curled out around the stem. Even at this resolution you should be able to see that the stem has no thorns – which tells us that this is a symbol of the Virgin Mary. ‘How do you know that?’, you may well ask. Well, I’m writing this post to answer that question.

For one thing, there are plenty of written sources that refer to Mary as rosa senza spina – ‘a rose without thorns’ – most notably St Ambrose, back in the 4th century. It refers to the fact that she was without sin. In Genesis 3:17-18 (yes, I know, I’ve quoted this before recently – see 275 – Then Mary gathered cherries), God rebukes Adam after the Fall, and tells him,

…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field

Mary is like the rose, but without the thorns: beautiful, perfect, and with nothing bad. However, if this were the only painting in which this appeared, we might still be dubious that we had the right meaning. So often the conclusions we draw are based on context. If more than one artist paints the same thing, then there must be a reason – although admittedly sometimes it is a purely visual, aesthetic inspiration, using the form without its original function. As it happens, there are many thornless roses in western art. Wandering through the National Gallery a few weeks ago, I saw a painting that was unfamiliar to me, but only because it has only recently been loaned from a private collection. It is an Immaculate Conception by Alonso Cano, who studied with Francisco Pacheco in Seville alongside Diego Velázquez – so is more or less contemporary with Francisco de Zurbarán.

It was Cano’s master, Pacheco, who fully realised what became the standard iconography for the Immaculate Conception, frequently repeated in Spain in the 17th century. The image draws on the first verse of chapter 12 in the Book of Revelation:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars

This verse had been interpreted as referring to Mary for centuries, and as early as the 15th century it had been used for some of the earliest images of the Virgin in her role as ‘the Immaculate’. However, it was Pacheco who formalised the swaying, full-length image, her hands held in prayer, that was so popular in Spain, and it was this model that Cano has followed. He has painted a crescent moon beneath the Virgin’s feet, and a golden glow to clothe her with the sun. The twelve stars (I can only see 10 here, but there is an 11th near her left shoulder, and the 12th must be behind her neck) appear at the edge of the dark circle of sky inside what could be interpreted as a halo of cherubic heads. Two other angels, with the bodies of children, appear on either side of her feet. The one to our left holds a white lily, which we all know refers to her purity and innocence, simply because it appears in so many paintings. The other angel holds a rose, the flowers the same colour as her dress (which connects it to her), and its stem without a thorn. The rosa senza spina occurs in enough paintings of the Virgin Mary that even without St Ambrose, we would know it referred to her. I’m not sure that we would also be able to work out that it refers specifically to her being in a state of grace (i.e. without sin) – although reference to Genesis 3:17-18 might be enough to get us that far too. So that’s how I know that the rose in Zurbarán’s Still Life refers to the Virgin Mary. And, as it does, maybe we should think about the other elements of the painting too. Let’s look back at the cup.

It is white: is that also a reference to Mary, and to her purity and innocence? Well, why not? After all, various bible texts are interpreted such that Jesus is referred to as ‘the water of life’. For example, in John 4:14, Jesus says ‘whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life’. So – this could represent the water of life contained within a pure white vessel, the Virgin Mary: during her pregnancy, she was, after all, a vessel ‘containing’ Jesus. In the Roman Catholic Litany of Loreto, Mary is invoked as Vas Honorabile, or ‘Vessel of Honour’. As it happens, the Litany also calls her Speculum Justitiae – ‘Mirror of Justice’, and elsewhere she is called speculum sine macula, ‘mirror without a stain’, a concept which derives from the Book of Wisdom 7:26, which was, inevitably, interpreted as a form of prophesy, foretelling Mary’s existence:

For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.

Maybe the reflection in the water – the result of the water’s mirror-like surface, refers to this too. And if the water doesn’t, perhaps the plate does.

To be honest, I think you would be pushing it to claim that this plate is an ‘unspotted mirror’. The reflections are superbly painted, but they are more naturalistic than crystal clear. The sheen of the light on the back right rim contrasts strongly with darker side of the cup, adding to the sense of depth – and am I right in thinking that the glints of light under the cup to both left and right imply that there are drops of water there too? It is the most wondrous passage of painting. Even if it isn’t a ‘spotless mirror’, this plate does look remarkably like the sort of plate, or paten, used for the host (the wafers which are used as the bread during Mass). According to Catholic belief, during Mass the bread becomes the actual body of Christ, and as he is the water of life, and the water is on this plate, it might as well be a paten.

But I want to go back to the context of this painting. However, rather than thinking about it in relationship to other artists, I want to consider its context within Zurbarán’s own oeuvre. Here are two examples of him using the same detail.

On the left is a slightly edited version of the National Gallery’s painting. On the right is a detail from another painting in the exhibition, The Family of the Virgin (about 1630), from the Abelló Collection. The details are not precisely the same, and curiously, on the right, the rose is cut off by the frame. It is possible that the painting has been cut down, although that is not mentioned in the catalogue of the exhibition. This is the rest of the painting, as seen recently in the National Gallery’s exhibition:

Mary sits in prayer between her parents Joachim and Anna. The plate, with the cup and rose, are sitting on a table at the left hand side. The presence of this motif in a painting which is about Mary confirms that Zurbarán associated it specifically with her. The same is true of another painting, which unfortunately is not in the exhibition.

The Miraculous Healing of the Blessed Reginald of Orléans (1626), from the Church of Santa María Magdalena in Seville, appears to be Zurbarán’s first use of this motif. Although not next to the Virgin, the plate, cup and rose are on a table in the foreground next to the Blessed Reginald’s bed (it could even be the same table). On the other side of him is Mary, leaning over him, tending to her patient. Once again, its appearance is associated with the Virgin – and could be interpreted to imply that Mary’s presence surrounds the sick man, as she is on one side of him, while the symbol referring to her is on the other.

The National Gallery’s Still Life is a quiet meditation on the nature of the Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception. How do I know that? Because literary sources, going back as far as St Ambrose in the 4th century refer to her as ‘a rose without thorns’, a reference which is regularly illustrated in western European paintings. Her identification as the ‘Vessel of Honour’ and ‘Mirror of Justice’ are included in the Catholic liturgy. The concept of ‘the spotless mirror of the power of God’ comes from the Jewish scriptures – the Old Testament. As a composition it is clear, calm and beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and spiritually profound. Zurbarán included it in a least two of his paintings which concern the Virgin, either as a child, or as the Mother of God, which suggests that the motif as a whole was, for him at least, a metaphor for her qualities. However, it occurs in yet another painting which is in the exhibition but which, at first glance, appears to have no connection to the Catholic church.

In the detail on the right the rose appears larger, and at a slightly different angle to the first version I showed you (on the left), while both the cup and its reflection in the plate are crisper. Nevertheless, the concept is the same: it is the same motif. However, even if the concept is the same, the context is not. This is the painting as a whole:

Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633, The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena) is considered to be Zurbarán’s greatest Still Life. However, apart from the repetition of the Marian motif, it doesn’t appear to have any other connection to Christian symbolism. Is this a case of ‘form without function’, or are we missing something? Is there a text which refers to lemons or oranges? Can we put them into the context of 17th century Spanish painting? Does the basket appear anywhere else? Well, there certainly are plenty of baskets – and we will see them on Monday. There will also be some equally fabulous lemons… which might help us to understand what we are looking at here.

276 – Looking beyond

Matthias Grünewald, The Resurrection from The Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512-16. Musée Unterlinden, Colmar.

This Monday, 1 June, at 6pm, I will give a talk about Mathis Gothart Nithart, who is better known to us as Matthias Grünewald. This isn’t related to an exhibition – more’s the pity – but to my visit to Colmar with Artemisia in a week or so. The main reason to go is to see Grünewald’s masterwork, the Isenheim Altarpiece, one panel of which I am thinking about today. General consensus among the experts is that only ten of his paintings have survived the onslaught of history – although some, and most notably the Isenheim, are made up of several panels. There are also around 30 drawings, many of which are now in Berlin: on Monday we will take a close look at them, together with the surviving paintings.

The following Monday I will be on my way home from Strasbourg (and so, indirectly, Colmar), and the next talk will have to wait until Monday, 15 June. This will explore the National Gallery’s Zurbarán – a bold and beautiful introduction to the work of the Spanish master, perfectly curated and masterfully hung. That will be followed on 22 June by a visit to the monumental Matisse at the Grand Palais in Paris. After that I will make my first reference to the Bayeux Tapestry this year, in what could turn out to be just one of two ‘Pre-Bayeux’ talks (more about the ‘tapestry’ itself will follow in the autumn) – but it will also look at two different exhibitions in two different museums on the Wirral. Provisionally entitled May Morris, the Reading Bayeux, and the Post-Pre-Raphaelites, it will be more coherent than that title might suggest. I will post more information about it in the diary very soon, though.

I’ve written about the Resurrection more than once – for example, recently I reposted Happy Easter and previously there was also Bringing the Resurrection back to Life – but I think this is the most remarkably painting of the subject that I know. Admittedly I am not as familiar with German art as I am with Italian, but I can’t think of anything else like it in terms of its power, energy, and wealth of colour, or in the way that it depicts the supernatural in a style that is itself appropriately supernatural. ‘The third day he rose from the dead’ it says in the Apostle’s Creed, but in this painting it is quite clearly night, with the black sky glistening with stars. Jesus has risen some distance above the tomb, glowing with a golden light which fades through orange to pink, and is finally ringed with blue. The shroud trails behind and beneath him, one end still resting on the edge of the tomb. Draped around his shoulders, it takes on most of the colours of the spectrum – red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo and violet: only green is missing. Soldiers lie in paroxysms both behind and in front of the tomb, and an enormous rock looms over the landscape. 

The soldiers guarding the tomb are mentioned in the bible. Matthew 27: 59-66 talks about Joseph of Arimathea taking Jesus’ dead body, and laying it in his own tomb:

59 And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
60 And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.
61 And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre.
62 Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate,
63 Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again.
64 Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first.
65 Pilate said unto them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can.
66 So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch.

So, the watch has been set. Clearly Grünewald has not painted exactly what the text describes, as there is no ‘rock hewn tomb’ with a stone rolled across the door. The tomb is clearly a standard sarcophagus, a rectangular ‘box’ of stone, with another slab as a lid. This was entirely traditional in Western European art, though, and almost everyone depicted it like this. The way in which the lid has been pushed off implies that the Resurrection was in some way ‘explosive’ – as does the energy with which the risen body is projected into the air. The burial took place on Good Friday – the first day – and on the third day (actually less than two days later, as it was Sunday morning) the Resurrection is celebrated. Matthew is quite specific about it. The first verse of Chapter 28 says,

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

So it is very early in the morning on Easter Sunday, Sunday being ‘the first day of the week’. It is only just beginning to dawn – hence the black night sky, looking darker against the brilliance of the resurrected Christ. The following 3 verses help to explain what is happening to the Soldiers:

2 And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.
3 His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
4 And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.

Again, the mention of an ‘earthquake’ implies an almost explosive Resurrection. There is no angel here, admittedly, but the remarkable colours of the image might have some origin in the description of the angel’s face as being ‘like lightning’. Nevertheless, we see the ‘keepers’ shaking, and becoming ‘as dead men’. It may be that the angel has yet to sit upon the tomb, even though he has already lifted the lid away.

One of the soldiers appears to be thrown towards us, while another is contorted, his left arm held above his head the right still holding his sword, which rests on his right knee, straightened as his leg kicks away from the ground. Thrown sideways, his helmet has twisted around, the eye-slits in the visor now looking upwards, as the face itself looks away. The shroud, resting on the edge of the sepulchre, is almost white here, a bluish white admittedly. This is the ‘clean linen cloth’ mentioned above in Matthew 27:59, but its appearance, reaching up out of the tomb, could be a reference to the Gospel of John. In the following passage it is usually assumed that ‘the other disciple’ is John himself. Chapter 20, verses 4-8, describes Peter and the ‘other disciple’ heading to the tomb, after Mary Magdalene had told them about the Resurrection:

4 So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.
5 And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.
6 Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,
7 And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

Is Grünewald showing us the ‘linen clothes’ about to fall back into the tomb? I think that is entirely possible.

There are more soldiers further away. One, in full 16th century armour, falls towards us – which, to my mind, is entirely counter-intuitive. For some reason I would expect him to fall away from the tomb, but, if there was an earthquake, the tremors could make people fall in any direction… In any case, the ‘intuitive’, what you would expect to happen, could itself be seen as being counter-intuitive, given the supernatural nature of the event. The sarcophagus is thickly carved from red stone. If this were in Italy, I would say it was Rosso di Verona – a red, fossiliferous limestone from the eponymous Italian city. Whatever it is, it has either been put together from small, angular sections, or has cracked with the blast. Another soldier, in red, with a chain mail hood, further away and apparently higher up than his armoured companion, crawls from left to right. The nearer of the two appears to have been of especial interest to one of Grünewald’s contemporaries – quite possibly a member of his studio. A contemporary drawing, now dated ‘c. 1515’, is held in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, not so terribly far away from Isenheim (well, globally speaking – it’s about 180km).

The artist is known, quite simply, as ‘the Grünewald copyist’, and he executed at least one other drawing of the Isenheim Altarpiece, also in Karlsruhe, which sheds interesting light on Grünewald’s working practice: we will see it on Monday.

I find the appearance of Christ truly astonishing. With his hands spread wide and raised, displaying the wounds from the crucifixion, and the feet separated, the wounds again visible, it is almost as if he has been sprung free from the Cross as much as from the bonds of death. His legs trail behind him slightly as he leans forward, floating effortlessly, with one end of the shroud spread out to our right, while the length hanging from his shoulders falls in a V-shape in front of him, framing his torso and revealing the wound in his chest. The hallucinogenic colours with which it is illuminated may well be relevant for the painting’s intended audience – but again, more about that on Monday.

The feet, suspended in mid-air in front of a blue-violet section of the shroud, are framed by the enormous rock which almost appears, itself, to be levitating. The soldier in red crawls away beneath it. The implication is that the Garden of Gethsemane was a rocky one, and it was from one of these rocks that Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb had been carved. There could even be the implication that this is the massive stone which the angel has moved, but I am also reminded of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 2:19-20, where he points out that we should think beyond nationality:

19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God;
20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone

Does the rock behind Christ’s feet represent the ‘corner stone’? I don’t know – but if I can see the connection now, so surely could the artist – or whoever was advising him. I’m also reminded of building houses on rock, in Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish builders (Matthew 7:24-27). After all, rocks are very stable – although maybe not in an earthquake. Peter, too, means ‘rock’, as Jesus himself acknowledged, saying ‘and upon this rock will I build my church’ (Matthew 16:18). With the Resurrection we are very firmly at the foundations of the Church.

The feet themselves are extraordinary. The wounds from the nails are a deep red, but glow with holy light, radiating in all directions. They are not unlike mouths. For medieval mystics, the ‘Five Wounds’ were often the subject of intense devotion, and more than once they were referred to as mouths which witness God’s love for his creation.

The wounds in Christ’s hands and side also glow, while the brilliance of his face almost dissolves it into the surrounding luminescence. In this painting Jesus really is the Light of the World. It was painted for the chapel of a hospital in Isenheim – and for the patients the image of the Resurrected Christ would surely have been inspirational. Apart from the five wounds, his body is perfect: without a stain, without a blemish and without a mark of the other tortures to which he was subjected. The contrast between his appearance here, and the abject torment of the Crucifixion, one of the most extreme ever painted, couldn’t be more marked: it’s not something I’ve ever heard mentioned, though. The patients themselves were undergoing a different abject torment – and for most of them there would only have been hope in the life to come. The compassion with which Grünewald treats his audience does not hold back from extremes – but, as this painting shows, he doesn’t hold back in the depiction of the power of redemption either. Overall, I am coming to believe that, at its simplest, the altarpiece as a whole expresses the problem, explains its solution, and tell us who to thank for that outcome – but I’ll explain what I mean more fully on Monday.

Another visit to Whistler’s Mother

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

I’m re-posting an essay from 2022 to celebrate the opening – today – of the exhibition James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain. I’ll be talking about it this coming Monday, 25 May at 6pm… so I’d better get to work! I originally wrote this as an introduction to the Royal Academy’s exhibition Whistler’s Woman in White, which explored the artist’s personal and professional relationship with Joanna Hiffernan, arguably his most important model. Today’s painting was not in that exhibition – but it does feature prominently in Tate’s new show, a rare opportunity to see it away from its home in Paris. Its official title, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 may not ring any bells, but if I were to call it Whistler’s Mother I’m sure the reaction would be different. The title implies that there is also an Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2 – and, of course, there is: there’s an illustration of it below, but I have also written about it in 205 – Coming to an arrangement.

The following week, 1 June, I will give a talk unconnected to an exhibition – though following up from my introduction to the work of Martin Schongauer. I’ll be talking about Matthias Grünewald, and looking closely at his masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, which, like the majority of Schongauer’s paintings, is held at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. After I’ve returned from seeing the altarpiece in person (with Artemisia), on 15 June I will talk about the National Gallery’s Zurbarán – a bold and beautiful introduction to the work of the Spanish master, perfectly curated and masterfully hung. That will be followed on 22 June by a visit to the monumental Matisse at the Grand Palais in Paris, but I will post more information about that in the diary very soon.

This is one of those paintings that seems to have entered the public imagination as ‘famous’ and therefore even ‘important’. It has even been given that most dubious of labels, ‘iconic’. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few years trying to work out what, exactly, gives a painting this status – there are relatively few which could be said to have some sort of ‘celebrity’ in the world of art. The Mona Lisa is the best example, I suppose, followed by Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. But there are others, like Klimt’s The Kiss, Munch’s The Scream or Grant Wood’s American Gothic which are so readily identifiable that they accrue their own type of fame, or infamy, or even notoriety, and which leads to them being quoted, re-purposed and even parodied. Whistler’s Mother is no exception. Among other appearances, it is a key element in that unmissable classic Bean – starring Rowan Atkinson as the eponymous ‘Mr’, who, in this case, works as a security guard at the National Gallery. OK, so the painting is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, but that’s a minor detail: we are talking about a work of fiction. And yes, I’m wrong, it is miss-able, but when I saw it with a group of National Gallery educators it was very funny. But putting that aside, why is this painting, or any painting, for that matter, iconic?

Simplicity is of the essence, I think. You need to be able to take it all in, so that, even at a second glance, you recognise it. Before you’ve finished looking at it the first time, it is already familiar. I suspect that strong, 2-dimensional design plays an important part – and Whistler’s painting has that in spades. I know that the Mona Lisa has a distant, atmospheric landscape, and The Scream has a bridge in exaggerated perspective, but what you notice first in each is the single figure facing resolutely towards you. In this case, Mother sits in profile, looking to our left, with her feet up on a low rest. This makes her lap almost horizontal, a feature which I think is also relevant: it ties her into the rectilinear composition of the painting as a whole. She is parallel to the picture plane, which is in itself slightly unnatural, as we rarely choose to arrange ourselves in line with the walls of a room. It implies stasis, and deliberate choice: she is somewhat abstracted from reality.

Two images hang on the cool grey wall. A monochrome picture – a print, perhaps, with a white mount and a black frame – hangs in a landscape format in the space between Mother’s head and the dark grey curtain on the far left. There is another, similar frame and mount at the top right corner, although there is barely anything of it, little more than a sliver, which gives it a compositional power far stronger than the small percentage of the pictorial space it occupies would suggest. There is no way of knowing whether this picture is in landscape or portrait format, but what we see implies the latter. As such, the two images echo the composition of the human figure, the picture on the right paralleling the stiff back, while that on the left is equivalent to the sitter’s lap. The strong, black horizontal of the wainscoting also emphasizes, and gives weight to, the horizontal placement of the thighs. These parallels are enhanced explicitly through the colouration – or rather, the lack thereof. The black of the frames and the white of the mounts are the same as those of Mother’s dress and of the headdress, collar, cuffs and handkerchief, the last of which she holds placidly on her lap. The silver grey of her hair is linked to the grey-scale of the engraving. The curtain also echoes this tonal range, although not going to the extremes of deep black or high white. It is Japanese, or in Japanese style: the influence of Asian visual arts on Western European painting was profound in the second half of the 19th Century.

All of these details emphasize the two-dimensional nature of the painting, and of its design. Looking forward to the 20th century, we might be reminded of Mondrian’s contemplative abstractions. But then, looking back, Vermeer inevitably springs to mind, with his careful placement of human actors against backgrounds defined by the rectilinear forms of paintings, picture frames, mirrors and other furniture. The only hint that we are seeing a three-dimensional space – apart from our inherent understanding of the structure of the human body – is the rug on which both chair and footstool are placed, with its woven border leading from the bottom left corner of the painting ever-so-slightly to the right, and some other, parallel lines in the rug which lead towards the footstall. But there is nothing that really grabs our eyes, and drags them into the distance – there is no real distance after all. There is nothing we could call a repoussoir, pushing our gaze back into the space. It is all statement, on the surface, and instantly recognisable. It is this, I think, which makes the painting ‘iconic’ – like an orthodox icon, flat, abstracted from reality, to make it more ‘ideal’. And yet, it is just a little bit approachable, as the skirt hangs down in front of the rug, just possibly reaching into our space – almost as if Mother’s self-contained composure is, in some way, accessible, if we could only just touch the hem of her skirt…

She seems to be intently focussed, with slightly pursed lips, her head slightly lowered, perhaps due to old age. Anna McNeill Whistler was 67 when this was painted. Not so terribly old, you might be thinking, but things were different then. She was enormously proud of her son’s success, although also despairing of his failings – including his dubious morals. At one point, after Whistler had received a legacy from an aunt, Anna wrote to Jemie, as she called him, suggesting that he use the £100 ‘to bestow on your model’. Why should he do that? The letter continued, ‘…you promised me to promote a return to virtue in her. I never forget to pray for her.’ The fact that Joanna Hiffernan was a model was not a problem, but, as models effectively sell their bodies, it was only a small step away from prostitution. And, to put it bluntly, Hiffernan was sleeping with the artist, whereas Mother clearly wanted him to settle down with a respectable woman. His response? He gave Hiffernan power of attorney over his affairs while he was away for seven months, and signed a will bequeathing his entire estate to her. Not exactly filial obedience.

It is not known for certain how the painting came about, although the most common version of the story is that Whistler’s model for the day (not Hiffernan) couldn’t turn up, so he asked his mother to stand in for her. However, standing in – or at least, standing – turned out to be a problem. Anna was getting on a bit, and not able to stand for long periods – hence the fact that she is sitting. I can believe the first part of the story, but not the second. Or rather, if the first part is true, he would instantly have decided to turn the canvas on its side. Everything about this painted is geared towards a seated figure, after all. Alternatively, the fact that he used his mother as a model could be related to a sense of filial duty, or it could also reflect the fact that money was scarce at the time. Three years earlier Anna had complained to a correspondent, ‘he must pay models for them every day a shilling the hour & they must be well fed!’ Presumably mother did not need to be paid.

I’m intrigued how one should categorise this painting. Although it is commonly called Whistler’s Mother, is it really a portrait? I had the same qualms about some of the paintings in the Royal Academy exhibition in 2022: I don’t think they are portraits of Hiffernan. She was a model in paintings which express abstract, aesthetic qualities: they are not explicitly ‘about’ her. After all, Whistler called today’s work Arrangement in Grey and Black – again, it is the abstract values that concern him, and if it hadn’t been his mother, it could have been a different model, perhaps. However, the same is not true of Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2, which is subtitled Portrait of Thomas Carlisle.

The title claims it is a portrait, and there is a greater sense, I think, that Carlisle’s appearance and character are important here. Having said that, when today’s painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition it was given the subtitle Portrait of the Painter’s Mother – probably because, even in 1872, the Academy was not ready for the developments of the Aesthetic Movement, with which Jemie was becoming firmly aligned. ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ would be the best short explanation of this term, but more about that on Monday. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 which show that identity is important.

Take this detail for example – the top right hand corner of the curtain, and the framed engraving. The circle on the drape contains a highly stylised butterfly formed from the letters J and W – for James Whistler. This is his signature (a clearer version can be found in No. 2 above) and it is placed close to the print. The forms of this image are so specific that you would think it would be possible to identify the original – and indeed it is. It is a simplified version of his engraving Black Lion Wharf, dating from 1859. The example I am showing you here comes from the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Whistler is identified as the maker of today’s painting by his signature on the curtain, and by its proximity to the engraving of which he was also the author. So we see his signature and some of his art while we are looking at another example of his art – the painting itself – which includes his mother. This is almost as much a self portrait of as it is a portrait of his mother, as if he were saying, ‘This is where I came from, and this is where I am now.’ On her arrival in London, Anna was apparently surprised by her son’s ‘flamboyant bohemian lifestyle’. If her own lifestyle expounded the same rigidity with which she appears, metaphorically, in this painting (which, as it happens, it did), then that is not surprising. The modern interior décor was presumably not to her liking.

The painting has an interesting, if coincidental, link with The Red Boy [which I talked about the week before I originally posted this essay]. Lawrence’s portrait (and it is definitely a portrait – it was commissioned as such, with the nickname being coined a century later) has the curious distinction of being the first painting to appear on a British postage stamp. That was in 1967. Anna McNeill Whistler pipped young Charles William Lambton to the post, though – quite literally, in this case – as she appeared on an American stamp 33 years earlier, in 1934, ‘In memory and in honor’, as the inscription on the stamp itself says, ‘of the mothers of America.’  We will have the rare opportunity to see the painting itself in the UK this summer, and Anna’s role as ‘Mother’ will be very much to the fore. As we will see on Monday, she has taken her place between her two sons – one of Whistler’s self portraits, and his portrait of his brother.

275 – Then Mary gathered cherries

Workshop of Martin Schongauer, The Virgin and Child in a Garden, 1470s or early 1480s. The National Gallery, London.

Martin Schongauer, who I will be talking about this Monday, 18 May at 6pm, is most renowned for his engravings, of which many have survived. As one of a family of goldsmiths, working metal would have come naturally to him, and it was probably a result of this that engraving copper plates became his métier. However, he must also have trained as a painter, although only a few paintings by him survive. Most of them are currently in the Louvre, as part of the exhibition Martin Schongauer: The Beautiful Immortal, which is the subject of Monday’s talk. The exhibition itself turned out to be twice as large as I was expecting! The first half covers Schongauer himself – and I thought that was it. However, as I prepared to leave, I saw that Part 2 of the exhibition continued on the other side of the corridor, with more of his work illustrating the many ways in which he influenced his contemporaries, not to mention later generations of artists, well into the 17th century. I will focus on the first half of the exhibition, thus looking at the artist himself, and cherry-pick the best examples of his influence. And talking of cherries – well, we’ll get to them, but there is a cherry tree in the painting I will be writing about today. Sadly, the National Gallery doesn’t have an autograph work by this wonderful artist, so instead I would like to look at an entirely charming example from his workshop. As it happens, the NG does have a print by Schongauer, but it is embedded in somebody else’s painting: if you want to know how, then you’ll have to join me on Monday!

The following week, 25 May, I will be exploring Tate Britain’s exhibition James McNeill Whistler, which will only just have opened, and then on 1 June I will talk about Matthias Grünewald. Apologies if you clicked the link last week only to be taken to the Whistler page – my mistake – but I have double checked this time round, so all of the links should be the right ones. All of the information is on the diary anyway, and correct at the time of going to press, but of course last week was the only time I didn’t post a link!

Future talks will include an introduction to the National Gallery’s superb Zurbarán exhibition (it really is outstanding) on 15 June, and on 22 June I will talk about the monumental late Matisse show which I saw at the Grand Palais in my two busy days in Paris at the end of April – but more information on them soon… in the diary and future posts.

I got to know this painting some time back when planning a book on the evolution of art as seen through the depiction of plants – an idea which sadly never saw the light of day. Schongauer was very much at the forefront of naturalistic depiction in Germanic painting, and his observations of flora and fauna were second to none at the time – if you like the flowers in today’s painting, just wait for the birds we’ll seen on Monday! As the title suggests, this is The Virgin and Child in a Garden, but for those more familiar with Italian art, this might not immediately strike you as looking like the Virgin Mary: we are somewhat fixated on the idea that she wears blue. However, in Northern Europe, she is just as likely to wear a red cloak over a blue robe – the inverse of what is often seen in Italy. The blue may be an expensive pigment (though I confess I don’t know which are used in this painting), but it also symbolises her role as Queen of Heaven and Star of the Sea. The red, on the other hand, is a colour more traditionally related to royalty, and so emphasizes ‘Queen’, as opposed to the blue which implies ‘of Heaven’. The red is also related to the Incarnation, the Word made Flesh in her Son Jesus Christ – who sits sweetly, almost doll-like, on her lap. The sky is blue, the vegetation green, a path crosses in front of the holy couple and winds around their bench, and, barely visible, the landscape stretches off into the distance.

The frame in the first photograph is not original. The narrow wooden border at the top of this detail, with a lip, or bur, around the edge of the painted surface, tells us that it used to have an engaged frame, one that was attached to the wooden panel before it was painted. This wooden border has subsequently been disguised by being painted to look like the rest of the image. However, this hasn’t been done very well, or even consistently: if it had, we wouldn’t see the wood at the top. I’ll cut out this re-painted border in following details. Mary’s head bends to our left, while the cherry tree, with its branches growing from multiple stems, bends to our right – the Virgin and the natural world lean in toward each other, with the tree also functioning as a frame, and potentially, even, a shelter.  Of course, if you know The Cherry Tree Carol, which is, admittedly English, but like the painting dates to the 15th Century, then you will realise that the tree might be leaning towards Mary because Jesus asked it to. When out walking, Joseph and Mary passed a cherry tree… here are a few verses:

Then Mary spoke to Joseph,
So meek and so mild,
“Joseph, gather me some cherries
For I am with child….”

Then Joseph flew in anger —
In anger flew he,
“Let the father of the baby
Gather cherries for thee!”

Then Jesus spoke a few words,
A few words spoke he,
“Let my mother have some cherries;
Bow low down, cherry tree!

“Bow down, O cherry tree!
Bow low down to the ground!”
Then Mary gathered cherries
While Joseph stood around….

You might notice that Jesus can communicate with the tree while still in the womb – but then as the second member of the Holy Trinity, and therefore God, he had created the tree in the first place. Schongauer was certainly aware of a very similar story, and illustrates it in his engraving of The Flight into Egypt, which we will see it on Monday: it is one of the prints that can be seen to have influenced Dürer – among others. In addition to being the subject of the eponymous carol, the cherry can also be a symbol of the joy of Heaven – thanks to its bright, joyous colour – but also, of Christ’s passion – given that the juice is red like blood. The joy and the suffering are not entirely unrelated in this case.

Notice how the natural world – and the man-made – help to focus our attention on what is important. The green hills on the right slope down towards Mary’s shoulder, leading us towards her, and the blue, distant hill on the left slopes down to the fence (already, in the 1470s, Schongauer and his workshop were aware of aerial perspective). The fence, on the right, curves up to Mary’s shoulder, and continues on the other side, with the crown of Jesus’ head projecting just above it. The fence thus serves to frame mother and child, and to push them towards us. It is also there to show us that this is an enclosed garden… which is, of course, another symbol (I must have mentioned it before). The relevant biblical text is the Song of Solomon 4:12:

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

A garden is fertile, but this one is ‘inclosed‘, so no one can get in. The Hortus Conclusus, as it is known in Latin, was a common symbol of the virgin birth.

We can see some of the flowers growing in the garden. On the left is a plantain, just next to the fence, and closer to the holy couple, some pinks, or carnations. I would love to say that they were symbols of the incarnation, but linguistically I think this only works in English. However, in German they are called Nelke, which is the same as the word for clove – partly because they smell like cloves, apparently, and also because the top of the stem from which the flower blooms is nail-shaped. ‘Clove’ comes from the Latin clavus meaning ‘nail’ – cloves look like nails, after all – and Nelke is also related to the German word Nagel, meaning ‘nail’. This flower, pale and delicate as it is (just like the Baby Jesus) is, of course, a symbol of Christ’s suffering, relating to the nails used for the crucifixion. To the right is a white flower with four petals – which botanists would describe as ‘cruciform’: I’ll let you draw your own conclusions (but the white is also related to purity). It is probably the cuckoo flower, or lady’s smock (Cardamine pratensis – thanks, as ever, to the Ecologist for the identifications). Both names relate to the time of year when the flowers bloom: about the same time as cuckoos return, or for that matter, close to Lady Day – the English name for the Feast of the Annunciation. So, yes, the ‘lady’, in ‘lady’s smock’ is Our Lady – the Virgin Mary. To the right of these are some red campion (Silene dioica) – although I’m not convinced by any of the explanations I’ve read about their symbolism.

If we look further down the painting we see that Mary is seated on a raised garden bed, with the flowers growing on either side of her. This manages to combine the idea of the Madonna Enthroned, as she is seated, and upright, with the Madonna of Humility, as she is seated on the earth (or humus  – which gives us the word humility, ‘down to earth’). Dürer – who was so interested in Schongauer’s work that he travelled some 400km overland from Nuremberg to Colmar to learn from the great master (only to arrive some time after his death) used this idea more than once – see, for example, 143 – A New Dürer. Poking their heads above the bottom of the detail are some lily-of-the-valley and an iris.

We can see them more clearly at the bottom of the painting. The lily-of-the-valley (Convalaria majalis), with its white, drooping, bell-like flowers would be seen as a symbol of Mary’s purity, modesty and humility, while the iris was very firmly associated with her suffering. When the Christ Child was presented at the Temple, the High Priest Simeon ended his song of praise with the warning to Mary, ‘Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also’ (Luke 2:35). Her suffering would be the result of seeing her own son crucified. The iris, in German, was called the Schwertlilie, or ‘sword lily’ – a name it also had in English, apparently – and so the connection should be clear. Its blue colour is often shown as close to the colour of Mary’s robes (it is not far off here), in the same way that her cloak, in this painting, is similar to the colour of the cherries.

In the bottom left corner there are some strawberries. Not only does each leaf have three sections – and anything that comes in threes is a symbol of the Holy Trinity – but it is also seen as a ‘prelapsarian’ fruit, which simply means that it has survived intact from before the Fall. When Adam and Eve do the one thing they were told not to, and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God tells them, in Genesis 3:17-18, that,

…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.

However, the strawberry doesn’t have thorns or thistles, or even a stone: it is one of the fruits of paradise.

I find this detail particularly touching. Mary has plucked one of the pinks, and holds it between her thumb and her slim, elegant fingers, showing it to her infant son. Rather than reaching out for it, his hand is held back to his chest, his elbow strongly flexed. There is a sense in his wide-open eyes and slightly drawn back head that he knows what it means. This is a human baby, wary of novelty, and of the unknown, but it is also the Son of God, who knows that one day a nail will be driven through what is now a soft and tiny hand. Stylistically the painting is deemed not to be by the master himself – but the conception of it must surely be his. As we will see on Monday, Schongauer’s art and ideas were arguably more influential than those of any other artist – and not simply because his engravings were so widely distributed. His ability to catch nuance was superb, and the precision of his story telling profound.

Michelangelo, and the still-lost Love

Alessandro Algardi, Sleep, 1635-6. Museo Borghese, Rome.

Yes, you’re right, this is not a sculpture by Michelangelo. Nor is it, for that matter, ‘Love’. You might have realised that already from the photograph – or for that matter, simply by reading the caption. But I do love this work – and after Bernini’s flashy showpieces on the ground floor of the Museo Borghese I love the calm of this glowing gem which you can find upstairs: Algardi may have been outranked, but he was never outclassed. As I can’t show you Michelangelo’s lost ‘Love’ (for the simple reason that it’s lost), I’m showing you the Algardi instead. I first posted this piece when I was attempting to talk about Michelangelo’s entire career (over several weeks), but now it feeds in perfectly to the Louvre’s current exhibition, Michelangelo & Rodin – which I will talk about this Monday, 11 May – as includes a late Renaissance sculpture as a stand-in for Michelangelo’s Cupid, as well as a classical Sleeping Cupid from Rodin’s personal collection: I’ve added a section at the end of the post to illustrate them.

The following week’s talk, on 18 May, will be about another Louvre exhibition, Martin Schongauer – The Beautiful Immortal. It’s a fantastic exhibition and Schongauer was such an important artist: the second half of the display is dedicated to an exploration of the different ways in which his engravings were used for paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, tapestries and more – and in the talk I will explore this aspect of his work as well as looking at the work itself. On 25 May I will introduce the Tate Britain exhibition James McNeill Whistler – which promises to be one of London’s most successful this year – and then on 1 June I will return to Colmar (where Schongauer was born) to have a close look at The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald – together with his other surviving paintings: there are only ten altogether, although I think the Isenheim could easily be counted as nine paintings in one. Meanwhile, back to Michelangelo, albeit Michelangelo via Algardi.

This is, in a way, one of my secret pleasures, something I always look forward to seeing, especially as it is something I see relatively rarely. The Museo Borghese in Rome is a hugely frustrating place: you have to book in advance and even then you only get a two hour slot. At one point you had to check in to the ground floor, check out again, and then check into the first floor, but I think they gave up on that complication fairly early on. When I take groups I find I can spend all two hours on the ground floor looking at the Canova, the Berninis and the Caravaggios: five sculptures and five paintings are more than enough for one visit. But if I can get upstairs (where most of the paintings are) then I will make sure I catch at least a glimpse of this sleeping marvel. However, I will rarely say anything about it, short of ‘look at that – isn’t that wonderful’, which, despite my usual verbosity, should be all that anything really needs. What do I like about it? The depth of the colour, the perfection of the forms, their apparent softness (yes, it is hard stone) and the roundness of most elements, which adds to the sense of repose created by the total relaxation of this child, helplessly abandoned to a deep sleep.

The figure is lying on a sloping ground. The latter is differentiated from the rest of the stone by its rough, unpolished surface, created by small, regular chisel marks which make the black stone look grey. Spread over the ground is a cloth, which, like the infant, is highly polished, the sharper, more angular folds of the fabric contrasting with the rounder forms of the body. The child’s left knee is raised, the sole of the foot resting flat on the ground, with the right foot stretched further out. The left arm, slightly bent, lies alongside, resting on some rounded forms, while the right arm is wrapped around the head – you can just see the right hand resting on top of the hair at the far right. The shoulders are turned slightly towards us, and the chubby face lolls, allowing us to see it from this angle – which is presumably why almost every photograph I can find of the sculpture is taken from this side. As ever, with sculpture, this is so frustrating: it is a three-dimensional art form, this is only a partial view! The eyes are closed, and the mouth downturned – looking a little grumpy, perhaps, but really showing the release of sleep. There is also a creature with a long bushy tail curled up on the rough ground (rather than on the cloth), presumably also fast asleep.

This is not a great photograph, I know, but it is one of very few that does not show the ‘predominant viewpoint’ included above. It’s surprising there are not more, as this side reveals some new information, and helps us to understand what is going on. This is a boy, for one thing, and he has wings, although they look more like butterfly wings than the usual feathered forms you expect to see on amoretti and angels alike. The subtle twist through the body is more evident from this point of view, with the shoulders turned a little to our right, the knees to our left, a movement that is indeed a common feature of works by Michelangelo. However, there is none of the tension inherent in his output, and the cloth lying on the ground is more fulsome, maybe even more generous – look at the rich, unnecessary folds going down the right side in this photograph. It has all the sensuality of the Baroque – which it is, of course, being by Algardi –  and a dramatic naturalism (at least, I think that if sleep can be dramatic, this is how it would look), which is what separates it from the contrived etiolation of Mannerism.

Without a close up – again, this is the best that I can find – it is hard to see what the rounded forms under the winged boy’s hand are – but they also form a garland around his head. Even here I suspect it’s not obvious, unless you are an avid, and slightly imaginative, gardener. They are the seed pods of a poppy, the source of opium, and a symbol of Sleep. The butterfly wings, too, belong to this pint-sized personification, as, unlike Cupid’s flapping bird wings, which presumably would wake you up, these would flutter noiselessly as you drift away. The small creature we saw before is a dormouse (I would never have recognised it) – just think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and you’ll realise they have always symbolised sleep, because they really do sleep for up to seven months a year. The choice of a black material is, of course, not coincidental, as most sleep takes place at night.

The sculpture was carved in what is called Belgian black marble, although it is not, truly speaking, marble (a metamorphic rock, transformed by high temperature and huge pressure), but a very fine-grained carboniferous limestone – a sedimentary rock. The work was commissioned in 1635 by Marcantonio Borghese, nephew and heir of Cardinal Scipio Borghese who had built a phenomenal collection of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ art, and who had died just two years before. We don’t know why Marcantonio wanted a personification of Sleep, but it was an image derived from antique prototypes which were popular not only in classical times but also in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Here is another embodiment of a similar idea, and another of my ‘secret pleasures’.

Well, not so much a secret, as a treat I look forward to seeing on the way to talk about something else – usually, in this case, the portraits by Raphael or the ceiling paintings of Pietro da Cortona in the Galleria Palatina in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It is Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid, painted while he was in Malta in 1608. Photography doesn’t always cope well with Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, and here, if anything, the image is lighter than when the painting is seen in the flesh, when it appears more subtle and evocative, at the same time as allowing the boy greater dignity: the shadows function as a loin cloth, and grant him a deeper repose. He rests on a plank on the stone floor, bow and arrow by his side, his head resting on his quiver. The left wing lies on the ground, the right is just traced across the darkness of the background, both framing the figure and protecting it. Like Algardi’s Sleep, his left arm lies beside him, although the right does not curl round his head. Again there is a Michelangelesque twist through the body, although going the other way – the knees fall towards us, the shoulders are flatter to the floor. But there is still the utter calm of undisturbed slumber.

This is one of the classical prototypes, a Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi dating from the 2nd Century CE. The idea goes back (as so many Roman ideas do) to the Greeks, and there is a wonderful Greek bronze Sleeping Eros, which was restored by the Romans, in the Met in New York – click on that link if you’d like to see photos, and read a very detailed analysis. I’m showing you this one because it was once – like most things in the Uffizi – part of the Medici collection, and so could easily have been known to Michelangelo. More of that in a moment. Like Algardi’s Sleep, this little chap (he’s only 69 cm long) lies on a cloth on the ground holding poppy seed-heads. This is definitely cupid, though – look at the wings – although there is a butterfly (perhaps not the most naturalistic) lying next to the poppies. His legs are spread, and flat out, while his right arm falls over his chest onto the floor. His left arm curves round his head, and holds onto some sort of bag or cushion to make himself more comfortable.

The Ancient Greek for ‘butterfly’ is Ψυχή – or ‘Psyche’ – which also means ‘soul’, while poppies, as well as referring to sleep, can also imply death, the sleep from which we do not wake. Sad as it is, one of the reasons why this particular genre of sculpture was popular in classical times was its suitability as a marker for the graves of dead children. This was not the motivation behind Algardi’s Sleep, though. Instead it was, like many other of the ‘modern’ sculptures in the Borghese collection, made ‘in competition’ with the classical prototypes – an idea which had been essential for the development of the Renaissance a good two centuries before Algardi turned up in Rome from his native Bologna. Sometimes, though, the admiration and emulation which inspired great art could descend into forgery, with even the greatest falling foul to temptation.

Michelangelo was an apprentice in the workshop of painter Domenico Ghirlandaio from the age of 12, in 1487, until he was about 15. Then, from roughly 1490-92, he seems to have studied informally at the Medici sculpture garden. Nobody is really sure how it worked, or who taught him to carve, but what is certain is that the garden was home to some of the Medici collection of classical sculpture, potentially including the Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi (above), and another example, in bigio morato (a different type of black limestone), which might have been the ‘cupido nero’ which was a gift to Lorenzo the Magnificent from the King of Naples. After Lorenzo’s death in 1492, and just before the Medici were exiled in 1494, Michelangelo fled – the first of several times he did this – heading first to Venice and then back to Bologna, where he carved a number of figures on the Arca of St Dominic (see 159 – Michelangelo, holding a candle). On his return to Florence in the autumn of 1495 he worked for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was from a different branch of the family to the previous (unofficial) rulers. It was then that Michelangelo carved his own Sleeping Cupid in emulation of the antique. Vasari mentions it the first edition of his Lives in 1550, and in his biography, three years later, Condivi gives us more information, describing it as ‘a god of love, aged six or seven years old and asleep’. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco approved, and also suggested to Michelangelo that he if he sold it in Rome as an antique, he would get a better price than if it was marketed as his own work. Indeed, a dealer managed to sell it to Cardinal Raffaele Riario, one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV, for 200 ducats – although he told Michelangelo that he’d got 30, which is what a ‘modern’ sculpture might have fetched. However, Riario found out it was modern and sent for the young upstart who had deceived him. The Cardinal returned the Cupid to the dealer, but commissioned another work from Michelangelo – which he then also rejected. In later life Michelangelo claimed that Riario had never bothered to commission anything from him, covering his back, no doubt, for the double rejection.

So what happened to the Cupid? It went back on the market, and initially Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, showed an interest in it – until she found out that it was modern. At this point nobody really knew who Michelangelo was. It’s not clear what happened to it next, but somehow it ended up in Urbino, where it was seized by Cesare Borgia (son of the Pope) when he sacked the city. In 1502 he gave it to none other than Isabella d’Este, who, by this time, would probably have heard of the young sculptor who had carved a Bacchus and a Pietà in Rome. She would eventually exhibit it alongside a genuine, classical cupid (with an unlikely attribution to Praxiteles) which she acquired a few years later. Both remained with the Gonzaga in Mantua until the 17th Century, when the family’s fortunes had waned, and much of the remains of their collection was sold to King Charles I of England. There are references to Michelangelo’s Cupid in inventories of the Royal Collection, and even, potentially, a drawing, but sadly the sculpture was probably destroyed along with almost all of the Palace of Whitehall in the fire of 1698. But what did it look like? Condivi’s description gives us few clues, and equally little can be gleaned from the descriptions in the Gonzaga or Royal Collection inventories – apart from the fact that, unlike other versions (Isabella’s classical Cupid, for example) it was not lying on a lion skin. However, we might get an idea from a painting in the National Gallery.

Workshop of Giulio Romano, The Infancy of Jupiter, mid 1530s. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG624

This is The Infancy of Jupiter from the workshop of Giulio Romano, painted in the mid-1530s. Giulio, you may know, was probably Raphael’s ablest associate, and ran what remained of the workshop after his death. However, with the Sack of Rome in 1527 he fled the Eternal City and headed north, where he did great work for the Gonzaga family, effectively taking over from Mantegna as Court Artist (at 21 years’ remove). The painting shows the infant Jupiter, who was saved from the fate of his siblings by his mother, Ops. His father, Saturn, did not want to be overthrown, so had eaten his other children at birth. When Jupiter was born, Ops gave Saturn a stone to eat in place of her new-born, and placed the baby in the care of the Corybantes. This was a good choice, it seems, as they were a holy heavy metal group, dancers dedicated to the Goddess Cybele, and they played loud music and clashing cymbals to cover the sound of the baby crying (see far left and right) so that Saturn would not discover him.

Jupiter lies on a white sheet in a wickerwork cradle, his legs apart, with his his left arm lying by his side, and the right arm wrapped around his head. The legs are not dissimilar to those of the classical Cupid from the Uffizi, whereas the arms are more similar to Algardi’s Sleep (which is actually the same arrangement as in the Medici bigio morato Cupid).  It is assumed that Giulio’s model was none other than Michelangelo’s fake, which he would have seen as part of the Gonzaga collection. There is a version of it in Corsham Court in Wiltshire – go and have a look if any of you are in the area: I can’t find a good photograph of it. Some people have suggested that it is indeed Michelangelo’s original, but very few have ever been convinced. Based on Giulio’s painting, we could imagine, perhaps, that the lost Love had legs like the Medici Cupid and arms more like Algardi’s Sleep – though carved in white marble.

Meanwhile, in the Louvre exhibition Michelangelo and Rodin, the same idea is covered with the following two sculptures. As their ‘stand-in’ for Michelangelo’s lost Love, they have a work carved in the second half of the 16th century by Tommaso della Porta (about 1550 – 1606), which was, for a while, attributed to Michelangelo himself – as so many things were. It belongs to the Museum of Antiquities in Turin, which is odd, given that it is not ‘antique’ – although this feeds back into the idea that Michelangelo’s work was passed off as classical.

You might notice that Cupid, fast asleep as he is, appears to be holding a club – which is not one of his usual attributes. However, he does have a pair of wings, so this is definitely Cupid… You might also notice that he has something around his head, looking not entirely unlike a muzzle: it’s actually part of a lion skin – which, together with the club, is an attribute of Hercules. I’m not at all sure why the sleeping Cupid should have dressed up as one of his cousins, but love is a powerful force: it conquers everything, after all, and so could be seen as not unlike Hercules.

The Louvre exhibits the Tommaso della Porta sculpture next to a genuinely Roman Sleeping Cupid from Rodin’s own collection. The ‘modern’ master was fascinated by classical sculpture, and owned quite a few – you may have seen the British Museum’s exhibition, Rodin and the Sculpture of Ancient Greece back in 2018. This example, dated to 100-150 CE, comes from the Musée Rodin, and was just one of several owned by the sculptor. It is possibly that he associated it with Michelangelo’s lost original (and if the exhibition makes anything clear, it is that Rodin held his Renaissance predecessor in awe) – and it is also possible that one of his own sculptures was once passed off as an antique… but more of that on Monday, perhaps, along with sculptures by both masters, not to mention many superb drawings by Michelangelo.

274 – Feeling blue

Konrad Mägi, Saaremaa Motif, 1913. Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn.

After last week’s delicate, subtle drawings by ten wonderful women from the 18th to the 19th centuries, today I’m looking forward to the rich colour and bold brushstrokes of Konrad Mägi, who I will talk about this Monday, 4 May at 6pm. I’m hoping that you’ll see how wonderful his paintings are from today’s post, which is, in some way I think, about the very nature of hope. The talk will be an introduction to the fantastic exhibition which is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 12 July.

As I type, I am on my way to Paris to see the exhibition Michelangelo and Rodin which I will talk about on 11 May, comparing the shared interests of these two greats: the human figure in motion, and an exploration of the incomplete (although I am dubious about this latter concept as a shared interest). The Louvre is also hosting an exhibition of the work of the man who did as much as anyone to turn printmaking into a fine art – even before the ‘Fine Arts’ were a concept: Martin Schongauer. Having seen a couple of his engravings and most of one of his altarpieces in his hometown of Colmar last week, I am really looking forward to it – and I’ll let you know what I think on Monday 18 May. After this, the next two talks will cover Tate Britain’s exhibition James McNeill Whistler on 25 May, and then an introduction to a second great Germanic artist whose work is now in Colmar, Matthias Grünewald. That will be on 1 June, just before I head out to that part of the world with Artemisia. Most of these are already in the diary, and I will add more information about the others as soon as I have set up the events.

If you do book for any of these talks, Tixoom will send an email with the ticket – effectively a link to the talk – within seconds. If it doesn’t arrive within 24 hours, do let me know and I’ll try and sort it out: it would be easier to do when there’s time to spare than 5 minutes before the talk itself! You should also get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these will also include the link.

We are looking at a highly coloured landscape, with what at first glance appears to be a river running between its two banks, flowing potentially from top left to bottom right. However, if we stop and notice the lighthouse at top left – tall, tapering, and white, ringed with red – we should realise that we are close to the sea, in a place where boats and ships are in danger of running aground. The banks of the ‘river’ are really the coastline, the increasing sparsity of the vegetation towards the water’s edge in line with the way in which plants colonise such liminal spaces: the Ecologist tells me it is called ‘primary succession’.

In the bottom left corner of the painting we can see the artist’s signature, and the date – ‘K. Mägi. 1913.’ It does look a little more like ‘Màgi’ – but that is probably because it’s easier to do a single line with a paint brush than the two tiny dots needed for an umlaut. It will come as no surprise that I don’t speak a word of Estonian, but the people I asked at Dulwich Picture Gallery told me that the name is pronounce ‘Maggie’. I was thinking of it with a German pronunciation of ‘ä’ which would be more like ‘Mehgi’, but I presume the accent distinguishes the ‘a’-sound from ‘ar’. By the time he painted this, Mägi has spent two periods in Paris – from 1907-1908 and then again from 1910-1912 – at which point he used a French spelling of his name, ‘K. Maegui’.

He would have had plenty of opportunity to see the works of the leading artists of the day – and of previous decades – including the Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists and the Fauves, although he doesn’t seem to have expressed (verbally) any particular enthusiasm for any of them. Nevertheless, this detail clearly shows their influence. The blobs of paint show how indebted he was to pointilisme, with its separated brushstrokes, here seen as dabs of paint building up the surface, thus taking the idea even further. The beach was created with a pale, off-white ground over which he has added blobs of white, cream and pale lavender. As well as conveying the overall colour, he manages to give the distinct impression that the beach is covered in pebbles, each mark representing a potential agony for the shoeless foot.

The colours of the vegetation are heightened, and although not as extreme and non-naturalistic as the expressive colours unveiled by the Fauves (‘wild beasts’) in 1905, they are still more expressive than naturalistic. They also use a variety of brushstrokes, the darker clumps built up from blobs of lighter and darker greens, mixed with different quantities of blue, while the yellow – presumably some sort of flower – is added with short vertical strokes. The rust-red vegetation – possibly the dead stems of last year’s plants? – is applied in tall, thin lines, or shorter, broader strokes. This technique, using the application of the paint to differentiate the qualities of the things being depicted, could have been learnt from Vincent van Gogh. Having said that, once you have seen several of Mägi’s paintings (and certainly by the time you come to this one in the current exhibition) you will realise that it couldn’t be by anyone else: the influences have been fully absorbed, and used by the artist to express a unique understanding of the world around him and his own relationship to it.

A recurring feature of Mägi’s coastal scenes (and there is a whole room dedicated to them in Dulwich) is the way in which he explores distance through the colour of the sea. Lighter in the foreground, and closer to the colour of the beach (probably because the pebbles can be seen through the shallow water) it gets darker and deeper in colour the further away it is. One of the things I learnt early in my career at the National Gallery came from Jonathan Miller’s thought-provoking 1998 exhibition On Reflection in which he pointed out that you can’t paint water: it is clear and colourless, there is nothing to paint. You can only paint the effect that water has on other things – the light reflecting off it, or refracting through it – or the impurities, such as mud and silt, which are carried by it. I have seen the Danube beautiful and blue – but only from the right position on an adjacent hill when the sun was shining. The blue is the reflection of the sky. Most of the time it has been a dull, greyish brown, like the Thames. The same is true of the sea – so given the colour of the sea in this painting, we should expect a beautiful blue sky.

However, the sky is not so blue. Predominantly pink clouds, with layers of white, reveal small patches of light blue, far paler than the water. However, the distant forest is that dark, and different trees are picked out – or at least implied – by different strokes of the same mid- and dark blues as used in the further reaches of the sea, which is presumably flowing between two islands.

As well as the darkening blues, another aspect of Mägi’s landscapes is the way in which different features ‘funnel’ our vision in certain directions. Not only does the blue of the sea get darker as it gets further away, but the distance between the two islands (if that is, indeed, what we are looking at) appears to get narrower. Similarly the section of land between the shore and the forest becomes narrower as we go from right to left, and the trees, likewise, look shorter. In this way our attention is pulled towards the houses on the horizon. The clouds, on the other hand, ‘open out’ as we go from right to left. A dashed white line at the top of the clouds curves upwards. While the land – with the water – ‘funnels’ our attention to the left, the clouds become more dominant, opening out to frame the feature which is just to the left of the detail above…

…the lighthouse. The clouds, colouristically, are like a pale emanation of its whites and reds, trailing off to the right – or conversely, leading our eyes from right to left along the white, dashed clouds to its summit. The sea, on the other hand, leads to its base, behind the green bushes on the nearer shore. Here in the top left corner we see the painting’s full palette, from darkest blues and greens, through bright yellows, oranges and occasional reds to hints of mauve. The chromatic variety tells us that this to be the focal point of the painting, the most interesting section, however marginal it might appear to be in the top left corner.

The lighthouse itself is painted quite differently from the rest of the landscape, with more smoothly applied and more blended brushstrokes which are, predominantly, vertical – expressing the verticality of the structure itself. Having said before that the clouds could be an emanation of this building, it could equally well be that the lighthouse is the solidification of the sky, the whites, pinks and burgundies being the same as those used for the clouds, while the blue shadow defining the left hand side is a darker version of the cloudless sections of the sky. This blue is, of course, shadow – and is related to the Impressionist colour theory, adapted by Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists, that the absence of sunlight should be represented by the complementary colour of that light. As a blue shadow, we might expect the sunlight to be orange. Indeed, there is a gently dabbed line of orange/ochre which stretches down the closest face of the lighthouse, although this fades subtly to a delicate primrose yellow. Where the sun hits the structure most directly, we still see the walls as white. Looking at the other, lower buildings, the walls which face the sun do glow orange – but this might be the result of the materials they are made from. Very few artists followed such theory rigidly, but use it as a starting point for their own artistry, allowing it to give way to an aesthetically driven interpretation of what they could see. Despite all of this, I do wonder if the deep blue seen on the lighthouse – connected to the sky as it is, and representing the shadow – is nevertheless in some way more closely related to the sea.

When seen as part of the landscape as a whole, I get a very clear sense that the deep blue of the sea, leading us along a curving path to the base of the lighthouse, even if hidden behind the bushes, rises up the side of the building, thus joining the sea to the sky. The depth of the blue resonates. The title of the painting, Saaremaa Motif, tells us we are on the island of Saaremaa, which lies in the Baltic sea to the west of Estonia, and north of Latvia, all but closing off the Gulf of Riga. Mägi visited twice, in 1913 and 1914. This painting dates to the first visit, a summer noted for its bad weather – although that is not obvious from the painting. While there, he made several daytrips to Vilsandi, a smaller island, on which this very lighthouse still appears to be standing, even if the red sections have now been painted white (you can find it on my go-to, google maps, as Vilsandi Tuletorn). He regularly travelled in the summer months. In 1913 he was have suffering from extremely painful joints (he was never a well man) and Saaremaa was well-known for its mud baths. There were also increasing worries about his mental health, and he enjoyed remote places with few buildings and just as few people… However, I can’t help seeing the deep blues of the distant sea as reflecting a sense of longing, while the connection between the sea and the sky is optimistic. The lighthouse is a stable structure, clearly depicted – its very purpose is to warn people of danger, and to keep them safe. He painted this, and a similar lighthouse, more than once – as we shall see on Monday – and, like the landscape itself, it surely had a symbolic value for him. Representing stability, security and protection, it is nevertheless almost out of reach. However, it is still, by its very function, a beacon – something to aspire to, perhaps – which could explain why he went back for a second visit, painting the same structure in different conditions, communicating a range of subtly varied moods. He is definitely an artist we should know better!