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!

273 – The first view

Lady Elizabeth Susan Percy, View of the Villa Pescatore from Villa Muti, Piombino, 1833. Courtauld Gallery, London.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about delivering my own talks is finding out what is and isn’t popular – and surprise, surprise, there are several star artists that people always want to hear more about, however much they’ve heard about them already – and quite right too! However, artists who aren’t as famous, and even artists who people have never heard of, turn out to be far less interesting it seems – which always surprises me. I would urge you not to give way to that tendency, as you miss so much: there’s always something new to discover, and probably, to enjoy! That is particularly true this week (Monday, 27 April at 6pm) when I will be talking about The Courtauld’s  A View of One’s Own. On display are some of the most delicate, sensitive landscape drawings I’ve seen, made by ten women artists from the 18th and 19th centuries that I didn’t know – it’ll be a real treat: today’s drawing is a good example! The week after is another case in point. Konrad Mägi, who I will talk about on 4 May, was the leading Post-Impressionist artist in Estonia. As it happens, I don’t know anything about Estonian art – but he is wonderful. His paintings are richly coloured, with echoes of Monet, Van Gogh and Munch, but he always remains himself. The works vary in mood from joyful and ebullient to tense and moody – so there’s something for everybody. The exhibition is a fantastic example of the way in which Dulwich Picture Gallery manages to find northern, or Nordic artists who are not so well known in Western Europe. I decided to go to the exhibition, and talk about it, thanks to the enthusiasm of one of you – and would invite the rest of you to join me on 4 May to see why!

Michelangelo and Rodin (11 May), who are currently being exhibited alongside one another at the Louvre, need no introduction. The comparison is, in some ways, so obvious I’m surprised the exhibition hasn’t been staged before. I’ll be seeing it next week, and so will be well placed to report back. I’ll also be able to catch up with another Louvre exhibition, dedicated to Martin Schongauer, who was so highly regarded in the 15th century that Albrecht Dürer travelled all the way from Nuremberg to Colmar to see him and learn from him – although he arrived too late: Schongauer had recently died. I will talk about that exhibition – which includes almost all of Schongauer’s paintings and many of his innovative prints – on Monday 18 May. The details are in the diary, of course, and the links above will take you to Tixoom if you want more information, and if you want to book.

If you do book any of these events, 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 it would 5 minutes before the talk! You should then get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these will also include the link.

Today we are looking at a drawing on a slim, landscape-format sheet of paper. It is a reasonably standard width, but not particularly ‘tall’, measuring 19 x 46 cm. This is ideal for charting the development of the horizon, which, despite its name, is rarely ‘horizontal’. In this case it rises from left to right as it tracks the peaks of the Tuscan hills. We know this is Tuscany from the title of the drawing: Piombino is due south of Pisa, and southwest of Siena, on a promontory projecting from the coast towards the island of Elba. However, despite the gradually fall of the terrain towards the left of the drawing, there is no suggestion of the sea: we must be some way inland. The drawing is on wove paper, a smooth, uniform paper type created by laying the paper pulp onto a finely woven brass wire screen that leaves no pattern or “laid lines” on the sheet. This technique was invented in the 1750s, and thus before any of the drawings I will be talking about on Monday. Rather than being white paper, which was then given a grey wash, the paper was made from grey pulp, and this mid-tone is used for the sky. It is lightened with white chalk for the clouds, buildings and other highlights, and detail is drawn in with graphite – effectively pencil. Watercolours add a hint of colour where required. The paper is tightly and irregularly cropped – meaning that the drawing is now mounted on top of a backing sheet, rather than being framed by a mount – which gives it, I think, a far greater sense of being a hand-made, three-dimensional object.

The borders in this detail show us that we are looking at the bottom left corner of the drawing. At first glance, it appears to be monochrome, working through the grey scale, but the more you look – I hope – the more you can see very subtle variations of colour – mainly greys, yes, but also pale ochres and greens. This might evoke a slightly misty day, were the details in the distance not so crisp, the result of the delicately drawn outlines of the distant hills. The light falls from the top right – shadows of the trunks of the trees in the foreground are on a diagonal from top right to bottom left – and their length suggests the sun is not high in the sky. My guess would be that this is morning, and we are looking roughly north-east. In accordance with the ‘rules’ of atmospheric perspective, the foreground details are darker, the others gradually lighten towards the horizon, which is far paler – thus encouraging us to look towards the light, and so into the distance. Three or four buildings are visible. From left to right they could be classified as ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, with some form of outhouse slightly closer that the ‘medium’ building, which has a large umbrella pine behind it, and a dark, arched entrance on our side. The ‘large’ building is topped with a tower roughly in the middle of the structure, although it does not appear to be entirely symmetrical. A long, diagonal form stretches away from it towards the bottom left – maybe some form of avenue, even if we can’t see two distinct rows of trees. Nevertheless, it would seem to be a building of some status.

Moving to the centre of the drawing more buildings are visible, each wall perforated regularly with relatively small windows. A second range of hills, smaller, lower, and darker than the distant range (which continues from the first detail) emerges on the far side of the undulating plain which lies beyond the foreground trees. Whisps of cloud trail horizontally from the tops of the distant hills. This is the result of orographic lift, apparently (I had to look it up), when moist air wafting from the sea is lifted over the hills: as the air cools, the water condenses and forms these clouds. The breeze continues, and the clouds form long, horizontal streaks. At the right of the detail, towards the bottom, a fence rises diagonally through one of the open fields: this is not wilderness, but land which is owned and enclosed.

This is the bottom right corner of the drawing. The fence we saw in the previous detail can be seen again (on the left), climbing the hill towards the largest structure in the landscape: a sizeable mansion. There are doors visible in the ground floor, what could be the windows in a mezzanine level, and above that, far larger windows. Presumably this is the piano nobile, the rooms for living and entertaining. Just below the roof are far smaller windows, possibly bedrooms, and probably for the staff. The mansion forms part of an agglomeration of buildings of indeterminate use, although at least one appears to have some grandeur, with what could be classical columns in the centre of its façade. Cutting off the bottom right corner on a low diagonal is a structure with what I initially thought were repeated arches, but now realise are trees in front of a high wall: the enclosure of a sizeable estate. This wall effectively frames the inscription in the bottom right corner, ‘Villa Pescatore From Villa Muti Piombino/Sora June 14 1833 Pallavicini’. This is both helpful, and a little confusing.

It is helpful, because it tells us what we are looking at, and gives us a precise date. This is a landscape showing a location somewhere near Piombino, drawn, or seen, on ‘June 14 1833’. However, given the resources I have to hand, I have been unable to locate either of the villas. Before long, any internet search leads back to this drawing. In Rome, the word ‘Villa’ refers not to an individual building, but to building together with the land around it. For example, the Museum Borghese is in the middle of the Villa Borghese – the parkland which surrounds the Borghese’s suburban palazzo. It could easily be that neither of the villas in the drawing survives, having been subsumed by the 20th century town, and I’m not sure which is the Villa Pescatore. It could be the area around the ‘large’ building which we saw in the first detail, with the avenue leading from it, or it could be centred on the mansion with mezzanine and piano nobile in the third… I suspect it is the latter: the delicate pink of the terracotta roof is the richest use of colour in the painting, however soft it is, and the wall, half shadowed, half in light, is the most expansive area of construction we can see. The trees which surround it (there might also be a wall), also define a sizeable area of clear space.

I’m confused by the mention of ‘Sora’, which is where I assume the drawing was made, and the word ‘Pallavicini’. Sora, as a place, according to google maps (which I know is not infallible), is south of Rome – nowhere near Piombino – and although there are two places called ‘Pallavicino’ (rather than ‘Pallavicini’, ending in an ‘i’), one is outside Genoa and the other is on Sicily. I suspect that studies for this drawing were made on location at the Villa Muti, and the finished drawing – which is surely too refined, too delicate, and too detailed to have been made in front of the motif – was completed later, in Sora. The date could either represent when the view was seen and sketched, or when the drawing was completed. My guess would be that Lady Percy was staying with some friends or acquaintances in Sora: the Pallavicini – but this is all hypothesis. Or, to put it more honestly, complete guesswork.

Lady Elizabeth Susan Percy – the artist – was the daughter of Algernon Percy, 1st Earl of Beverley. Her earliest works were made in her late teens: she probably learnt to draw as one of the accomplishments of any refined young lady. She seems to have made her first visit to Italy in 1802, at the age of 20, during a brief pause in hostilities during the Napoleonic wars. Whilst abroad, she drew avidly: the Vatican Museum has 47 of her drawings from this period. There are also drawings in the Tate Collection – which names her as Lady Susan Elizabeth Percy, the order of names being the same as those given in the research carried out by a member of her family. The Vatican, on the other hand, goes with Elizabeth Susan – and as that is the order also given in her last will and testament, that is the order the curator of the Courtauld exhibition has chosen. Lady Elizabeth Susan Percy never married, and settled in Italy in the 1820s. She lived in Rome, as part of the ex-pat community, until her death in 1847. Among her friends (and colleagues) was the poet, and landscape artist, Edward Lear. There is no evidence that she ever exhibited her work, even if she must have shown it to her friends, so this could be the first time this View has been viewed by a wider public.

This detail alone, I think, shows us how brilliant she was. The differentiation between the ranges of hills is quite astonishing, given the delicacy of the outlines and the subtlety of the tonal shading creating both height and distance. The choice of viewpoint also enhances harmonies in the landscape itself. The agglomeration of buildings is nestled under the tallest hills, the rooves of the varied structures echoing the inflections of the hilltops. These forms are rendered ethereal by the clouds floating up above, which also echo the details below, while the horizontal streaks caused by orographic lift continuing their wispy flow from left to right below them. These echoes and resonances become all the more clear if we pull back a little, to see how the boundary wall itself parallels the incline of the hills. It’s a beautiful drawing: her work clearly deserves to be far better known – and she is just one of the artists I will be talking about on Monday. I do hope you can join me!  

Back Home with Uncle Gianni

Bernardo Bellotto, Venice: Upper Reaches of the Grand Canal facing Santa Croce, about 1738. The National Gallery, London.

After visiting Vienna to see the beautiful and well-crafted exhibition Canaletto & Bellotto, which I will talk about this Monday 20 April at 6pm, I returned to England for a few days before heading off on holiday to Naples and Ischia. There was so much wonderful to see there, but there’s no time to talk about that now! I got back late on Monday night, and am ready and raring to go. After Canaletto & Bellotto I have planned the following four talks:

27 April – A View of One’s Own (Landscapes by British Women Artists at The Courtauld)
4 May – Konrad Mägi – (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
11 May – Michelangelo and Rodin (The Louvre)
18 May – Martin Schongauer (The Louvre)

All of this is in the diary. Alternatively, the links above will take you to Tixoom for more information and booking. One of the above – Martin Schongauer – is directly related to the trip to Strasbourg and Colmar from 5-8 June which I am leading with Artemisia, and closer to the time (Monday 1 June) I will also give a talk on Matthias Grünewald, whose Isenheim Altarpiece we will be seeing in Colmar.

Given that I’m talking about Canaletto & Bellotto on Monday, this is an ideal opportunity to re-post a blog from September 2021. At the time, the National Gallery was displaying it’s newly acquired Bellotto, putting it into context with a beautifully focussed exhibition entitled Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited. Back then I thought it would be a good idea to look at one of Bellotto’s earliest views, dating from the years before he travelled to Dresden, where the Königstein views were painted (that trip to Dresden will form a small part of the talk on Monday), and the post seems even more relevant now. It looks back to the days when Bernardo Bellotto was still working with his uncle, Giovanni Antonio Canal, also called Gianantonio Canal, but who we know better as Canaletto. And no, I don’t really think he was called Uncle Gianni…

Personally, I think this is a lovely painting. It’s unassuming enough, I suppose, and perhaps there isn’t really much to distinguish it from so many of the views of Venice which now enrich the walls of museums across the world, but it was the only Bellotto that the National Gallery had until its purchase of The Fortress of Königstein from the North in 2017. This might seem strange, given that Bellotto was every bit as good as his uncle, and the National Gallery owns at least 14 of his paintings. Why did the British value Bellotto so far below his uncle? Who can say? But it is worthwhile remembering that, while Canaletto spent most of his time working in his native city – the haunt of many a Grand Tourist – Bellotto did not. And the little time Uncle Gianni was out of the country, he was in England – hence his pre-eminence in the UK, perhaps. Not only that, but we do have a tendency to narrow our gaze. You want a view of Venice? You want Canaletto! He’s the main man, he’s the famous one, get the best. Only I’m not convinced that he always was the best: there are times when I’d rather have a Bellotto – or a Guardi.

So, what do I like about this painting? Well, it’s charming, it’s clear, well painted, well composed, and it sparkles with light, and with the life of Venice. As with so many of the vedute – or ‘views’ – it appears to assume an impossible viewpoint. We seem to be at the same height as the people on the bridge that can be seen on the right of the canal – only we also seem to be in the middle of the Grand Canal. However, there is not, nor there never was, a bridge just here – although there is, admittedly, a kink in the canal. More of that later. We face the church of Santa Croce directly (it’s on the right), with its simple, apparently neo-classical façade. Now, however often you have been to Venice, I can guarantee that you have not been to this church. How can I be so sure? Well, it was destroyed in 1810: a communal garden now takes its place (see the photograph below). We can see gondoliers on the water, and people walking along the fondamenta – the canal-side path. A be-wigged aristocrat in red stands in the shadows at the foot of the steps to the church, and a hooded figure emerges from the left-hand door. Further back two people cross the bridge, and beyond that we can see the dome of San Simeon Piccolo, completed by architect Gianantonio Scalfarotto in 1738 as a neo-classical echo to Longhena’s baroque Santa Maria della Salute at the other end of the Grand Canal. The date of this church gives us a clue to the date of the painting. In the distance is the campanile (bell tower) of San Geremia – St Jeremiah. In the western church it is not usual to call an old testament prophet ‘Saint’, although it is in the orthodox church. The name of this, and other, Venetian churches reminds us of Venice’s connections with Byzantium. The view – with the exception of the absent church – is not altogether different today.

On the other side are three – or, arguably, four – more churches, only one of which survives.

From left to right they are the convent of Corpus Domini, which is more-or-less hidden by the surrounding wall. Further back is the taller renaissance façade of the Scuola dei Nobili – strictly speaking, a confraternity, although, as they all did, the complex would have included a consecrated chapel. This is followed by Santa Lucia, and finally, Santa Maria di Nazareth, known universally as the Scalzi, being the home of the Discalced (or ‘barefoot’) Carmelites. Its late-baroque façade was designed by Giuseppe Sardi and completed in 1680. This is the only surviving church from those on the left of the painting. Nowadays it is a familiar sight, because it is, after San Simeon Piccolo, the second church you would see when emerging from the railway station. And if you have been to Venice by train, you may remember that the station is called Venezia Santa Lucia – which is the main reason why the buildings here have changed so much. In 1861 the Austrian overlords destroyed Santa Lucia (the church) to build the first railway station, at the end of a new land bridge. This was then re-built between 1936 and 1952 (it took a long time because the war slowed things down) to a final design by Paolo Perilli.

This is the best photograph I can find of Bellotto’s view now – with the station on the left, the Scalzi covered in scaffolding, and the campanile – and dome – of San Geremia in the distance. But this is telling: there is hardly a hint of the right bank of the canal, and only a glimpse of the portico of San Simeon. The vedutisti ­– the artists who painted the vedute – were experts at combining viewpoints, and this was something that Bellotto would have learnt as an essential part of his training. What we see in the images may look real, but if we were there we would have to look from one side to the other to see it all.

Just visible in the background of this photograph – crossing in front of the brightly-lit palazzo – is a relatively ‘new’ bridge, built by the Austrians across the Grand Canal. This helped to connect the station to the city, and facilitated the movement of troops, who were needed to control the revolting Venetians. In 1848 there had indeed been a revolt, when the locals briefly took control of their own city. It didn’t last long: the Hapsburgs took back command the following year, and remained in charge until 1866 when Venice joined the newly-united (or, at least, uniting) Italy – even if most Venetians still don’t believe that they really are the same as other Italians.

It would help us to understand our painting if we looked the other way. Here is a painting by Canaletto, which is also in the collection of the National Gallery: The Grand Canal with S. Simeone Piccolo painted shortly after the Bellotto, in around 1740. In case you were worried, the final ‘e’ of ‘Simeone’ is not a typo – nor is its absence above: the ‘e’ is Italian, but not Venetian, like ‘Canal’, Gianantonio’s family name. It was because he was the son of another Canal – Bernardo – that he was called ‘little Canal’, i.e. ‘Canaletto’.

Canaletto Venice: The Grand Canal with S. Simeone Piccolo, about 1740. NG163.

We can see some of the same buildings – San Simeon is on the left, with the far simpler bulk of Santa Croce in the distance, just before the kink in the canal which means that the fondamenta curves round to our right – providing the viewpoint for Bellotto’s painting. Then on the right we can see the baroque façade of the Scalzi, and the projecting mass of Santa Lucia. Compare that with the view today – at least of the right-hand side of the canal, from more or less this point of view (where now there really is a bridge).

Enough said.

Apart from the skill, and the beauty of the painting, I love the historical content of Bellotto’s work – the documentation of the life and fabric of the city. I have little doubt that both of these paintings were created – in part, at least – to document one of the city’s latest landmarks – San Simeon Piccolo. The Bellotto is also interesting because he would have been young at the time it was painted. Born in 1722, he was the third child of asset manager Lorenzo Antonio Bellotto and Fiorenza Domenica Canal. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Bernardo Canal, a theatrical scene painter. He trained, of course, with his uncle, Canaletto (Fiorenza’s brother), and already by the age of 16 he was registered as a member of the Fraglia dei Pittori – the Venetian painters’ guild. It was around this time – 1738 – that our veduta was painted. He was sixteen. How could he have got to this level so quickly? Well, manual skill can easily be learnt with enough application and an early start, but the conceptual skill? He had help. His painting was based on his own preparatory drawing, now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. Sadly, I can’t find an image of it – but not to worry, as Bellotto’s own drawing was actually based on one by his uncle, which is now in the Royal Collection. Compare and contrast:

The composition is almost exactly the same, of course, plus or minus the odd gondola, although Bellotto makes the distant campanile slightly more prominent. This is how you learn – by copying the master. You study his original sketches, see how he combines them into a coherent composition, and copy that compositional drawing, just to make sure that it has all sunk in. I would like to see Bellotto’s version of the drawing, though, as I’d like to see how he sketches the sky. I have no doubt that both artists were right handed. Apart from the obvious fact that most people are, and always were, and, if they weren’t, were often made to be, in Canaletto’s sky the lines go from top right to bottom left – the default direction for right handed people sketching. For Canaletto, this is not a regular angle, though, with the lines varying from 45˚ to the horizontal at the top right and left, and varying across the centre to something more like 25˚. You get a similar variety of brushstrokes in the skies of Canaletto’s paintings. However, one of the stylistic features of Bellotto – to my mind, at least, I’ve never heard anyone else mention it – is that the brushstrokes in the blue of the sky are often an almost obsessive 45˚- which I hope you can see in this detail. It looks as if there is an almost imperceptible rain.

The detail also shows the thickness of the paint in the clouds. This three dimensional ‘paste’ is given the Italian name impasto, and is one of the ways in which Bellotto’s paintings differ from those of Canaletto, who does not use impasto to the same degree. Other differences include larger canvasses, more magisterial views, and a different palette. It can be cooler, and more silvery, or darker, with a greater use of browns. The latter is certainly true for the Viennese paintings, which I will be talking about on Monday. However – we will start in back home with Uncle Gianni in Venice, with bright and luminous paintings not unlike today’s.

Happy Easter (again)!

Andrea Bonaiuti, The Resurrection, 1365-8. The Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

Happy Easter!

That’s the main reason for this post, to be honest: to wish you a Happy Easter, if you celebrate, and, if you don’t, in the hope you are enjoying the long holiday weekend, if you are UK based. There’s no talk this week or next, but I have managed to line up the next month-or-so, which is the other reason for this post: to keep you up to date, as a few people have asked what’s next. It is, of course, all on the diary. To make things simple, here’s a list:

20 April – Canaletto & Bellotto (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
27 April – A View of One’s Own (Landscapes by British Women Artists at The Courtauld)
4 May – Konrad Mägi – (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
11 May – Michelangelo and Rodin (The Louvre)
18 May – Martin Schongauer (The Louvre)

All are Mondays, all are at 6:00pm BST (British Summer Time) – but Zoom will sort that out for you. The links above will take you to Tixoom, and more information about each talk. Meanwhile, as I’m here, this is a good opportunity to re-post the Easter blog from 2021, which came at the end of my Lent-long exploration of a very different painting… but that can wait for another Lent! This is what I wrote almost exactly five years ago:

Yesterday [it was Lent 46 on 3 April 2021] I referred to last year’s blog on The Devils in Andrea Bonaiuti’s Harrowing of Hell – and then I thought I ought to read it through, just in case there were any embarrassing typos. I’m glad to say that there weren’t, but I was surprised to see how much of yesterday’s material I had already covered. The focus changed, I suppose, from putting the Harrowing of Hell in context, to using the Crucifixion as a focus. I will do the same today, as last year I included this painting of the resurrection when talking about The Devils, and also referred back to it on Easter Day itself, when I talked about Donatello’s relief in San Lorenzo, which still continues to astonish me (see Day 25 – The Resurrection).

We have already explored the frescoes on this wall [in Lent 46], starting at the bottom left, outside the walls of Jerusalem, then looking up to Calvary, and back down again to hell on the right, the position of the narrative on the wall effectively mapping, in relative terms, the supposed geographical locations of the settings. But for the resurrection, where should be go? Clearly, from hell, we must look up, and then look higher still than the Crucifixion: up onto the ceiling.

Once more I think that the use of the available space is remarkable – the resurrection, the culmination of the Easter story, and the confirmation of Christ’s triumph over death, is at the very top of the decoration of the chapel, as close to the apex of the ceiling as is possible. We can see the edges of the other images on the quadripartite vaulting, but we’ll talk about them another day.

Three Maries approach the empty tomb from the left, the soldiers still fast asleep in front of it, two of them with shields labelled SPQR (although the inscription on the red shield is hard to see). Two angels sit on the edge of the open sarcophagus, the lid having been tipped off to the back – you can see one corner of it next to the right angel’s wing. Christ is resplendent – and glorious – up above. There is no description in the bible of how Jesus emerged from the tomb, but what we see here is a combination of elements derived from all four gospels. Mark 16:1 says,

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

So – these are the three woman we see to the left of the image. All four gospels say that the stone covering the tomb had been taken away, and most say it had been rolled. The bible implies that Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb had been cut into a rock like a cave, with a stone rolled in front to close it. However, medieval artists knew that people were buried in sarcophagi, and that was what they were going to paint. By the time Bonaiuti was at work in the 1360s, this image was entirely traditional. Mark 16:5-6 goes on to say,

And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

The angel who is gesturing, as if to say ‘behold the place where they laid him,’ is indeed on Christ’s right side, even if (1) Jesus is way above them, and (2) there are two ‘men’ in the painting, not just the one referred to by Mark. Matthew 28:3 also mentions only one angel, saying, ‘His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.‘ However, Luke 24:4 says, ‘two men stood by them in shining garments.’ Bonaiuti draws on all of these accounts – the white clothes, which do indeed shine out against the relatively dull background; the gesture towards ‘the place where they laid him’; and, from Luke, the fact that there are two of them. But that is not the only source for this image. Compare these two details:

On the right is Giotto’s Resurrection from the Scrovegni Chapel, painted some 60 years before Bonaiuti’s version. I made the mistake last week of saying to a group that Bonaiuti had worked in the Scrovegni Chapel: I was thinking of Giusto da Menabuoi, another Florentine artist, and similarly on the edge of being considered obscure. But I can see why I made the mistake. It does look as if Bonaiuti had seen Giotto’s painting, as he combines the same elements. Both images show two angels sitting on the tomb, with the one on our left pointing to the risen Christ, at whose feet kneels Mary Magdalene. The pointing hand, illustrating the phrase ‘behold the place where they laid him’ could equally well, in the Bonaiuti, illustrate the phrase ‘he is risen,’ which is used in all three of the synoptic gospels. Giotto is being remarkably clever, combining the resurrection with the Noli me tangere (more of that later). It is almost as if, for Giotto, the two angels sitting on the tomb are a ‘flashback’, or as if they are talking to the three Maries who are ‘off screen’, as it were – as indeed they are in the detail I have taken from the Bonaiuti.

I have written about the episode traditionally called the Noli me tangere before, when I discussed Galizia Fede’s version (see 104 – Don’t touch!), not to mention Giotto’s painting in the Scrovegni which we see here (109 – Death and Resurrection). The title itself comes from John 20:17, and means ‘touch me not.’ According to John, Mary Magdalene finds the tomb open, and so goes to tell Peter and John, who run there only to find it empty, before heading back home.  John 20:11-12 then says,

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

It seems clear that, however much Giotto and Bonaiuti drew from the synoptic gospels, everything they needed is here. In John’s account Mary then turns away from the tomb and sees the risen Christ, but does not know it is him. At the end of John 19 we were told that the tomb was located in a garden, which could explain what happens next in John 20:15-17,

Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

Notice that Mary Magdalene is the first witness of the resurrection. Notice, too, that Jesus instructs her to bear that witness to the apostles. Now, given these two observations, I really don’t understand the objection to having women in the priesthood. In fact, in all of the gospels it is the women who are told to tell the apostles that Christ is risen, although in Matthew, Mark and Luke it is the angels who give this instruction. So, if this ministry was valid, what is the problem now? But I’ll get off my soapbox and move on.

In both of the details, and in Bonaiuti’s image of the resurrected Christ above the tomb, Jesus carries the Cross of Christ Triumphant: the red of his suffering, in the shape of the cross, against the white of his purity. He also, in both appearances in Bonaiuti’s fresco, wears red and white, as do the angels sitting on the tomb: these are the colours of the resurrection. Bonaiuti shows the resurrected Christ carrying the flag in his right hand, with, in his left, a palm leaf, denoting his victory over death. In the Giotto, it is the flag itself which gives us this message. Written in the four white corner sections are the letters ‘VIC’, ‘TOR’, ‘MOR’ and ‘TIS’ – or Victor Mortis, ‘victor over death’, or ‘conqueror of death’.

In Bonaiuti’s telling of the story the resurrection seems effortless (especially when compared to Donatello’s version which I mentioned above). Christ floats in the sky, drapery only slightly ruffled by the breeze, a glorious mandorla of light around him which illuminates, ever so slightly, the trees growing on either side. The hills slope down towards the tomb, leaving Jesus beautifully framed in the middle of the blue sky, the apex of a triangle whose base is formed by the sleeping soldiers and sides by the attendant angels. He is at the very top, a joyous triumph at the end of the long, slow period of reflection that is Lent, and the unimaginable suffering of the Passion. A Happy Easter, indeed!

272 – Dressing up and making believe

Michaelina Wautier, Two Girls as Saints Agnes and Dorothy, c. 1655. Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Greetings from Vienna! I’ve just got back to my hotel having seen Canaletto & Bellotto – it’s superb, but more of that later. I also bumped into one of you first thing, which was delightful, if confusing (I wasn’t really awake)! The exhibition Michaelina Wautier, about whom I will be talking this Monday, 30 March at 6pm, was here in Vienna just a few weeks ago, but opens this week at the Royal Academy in London. Michaelina herself has taken a little longer to come out of the shadows than some of her contemporaries, women who were every bit as skilled as their male colleagues. I first saw her work in the exhibition Ingenious Women in Hamburg a couple of years ago, and so was delighted when I learnt that the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna would be staging an exhibition dedicated to her. And yes, I was even happier when I heard that it would come to the RA. Sadly not everything has travelled from Vienna – today’s painting, for example, is already in an exhibition in Ghent for example… but that makes it all the more worthwhile to look at it today. My current trip, to see Canaletto & Bellotto, will be the subject of the following talk, on Monday, 20 April (in between I’ll be on holiday…). To follow that I will talk about a slightly more recherché, but entirely delightful, exhibition looking at female landscape artists. It is my third visit to The Courtauld this year, this time to see their exhibition A View of One’s Own. None of the women exhibited are ‘famous’ – but they were all undoubtedly experts in their field, and this focussed exhibition is definitely worth a visit in its own right. I will take a close look at it on 27 April. More will follow, and any news will eventually appear on the diary.

If you do book any of these events, 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! Of course, it could be in your spam folder (that happened to someone just last week). You should then get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these will also include the link.

This year’s trips with Artemisia are rapidly filling up – both Siena trips are full, as is Liverpool – but there are still a few places left if you would like to come to Strasbourg and Colmar from 5-8 June. Both locations are remarkably picturesque, and have fantastic food – and in June the weather will be great, ideal for a boat trip around Colmar’s ‘Little Venice’ – oh, and there’s truly fantastic art too! This includes Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (in Colmar) – an astonishing painting that truly is one of those important works you really should see – and one of France’s most fantastic Gothic cathedrals (in Strasbourg) – for over two centuries the tallest building in the world, and still the tallest medieval structure to survive! And then there’s the history… but don’t let me get carried away: just click on the link above and book!

Two girls are standing in a darkened room which is enlivened by a swathe of vermillion cloth hanging behind their heads. There is nothing to indicate where they are though, but there is a table covered with a similarly coloured fabric in the front left corner, on which a basket of apples is surrounded by scattered roses. The two girls are of different heights, and so may be of different ages, although this is by no means certain. The most prominent stands on the right: not only is she taller, but she wears brighter colours – a rose-pink dress, and a voluminous daffodil-yellow cloak. She also has a striped scarf, or shawl, around her neck. She looks out of the corners of her eyes in the direction of the other girl – although it is by no means clear that she is actually looking at her. She indicates a sheep, or lamb, with her right hand, while holding its head with her left. She stands further forward than the other girl, and her cloak falls in front of the table cloth – so our view of her is clear all the way to the bottom of the painting. By contrast, the other girl is shorter, stands behind the table, and so is further back than the taller girl – all compositional motifs which make her less prominent (and therefore, in some way, less important). In addition to this she wears a dark green dress which merges with the dark background, again making her appearance less striking. However, this dress has sleeves which are slashed from the shoulders, allowing us to see not only the billowing sleeves of her white chemise, but also her hands and more or less of her forearms. In her right hand she is holding a rose, whereas in her left there is a long, undulating green form which continues the diagonal of her forearm. This is a palm of martyrdom, which helps us to understand what is going on. These two girls are dressed as saints – but they have no haloes to confirm their sanctity.


Not all artists paint haloes, though – often our understanding of the subject matter and the identification of the characters represented relies on context. It becomes obvious, due to the sense of a narrative, or the other figures represented, that we are looking at a specific type of person – but that is not the case here. However, it would seem unlikely that a girl who is so finely dressed – even though her clothing doesn’t seem to refer to any specific historical or geographical style – would have a sheep as a pet. Not only is this animal not in a field or farm, but it is indoors, suggesting that it must be there for a very specific reason. It is, indeed, a symbol. The saint most commonly associated with a sheep, or lamb, is of course John the Baptist, who greets Jesus just before his baptism with the words ‘Behold the lamb of god, which taketh away the sins of the world’ (John 1:29 in the King James version). However, this is not John – no camel skin, and definitely a girl. But if we quote the Vulgate, the same verse would be ‘Ecce agnus Dei…’. The Latin for ‘lamb’ is ‘agnus’, which suggests that this girl is dressed as Saint Agnes. While this linguistic similarity might seem ‘obvious’, it isn’t, necessarily. Rather than her name, the appearance of the lamb can be connected to a vision – it’s probably a combination of the two. Most artists – indeed anyone who could read – would have known the Golden Legend (to which I have regularly referred), a collection of the lives of the saints put together by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s. He started every ‘Life’ with a discussion of the meaning of the saint’s name – a form of etymology. I am quoting from the first English translation, by William Caxton, which was published in 1483, and this is what he says about Saint Agnes:

And next followeth of S. Agnes, and first the interpretation of her name.
Agnes is said of agna a lamb, for she was humble and debonair as a lamb, or of agnos in Greek, which is to say debonair and piteous, for she was debonair and merciful. Or Agnes of agnoscendo, for she knew the way of truth…

You can find the full ‘Life’ on this link, but a couple of details from it might be helpful. Agnes’s martyrdom involved being stripped naked and led to a brothel (they didn’t want to kill a virgin) – but no one could approach her, and she made the best, even of this situation.

Then made she of the bordel her oratory, and in making her prayers to God she saw tofore her a white vesture, and anon therewith she clad her and said: I thank thee Jesu Christ which accountest me with thy virgins and hast sent me this vesture.

Curiously – to my mind – the website of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which owns this painting, says that this ‘vesture’ is shown in the painting, or rather, ‘She is wearing a loose yellow cloak that is also mentioned in the Legenda aurea [Golden Legend]’. It could be that there are different translations, but I can’t think why a virginal white would appear anywhere as yellow. However, they might be referring to another section of the Life. Agnes’s foster sister Emerentiana was also martyred, and buried alongside her, and,

…when the friends of S. Agnes watched at her sepulchre on a night, they saw a great multitude of virgins clad in vestments of gold and silver, and a great light shone tofore them, and on the right side was a lamb more white than snow, and saw also S. Agnes among the virgins.

Maybe in this painting ‘Agnes’ is wearing one of the ‘vestments of gold’ – and also standing, without doubt, next to the lamb.


As part of the composition, the figure of ‘Agnes’ forms a narrow pyramid, or a tall, slim, isosceles triangle. Its outline leads up from the lamb in the bottom right corner to her head, and then down to the left of centre, just in front of the table. The yellow cloak falls off her right shoulder (on our left), revealing a sliver of the pink dress, and curving round the striped shawl. The red cloth hanging behind her head echoes the curve of her shoulders, rising on a shallow diagonal from our left, and then curving down to the right, with an undulating hem leading to a sharp corner.


Rather than looking towards the taller girl, this figure looks down to the right – towards the lamb – and her gaze parallels the diagonal of the palm. It was this palm which alerted us to the fact that these girls represent two saints. Her hair is held back by a band sewn with many pearls, and she also has strings of pearls around her wrist and neck. Not only that, but the slashed sleeves of her dress are pinned up by brooches hung with a large drop pearls. With so many pearls, we might guess that this is Saint Margaret – as ‘margarita’ is Latin for ‘pearl’ (the Greek word is similar) – but she is not. There’s no dragon, for one thing. The roses and apples tell us she is St Dorothy. If I’m honest, I knew about the flowers – but clearly hadn’t read her Life in enough detail to realise that they were specifically roses – and I don’t remember seeing the apples in any other image: however, they should be there. Again, I am quoting from the version ‘Englished by William Caxton’, as it says in the first edition of 1483, which you can find via this link. Like St Agnes, St Dorothy saw herself as the bride of Christ – as Nuns do to this day – and so He is the spouse referred to here. She was condemned to death by beheading,

… and as she was led to the place assigned where it should be done, a scribe of the realm, named Theophilus, said to her in scorn: I pray thee to send me some of thy roses and apples that thou hast gathered in the garden of thy spouse that thou praisest so much, and she granted to him his desire. And this was in the cold winter time when there was both frost and snow.
…
And this holy virgin bowed down her head, and the cruel tyrant smote it off.
But a little before this, appeared before her a fair child barefoot, clothed in purple, with crisp hairs, whose garment was set full of bright stars, bearing in his hand a little basket shining as gold, with roses and apples, to whom the virgin said: I pray thee, bear this basket to Theophilus the scribe.
…
And as this said Theophilus stood in the palace of the emperor, this child came to him and presented to him the basket, saying: These be the roses and apples that my sister Dorothy hath sent to thee from Paradise, the garden of her spouse, and then this child vanished away. Then he, considering the marvellous work of God in this holy virgin, said anon with a stern voice, praising the God of Dorothy for that great miracle which was showed to him of roses and apples that time, that he that sent to me these things is of great power, and therefore his name be blessed world without end, Amen. And then he was converted to the faith of Jesu Christ, and the most part of the people of the city.

The ‘fair child’ who delivered the basket is often identified as the Christ Child himself, and is occasionally treated as one of St Dorothy’s attributes. A good example is the painting by Francesco di Giorgio in the National Gallery, Saint Dorothy and the Infant Christ, in which it is the Christ Child who is carrying the basket. It only contains flowers – too small, and indistinct to identify – but definitely no fruit – which could explain my ignorance about the apples.

For Michaelina Wautier, as for so many, the basket is enough to identify Saint Dorothy, and not only that – it is beautifully painted. The apples are some of the best I remember seeing, with a delicacy and subtlety of painting that is unparalleled. Fine strokes of red and green paint are delicately interwoven, and only interrupted by a soft sheen of white, where the light reflects off the surface. The form of each fruit, curving round at the end to the dark dimple containing the remains of the blossom, is perfectly realised. However, even if these are heavenly apples – delivered by the infant form of Dorothy’s devotional ‘spouse’ – one of them, on the right of the basket, has a small bruise: it is real, not idealised. I suspect that the roses are Rosa gallica, the Gallic or French rose, the first to be cultivated by the Greeks and Romans, but I’m not an expert (and the Ecologist is in Kenya). However, they are a deep red – and dog roses (Rosa canina) are usually a very pale pink. The photos of Rosa gallica that I’ve seen are not this dark either: the rich colouration could either relate to their heavenly origin, or to the fact that this is a 17th century painting, by which time the cultivation of roses was resulting in a wider range of colours. The basket itself is also rather beautifully painted, and, in terms of baskets, a rather fine example. There are four curving handles, below which the basket is supported by four spherical feet (admittedly only one is visible, but I am extrapolating). In between the handles are wooden finials carved a little like chess pieces, below which hang short chains with three links each – presumably these are purely decorative details. The weaving of the basket itself is meticulously painted, with slight gaps between the weave towards the top and bottom, and stronger rings framing the splayed sides at its rim and base. Michaelina Wautier did paint a couple of Still Lifes which survive – but then, she worked in all genres, one of the features of her work which the curators of the RA exhibition deem remarkable (and yet, I can’t help thinking that most women who painted worked in more than one genre anyway).

The specificity of the faces has led people to believe that this is a double portrait, of a type known as a portrait istorié – in which the subjects are dressed as figures from myth or religion. This explains the ‘as’ in the title of the painting, Two Girls as Saints Agnes and Dorothy. The similarity of the features suggests that they are two sisters. Notice especially the cupid’s bow mouths, the noses with a round, bulbous ends which rise from curving, slightly depressed bridges, and the hint of dimples in the chins. It’s always tricky to make these assertions, though, as what you are looking at, as much as anything, is the artist’s style. Michaelina tended to paint a long, vague highlight along the bridge of the nose, with a separate, irregular highlight at its tip, for example. She painted the softest of lips, and the most delicate hair, lustrous, and combed back from the irregular hairline, where the scalp is revealed in between some of the parted hairs. The girls are so refined that their skin is luminous, and with the elder sister in particular – who I take to be ‘Saint Agnes’ – it appears translucent, with the blood vessels visible beneath. While ‘Dorothy’ looks down to the lamb, ‘Agnes’ looks towards her sister, her mouth slightly open. In both cases the red cloth passes behind the head at eye level.

When see together, it is clear how the red cloth links the two girls and directs our attention towards the directions of their gaze. ‘Dorothy’ appears deferential, while ‘Agnes’ is concerned for her younger sister – or for the fate of Saint Dorothy – or both. We can only hypothesise why they are dressed as these two saints, as we have no idea who they are (there is a suggestion, but it seems to be without foundation). In the 18th century Joshua Reynolds painted portraits historiés to try and raise the status of portraiture: he would far rather have been painting ‘history paintings’. Earlier generations though, especially in cases like this, sometimes used them to stress the sanctity of the sitters. The subjects here would have been the daughters of a wealthy Catholic family in Brussels – where Michaelina shared a studio and lived with her brother Charles – and this portrait may have been painted either because the parents were inordinately proud of their daughters, or because they wanted to demonstrate their eligibility for marriage: wealthy, beautiful, modest, saintly and virginal. Whatever the reason I am only too glad to enjoy the delicacy of depiction, the mastery of form and composition and the rich use of colour, not to mention the evocation of character, and the subtlety with which the identities of the Saints is presented.

The girls may be dressing up and playing make believe, but another reason why they are dressing up is to make us believe in these two saints and in the virtue of their lives. It is the great power of painting to make us believe. After all, when looking at this image there really are no sisters, no saints, no flowers or apples, not even a lamb: there is only paint. And yet, as we will see on Monday, Michaelina Wautier can make us believe that these things were there, that she saw them, and she painted them. And how well she painted them too! I think I’ll have to go to the exhibition in Ghent to see this painting in the flesh…

271 – Drunk on light

Georges Seurat, Study for ‘The Shore at Bas-Butin (Honfleur)’, 1886. Baltimore Museum of Art.

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times already, but The Courtauld’s enormously successful Seurat and the Sea is selling out regularly – but not too far in advance, fortunately (most days next week are still available, for example). I will be talking about the exhibition at 6pm this Monday, 23 March if you want any encouragement to book!  The following week, Monday 30 March, I will introduce the Royal Academy’s display of works by the wonderful Michaelina Wautier, which I will have seen just a couple of days before. This will give me time to assess whether she really was ‘one of Europe’s most important artists’ as the RA’s website claims. From what little I’ve seen in the flesh – and from photographs – she does seem to have been truly remarkable. However, I’m never entirely sure what the word ‘important’ means – there are so many different ways of assessing importance. I’m sure it will be one of the things that we will consider during the talk, though. Before then I am heading to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to see – and review – their next exhibition, Canaletto & Bellotto. This will be the first to compare the travels of the artists who, as well as being master and pupil, were also uncle and nephew. I will let you know what I’ve seen on Monday 20 April, focussing, as the exhibition will, on the artists’ travels outside of Venice. The above events are already in the diary, and soon I will add more: introductions to The Courtauld’s A View of One’s Own (landscapes by women) on 27 April, and Michelangelo and Rodin, at the Louvre, on 11 May – and I’ve already planned what I want to talk about after that.

If you do book any of these events, 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 then, when there’s time to spare, than 5 minutes before the talk! You should also get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these too will include the link.

This is how today’s painting, Seurat’s Study for ‘The Shore at Bas-Butin (Honfleur)’, appears in The Courtauld’s exhibition, and presumably how it is exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which owns it. A small wooden panel, measuring 17.1 x 26 cm, is framed by a flat white frame which must have at least twice the surface area of the painting itself. It is so often the way that the status of small works of art is proclaimed by giving them relatively large frames, thus making them take up more wall space. As a ploy it is perfectly understandable, but counter-productive for close viewing: it doesn’t necessarily help us to see them any better. Seurat did regularly exhibit such small works, though, either individually, or framed as a group. They were created either as works in their own right, or as studies for paintings on canvas. He also used them to get to know a motif better, an exploratory process which helped him to understand a particular location and so to decide which views to focus on. He gave these studies the name ‘croquetons’, a term derived from the French word ‘croquis’, meaning sketch. He produced them regularly during his short life, and after his premature death, at the age of 31, 163 were recorded in his studio. Like so many preparatory, or exploratory works, they are relatively freely painted, spontaneous, and sometimes (as far as I’m concerned) more interesting than the controlled and contained works which are derived from them.

In order to look at the imagery with greater clarity, I am going to cut out most of the frame.

We appear to be looking out over the sea, but a faint horizontal line of cream-coloured dots about halfway up the painting on the left would tell us – if we could read it more clearly – that we are looking across the mouth of the River Seine. Bas-Butin is on the Normandy Coast, very close to Honfleur, which Seurat visited in summer of 1886. It is on the other side of the river, and a little upstream, from Le Havre. The sky is a mixture of mottled dabs of light blue and cream, while the water varies from dark blues, near the shore, to greens further out, with the same cream colour intermixed throughout. This cream is the basic colour of the beach, a triangle of which appears at the bottom of the panel in the middle, and the cliff, also seen as a triangle, coming down from the top right of the painting. The bottom right corner is filled with vegetation, defined by a range of greens, blues and pinks. More patches of plants can be seen at the top of the cliff, and across its surface.

I took the photograph above myself, and, as usual, the works in the exhibition are illuminated from above. However flat the frame is, it still casts a shadow across the top of the painting, although there is very little we cannot see. The first image below is a rather low-resolution file (which also seems to be out of focus) from the Baltimore Art Gallery’s website, the second is my image with the shadow cut out.

There’s just a little bit of vegetation missing from the top right corner in my photograph – together with the equivalent strip of sky, of course. The colours are a bit different… probably the fault of my phone, although the following detail, which I also took, appears to be closer to the lighter, sunnier colours of the Baltimore file.

The detail focusses on the part of the composition which I think had attracted Seurat to this motif – the place where the lower point of the cliff (the triangle tumbling down from the top right hand corner) touches the upper point of the beach (the triangle reaching up from the bottom). The seaward boundaries of these areas continue as intersecting diagonals which, opposite the sea, define the area of vegetation in the bottom right corner. It is almost as if a strip of a cream-coloured ribbon, dividing the blue of the water from the green of the plants, has been twisted in the middle, bringing its two edges together to a single point. The just-off-vertical lines which cross the image are the result of the paint brush skipping over grooves in the panel which Seurat may well have scratched in to create exactly this sort of effect – although it’s not entirely clear to me why he wanted to do this.  

The horizon runs a little way above the kink which joins the cream triangles, and just below it you may be able to make out two vessels on the water. To the left of the cliff is a sailing boat, its mast and sail projecting above the horizon. To the left of that a horizontal row of dark dots, with a vertical line roughly in the middle, define a steamboat with its funnel. A little higher, and reaching to the left edge of the detail, are some of the cream dots which mark the opposite bank of the Seine. These undetailed details may be easier to read if I trim the image slightly.

I don’t know if that does make it any clearer. However, Seurat knew what he was looking at, and knew how he wanted to translate it into his own visual imagery – this study was for himself as much as anyone else. One of the things that makes it harder to read is the persistent repetition of the same colours, the result, I suspect, of both practical and stylistic choices. Seurat painted this study ‘en plein air’ (‘in the open air’) in front of his ‘motif’ (or ‘subject’), in true Impressionist fashion – even though he was in the process of re-imagining and re-inventing the Impressionists’ techniques. Plein air painting was made easier by the contemporary development of portable painting boxes, know as pochades or ‘boîtes à pouce’. The latter got its name because, like a palette, the box had a hole into which you could insert your thumb (‘pouce’ in French) to hold it more easily. The small wooden panel for the sketch could be inserted in the open lid of the box, with the palette, and paints, in the shallow box itself, which would be held horizontally. A small box could only contain a few different tubes of paint – and I assume that the fewer paints you took with you the easier it might be. Of course, the other reason for repeating the colours – the stylistic choice – was to create pictorial unity, and thus a harmonious composition. In this respect it is worthwhile comparing strips of the study from the far left and far right of the painting.

The strip on the left (oddly a bit out of focus, I realise) is almost equally sky at the top and sea at the bottom, with the opposite shore – just a few dabs of cream coloured paint – dividing them. On the right we see the cliff, the vegetation at the top (what little remains after I’ve cut out the shadow cast by the frame), and the vegetation at the bottom right corner. Notice how the cream colour of the cliff (on the right) can also be seen in a few dabs of paint at the bottom of the same strip, but also in the sky and sea on the left. But then the lighter greens of the vegetation – and to a lesser extent the darker greens – can also be seen in the sea on the left. The pale blue of the sky continues through the sea, but can also be seen in the vegetation on the right, and, to a very small extent, in the cliff as well. The darker blues of the sea are intensified in the vegetation at the bottom right. The same continuity of colours can be seen if we compare strips from the top and bottom.

I’ll let you look for the matching colours these two details, but suggest you pick out the creams and the light blues in particular. As suggested earlier, Seurat is seeking pictorial unity, showing us that this seascape, or ‘marine’, to give it the name he used, is all lit by the same light, and takes on the same colours. This makes sense, if we remember that the sky, cliff and beach could all be reflected in the water, and that the light reflecting from the water will in its turn fall on the cliff, beach and vegetation, thus having an effect on the way we see them. Seurat was also drawing on colour theory known and practiced by the Impressionists – although very subtly in this case. This theory was, of course, one of the key driving forces of his own personal technique. The creams and light blues can be seen as a lighter, less intense version of one of the main complementary pairings, blue and orange. Placing them next to one another helps to make the surface sparkle, thus creating a fresher image. In the case of this croqueton the individual pointillés (or ‘dots’) are relatively large – but in the finished painting based on this composition they become far more refined. Conveniently, both are included in The Courtauld’s exhibition – so here they are.

There are several differences between the two images, and it’s not just a matter of size (not that you can see that here): the Study measures 17.1 x 26 cm, while the finished painting is 65.5 x 82 cm. Unlike the Study, which is painted on wood, the finished work, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai, is on canvas. The proportions are considerable different, with the canvas far taller in proportion to its width. When buying supplies, Seurat always selected croquetons in this particular format. Each pre-prepared format had its own name which related to the genre of painting it was considered suitable for – and this one, not coincidentally, was known as a marine. As far as Seurat was concerned, this was also, presumably, the format which would fit into his boîte à pouce. Given the taller format of the canvas, there was some extra space, which Seurat filled at the bottom of the canvas. He added a broad, sandy path leading down to the beach, and the posts of the breakwaters (which help to prevent coastal erosion). There are also more fully formed plants in the bottom right corner. Notice how he subtly shifted the top of the cliff so it leads in from the top right corner, rather than from a little way along the top of the painting, making it more obviously a diagonal.

The smaller, more refined dots mean that features are more precisely defined. The canvas has a cloud in the sky – but if you look back to the Study you might be able to distinguish the sketchy way in which this is notated. The steamboat and distant shore are far clearer – and also echo one another in form. However, rather than the single sailboat, with its sail reaching above the horizon, in the canvas he has included two small yachts, creating a sense of perspective, and therefore a greater sense of distance. The variation in the colour of the sea – from blue near the shore, to a lighter green further out, is not only more marked, but also very subtle. In some way this is a reflection of what we see in the sky, where the colours are paler on the horizon, darkening towards the zenith, with touches of the darker blue at the very top of the painting. The whole has a calm, limpid atmosphere which is enhanced by the omnipresence of lighter tones, and especially of the cream colours of the beach and cliff. It is a celebration of light.

The summer of 1886 was the second of Seurat’s five marine campaigns, the subject of The Courtauld’s exhibition. Although one of his most productive, the weather was not always kind to Seurat that year. As he told Paul Signac in a letter written two weeks or more after his departure from Paris (quoted in Karen Serres’ superb catalogue),

“The wind and therefore the clouds have bothered me these past few days. The stability of the first days should come back … What else can I say? Well, that’s it for today, let us get drunk on light once again, it’s a consolation.”

Today’s Study was clearly painted on one of the days when the winds were gentle and the seas calm (after last week’s Sondheim, today I feel a Mozart aria coming on…). During the winter months Seurat worked on his more theoretical paintings in Paris, but he took his summers away from the city to clear his eyes. Perhaps as a result of this, the paintings we will be looking at on Monday all turned out like the memories of an ideal holiday: gentle and calm, with every element corresponding to what we wanted.

270 – Don’t sing a nocturne just yet

Anders Zorn, Midnight, 1891. Zornmuseet, Mora.

I am looking forward to paying a return visit to the wonderful exhibition I saw in Hamburg earlier this year for Anders Zorn (Part II) at 6:00pm on Monday, 16 March. This will be a second chance to enjoy the rich colour and painterly splendour of Sweden’s great artist, a friend and colleague of both John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla, and just as superb. The talk will be perfectly self-contained for anyone who couldn’t be there for Part I, and will include completely different, but equally fabulous images for those who could. The exhibition has moved, in a slightly different form, to Madrid, where it will be on show at the Fundaçion MAPFRE until 17 May. As you are unlikely to be able to see quite so many of this wonderful artist’s works in the same place for quite a few years – unless you head to his hometown of Mora, in Sweden – I would really recommend it. And if you can’t get there, I suppose the talk might be the next best thing! A week later, on Monday, 23 March, I will introduce The Courtauld’s enormously successful Seurat and the Sea. If you want to see the exhibition in person, book now if you can, as the tickets are rapidly selling out. Talking of popular exhibitions, last Sunday I tried to see Tate Modern’s Tracey Emin retrospective, but it was so crowded that I couldn’t even walk through the spaces. I’ll head back when I can (on a weekday, and when the rush has died down), and may plan a talk for a later date. Instead, on Monday 30 March, I will talk about the marvellous Michaelina Wautier, an unparalleled 17th century female artist who – surprise, surprise – has been almost completely forgotten. An exhibition of her work will have opened at the Royal Academy just a few days before, having arrived fresh from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – which, by then, will be hosting an exhibition dedicated to uncle and nephew Canaletto & Bellotto. This will be the first to compare their travels outside of Venice – to London and Vienna – and so to compare the paintings which were the result: I will talk about it on Monday 20 April. All of these events are already in the diary, but you can check there for anything else that might be coming up, including (potentially) The Courtauld’s A View of One’s Own (landscapes by women) and Michelangelo and Rodin, which will be at the Louvre.

If you do book any of these events, 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 it then than 5 minutes before the talk! You should then get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these will also include the link.

A woman is rowing away from us, heading towards the bank of what could either be a river or a lake (we can only see one bank, so it is impossible to tell). She is looking over her right shoulder to check her direction of travel. We can only see the bow (i.e. the front) of the boat, and our point of view suggests that the artist was a passenger, sitting towards the stern: we are effectively travelling with him. The weather is calm, without even the hint of a breeze. If there were one, the surface of the water would surely be rippling, but as it is, the mirror-like surface reflects the emerald-green grass and verdant profusion of bushes and trees growing on the bank, as well as the lavender sky and distant purple hills.

A thin line of reddish-brown runs through the middle of the green. This is the river bank, standing proud rather than sloping into the water. Because of the freedom of Zorn’s technique, the light green grass on the flat surface of the bank and its reflection in the water are rendered with different brushstrokes. He has not restricted himself to exact symmetry, and this creates an ambiguity: is that the reflection of the grass you can see below the bank, or are there also light green plants growing out of the water? The bushes beyond the grass are a mixture of light and dark green according to the fall of the sunlight. Judging by the yellow/gold light on the woman’s hair and on the back of her neck, the sun is very close to the horizon, and so presumably not reaching all of the bushes. The trees are darker still, which could either be due to the species, or to the fall of light – or both. Whatever the reason, the increasing darkness of the plants as you move away from the water helps to create a sense of depth. The interior of the boat is a rich, orangey-red, the separate brushstrokes stretching the full range from touches of yellow to a glowing vermillion.

Behind the woman’s head the green bank stretches off into the distance. Her hair is plaited, and fixed up in a bun. It is only brightly lit (and not that brightly even then) on our right. The horizontal fall of light on her hair, together with the colour of the sky and hills, suggests that it is either dawn or dusk. I find the two pale, vertical forms behind her head hard to read, but the more I look, the more I think they are the sails of yachts moored at the riverbank.

Zorn has carefully observed the geometrical cross-section of the oar handle (hexagonal, but tapering to a rounded handle, I would suggest) and models it with long, smooth brushstrokes of light, mid- and dark brown on the three visible facets. The rowlocks (pronounced rollocks) – ‘fittings attached to the gunwhale (top edge) of a boat that hold an oar in place, serving as a pivot point or fulcrum for rowing’ – are sketchily depicted, looking a bit like two wooden hands reaching around the oar. However, the firm grasp of the woman’s right hand on this oar, with the index finger projecting slightly more than the other three, and the thumb wrapped around the end, suggest that everything is in working order. Her green, striped skirt billows out from her waist, kinking in over her lap and down to her knees, and flares out slightly over the wooden bench on which she is sitting. Dark marks on the orange/yellow interior of the boat suggest the nails which are holding the planks in place. Significantly, the gunwhale (see above) leads directly from the bottom left corner of the painting (which is the bottom left corner of this detail) thus leading our eye into the painting along the diagonal which runs from bottom left to top right.

In the bottom right corner of the painting, the left oar (on our right) has far less clearly defined facets, maybe the result of the lighting – which is true of so much in this painting. The interior of the boat here looks brown, like wood – which is, after all, what it’s made of – and this confirms the position of the sun. At the horizon, its rich orange glow colours the interior of the boat where it falls, on our left. The woman’s left hand is, if anything, slightly better articulated than her right, with the knuckles standing proud, catching the light of the sun, and the lower joints darker as they wrap around the oar. The signature is painted against the brown interior of the boat, just above some yellow-green fabric lying under the oar. In three lines it says ‘Zorn/Mora 91/midnatt’ – the artist’s name, the location and date, and the title of the painting: Midnatt (in Swedish), or Midnight. But the sun is just rising or setting!

Anders Zorn, the artist, was born in Mora, in the Swedish province of Dalarna, in 1860. At the age of 15 he headed south to Stockholm to attend the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. He left the Academy in 1881 – without graduating – and moved to London the following year. He returned to Sweden in 1885 and married Emma Lamm. The couple spent an extended period in Paris (1888-1896), although they returned to Sweden for regular visits, as well as travelling extensively elsewhere. In 1896 they settled back in Zorn’s hometown, Mora, and remained there until the artist’s death in 1920 – although they did continue to travel widely during that time. Mora lies at 61° north – on a very similar latitude to Muckle Flugga (at 60° 51’), which, with exception of the odd rock, is the northernmost point of Shetland, and therefore also of the United Kingdom. Zorn described this painting as “a bright and chilly Nordic summer’s night” – and yet, to the eyes of those of us living further south, it doesn’t look like night at all. Although this is not the land of the midnight sun (the Arctic Circle lies at 66° north), summer nights can be remarkably luminous this far north. It reminds of a song from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, which is set in Sweden. Shortly after the couplet “The sun sits low/ As low as it’s going to go,” it concludes with the following verse:

The sun won’t set
It’s fruitless to hope or to fret
It’s dark as it’s going to get
The hands on the clock turn
But don’t sing a nocturne
Just yet

If you would like to hear the whole song (which is relatively short) sung by the original Broadway cast, just click here.

The pictures so far have all come from a digital file I found online (I’m afraid I can’t remember which one), and the colours are, I think, slightly heightened, if not garish. The details just above and below are ones I took myself, and I think they give a better idea of the true colour, and certainly give a better sense of the surface of the painting, how it is worked and how the paint is applied – even if you can see the gallery light reflecting off the top edges of the brushstrokes. Between them I think they emphasize how the woman rowing the boat is in harmony with her natural surroundings, her mauve top echoing the sky and hills (and their reflections) while her green skirt relates more to the vegetation on the river bank. She is located in the midst of earth, air and water, with the fire of the sun illuminating both her and the interior of the boat.  As such, I find it somehow significant that the red-brown line of the riverbank coincides with the position of her mouth. I don’t know what relevance that has, but it somehow seems apt, and is (to me, at least) visually satisfactory – she is at one with the landscape. The blouse is beautifully painted, with dabs and dashes of the lavender of the sky and the purple of the hills alternating with a pink, not unlike her flushed cheeks. It is as if Zorn is nodding toward Seurat, and his Divisionist brushstroke, which was first fully realised in 1884 with Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte (the subject of another Sondheim musical!), eight years before Midnight was painted. However, I don’t remember Zorn using the Divisionist – or Pointilliste – brushstroke anywhere else.

Looking at both hands together it is immediately apparent that the woman is changing direction. If she were rowing in a straight line, her hands would be next to each other. The hand on our right is lower down, suggesting (to me at least, who has very little experience of rowing), that she is holding the starboard oar (‘right’ in the direction of travel) out of the water, whilst pulling hard on the port oar. I’m trying to work this out logically – although logic often fails me. I think this means that the boat would turn to port – which would imply that she is steering towards the bank. Who knows where she is going, or why, at this time of night? Maybe she is quite simply heading home after a party – the Midsummer Dance of one of Zorn’s most famous paintings, perhaps? We will see it on Monday, when one of the themes we will cover will be Zorn’s return to the province of Dalarna, and the paintings – like this one – that he continued to paint on his regular visits ‘home’ even before he settled back there.

269 – A – Z (II) – William Nicholson was an Artist

William Nicholson, A was an Artist, from An Alphabet, published by William Heinemann, 1897. UK Government Art Collection.

A few weeks back I wrote a post From A – Z playing on the idea that the letters were Anders Zorn’s initials. I hadn’t remembered at the time that one of the earliest independent works by William Nicholson – whose brilliant paintings, prints, theatre designs and book illustrations I will be discussing this Monday, 2 March at 6pm – was an illustrated alphabet. Today I want to introduce the exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery by looking at the first image from the sequence – the letter ‘A’. However, the following talk, on 16 March, will also be A – Z (II), or rather Anders Zorn (Part II) – a second chance to enjoy the rich colour and painterly splendour of Sweden’s great artist. A friend and colleague of both John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla, his art is every bit as brilliant as theirs. The talk will be perfectly self-contained for anyone who couldn’t be there for Part I, and will include completely different, but equally fabulous images for those who could.

This will be followed on 23 March by a second visit this spring to The Courtauld for their hit show Seurat and the Sea. If you want to see the exhibition in the flesh, I’d book now. I was planning to go this week, but it’s sold out until the second week of March – so I’ve booked then, in plenty of time for the talk. However, I won’t get to see the other exhibition there for a while, so on 30 March I will talk about Tate Modern’s Tracey Emin retrospective. There will be more on that in the diary soon.

If you do book any of these events, 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 it then than 5 minutes before the talk! You should then get reminders 24 hours and 15 minutes before the talk, and these will also include the link.

This year’s trips with Artemisia are rapidly booking up, but there are still a few places left to visit Strasbourg from 5-8 June. As well as the city itself, with its rich history, one of France’s most beautiful cathedrals and a notable collection of old master paintings, we will have a day trip to Colmar, a truly picturesque town and home to Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, one of those remarkable renaissance paintings which really should be seen in the flesh.

Today we have a print – a hand-coloured woodcut on paper. It is the first in a set of 26 – the entire alphabet – all of which are included in the exhibition I will discuss on Monday. Admittedly this isn’t a great photograph – it’s one I took in the exhibition, complete with reflections, but we’ll get to better ones. I wanted you to see the full size of the paper, with a wide, white border around the printed image, and Nicholson’s signature floating below. Often a print like this would be framed with a mount covering most of the border, leaving only the imagery visible – but here the whole extent of the sheet can be seen. In many ways I think it is preferable, as it shows the balance of positive and negative space that Nicholson intended, allowing the bold, powerful imagery to be read clearly. This has then been sympathetically framed in a simple black, which echoes the printed frame around the imagery of the woodcut itself. The red at the outer edge is the colour of the wall in the gallery. The first two letters of the alphabet are displayed on one wall, with the remaining 24 on another. They appear together like this:

Why haven’t they hung them in alphabetical order, though? I always get hung up on little (and probably irrelevant!) details like this. I suspect this choice was made because it is pictorially more satisfactory to have the two figures looking in towards each other: it makes the ‘composition’ of the hang look more contained. But it is also relevant that these two prints are separated from the rest of the sequence because they are both portraits. ‘A’ is a self portrait, while ‘B’ is Nicholson’s friend, former collaborator, and brother-in-law, James Pryde. ‘Beggar’ might appear to be an odd choice for an illustrated alphabet, let alone a friend, but not if you know a bit more about these two artists. They were students together at Hubert von Herkomer’s Art School in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and their friendship was strengthened when Nicholson married Pryde’s sister Mabel – also an artist – in 1893. From 1894 the two men collaborated to design posters for theatrical productions and other advertisements. Notice that the beggar is holding a staff. Rather than using their own names, the pair took their collective title from one they saw – and were apparently amused by – printed on a sack of hay: Beggarstaff. As J. and W. Beggarstaff, most of their surviving work was produced in 1895 and 1896, and, although other designs are documented in later years, most are lost, and their appearance unknown – but they don’t appear to have collaborated after 1900.

Is it a coincidence that An Alphabet was Nicholson’s first major independent commission, and that, if placed in alphabetical order, the two turn their backs on each other? Or that Pryde is cast as the beggar, with an uphill struggle ahead of him? These days, Pryde’s work isn’t nearly as well-known as Nicholson’s, and, as his Wikipedia entry states, ‘He is principally remembered as one of the Beggarstaffs’. However, it’s not as if Nicholson looks entirely positive about his own artistic future, given the intriguing caption – A was an Artist – but more of that later.

The boldness and clarity of conception of this image is what helps to make it memorable. Both colour and line are kept to a minimum, with a matt black background in the upper half, and a grey/beige colour for the floor. These limited means show the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, very much in vogue in the second half of the 19th century, and collected by artists such as Monet and Van Gogh. If you think about it, the composition of today’s print is not entirely dissimilar to that of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers… Japanese art was also an influence on many other artists, including Whistler, whom Nicholson greatly admired. Indeed, it was Whistler who had introduced him to another William – William Heinemann – who published An Alphabet in 1897. The limited colour range of A was an Artist is also typical of Whistler – just think of Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (see 151 – Mommie dearest).

The artist (a self portrait by Nicholson, as I’ve said) sits on the ground with his knees to one side and his feet towards us, resting his left hand on the ground on another print from An Alphabet. The label in the exhibition says that ‘Nicholson depicts himself as a pavement artist’, but I’ve always thought that the term ‘pavement artist’ refers to someone who draws – with chalk, usually – on the pavement itself. I’m not sure about its application to a man who has laid a print on the pavement. This reminds me more of the people who hawk prints at tourist destinations, or along the park fences on Piccadilly and Bayswater Road in London. Another print is propped up on the right-hand side, but cut off by the bold black frame.

Nicholson shows himself in profile, which makes the image less personal, but also stronger. His black hair is apparently brilliantined, with the shine created by bright patches of white paper in the black ink, suggesting the reflection of light. A woodcut is a relief print, meaning that areas which are not to be coloured are cut away. It is the top surface, the original surface of the block, which takes the ink. The reflections of light in the hair were made by cutting into the block so that the ink wouldn’t reach them. Thin lines, like the wrinkle in between Nicholson’s nose and cheek, or the folds on the scarf and waistcoat, are especially bravura examples of cutting, as they are made by thin ridges of wood standing away from the rest of the block which was cut away all around them. It would be so easy to take them out with one slip of the chisel or gouge, and impossible to replace.

Nicholson’s head is upright and his chin held high, suggesting a certain pride, even if he is seated on the ground, and dressed in his shirtsleeves. Yes, he has a waistcoat, but without a tie or jacket this outfit would read as working class, suggesting the subject is a humble street trader.

This reading is confirmed by the rolled-up sleeves – a real sense that Nicholson is at the ‘coal face’ of making, entirely down-to-earth, but proud of his honest labours. To the left of the knees we can see what is effectively the ‘horizon’ – the join between the ground and the black background. To the right, the horizon would appear to be lower – but that is the result of Nicholson’s shadow cast on the ground: the light is coming from the left. This shadow has the same intensity as the shadows in the folds of the trousers and the background itself, all of which are therefore unified into one area of black. This lack of variation in tonal values is another of the features which makes the image so clear and so striking. Oddly, the left arm, resting on the floor, does not cast a shadow – but that is presumably to simplify the composition. It also helps to draw a parallel with the image propped up on the right: Nicholson’s left arm reaches out behind him, and rests on the floor, in a similar way to the figure in the print marked ‘D’, whose right arm reaches forward and rests on a stick. There is some form of symmetry, or echo, between these two figures, which implies that the selection of this print is relevant to the interpretation of the image as a whole. The flesh tones of Nicholson’s arms may have a pink wash, but I might be imagining that – or it might have faded. However, the clothing of the figure in the print on the floor is coloured red.

The print of ‘P’, like ‘A’, has a grey-beige floor and plain black background. We’ll see below what these images were, and consider what relevance they have to Nicholson himself. However, what most intrigues me is the choice of the word ‘was’ in the caption, A was an Artist. What was Nicholson thinking? Why not A is an Artist? He was only just starting his career, after all. He was 25 when this print was published, with another 52 years to live (not that he was to know that). Is it a sign of insecurity, not knowing if he could make it on his own without the help of James Pryde (on whom he has, nevertheless, turned his back, and who he has imagined as a beggar)? Or is it the opposite? Maybe Nicholson had supreme confidence in his legacy, and knew that people would still be looking at this woodcut in the future – as indeed we are in 2026. The print reminds us that we are looking at a portrait of an artist who was working in the past, and a self portrait, at that. As such he could have used the image to illustrate a different letter: I was an Artist. This works as a statement, even if it doesn’t function in the standard terms of an Alphabetical sequence. W was an Artist would also make sense, as would N… Whatever the explanation, the phrase is strange, and it is the only print out of 26 in which he uses the word ‘was’. Elsewhere we have the format of B for Beggar, which is one of sixteen uses of the word ‘for’ on its own. There are eight examples of ‘is for’, and one where it is just the letter and the word (X Xylographer – a man cutting a woodblock). ‘A’, though, is where the alphabet starts, and where Nicholson starts – and where he all but suggests he is already finished!

I said above that these are ‘hand-coloured woodcuts’ – but what does that mean? Compare and contrast the next two images.

The one above is a detail from a version in the British Museum, while the other is a detail of the print in the UK Government Art Collection – the one in the exhibition that we have been looking at. I hope you can see that the basic composition, printed in black, is exactly the same: it was printed from the original block. However, the red colour on the print is applied differently. In the BM version (top) the red goes all the way down to the hem of the man’s garment, with a slightly darker brushstroke over the chest. The face is also consistently pink. In the Government print (bottom) there is less colour on the face, the paint does not go down to the hem, but does colour some of the sleeve over the right shoulder. They are, simply, hand-coloured: Nicholson took each individual black and white print, and added colour to the robes of the figure with a brush and watercolour paint. He also added a grey wash to the clothing of the self portrait and grey-beige to the floor. This technique was highly personal, making each print a unique ‘original’, but it was enormously time-consuming. When the sequence was re-released, it was reproduced via lithography: the edition was more consistent, and cheaper to produce.  

But what are the two prints he appears to be selling? And how relevant were they to his personal life, and his career as an artist?

D is for Dandy would turn out to be entirely relevant. One of the aspects of Nicholson’s life and creativity that the exhibition explores – and which I will touch on this Monday – is his self-presentation. Like many artists, he was one of his own best creations, and was always dressed to the nines, whether formally in public, or informally at home – his dressing gown was notorious! He also loved the precise shade of yellow which this Dandy is wearing. Not only did he use it in the costume designs for one of Noël Coward’s earliest plays, but he also had a favourite waistcoat in this shade: in a family portrait by William Orpen (which is in the exhibition) he is wearing it underneath the dressing gown…

Notice how, being a print, in A was an Artist the pose of the Dandy is reversed, a mirror image of the original. However, he has made sure that the letter ‘D’ is the right way round, and appears at the bottom left of the image, as it does in the original – it is a deliberate choice to make sure that the ‘D’ is seen – a confirmation that the identification of the subject is relevant. Unlike ‘A’, D is for Dandy has a white background and floor, with a single thin line for the horizon. Nicholson omits this line in the version seen in A was an Artist, presumably for simplicity’s sake.

There are minor variations in P for Publican. The long, sleeveless coat is maroon, rather than the reddish pink used in Artist, and the front panel of the coat is completely and consistently coloured. Although the image is reversed (with a simplified, and shorter, pipe), he has made sure we can read the ‘P’, but has left it in the bottom right, its position in a mirror image. While the choice of this character alongside his self portrait might appear strange, it is – surprisingly perhaps – another autobiographical reference. When he married Mable Pryde in 1893 it was without her parents’ permission, or even knowledge. They eloped, married in Ruislip, and went to live in a former public house, the Eight Bells in Denham, Buckinghamshire. Shortly afterwards James Pryde came to visit for a couple of weeks – but stayed for a couple of years. They were, indeed, at home in the pub. Or, put another way, they were the publicans…

As it turns out, the basic elements of this composition would serve Nicholson well. In several of his still life paintings, and at least one portrait, the main subject rings out against a profoundly black background. The difference with the later works – as we will see on Monday – is that these subjects are brilliantly detailed, almost mesmerically so. However, the flashing, flashy highlights we can see in the slicked-back hair of this print have their own life in Williamson’s virtuosic application of oil paint which became a hallmark of his portraits and still life paintings. A was an Artist who started as a printmaker.