Day 13 – Cosimo Fanzago, Chiostro Grande, c. 1623, Certosa di San Martino, Naples.

Originally posted on 31 March 2020

Well that’s a surprise! It’s not a painting. I think I did say, almost two weeks ago, that I would be talking about a painting every day, but quickly realised there’s more to life than flat things – and I love painting, sculpture and architecture equally, so today’s #pictureoftheday is a picture of a sculpture in Naples. To be honest, I really want to talk about the space it’s in, the ‘Chiostro Grande’, or large cloister of the Certosa di San Martino – or Charterhouse of St Martin – in Naples but I suspect this image will better at grabbing you attention! 

It’s not entirely clear who designed he cloister, to be honest, although it is traditionally attributed to architect and sculptor Cosimo Fanzago. Born near Bergamo in the North of Italy, he made his name in Naples. He was certainly working in the Chiostro Grande around 1623, but might have added the decoration to a slightly earlier structure. At the very least he was responsible for the architectural frameworks of the doors in the corners of the cloister, and the sculptures which inhabit them: they are all fantastic, but this is probably the best.

It represents the Blessed Niccolò Albergati, a Carthusian monk who became a Bishop in 1417, and then a Cardinal in 1426. Five years later, working as a diplomat in Antwerp, he met Jan van Eyck who painted his portrait –which looks nothing like this sculpture. I’d trust van Eyck, though, as Fanzago is clearly creating a dramatic showcase with which to display his ability to make marble move. Albergati wasn’t beatified (the first step towards being recognised as a Saint) until 1744, but his inclusion in the Chiostro Grande in the 1620s shows that he’d been revered by the Carthusians for a long time. 

The sculpture shows Fanzago at his very best, but to appreciate it fully you’d have to go and visit, as you need to move around it and see it from more than one point of view. You would see it frontally like this while walking along one of the arcades in the cloister (imagine it in the far distance in the second picture). Framed by the cool, grey marble, the brilliant white figure stands out, both in terms of colour and sculptural form. It’s like he’s standing behind an oval window, his bible resting on the windowsill, with his habit flowing out into our space. His left wrist rests on the book allowing his hand to fall forward towards us, and he props his right elbow on the other side of the book, his wrist bent back so that his long, curving fingers rest on his face. The sculpture are deeply cut – especially behind the book, creating a dark shadow – and every joint is beautifully articulated, with each finger extended differently, and a large space opening up between his chest and right arm – which you can only really appreciate from the left-hand side.  In this photograph he appears to be turning away from us, but imagine approaching along the arm of the cloister which joins from the left. Not only would you see the looping form of the arm and hand, but you would also see him looking down towards you, assessing you, fully aware of your actions, perhaps: curious, if not judgemental. This is a sculpture which is perfectly suited to its location.

Wherever you go in the world, the best way to understand it is to find a place where you can see as much of it as possible in one go – go to the top of a tower, if you can. Or go up a hill, which is where the Certosa is, overlooking the bay of Naples, as that’s where the Carthusian monks decided to establish their monastery. From the terrace outside you can get a very good sense of the extent of the city, of its limits in Greek and Roman times, and of its expansion in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries (although the latter is rather distressing). It’s the perfect place to go.

I’ve been wanting to write about the Carthusians for a while – ever since #POTD 6 as it happens, as the artist of that mesmerising Still Life, Juan Sánchez Cotán, entered the order in his forties, in the middle of a career as a successful artist. The Carthusian Order is intriguing, and the monks would be doing very well right now. Founded by St Bruno of Cologne in 1084, the order is a combination of two different types of monastic lifestyle: eremitic and coenobitic. The former is the life of a hermit, withdrawn from the world, and solitary. The second implies belonging to a community. The Carthusians manage to do both by being hermits within a community.

There were – and are – two types of Carthusian: cloistered monks, who live a life of prayer and contemplation, who are destined to become Fathers, and the lay brothers. The choirmonks all live in the cloister, and each one has their own split-level cell, built to a uniform design. On the lower level is a room in which to store wood for a stove, and a workshop for manual labour. The rest of this level is given over to a walled garden, used by the monks for prayer and contemplation, and to grow food for themselves and the rest of the community. On the upper level there is a small area for prayer, which adjoins a larger space, a combined bedroom, dining room and study. Each monk eats lunch and supper alone, the food being delivered via a turntable next to the door of the cell by one of the lay brothers, who are responsible for the practical running of the monastery, but who also lead a life of silent prayer and contemplation. You can see these ‘turns’, as they are called, on the far side of the cloister in the second picture, and all around the cloister in the third. Of the seven daily services, the cloistered monks say four on their own, leaving their cells three times a day for communal worship. I’ve read that they go for a walk in the countryside once a week, and only then can they speak. However, another source said this outing would take place once a year, and yet another, never. On Sundays and special feast days there are communal meals, but these are eaten in silence.

Basically they are all self isolating and socially distancing while at the same time receiving home deliveries and remaining part of a wider community – we could all be doing it now. The first time I visited San Martino I wanted to move right in. Having passed through the church, which is richly decorated in brightly coloured marbles – quite overwhelming – I stepped out into the Chiostro Grande, with its pure white architecture, and it took my breath away. The weather was pretty much like it is in these photographs, too – clear blue skies, and pleasantly warm. Not only that, but I quickly realised that almost all of the cells have sea views – check out the third illustration. It was an especially good place to be in times of plague: the monks went out very rarely, so they were unlikely to catch anything. In any case, they lived high above the city, well outside the city walls, so disease would not reach them. Monks also had an age-old tradition of washing their hands before meals, so they were even less likely to get ill. As a result it became abundantly clear to the people of Naples that God was watching over the Carthusians, especially when, in 1656, the plague killed around half of the 300,000 inhabitants of the city, and the monks didn’t even get sick. What a brilliant place to live. Mind you, the only way out was up – to Heaven – leaving their earthly remains in the Cemetery that is visible in the second image. You can see it on the right, surrounded by a balustrade, which Fanzago topped with rather cheery skulls. I suppose it’s not how we’d choose to live today. Apart from the fact that in 1907 a twenty-year-old architectural student from Switzerland visited the Certosa di Galuzzo, just outside Florence, and made a number of drawings – the fourth picture comes from one of his sketchbooks.

The idea of living separately as part of a community made sense to him. Everyone has some open space of their own and room to work, sleep and eat, while being part of a community, with all the infrastructure necessary for good living easily to hand in the same building. Initially the young Charles-Édouard Jeanneret arranged these units horizontally. But then, he piled them up into the sky, so people would living like crows – an idea related to the name by which we know him today: Le Corbusier – ‘the crow-like one’. Sadly a lot of bad architecture was influenced by his ideas, but I can’t help thinking that the ideas themselves were necessarily wrong: it was when the need for individual open space started to get cut out as ‘inefficient’ that it became less desirable. Perhaps I’ll move into San Martino after all.

Day 12 – Jan Steen, The Effects of Intemperance, about 1663-5, National Gallery, London.

Originally posted on 30 March 2020

I thought about this painting the other day, as I was taking my daily exercise. I saw someone walking directly towards me right down the middle of the pavement who clearly wasn’t going to shift out of the way, so I stepped out into the middle of the road and cut along the dotted line as if I were saving a voucher for my own well-being. And I thought, whatever happened to ringing bells and shouting ‘unclean, unclean’, even if we are all healthy? After all, we can’t know that we are.

So naturally I thought about this painting, ‘The Effects of Intemperance’, by Jan Steen. You’re probably already worrying about social distancing, but they are a family unit, just a somewhat dysfunctional one. Mum has fallen asleep, pipe in hand, while her eldest daughter is giving the parrot a drink of wine. Two of the kids are feeding the cat a rather impressive pie, another throws roses at a pig, while the last, on the far left, has got his hand in his mother’s purse. It’s appalling behaviour, why are they doing this? Any of you who are home schooling probably understand the situation far better than I do, but notice the flagon resting on the ground by the eldest girl’s hand – it has toppled over and the lid is open, but nothing is coming out. Mum’s drunk the lot – with the exception of the glass being held by her daughter. The temptation to hit the bottle at the present time must be enormous. Mum’s clearly had a bit too much and has fallen asleep. So the kids are running riot. 

So far it all makes sense, but who would dream of giving wine to a parrot? Well, what do parrots do? They talk, for one thing – or rather, they copy what other people do. They parrot. Now look at the parrot, and look at the mother – the posture, the curve of the back, the position of the head, and the angle of the head to the body, not to mention the colours – greys, reds, and whites. They are the same. In image as well as in behaviour, the bird is parroting the mother – she has been drinking, and so the parrot has too. Before long, they will both fall off their perches. The mother is setting a bad example. To quote a Dutch proverb commonly illustrated by Steen, ‘As the old sing, so the young pipe’.

The daughter will be the next to fall off her perch. We know this, because she is holding a pretzel. Nothing wrong with a harmless, salty snack, you might think, unless we look at a genre of literature that was popular in the Netherlands in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, the Emblem Book. Each emblem has a title and a picture, together with some text explaining the connection between the two. One of these emblems features a pretzel, being held on either side by the little fingers of two different hands. It seems that the Dutch used to play a game with pretzels, very similar to the game I used to play after Sunday lunch roughly once a month, when we’d had roast chicken: pulling the wish bone. Each person grabs hold of one end of the Y-shaped bone and pulls until it breaks, and the person who gets the larger part of the bone wins. The same rules apply for the pretzel. But who, in the emblem, is playing this game? The text explains that, from the moment they are born, children are a prize fought over by God and the Devil: who would get the larger part? If this young lady doesn’t mend her ways – and follows the example of her mother – she will go to the Devil. 

What about the children feeding the cat? It’s clearly a waste of good food, and their lives could be similarly wasted. The image of the boy throwing roses to a pig comes from another emblem, which is ultimately derived from the teachings of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew: ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you’. If I had any pearls, I’d certainly hold on to them. As for roses and pigs, ‘they don’t go well together’, to quote the title of emblem, so again, life, and its beautiful possibilities, are being wasted. And finally, the boy stealing? Well, that’s just criminal, and it’s where Steen’s light-hearted touch gets a little bit heavy.

Whose fault is all this dreadful behaviour? Well, of course, it’s the mother’s fault. She hasn’t been doing her duty. But, you might ask, what about the father? I remember asking that question to a group of children once (taking care not to assume that everyone lives with two parents), only to receive the answer from one of the seven-year-old lads, in loud and ringing tones worthy of Barbara Windsor in Eastenders, ‘Ee’s messin er abaaaaaht!’ And how right he was.

You can see Dad at the far right of painting, in the background, a young woman on his lap, and he’s got a whole pie to himself. Why is he behaving like that? Again, it’s the mother’s fault, of course. If she had been a good wife, he wouldn’t have run off with someone else. Of course he’s in the right – he is on the side of the church, which is shown directly above him. Now you might be thinking, ‘But surely, she’s hit the bottle because he’s run off with a younger model’. But that’s because you’re not living in the Dutch Republic in the 17^th Century. Or 1950s England, for that matter, when, I’m led to believe, mothers were still saying to their daughters, ‘If you don’t give him what he wants he’ll only go and look for it somewhere else’.

What’s going to happen to the mother next? Or to put that question another way, what can you see hanging over her? I love it when paintings can be so directly translated into words. Well, in this case, she has a basket hanging over her head. In it you can see some sticks and a crutch, as well as a rattle dangling down the left-hand side. Dutch society said that, if a wife proved to be a disappointment, she could be sent back home without her dowry. She could end up homeless. She would be beaten for her wrong-doing (the sticks), and might get ill (the crutch). And if she got really ill, she would have to warn people by shaking the rattle: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’

All this is dreadful. It is unbelievably harsh. And yet the painting is – well – fun. It is, after all, one of the very few paintings in the National Gallery where someone is actually smiling. So what is the artist saying? Steen is, of course, a product of his time, and the Dutch Republic had the first real art market. As a result, it also had the first real art collectors. Rather than most paintings being commissioned, or ‘made to measure’, a lot of the work was ‘off the peg’ – so if you wanted a particular genre of painting you would go to a particular artist. If you wanted a fun, satirical painting, you would go to Jan Steen, for example. A consequence of this was that artists’ incomes were not guaranteed, and many of them had a second job. Jan Vermeer was an art dealer, for example. Jan Steen ran a pub. Yes! He sold the very alcohol which could so easily prove to be the mother’s ruin. He would have seen drunkenness and its results every day.

I once asked a group of children – possibly the same ones – what the ‘moral’ of this painting is. ‘Don’t drink or smoke’ came back the answer. I could foresee enormous problems for some of them if this got back home – and in any case, that’s not the message. Even if it were, Jan Steen softens his lesson with humour. He would never put anything quite so bluntly – nor was he so entirely proscriptive. ‘Just look at this’, he says, ‘and now, make up your own minds’. We now call the painting ‘The Effects of Intemperance’ – or basically, ‘Don’t Drink and Smoke Too Much’. In other words, as the ads say, ‘Please Drink Responsibly’. And while you’re at it, wash your hands and stay at home. 

Day 11 – Lucas Cranach the Elder, Cupid complaining to Venus, 1526-7, National Gallery, London.

Originally posted on 29 March 2020

I’ve had a request to talk about Cranach, partly to make up for the fact that the exhibition at Compton Verney, which opened on 14 March, can no longer be seen. I’m delighted to do so, although at this point, I must put my cards on the table. He is not my favourite artist. Not every artist can be (though most of them are…). Every artist’s career develops in a different way, but there are certain set patterns. Some just get better and better (Rembrandt), some get better and level off – at a consistently high level (Caravaggio) or an average one (no names – or maybe Sickert, who often painted in a colour I would describe as mediochre), some go up and down (Hockney) while some get better, get good, level out, then tail off. I’m afraid I’d put both Canaletto and Cranach in this last category, as in both the endless repetitions, whether of motifs or formulae – or entire images – make their late work seem automatic and ultimately uninteresting.

That said, Canaletto is one of my favourite artists (his not-so-good was better than many artists’ best), and Cranach is not only an important artist, both as portraitist, and PR guru for Martin Luther, but also created paintings that both delight and charm, which contain passages of extreme beauty. Today’s painting is one of these – his ‘Cupid complaining to Venus’.

Unlike Botticelli’s ‘Birth’ (#POTD 8) there is no mock modesty here – Cranach’s Venus is brazen. It’s not often you wander around in the woods with no clothes, but accessorising your birthday suit with a chunky gold chain and a red plush hat trimmed with fur can only look louche. Particularly given the shape of the hat, its colour and the fact that it is trimmed with fur – I’ll leave it to your own imaginations to decide what it was that Cranach was really thinking about. Also, she is clearly standing astride a branch, rubbing her foot along it, her left arm holding another branch above her head so we see her apparently smoothly shaved armpit. When I was at drama school I was told that, in medieval dance, ladies never lifted their arms above their shoulders, it’s just not ladylike. I would suggest that the same should apply here, and that Venus is being deliberately provocative. But you’d probably realised. Not only that, but she’s looking at you. Yes, you! And it’s an apple tree. It brings to mind other paintings of naked women under apple trees – I’m just showing you the second illustration as an example that I have chosen at random. Apart from the fact that it’s anything but random, of course, as it’s also by Cranach and it was painted at about the same time. There is even some suggestion that the two might have been painted to be seen together. Its long-term home is the Courtauld, just down the road from the National Gallery.

This is ‘Adam and Eve’, of course, and we’ve got to the point in the story where Eve is handing Adam an apple, and he’s clearly not sure what to do with it. It’s not obvious whether Eve has taken a bite yet (in some paintings it is – you can see the bite marks), but he certainly has not. It is purely by chance that they are standing behind low-lying branches, thus fortuitously preserving their modesty. Mind you, if I were Adam I’d definitely be wary of those antlers. 

In this painting, Eve is looking at Adam, holding out an apple, her left hand clasping a branch, provocatively showing him her armpit and tempting him to take what she has on offer. And that’s exactly what Venus is doing in today’s painting: looking at you, tempting you to take what she has on offer. But in a thoroughly Christian society, which Cranach’s was (a Protestant one, as it happens) the pagan subject matter is justified by its moral – Christian – tone. That is an apple tree, this is temptation, and you would be wrong to fall for it. It’s a tease. 

And Cupid? What’s going on there? Well, look at the third image: he is holding a curiously shaped and patterned object, there are insects on his chest, arm and forehead, and he reaches up to his head, looking to his mother in some distress. The ‘object’ is a honeycomb, and the insects are bees – he has been stung. And what do you do, as a small child (albeit a minor deity with wings) when you’ve been stung by a bee? You go and tell mummy. And what does mummy do? Ignores him completely. Not only that, but her right hand is held down towards him, as if to say ‘Sshh! Darling! Not now! I’m flirting with the viewer’. 

Cranach included an inscription at the top right of the painting, so we do know what is going on, even if it is written in Latin. Artists weren’t as ‘uneducated’ as we sometimes think. It’s a reference to ‘Idyll 19’ by the Ancient Greek poet Theocritus, writing in the first half of the 3^rd Century BC. The verse is also called ‘The Honeycomb Stealer’, which I prefer, as ‘Idyll-19’ sounds like a highly infectious strain of poetry. What has happened is that Cupid has reached into the hive to take the honeycomb, and the bees have flown out and stung him. The moral here is not ‘do not steal honey’. After all, look at the shape of the hole in which the bees built their hive, while at the same time remembering (a) this is an apple tree, seen as the tree of temptation, (b) the act of reaching in, and (c) the shape of Venus’s hat. I’ll leave the rest to you.

So, how does Venus respond, when he’s finally got her attention? In the words of Theocritus,

‘”What?” cries she, “art not a match for a bee, and thou so little and yet able to make wounds so great?”’

(This is clearly an old translation, which I gleaned from this site: https://www.theoi.com/Text/TheocritusIdylls4.html)

Basically, he has stolen the honey, and the bees have stung him. In the same way, he shoots his arrows to make people fall in love. Sometimes, love is sweet like honey – but sometimes it really hurts.

The atmosphere of love is woven through the painting. In the background, on the left, a pair of deer, stag and doe, is successfully self-isolating in the depths of the wood. But elsewhere, we see the sting. In the far distance, on the lake, towards the right-hand side of the painting, in one of those moments of sublime beauty that Cranach can conjure up, we see a cottage reflected in the limpid waters of the lake, the leaves and branches of the distant trees sketched out with poetic delicacy. Just above the reflection of the cottage, there is a pair of swans, and they look like they are about to start fighting. Ay me… The course of true love never did run smooth. I trust things are going better for you, wherever you are socially distanced.

Day 10 – Ilya Repin, Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870-73, The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Originally posted on 28 March 2020

Russia had the most wonderful artists in the 19^th Century, and it surprises me a little that, although we are so familiar with the name ‘Tolstoy’, most of us have never even heard of the likes of Shishkin, Kramskoy or Repin. It’s similar to the case in Finland, where we know Sibelius, but Gallen-Kallela is unfamiliar. In both cases the reasons are the same, I suspect: paper is easy to move, and words and dots easy to reproduce, so novels and symphonies can easily be exported across the world. Paintings can also move easily, I know (although, like us, they are stuck where they are for the time being), but in both cases, the Russians and Finns took care to hold onto what they knew was good.

I was reminded of today’s painting, ‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’ by Ilya Repin, while I was writing yesterday, because the first time I saw it, in the company of the lovely Irina Polevaya, I realised it has some connection with Turner’s ‘Fighting Temeraire’ (#POTD 9). It’s not just that both show ships being towed: both paintings also use this as a metaphor for progress. Admittedly Turner’s is about making progress, while Repin’s shows a society failing to move forward, even if it does show the human will triumphing against great odds. It is about the failure to progress, although, like the ‘Temeraire’, it is not without optimism. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Repin entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1863 just as some of the students were finding the academic training restrictive, and the proscribed subject matters they were assigned irrelevant. They broke away to form their own Society, much as Gustav Klimt and his Viennese contemporaries would do some three decades later. From 1870 they started organising exhibitions that would take art to the people in the provinces, and for this reason, they became known as ‘Peredvizhniki’ – ‘The Wanderers’. As well as Ilya Repin, the group included two Ivans, Kramskoi and Shishkin. The second image I’m showing you is a detail of the former’s superb portrait of the latter, partly because it allows me to mention two for the price of one, and partly because, well: beards. The Wanderers painted the best beards, and of the best beards Kramskoi was king.

‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’ is often seen as the signature painting of The Wanderers. Aside from the great selection of beards, it deals with issues grounded in society, which affect the people themselves. In this sense it belongs to an artistic movement called Realism, effectively founded by the French artist Courbet in 1855. Although the painting is naturalistic in appearance, ‘naturalism’ is not what is meant by ‘Realism’. Courbet’s aim was, in his own words, ‘to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation.’ So his subject matter was not drawn from Christianity, nor did it include ancient myths and legends, these last being irrelevant to most people. Instead, the subjects were important everyone in different ways. In Courbet’s case this included his monumental painting, ‘A Burial at Ornans’, where the interment of the artist’s own Uncle is used to provide an image of universal relevance.

Repin was inspired to paint the Barge Haulers following his experiences travelling the country, and all of the people depicted are based on characters he met and got to know. The man at the front, for example, who seems to lead the way, was based on a defrocked priest called Kanin, whose long-suffering dignity was a particular inspiration. Repin was surprised to learn that the burlaks, as the barge haulers were known, were drawn from across a wide range of society, and, although the groups would have been larger than the one depicted, he chose eleven men to represent a broad swathe of Russian society, a condemnation of the inhumane exploitation of labour. And even here not everyone is included – groups of burlaks could be made up entirely of women. This was a situation that continued into the 20^th Century.

The men are bowed, but not quite broken, exhausted, but still – if only just – able to continue. The one exception comes exactly half way along the group – five men in front, and five men behind, a young, blonde man stands out, his lighter clothes and upturned face catching the sun, as does his hair, and the arm across his chest, the hand pressed to his heart showing determination, the look on his face defiant. He looks towards the left of the painting, and directs our attention toward a boat travelling full sail in the opposite direction, travelling down stream. These men are going against the flow and into the wind – everything seems to be against them, and yet, they continue. 

The men are tied together like a chain gang, and attached to the ship by a rope which leads our eye to the top of the mast. This is flying the Russian flag, easily recognisable by its bars of red, blue and white. And yet, if you know the Russian flag, you will know that white should be at the top – not the bottom. This flag is flying upside down, an internationally recognised symbol that the ship is in distress. But what we are witnessing was, for Russia at the time, day-to-day life. Has Repin ‘got it wrong’? Oh no. This is no normal barge, no normal ship: flying the Nation’s flag, it represents the ship of state, which is about to run aground. What is remarkable is that, from the completion of the painting when it was reworked in 1873, it would be another 44 years until the Russian Revolution. Had Repin seen it coming? Well, it was a long time coming, let’s face it, given that the Decembrist Revolt had taken place 48 years before, in 1825. And what is even more remarkable was that, not only was it highly praised from the start – even though it was the work of an unknown 26-year-old (Repin later considered it his first professional work) – but that it was bought not by a member of the art world cognoscenti, but by Grand Duke Vladimir, son of Tsar Alexander II, at the heart of the establishment. Admittedly Dad was trying to reform Russia, having emancipated the serfs, abolished the death penalty, reorganised the legal system and ended some of the privileges of the nobility. He might have gone even further were it not for the numerous assassination attempts, the seventh of which (at least) finally succeeding in 1881.

Repin also tells us that not only is the state doomed, but the exploitation of these men is, in any case, completely unnecessary. The downward diagonal of the far-right rigging leads our eye to a steamboat in the distance. Steam power could be doing the work of these men, and yet this system continued unabated for decades.

I don’t know that Repin ever travelled to England, but in 1873, the year the painting was definitely finished, he did visit France and Italy with his family. It was first exhibited in 1870, though. Why is this important? We know about his early travels, but that doesn’t include the UK – so he can’t have seen ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. However, he might have seen a print of it. But it’s more likely that the similarities are a coincidence. After all, ships with sails furled being towed, ships in full sail and steamboats could be seen on every river in the developed world by this stage, and for any talented artist the ironic contrast of towing and sailing, of old and new, sail and steam and the metaphor of going against the tide would be obvious choices. Admittedly, both artists use the towing of an obsolete vessel as their central theme, although the difference is that Turner’s is a worthy veteran of war, while Repin’s represents the corrupt ship of state doomed to run aground. 

The painting is well known in Russia, and is often parodied, being used for satirical cartoons. Who is pulling the ship of state today, and who would we put on board the barge, exploiting the barge haulers for an easy ride? I’ll leave that for you to decide, but I have a few thoughts. One of the many notable people who appreciated this painting was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose initial fears about the painting, when he read about it in the press, were that it would be too obviously political, agitprop rather than art, and that Repin would be milking the pathos. His fears proved to be unfounded. ‘Not a single one of them shouts from the painting to the viewer, ‘Look how unfortunate I am and how indebted you are to the people!’ he said. And then went on to add that he saw, ‘barge haulers, real barge haulers, and nothing more… you can’t help but think you are indebted, truly indebted, to the people.’ Today we have health workers and carers pulling against the tide, walking into the wind. You can’t help but think you are indebted, truly indebted, to them.