230 – Mannerly devotion shows in this

Unknown artists, The Palmers’ Window, mid-15th century. St Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow.

In the three and a half years I’ve been writing this blog I have only talked about stained glass once (see Day 78 – St Petroc). However, given that this Monday, 16 September at 6pm I will be talking about some English saints, and that much of the art which depicted them has been destroyed, this is an ideal opportunity to look at some more. The saints I am interested in are Behind the King in the National Gallery’s splendid Wilton Diptych, and they are the subject of the second of my two talks wondering Who’s Who in Heaven? This week, as well as identifying the characters themselves, we will also think about why it is useful to know who they are: what does the choice of saints tell us about the patron, the original location of the painting, and the reasons why it was painted, for example? Two weeks later (30 September) we will set out on The Piero Trail, and after two more (14 October) we will head back to the National Gallery to rediscover Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s brilliantly reviewed exhibition, hoping that this is Vincent, speaking for himself… The details, and links to book, are also in the diary, of course.

There are many different ways of organizing a stained glass window, even more than the variations on the possibilities of an altarpiece, I suspect. It is quite common to have a whole series of individual saints in different lights (the section of a window which forms a single opening contained by the stone tracery), but it is also quite common to have a number of different, unrelated narrative scenes. In this case each light has a single episode from a longer story, like chapters in a book – or maybe paragraphs, as each episode is relatively short. Actually, it is two stories combined into one, but that turns out to be the whole point of the window. It hasn’t always looked like this, though, even if it probably did when it was first made in the middle of the 15th century. It was lucky to avoid the wide-spread bouts of iconoclasm that happened as a result of the reformation, both during the reign of King Edward VI, England’s first truly Protestant monarch, and the interregnum, with the Commonwealth headed by that notable killjoy Oliver Cromwell. The iconoclasts were sent far and wide to destroy what was considered to be idolatrous imagery, but they didn’t get everywhere. The majority of the glass in St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow survived, and it’s a real treasure trove. Glass survived more than sculptures and panel paintings as it happens, partly because it was harder to reach, and also for purely practical reasons: the iconoclasts didn’t necessarily want the churches to get cold or wet. However, it wasn’t just the iconoclasts who got to the windows. Churches were frequently rebuilt and redecorated for reasons of taste, or as the result of decay. By the 19th century several panels from this particular window had been moved, and were installed in the tracery of another, nearby window. By then, though, there was a considerable revival in the Church of England, and various waves of restoration ensued. This didn’t always return the material to its original state (often that just wasn’t possible), but to what the 19th century artists and designers thought that it should have looked like had the original makers done it properly. And if they didn’t know what that was – well, they just made it up. We shall see some evidence of that here… although thankfully, it seems, not too much. We will read the window as you should read any good book – in a European language, at least – from left to right and from top to bottom. For some of what follows, I’m indebted, among other things, to an agreeably thorough study by Professor Christian Liddy of Durham University in the Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, as well as to some superb photographs by @granpic on Flickr.

At the very top there are two coats of arms. On the left we can see a golden cross against a blue background (my apologies to anyone interested in heraldry, but I’m going to use the standard English terminology for colours, so that I and everyone else can understand). In each of the four corners of the cross, and underneath it, there is a golden bird with no legs, described as a martlet. These are attributed arms, which means they were effectively ‘invented’, a practice applied to members of the nobility who had lived before the age of heraldry. In this case they were the attributed arms of a king of England who was later canonized: Saint Edward the Confessor. His title implies that he lived a life of great sanctity, but rather than dying for his faith (which would have made him St Edward Martyr), he died in old age still confessing his faith. Historians might argue this fact about the man himself, but that is all but irrelevant to the beliefs of those who commissioned the window. Recently I realised that the same arms appear on the roof of Aberdeen Cathedral, where they are attributed to St Margaret, mother of King David I of Scotland. The arms to the right are those of the town itself, Ludlow, not far from the border between England and Wales. However, they might not be original: when the window was restored/reconstructed between 1875 and 1878 the firm responsible asked for confirmation of the appearance of the Ludlow Arms. This could suggest that originally the space was given over to something else, maybe the arms of the Palmers’ Guild, the patrons of the window. As we shall see, they claimed that their statutes had been authorised by none other than St Edward the Confessor, but that’s not possible: the guild wasn’t instituted until the 13th century, and he famously died in 1066.

Palmers were theoretically people who had travelled to the Holy Land, and come back with a palm leaf as evidence: to all extents and purposes the word ‘palmer’ was synonymous with ‘pilgrim’. I first came across it – as with so many great words – in the works of William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet can be quite tricky for the protagonists as we have to believe that they are truly and profoundly – and instantly – in love, and yet they are hardly ever on stage together. You’ll have to take my word for it: I played Romeo early in my career, and there are few lines to convey such intensity. But of course, as ever, Shakespeare helps you. The first words that the two lovers speak to each other form a perfect sonnet: fourteen lines, perfectly scanned, with an elegant rhyming structure to boot. If their ability to improvise one of the tightest verse structures as teenagers in the middle of a party to which one of them was definitely not invited is not a sign that they were made for each other, I don’t know what is. It’s Act 1, scene 5 and these are their very first shared words:

ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET 
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO 
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET 
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO 
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET 
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO 
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.

I rest my case. A bit of digression, I know, but… palmers are pilgrims.

So far we know that the window is in Ludlow, and dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. In the lights below the arms (see above) there are six blue arcs, framed by small sections of red and green glass, containing a series of blue circles. I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen anything like this before (I’m not actually a Window Historian), and can’t begin to explain the origins of this decoration. Maybe something to do with the vault of Heaven over the ensuing story which happens down on earth, but I couldn’t even tell you whether they are original to the 15th century design, or a 19th century invention.   

This is the upper tier of lights. At the top of each is a canopy, and the way they are designed helps to date the window to the mid-15th century, ‘three-sided structures decorated with turrets and pinnacles, with arches opening to reveal a vaulted roof’, according to Christian Liddy. The chapel containing the window was rebuilt between 1433 and 1471, which adds strength to the suggested date. In the left light we can see an English ship (the flag of St George is flying on the main mast), on which we can see a man in green and two in blue. The next two lights show more men in blue in the countryside, while yet more are gathered, in an interior setting, in the fourth light. It’ll be easier to understand with details. The majority of the story actually comes from the Golden Legend, which I have mentioned often, a collection of stories about the lives of the saints put together in the 1260s by a Dominican friar (who eventually became Bishop of Genoa) Jacobo da Voragine. However, the Life of St Edward the Confessor wasn’t included in the original version: it was one of several Lives of English saints which were added to an English translation of 1438. The so-called the Gilte Legend was probably the source for the Palmers’ Guild window, even if the story was also included in a subsequent translation which became far better known: the version by William Caxton. However, as that wasn’t published until 1483 it was too late for this window.

The man in green is holding the tiller, steering the ship across the sea, which is only just visible as white waves in the bottom right of this detail: it is barely more visible in the light as a whole. The precise, naturalistic lines of the tiller-man’s face, and the crisp, taught curls of his hair couldn’t be more 19th century. The same is true of the detailing of the ship itself. Indeed, this panel is the major area of ‘restoration’ – for which read, ‘reinvention’. Apart from the canopy above this scene, the whole light had been lost by the middle of the 19th century, whereas the glass in the rest of the window is original, according to a contemporary (i.e. Victorian) report. It is not entirely clear how accurate that was, though… The two men in blue at the brow of the ship – just next to the anchor – are praying ardently for God to protect them, and to bless their journey across the sea to foreign lands. Their hats are typical of those worn by pilgrims, even if there are no pilgrim badges attached. The hats, if not their gestures, tell us that they are two of the Palmers. This is not, strictly speaking, part of the story of St Edward, although it will become so. It gives us a hint that the Palmers were using the story for their own ends.

The story really starts in the second light, for which I’m afraid I don’t have a terribly good detail. I hope you can pick out, in the foreground, two men with long white beards – two old men. The one on the right is higher up and wears a blue cloak over a red robe. He has a broad white collar, or cape, flecked with black: ermine, a sign of royalty. But then he also has a sizable gold crown – he is a king. Indeed, he is King Edward. Saint Edward, even. The man on the left wears what appears to be a pale, possibly white cloak over a blue robe. His diminutive stature suggests that he might be kneeling, and his hands are reaching out towards the king, a gesture which the king himself reciprocates. One day when travelling, the Life of Saint Edward the Confessor tells us, King Edward met a poor beggar, who asked him for alms. The king responded, good and holy man that he was, with the gift of a precious ring. The importance of this ring is demonstrated in the third light: we can see it very clearly at the top, just above the trees. The beggar, now clad entirely in blue, but recognisable thanks to the same white, forked beard, hands the ring to one of the two Palmers.

When seen in close-up it becomes obvious how large this ring is – an enormous gold loop mounted with a precious stone which could even serve as a bracelet for the impossibly slim 15th century wrists of these figures. It is certainly far too large for their elegantly stylised fingers. Here the glass is original – apparently – but I’m fairly sure that the painted details of the trees are 19th century. It is exactly the sort of patterning you can find in Morris & Co. windows, even if the firm responsible here was Hardman’s of Birmingham. As it turns out (and doesn’t it always) the poor beggar wasn’t a poor beggar after all, but St John the Evangelist in disguise. Edward the Confessor was known to have had a particular devotion to the Evangelist, so it isn’t entirely surprising. St John revealed himself to some pilgrims in Jerusalem, telling them not only who he was, but giving them Edward’s ring, and asking them to return it to him. St John also asked them to tell Edward that they would soon be meeting each other – in Heaven – in a few months’ time. It was 1065.

In the fourth light (and apologies for the quality of this detail), the Palmers kneel before the king, who sits enthroned, holding the ring in his right hand. It is a similar size, but not as clear due to the condition of the glass and the quality of the detail. Courtiers in red gather around the king, standing and sitting, while the Palmers kneel. Together with the ring, the Palmers passed on St John’s message about the king’s imminent demise, and the rest is history – and the only date that the English are supposed to remember. The story of the ring was first written down around 1161, just under a century after the king’s death, in a Life of St Edward. It almost certainly derives from the fact that, when the tomb of the king was opened (for the first time) in 1102, there was indeed a ring on one of his fingers. This was later taken off when the body was moved (for the first time) in 1163. It became the symbol by which he was most commonly identified – his most important attribute. However, devotion to the saint had waned by the 15th century, when the window was made, as the immigrant St George had long before taken his job as the main patron of England. Edward’s relevance for the Palmers’ Guild was secure, though. The supposition, in the window, that the pilgrims who met St John in the Holy Land were members of the Palmers’ Guild is pure invention. However, the story that the window tells is about them, with St Edward the Confessor being relegated to the role of a supporting actor in their legend.

Christian Liddy has pointed out that in the 1st and 4th lights in the bottom tier the canopies precisely match those directly above them, whereas in the 2nd and 3rd lights they are reversed. It could easily be that, when the windows were replaced into the right tracery in the 19th century, the two central sections were inadvertently installed the wrong way round.

The lower four lights show the continuation of the Palmers’ version of the story: none of this occurs in any version of the Golden Legend. The scenes as now ordered alternate between external and internal locations, with grass and rocks in the first and third, and intricate tiling in the second and fourth – but we should remember that the 2nd and 3rd lights should be reversed, so the two external scenes would be followed by two interiors.

The first light show a procession of clerics led by one holding a processional cross, followed by others with candles, a bible and, I suspect, a thurible (an incense bearer), with the two Palmers further back. They are winding through the countryside towards a building, and might appear to be progressing towards the second light, in which king Edward sits enthroned. However, they should be processing towards the greeting in the third light, from which the right hand detail above is taken. This procession welcomes the Palmers back from the Holy Land, and when they arrive at the gates of Ludlow they are greeted by the chief magistrate, who we can see wearing red, on the left of the right hand detail, where he is embracing one of the Palmers (the other stands in the shadows on the right). Let us overlook the fact that this is supposedly 1065, and Ludlow didn’t exist then, and also the fact that it didn’t have impressive town gates like the one shown in the window until the 13th century. What is important is that the Palmers are being celebrated by the leading citizens of the town. Stylistically, to my eye, the two embracing figures have the most medieval-looking painted detail – slightly scratchy, as if worn with age, and in any case more spare. The same is not necessarily true of at least two of the figures in the background, whose eyes look just a little too naturalistic.

This detail, from what is now the second light at the bottom, shows the two Palmers kneeling before King Edward, their pilgrims’ hats tipped back off their heads as a sign of respect. We can see the intricate details of the king’s crown and ermine collar, which makes me think that even if the glass here is original, the painting of the details must be restoration: it is too specific, too precise, too clear – and too much like other Victorian neo-gothic windows – to be original. His left hand (with admittedly medieval-looking fingers) rests on a piece of paper, decorated with an intricate circular design, which is being taken by one of the two Palmers. Behind them a cardinal, dressed in red, with a broad-brimmed red hat, gestures towards the paper and its design. This represents the Founding Charter of the Palmers’ Guild, given to them, according to this window, by none other than St Edward the Confessor himself. However, as I’ve already said, this is impossible: his death resulted in the Battle of Hastings, which we all know happened in 1066. According to surviving records of the Palmers’ Guild from 1389, the guild itself had been founded in 1284. Historically speaking, though, it might actually have begun earlier, in 1248, when pilgrims – or rather crusaders – returned from the crusade of the French king, Louis IX (Saint Louis of France, in case you were wondering, or if you know your Caravaggio).

In the final light the Palmers, in their formal livery of long blue robes, but without their pilgrims’ hats – they have been replaced by fashionable, 15th century red chaperons – are celebrating with a guild feast. They join hands to express their ‘brotherhood’, and are entertained by a musician playing the harp: friendship and harmony are the order of the day. At the bottom of the light are the words ‘fenestram fieri fecerunt’. This inscription follows a blank space, and if you look back there are similar gaps at the bottom of the other lights, suggesting that this is only the end of a text. Comparison with equivalent inscriptions elsewhere suggests that, in full, it would have read something like, ‘Pray for the souls of the brothers and sisters of the Palmers’ Guild. Here they have had the window made’ – although the only words which survive are ‘have had the window made’. There is no little irony in the fact that none of the ‘sisters’ of the guild (and they are known to have existed) are represented in the window. Apart from this, the imagery is notable for the way in which the guild glorifies itself. In the upper tier it inserts itself into the story of St Edward the Confessor – or rather, it inserts the story of St Edward and the miracle of the ring into the guild’s own story. The miraculous events are framed by the idea that two of the Palmers travelled to the holy land, and returned to Ludlow: these scenes occur in the two left hand lights, one above the other. The two windows at the top right imply that it was these two Ludlow Palmers who were the pilgrims mentioned in the Life of St Edward – which is, of course, pure invention. The central two lights in the bottom tier then demonstrate how central the Palmer’s Guild was to the life and prosperity of the town itself, and also that their authority came from none other than royalty. They were lauded by both the leader of the town and the ruler of the country, and all this because they were trusted by saints. No wonder they felt the right to celebrate in the final window. All this is very useful as far as Monday‘s talk is concerned, as we will now be able to identify at least one of the saints Behind the King in the Wilton Diptych.

229 – Wise Men, Kings, Saints…

Jacopo di Cione and workshop, The Adoration of the Kings, 1370-71. The National Gallery, London.

I know, there are still 118 days to go before Christmas, but even so I have decided to look at a painting of the Three Wise Men. I’ve chosen this painting because the protagonists feature in Jacopo di Cione’s magisterial San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece, one of the National Gallery’s great unsung masterpieces, which will be the focus of my talk this Monday, 2 September at 6pm. Entitled Who’s Who in Heaven: 1. Around the Queen, it is the first of two talks dedicated to saints. The Queen in question is the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, and in the altarpiece she is surrounded by no fewer than 48. My intention had been to talk about all of them, but honestly, what was I thinking? Given that I would like to put them all into the context of early Italian painting, I clearly won’t be able to cover every one.  The talk will serve as an introduction to this fantastic polyptych, and will also be a reminder of what sorts of things we should look for – and why – when we are identifying the people represented in Christian art. Two weeks later, on 16 September, I will follow up with 2. Behind the King, taking the jewel-like Wilton Diptych as my starting point. We will look at the religious and political concerns of King Richard II, and use what we have learnt to draw some conclusions about the the importance of context when interpreting other religious art.

At the end of the month, on 30 September, we will take a virtual journey around The Piero Trail, and finally (for now) on 14 October, I will be introducing the National Gallery’s main offering for it’s bicentenary, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. However, rather than the purple prose on the Gallery’s website, I would like to think about what the paintings themselves tell us, hoping that this will be Vincent, Speaking for himself… Details, as ever, are in the diary.

The San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece is a remarkable survival: a four-tiered polyptych painted in 1370-71 for the eponymous Benedictine church in Florence. Its survival is remarkable for a number of reasons, the main one being that the church itself was destroyed in 1784. Even before that, the polyptych had been taken down from the high altar, and broken up because it was too large for the side chapel to which it was moved: the panels survive, but not the frame. The National Gallery has the three upper tiers of the polyptych. The predella, which originally formed the lowest tier, is elsewhere. Today we are looking at one of the panels from what would have been the third tier up, dedicated to a very abbreviated life of Christ, in six episodes. This the second of the six, The Adoration of the Kings. Having seen the star in the east, they have travelled to pay homage to the Boy Born to be King, and are gathered around him in the bottom half of the panel. He sits on the lap of his mother Mary, who stands out by virtue of her rich, deep blue cloak. This uses the highest grade of ultramarine, which would have been far more expensive than the gold leaf used for the sky.

The use of gold leaf was not profligate: it was beaten into such thin sheets that it was translucent – you could see light through it. If it had been stuck directly on to the white ground used for the rest of the painting, the white would have been visible through the gold, making it look rather dull. To avoid this, any area to be gilded would be prepared with a red, clay-based paint called bole, which, when seen ‘through’ the gold, made it look far richer – and far more ‘gold’. The bole can be seen around the gold at the top of the painting: they only gilded the section of the sky which would be visible once the panel was framed, for economic reasons. The shapes taken up by the gold and the painted hills on either side tell us the shape of the original frame.

There is a light brown hill on the left topped by a pale pink castle, with four trees growing further down the slope. On the right there is a taller grey-pink hill, with two trees growing as far up as we can see. There are two clefts coming down, one through the taller hill, and another between the brown and pink hills. From this cleft emerges the head of a horse, and below that we can see two camels, and several men. The entourages of the three kings are arriving from the valleys between the hills, which, in the painting, have been stylised into apparently impassable clefts: the painting is about storytelling rather than the depiction of naturalistic space. A thatched roof projects from a pink building on the right, and at its apex we can see a star – the star – which is precisely what has led the kings to this location. The thatched roof is part of the stable, which, as I’m sure you all know by now, is not actually mentioned in the bible.

Three men stand on the left, all fashionably dressed (for the 1370s, but not for the date of Christ’s birth), with the one we can see full-length wearing a short, striped, yellow tunic over the must-have item for well-to-do men: red hose. They are presumably the kings’ valets, or equivalent. The three kings kneel with different degrees of obeisance, the eldest bending the lowest. He has removed his crown and placed it on the ground in front of him as a sign of his humility, and he leans forward to kiss the child’s foot. Jesus hands the gift of gold to his stepfather Joseph, who is standing on the right of the picture. Below him is a gully, in which a pipe gushes water. It’s an odd detail which I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere, but I presume it is a reference to the coming of the Messiah, the Water of Life.

If we look closer at this scene, we can see how sophisticated the conception of the painting was, if not, maybe, the execution: this is why it is assumed that Jacope di Cione was assisted by his workshop. Well, that, and the fact that this was one of the largest altarpieces in Florence at the time, which would have required the collaboration of a numerous people anyway – carpenters, frame makers, assistants to mix the paints, goldsmiths to do the gilding, etc., etc. Delicately poised on his mother’s knee, the Christ Child lifts his right hand in blessing, while his supernaturally strong left hand holds the gift of gold at arm’s length. He reaches over Mary’s hand as he passes it to Joseph, who reaches behind the supporting strut of the thatched roof to take it. Joseph holds the hem of his cloak – lilac with an olive-green lining and gold trim – with his right hand. I’ve often imagined a whole pile of presents stacked behind the stable, but I probably shouldn’t be so frivolous. The folds of Jesus’s red cloak are picked out in gold, and the same fabric – red with gold highlights – is worn by the youngest king.

The age of the kings is clearly demarcated: the youngest has no facial hair and a pale complexion, a sure sign that he hasn’t been out in the world that long. He still wears his crown (knowing that he will be last in line to greet the infant) and holds his gift (myrrh) in his right hand, the left tucked under his right arm. Next to him, in green, the ‘middle’ king has a full head of hair (like his younger companion) but also a moustache and short beard of the same ginger. He gestures with his left hand, his elegant, slim fingers widely spaced, with the forefinger pointing up towards the star: he seems to be telling the youngster that they are definitely in the right place. He has already removed his crown – although it is not clear where he has put it. The eldest has white hair, with a receding hairline, and a long white beard. He holds the Child’s left foot delicately between thumb and forefinger. We will see a very similar gesture, and consider its implications, when we look at the Wilton Diptych in a couple of weeks’ time. Notice that there are six haloes. Obviously Jesus, Mary and Joseph are considered holy, but the three wise men also have the unmistakable signs of sanctity.

There are three main panels in the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece: the central one shows the Coronation of the Virgin, while the flanking panels each has a group of Adoring Saints – it is mainly these that I will be looking at on Monday. Above each panel is a pair of narrative images, and the two illustrated here sit above the left-hand group of Adoring Saints. The one on the left shows The Nativity, with the Annunciation to the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Shepherds. Mary sits in prayer, under the same thatched roof, in front of the same building, next to the new born infant, who is swaddled and lying in the manger. The Ox and the Ass are lying behind the manger, in adoration, just like the two shepherds to the left. Above the holy mother and child, a choir of angels sings and plays heavenly music. St Joseph, in the same clothes as in the other panel, sits at the bottom left of the image. What should be clear is that both events – The Nativity and The Adoration of the Kings – happen in the same place. It is easier to see that if we compare details, though.

We have the same two hills, topped by a castle and four trees on the left, and two trees on the right, but the colours are different. The hill on the left is far darker in the Nativity than it is in the Adoration, but that is because the former takes place at night time. It is actually one of the earliest nocturnal scenes in a panel painting, the darkness emphasised by the glow of divine light emanating from the angel who is announcing the good tidings of great joy to the shepherds. The supernatural light gives the hillside with its two trees, as well as two shepherds, four sheep and a rather forlorn looking dog, a warm yellow glow. All of these things have gone by the time the Magi arrive, leaving the star to hold its own in the daylight. One of the features that has always amused me is that the stable has a retractable roof. Like a skilled theatre designer, Cione must have realised that there wouldn’t be so much space on stage with three kings and their retinues, so he pushes the thatched roof out of the way.

Aside from the shifting roof, the stable looks pretty much the same, and the stage is indeed far more crowded. In the foreground the rocky ledge on which the stable has been constructed has exactly the same cracks and crevices in both paintings, and both have the same gully with the pipe spouting the same flow of water. However, by the time we get to Epiphany (6 January) a creature has arrived to drink. I’ve always assumed it is a beaver. I have never known what it is doing there, nor have I ever seen a reference to it. The same shepherds which were atop the hill, watching over their flocks by night, are now at the bottom of the valley in prayer, one, with red hair, with his hands pressed together, and another, with a medieval hoodie, crossing his hands over his chest – another early form of prayer. They do not have haloes. How come they are not considered holy, but the Magi are? Is there a class bias? Are the poor labourers not considered worthy? It could, potentially, be worse. As the shepherds were in the nearby fields they were seen as locals, whereas the kings were clearly outsiders. As such, the shepherds came to represent the Jews who converted to Christianity, while the kings represented the Gentiles. Is it antisemitism that has denied the shepherds their haloes? I doubt it: no one has doubted the sanctity of the apostles… I have never heard of any relics of the shepherds, though. The kings, on the other hand, have ended up in Cologne – having been stolen from Milan by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ in 1164 (they had been taken to Constantinople by the Empress Helena, where they were given as a gift – by her son, Constantine the Great – to the Bishop of Milan, in case you were wondering). They were highly revered in Florence, as it happens. This is a detail from the left panel of Adoring Saints.

It is a little confusing, as you can probably pick out four crowns. The one at the top left is a princess, though, a virgin martyr, presumably (she is carrying a lily), but I’m not sure if anyone has worked out which one. At the top right is the oldest king – usually given the name Caspar – with his receding hairline and long white beard, his gift of gold held proudly in front of him. At the top centre is the middle king (Balthasar, although the order of names was not fixed), with red hair, moustache and beard, also holding his gift. Directly below him, with his pale, beardless face, is the youngest, Melchior. Their appearance in the San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece reminds us that they were – and are – considered Saints by the Catholic Church (there was no other church in Western Europe at the time), but also that they were highly revered in Florence in particular. A religious confraternity, the Compagnia de’ Magi, was set up in their honour, and in the century after Cione painted his masterpiece many of the Medici family were members. Based at San Marco – the rebuilding of which was largely financed by Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici – annual processions on the Feast of the Epiphany would pass along what is now the Via Cavour to get to the church. This is probably one of the reasons why the Medici built their ‘new’ palace in its prominent location on that street in the 1440s. It is also the reason why the chapel of the palace is decorated with Benozzo Gozzoli’s stunning Procession of the Magi, which winds its way around three of the four walls, with portraits of the Medici family included in the retinue behind the youngest king. Having said that, I would challenge anyone to pick out the three kings in the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece from a distance.

I’ve mentioned four of the Saints today – three kings and an anonymous princess (in the top left corner of the bottom left panel) – which only leaves 44 for Monday. Let’s see how many I can include…

228 – Curtains for My Parents

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

David Hockney must surely be Britain’s most famous, and successful, living artist. He also happens to be one of those who is most interested in the art of the past, which is the point made by the National Gallery’s capsule exhibition, Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look which I will be talking about this Monday, 26 August at 6pm. In just three paintings, and some relevant documentation, it becomes clear that he has spent years enjoying the paintings in the National Gallery, and is intrigued by the many different ways we can interact with the art of the past. Today I would like to look at some paintings and drawings which don’t make it to this exhibition, nor for that matter the catalogue, but which are, nevertheless, entirely relevant. The following week (2 September) I will consider the question Who’s Who in Heaven? This is one of two talks, with the second following on 16 September. The first will look at the figures Around the Queen – focussing on Jacopo di Cione’s Coronation of the Virgin in the National Gallery, which includes as many as 48 different saints. In the second we will see who is Behind the King in the glorious Wilton Diptych. Two weeks later (30 September) I intend to take a quick tour around The Piero Trail – thus returning to Piero della Francesca, one of Hockney’s major sources of inspiration. But I’ll post that on the diary nearer the time.

There are only three paintings in the small exhibition, but they form a perfect triptych. Nevertheless, I won’t have time to cover all of the material related to them on Monday, so this is a somewhat convoluted exploration of the origins, and implications of just one of the three paintings, David Hockney’s My Parents (1977). Above is an earlier version, My Parents and Myself, which was started in 1975 while Hockney was living in Paris, but then abandoned – much to his parents’ distress. Unfinished, it languished for decades in his Los Angeles home until seen in public for the first time in 2020. Hockney’s mother and father are seated to our left and right respectively on what looks like a square platform, with curtains slung on a rail above as if they are on stage. In between them is a bright green cabinet with a vase of yellow tulips on one side, and a mirror, reflecting the face of the artist, on the other: this is a triple portrait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first is a detail from My Parents and Myself. The second has all the black curtain hooks in Invented Man… – and sketched in, even with different curtains, in the Study for My Parents and Myself. It also has the vertical support from which the un-bowed pole hangs in Invented Man… It is a detail from the predella panel of Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece, painted for the eponymous church in Florence and now in the eponymous museum. David Hockney discusses his love of Fra Angelico in an interview in the current National Gallery catalogue, and picks out the Annunciation frescoed at the top of the stairs in the former Dominican friary which now houses the Museo di San Marco. However, the borrowed curtains are not mentioned, so I’m very glad I remembered them [since writing this post I have found a reference to the Fra Angelico painting on the David Hockney Foundation website, on a page about the year 1975, when Invented Man Revealing Still Life was painted – but that’s not where I know it from…]. There are others references, too, adding up to an entire ethos. But that’s what I’ll be talking about on Monday.

227 – Another pearl

Gerard ter Borch, Woman Writing a Letter, 1655. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

In her beautifully written and wonderfully readable book Thunderclap, Laura Cumming leads us through her life with art and her experience of the works of the brilliant, but ill-fated Carel Fabritius. As she takes us on this journey we also encounter a number of other artists who mean a lot to her, and it is some of these that I will talk about this Monday, 19 August, at 6pm. Thunderclap: the ‘other’ artists will look at Rembrandt, Cuyp, ter Borch and Coorte – some of whom I have known for years, others who have become favourites more recently, thanks, in one case, to Cumming’s writing. I will write about one of them today (although without the same ease, I fear). The week after, I will introduce the National Gallery’s Hockney and Piero, and then, in September, it’s ‘back to school’. I thought it was time for a revision course on Who’s Who in Heaven? There are two talks: part 1, on 2 September is entitled Around the Queen, while part 2, two weeks later, is Behind the King. You can find more information via those links, or on the diary. And if anyone is interested in New Music, and just happens to be free next week, I will be narrating a couple of pieces in an informal, free concert at one of the city churches, St Vedast, Foster Lane, on Wednesday 21 August at 6.30pm: there’s no booking, so just drop in and say ‘hello’ afterwards!

A woman sits writing a letter. It’s a familiar idea, especially in Dutch art: Vermeer, among others, painted the subject more than once. But this is a first – the first in a series of women writing letters painted by Gerard ter Borch, and, it is said, the first by any Dutch artist. What was the fascination? We’ll get there. But first, let’s look. Unlike some other paintings of this subject that I know, there is no sense of urgency, worry or threat. It is calm, and relaxed, and the woman appears to be focussed: intent on her task and in control. There is a warmth, created by a variety of reds. The background is dominated by a deep red canopy bed (somewhere on its website the Mauritshuis describes this as a four poster, but I can’t see any evidence of any posts). A different shade – brick red? – can be seen in the carpet on the table, and the woman is sitting on a brilliant vermillion cushion. She herself wears a bodice which is a light red or pink, maybe salmon. The other colours blend in with these reds – the dark brown of the wall, and the lighter brown of the table on which the woman is resting.

The top 40% of the painting is given over to the ‘background’ – the dark grey-brown wall and the canopy hanging in front of it. There is also a rectilinear form at the top, just to the left of the canopy, which in the picture as a whole, if not this detail, reads as a painting, indistinct in the darkness at the back of the room. The canopy itself appears to be circular – although it could be oval – and hangs from the ceiling. At the top there is a red fabric sphere with a gold trim, and a black line rises above it out of the painting – a rope, or chord, which must be attached to the ceiling. To the right we can see the shadow of this sphere, and of the chord: the length of the shadow implies that the ceiling is some way above the picture frame: it is a large room, which tells us – as if the bed and the clothing didn’t – that this is a wealthy woman. Below the sphere a circular fringe crowns the conical top of the canopy. At the bottom of the cone the fabric hangs over a circular loop, with another fringe, forming a sort of pelmet. The curtains of the canopy are just open at the front. They are also trimmed with gold, and slightly parted to reveal a dark interior.

At the bottom of the painting is the table, which would normally have been completely covered by the carpet. Not only would this help to display the carpet – an expensive item of interior decoration – but it would also keep the table clean and free of dust for times when it is used. This is one of those times, and the carpet has been pushed back to provide a firm, flat surface on which to write. People often ask – when looking at a Vermeer, in particular – why is the carpet pushed back? This is why – so that part, at least, of the table can be used. And also, because it looks more interesting. There might be other implications, as well: something is not quite as ordered as it should be, perhaps. The table itself is elegantly carved but not overly elaborate. The flat surface is made up of two leaves: if this were a contemporary table I would say that it could be extended, but I’m not sure if that’s applicable to the 17th century. The leg that we can see is topped with a square section, fluted like a pilaster, and this is is supported by a round leg. It stands directly beneath the woman’s torso, visually (and perhaps, by implication morally) acting as a firm support. She holds her quill in her right hand, with her left lying on the bottom of the paper to keep it steady. Next to her writing hand is an open pewter ink well, and next to that is another pot, the function of which is not clear – perhaps powder, or sand, to dry the ink? I confess I don’t know the technicalities of 17th Century Dutch letter writing. The brilliant cushion is a surprising highlight – by far the brightest and most intense hue in the painting, which might suggest that there is more to this woman than meets the eye, something bold and daring. The vivid colouration is enhanced by the contrast with her dark skirt – which, at the other end of the visual spectrum – is quite possibly the darkest thing depicted, apart, perhaps, from the shadows. The contrast also serves to show us how caught up in her letter the woman is, as it helps us to see that she is leaning forward to write. The skirt flows back behind her before being tucked firmly under her thighs, which must be resting on the forward edge of the cushion.

The focus of the woman is complete. If we follow her gaze as she looks down at her writing, the diagonal from her eye to the page passes through the tip of her nose, the feathered end of the quill and then down to the black, ink-stained tip. The light from the window – which must be large, and behind our left shoulders – lights up both the letter and the woman’s flesh, making them equivalent in colour and intensity. Her forehead, the seat of memory, reason, and intellect, is the most brilliantly illuminated part of the painting. Her neck and shoulder are also bright, as is the pure white chemise which ruffles up underneath the well-tailored bodice, perfectly fitted to her form. Particularly brilliant, and even a little sensuous, is a dimple of shadow where the neckline passes around her right shoulder, the result of the right arm being brought forward to write. It marks the transition from the shoulder to the top of her breast, and carries the suggestion that the bodice might even fall off the shoulder. The slightly parted curtains disappear behind the back of her neck, the dark shadows contrasting with the brightly illuminated flesh.

The paper has already been folded, and yet she is still writing. I would assume you would write on a flat piece of paper, and fold it when you were finished. It has been suggested that she is correcting something, having noticed a mistake. Or she could be adding something, to make a point. She has only written on the top half of this page – although there is another sheet underneath. I particularly love the way in which the corner of the paper to our right curves up. A shadow is cast along the full length of the page, but this curl makes it more visible. It also allows us to see the shadowy underside of the paper, not to mention the thinnest line of its beautifully lit edge. While many of the forms are evocatively vague, in this case Ter Borch has shown us how skilled he was: he has painted the thickness of a sheet of paper.

The woman’s hair is clean and lustrous. It has been thoroughly combed and pulled back into a number of bunches. One is wound round the back of her head, while another – presumably two others, one on each side – is arranged at the side of her head, casting a shadow on her neck. Ringlets, formed from strands of hair which are too short to tie back, frame her forehead. And she has a pearl, but it is not an earring: it is hanging from a sky-blue ribbon. With the exception of some of the patterning in the rug, this is the only touch of blue in an otherwise red-brown painting. And rather than her ear, it is attached to one of the locks of her hair. You can see the strand being pulled down vertically by its weight. It’s not an earring – but then, it’s probably not a pearl. A pearl that size would have cost an enormous sum, well beyond the reach of an artist. It’s probably an imitation pearl: the Venetians were highly specialised at making them from glass. The same is true for The Girl with the ‘Pearl’ Earring, which currently hangs next to this painting in the Mauritshuis, a clever nod by the curators to the connections between these two works and their artists.

When we look back at the painting as a whole, it now seems ever clearer to me that the table leg is a support for the woman. Her left arm, on which she is leaning, rests on the table above it, and it is lined up so precisely with her torso. However, the opening of the canopy is slightly to the right of this vertical axis, which feels somewhat disjointed. The gap widens slightly as it falls from behind the pelmet down to the woman’s brilliantly illuminated back, and, if anything, lines up with the dark shadow to the right of the table leg, and the darkest of the woman’s skirts. The cushion pulls our eye in that direction, framing the darkness, and if I’m right that its glowing red suggests something unexpected about this woman, then maybe that would give us a clue about the content of her letter. But it can only be a clue – there are no legible words, no real evidence. As so often, our interest is aroused by the very lack of certainty. However, she is almost certainly writing about love – people in paintings almost always are.

This was the fascination behind women writing letters – or reading letters – or men writing letters, because women would read them (there’s a beautiful pendant pair of this last coupling by Gabriel Metsu in the National Gallery of Ireland). Young women of a certain class were not allowed out of the house unchaperoned, but were kept safe in their gilded cages. Only specified men could come calling. And yet letters could travel unobserved, especially if there was a pliable servant, or maid, or a window that could open. There were whole books containing model letters – what to write to [insert name here] if you wanted to tell him/her about [see list of concerns in index]. As ever, Shakespeare sums up the problem. In As You Like It, Rosalind is in disguise as Ganymede, and has promised to cure Orlando of his love for Rosalind by getting him to woo Ganymede, who is ‘pretending’ that he is Rosalind (…and the woke generation think they’re on to something new…). In Act IV, Scene I, Orlando, frustrated with Ganymede running rings around him (and Shakespeare is often aware that a lot of the women are smarter than a lot of the men), starts to despair, with the phrase, ‘O, but she is wise’. To which Rosalind (as Ganymede) replies, ‘Or else she [i.e. ‘I’] could not have the wit to do this’. He (she) continues:

The wiser, that waywarder. Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement. Shut that, and 'twill out at the keyhole. Stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

Young women were not allowed out of the house unaccompanied – but letters could ‘out at the casement’ (i.e. go out the window), be slid under the door, or simply be carried to their destination by a maid. The more I look at this painting, the more the bed becomes a looming presence, with the spreading canopy linking the rucked-up carpet and the scarlet cushion, while the gradually parting curtains suggest where the story is going. Which makes me wonder about the model for this painting, and what she thought of it all. And the reason why I wonder is that, unlike so many others, we do know who she was: Gesina ter Borch, the artist’s half-sister, who was also an artist. I’ll show you some more pictures of her – and by her – on Monday.

226 – Wise saws and modern instances

Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws, 1927. National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

The Royal Academy’s exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, about which I will be speaking this Monday, 12 August at 6pm, is undoubtedly one of the most visually exciting exhibitions I have seen for a long time. Relatively few of the artists who are included were known to me, and those who were, such as Kazymyr Malevych (Ukrainian, rather than Russian transcriptions are favoured throughout) and Sonia Delaunay, do not have the same impact as some of the brilliant artists who are, for me, discoveries, such as Vasyl Yermolov or Oleksandr Bohomasov, about whom I am writing today. The fact that the paintings have made it to the UK is a story in itself, and if you can’t make it to the talk on Monday I would urge you to get to the Royal Academy before the exhibition closes in October. The following week, on 19 August, I will return to Laura Cumming’s superb book Thunderclap, to think about at The ‘other’ artists – i.e. the ones she discusses who are not Carel Fabritius. To round off the talks in August, on the 26th I will look at the act of looking itself, alongside Piero della Francesca and David Hockney, by introducing the National Gallery’s Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, which opened yesterday. After that things are still pretty much up in the air, but will probably include two talks looking at saints from medieval paintings in the National Gallery, an introduction to the NG’s forthcoming Vincent van Gogh exhibition, and a tour around ‘the Piero trail’ – thus returning to one of our heroes from the end of August, in anticipation of what looks like being a very ‘Renaissance’ autumn. But as soon as things are pinned down I will post details in the diary.

This painting was never meant to be seen on its own. It was originally supposed to be part of a triptych, a form which is otherwise unknown in modern Ukrainian (or for that matter, Russian) art. But for now I’d like to look at it as an object in and of itself. We can see three men performing various actions relating to the title of the painting, Sharpening the Saws – and, even if the definite article didn’t tell us that ‘the’ saws were the subject of the painting (rather than the men), the painting itself makes that clear. I can see six, painted in a variety of rich colours, and at two predominant angles: just off vertical and just off horizontal. Both of these features – colour and angle – are essential aspects of Bohomazov’s work. His major concern was how an artist could communicate with his audience, or, in other terms, what it was in a work of art which conveyed the feelings and sensations an artist experiences to the viewer. He wrote several theoretical texts about these concerns which seem to have anticipated the ideas – and art – of the likes of Kandinsky and Malevych, but even now they have been relatively little read (including, I confess, by me). In this painting, for example, both the colours and the angles of the saws help to convey the energy of the activity. Rhythm was another essential aspect of his work, something which he saw as not only quantitative but also qualitative, an element of art which could express concepts as diverse as speed, energy, regularity or mood: something which can be both measured and felt.

This detail shows the bottom left corner of the painting – which disguises the fact that the titular activity – sharpening – takes place at the exact centre of the canvas. A man in a fuchsia-coloured top and burgundy trousers is sitting on a section of a log with what appears to be a dark green saw resting across his lap. Holding a file in his two hands – the handle in his right, the working end in his left – he is sharpening one of the teeth of the saw about a fifth of the way along: the file is almost at the dead centre of the painting. Given that there are three other saws lying next to him, he clearly has his work cut out. These three saws – in deep blue, an even darker green, and cerise – splay out from a single focus. This is a technique which Bohomazov had developed in his earlier, more abstract works, and is one way in which he conveys movement. This can be read as energy either leading in to the focal point, or radiating out from it. Bohomazov’s prime interest could be rendered as ‘we see what we feel’, and the way you personally see this movement – in or out – is, I suspect, dependent on your own temperament. As well as having this rhythm of forms, there is also a rhythm of colours – blue, green and cerise – which helps to create the visual excitement of the painting, and reminds us that the saws are the subject: the colours are far more intense than those of the partial logs on which the man is sitting, and so they grab our attention. The saws are all tapered, with the broader end closer to us – the exception being the more vertical example held by the man in yellow on the left (we’ll come back to him later). The broader end has a thin bar attached to it, with a ring at the end, through which a small round pole, presumably made of wood, has been inserted. There is an unusual object in the bottom left, the same colour as the poles (so presumably also wood), the function of which is not immediately apparent (unless, perhaps, you are a sawyer). It is circular, with round poles projecting from opposite sides – similar to those on the end of the thin bars – and square protrusions at right-angles to the plane of the circle. There is also a black line describing the diameter of the circle.

The man standing on the left of the painting is checking that the process of sharpening is complete, looking along the saw to check that everything has been done correctly, and that each tooth is correctly aligned and suitably sharp. This is perhaps the most naturalistically coloured example, with the blade arguably a tempered yet slightly rusty steel. The harmonious way in which the men work with each other, and with their tools, seems to be expressed by the way in which the saw is aligned with this man’s left leg, on the same off-vertical diagonal. His weight is supported on his vertical right leg, almost like a classical contrapposto. This leg is the only significant vertical in the painting, suggesting that the man is clearly stable, in control, and, we can therefore assume, reliable. Lying on the ground behind his right foot is a log, a section of a tree trunk which has been cut transversely, but not yet longitudinally. Once the saws are sharpened and put to good use, this log will be turned into a series of rectangular beams, some of which we can see to the left of this standing man’s leg, stacked in an open, square formation to dry, or ‘season’, the lumber.  Above this is an orange structure, presumably constructed from even more beams.

A similar orange structure forms an almost theatrical backdrop to the man in green with a yellow-green hat. The striations in this structure again suggest that it could be formed from a series of cut wooden beams, which admittedly look as if they are rather precariously stacked. One of the problems of interpretation is that, apart from the deep blue sky, the dark blue distant hills, the green grass, and some of the logs, colour is not used for its descriptive function, but for expression, differentiation, and – as ever, with Bohomazov – the creation of rhythm. The man in green smiles, and looks over to his colleague who is hard at work. He looks relaxed – which might imply that the work for the day is almost done. He holds a red-pink saw with a hand that looks slightly oversized – presumably gloved, given the way he wraps his hand around the teeth of the saw: even if it were blunt this wouldn’t be comfortable! On the far right there is a pink cloth draped over a pole – presumably a tent-like construction to store the wood, or the saws.

If we return to the centre of the action – the sharpening of the saws – but this time looking at the bottom right corner of the painting, certain things become clearer. For one thing, we can see the curious circular structure from the bottom left corner put to its proper use: it is at the thinner end of the cerise saw, the black line across the diameter being a slit into which the saw has been inserted. The two short, round poles are handles: the saw could therefore be held at either end, but, given how long it is, it would need two people to operate it. The man in green is sitting on one of several logs which have been sawn longitudinally – along the trunk – but have not yet been refined into rectangular beams. The different qualities of the wood and bark are expressed by different non-naturalistic colours – pale blue on the outside (the bark, effectively), a thin a layer of pink and a thicker one in pale green, and underneath a more-or-less naturalistic wood colour. These hues are less saturated than those used for the saws: while these sawn logs are relevant as part of the process, it is the saws, as ever, which are most important. This is insistently stated, even evoking the action of the saws. The angle between the green saw (being sharpened) and the blue one could be read as describing the sawing motion itself, back and forward, with the repeated regularity of this movement restated by the nearer green and cerise saws.

As a whole the painting is a paean to this process – from the trunk, cut into logs transversely, the logs cut longitudinally, then refined into beams, which are stacked openly to dry, and then, when fully seasoned, stacked more densely.  The work has resulted in the blunting of the saws and the need for them to be sharpened. But, however complete this process may appear, it is not the whole story. As I said above, this painting was just one from a triptych, of which only one other was completed.

The central section, Sawyers at Work (1929), is also in the National Art Museum of Ukraine – but sadly, not in the exhibition (for historical reasons I suspect it is rather fragile). It shows the saws in action – being used just as supposed. The men standing atop the open platform hold the handles attached to the thin poles at the broader end of the saws, while the men on the ground hold those on the circular structures which are threaded over the thinner ends. The saws are operated vertically, or at a slight angle, as they make the long longitudinal cuts. As they work their way through each trunk, the trunk itself would also have to be moved, edged further out, or they would find themselves sawing through the supporting platform. Note how the most active man wears the deepest colour – a dark blue – and is about to thrust down the most richly coloured, red, saw. Meanwhile, a man in green (possibly the same one as in the other painting – he also wears a pale hat) sits on a completed beam at the top right. Maybe this contrast between action and rest, and the tones and hues used to portray it, could tell us about Bohomazov’s language of colour. And maybe one day I will read Bohomazov’s Painting and its Elements (1914) and find out.

Sadly, as I have said, the triptych was not completed, although it had been fully planned. Among many other drawings and sketches, a watercolour study survives, which was sold relatively recently by James Butterwick, the leading dealer in Ukrainian art (and one of the Partners in the publication of the superb catalogue, £10 from the sale of which goes towards supporting museums in Ukraine). The watercolour has has been used in a reconstruction of the triptych in one of the interpretation panels at the Royal Academy.

When seen together we can see how the rhythms of the painting are all-important – with the dark diagonals formed by the logs in the left hand image leading from the top left down towards the central painting, in which the vertical action is paramount. On the right, the man in yellow frames the edge of the painting, with his saw leading us in, but also framing the man who is sharpening, who is ‘supported’ but the three saws on the right. At a lower level these echo the logs in the left hand painting, and lead our eye in from the right of the triptych towards the centre. The standing man’s saw in the right painting is reflected by the beams which support the platforms in the two other paintings. From left to right – or right to left – the rocking rhythms surely echo – once again – the act of sawing itself. This triptych was executed from right to left, and could equally well be read that way: all the elements of the process – and the art – work together.

Whichever way you read the triptych, the watercolour sketch Rolling the Logs (1928-29) shows what could be seen as the first stage in the process, with the unsawn logs being rolled up onto the wooden frame in preparation for work to begin. The logs are large, and extremely heavy, and six men work together to perform this task – the colours suggest that they could easily be six of the eight men in Sawyers at Work. If it hadn’t been obvious before, this act of collaboration could help our understanding of the overall meaning of the triptych: this is the work of a collective, with the citizens of the soviet working together. The irony of this is that, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, fasces – which give fascism its name – are bundles of sticks. A single stick can be broken easily, but as a bundle it is unbreakable. In both cases the group effort is seen as essential to the survival of the whole society. The problem with both systems is, I suppose, that individual rights get suppressed by the directives of the few in control. But let’s face it, I’m not a political theorist. Yet here we are, realising that art is not necessarily an escape from the everyday world (which, of course, it can be), but also an essential element in understanding who we are and how we live. It’s not the icing on the top – it is an expression of the whole thing.

But what were the politics of the artists themselves? There is, apparently, a lot of work still to be done on the motivation of Ukrainian artists at the time. Bohomazov’s work is some of the first you will see if you visit In the Eye of the Storm – but his early output is unrecognisable when placed alongside The Sharpening of the Saws. Many artists – and Kazymyr Malevych is the most famous example – changed their style from abstract, or at least highly stylised, to a more politically acceptable form of socialist realism, which is how we could describe Sharpening the Saws. However, it is not clear, for each individual artist, whether this was the result of obligation – effectively a pragmatic stratagem for survival – or genuine political conviction, or even inwardly motivated artistic development. Whichever it was for Bohomazov, it is chilling to think that, had he not died of TB in 1930, he may well have completed the Sawmill Triptych, but, even so, he would probably have died in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, like many of his contemporaries. The fact that these paintings survived at all is effectively an accident of history – but more about that on Monday. And that fact that they have been brought to safety speaks of the dedication of some determined and courageous people who realised that this art – this witness to the power of the human spirit – should be seen more widely. For this reason, if none other – the brilliance of the art, for example – I cannot recommend the exhibition highly enough.

Another look at Laura looking

Laura Knight, Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper (‘Self Portrait’), 1913. National Portrait Gallery, London.

This Monday 5 August at 6pm I will conclude my three part series on Tate’s superb Now You See Us, with a talk entitled From photography to something more modern. I will look at a few remaining paintings in the Victorian Spectacle room, before moving on to think about women and watercolour, photography, and then, as the title suggests (given that photography was developed back in the 1830s), ‘something more modern’, looking at paintings from the first two decades of the 20th century. I revisited the exhibition last week, and there really are some wonderful things to see in these last few rooms (as there were in the ones before, of course). The following Monday, (12 August) I will explore the Royal Academy’s exciting In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s: it’s the most visually exciting exhibition I’ve seen this year, and really shouldn’t be missed. I’d then like to to revisit Laura Cumming’s beautiful written and highly readable book Thunderclap. Although she is mainly concerned with the enigmatic Carel Fabritius (about whom I have already spoken this year), she also discusses some other ‘greats’ from the Netherlands who mean a lot to her, including Hendrik Avercamp, Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch and Adriaen Coorte. They will all be included in Thunderclap: the ‘other’ artists on Monday 19 August. And finally, for August, (on the 26th) I will introduce the National Gallery’s soon-to-open Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, which brings together paintings by David Hockney and Piero della Francesca and looks at the nature of looking itself. More talks will follow: the details of everything that has been arranged so far can be found on the diary page of my website.

The undoubted ‘star’ of the last room of Now You See Us is Laura Knight. Or, if you prefer, Dame Laura Knight: in 1929 she was the first female artist to be granted this honour. Seven years later, she was also the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, and in 1965 she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition there. As I’m currently on holiday, passing through Aberdeen (did you know they have the most fantastic art gallery? I’m on my way there now), it seems a good opportunity, after last week, to revisit another post from January 2022. This one was originally entitled Me, Myself and I? and looks at one of Laura Knight’s truly great paintings.

It’s a remarkably original choice for any artist – a self portrait seen from behind: she is focussing on what she does, not what she looks like. Knight appears sensibly dressed, with a mid-length red jacket over a grey skirt, and what I would interpret as a striped foulard around her neck (although, as you probably realise, I am not an expert on women’s dress). As it happens, it’s not a jacket, per se, but a favourite cardigan, which she called ‘The Cornish Scarlet’. She bought it at a jumble sale in Penzance for half a crown (or 2/6, or 12.5p, depending on your age), and it can be seen in a number of her paintings. Nowadays it would be classed as ‘vintage’ and cost a whole lot more. She also wears a black hat with a colourful ribbon almost hidden by the upturned brim: all respectable women should wear a hat when in public. Her hair appears to have been plaited and pinned up. If she hadn’t turned her head to the right, we wouldn’t be able to tell who she was – and it is not clear why she has turned so far: certainly not to look at the model, as she looks past her, to something out of the frame. She is holding a paint brush in her right hand, and, from the bend of her left elbow, we can imagine that she is holding a palette in her left. The model, who is completely naked, stands with her back to us, on a striped rug which is itself on a raised platform. While her heels are more or less parallel to the picture plane, she is turned to the left, allowing us a partial view of one breast. She raises her arms around her head, with her right and left hands resting on her hair and right arm respectively. Behind her is a red screen. It may be a folding screen, although the right-angled section to the left has a trim not seen in the plain vermillion area behind her, which could even be a brighter cloth hanging over the screen: the construction is not entirely clear. In front of it, though, to the left, and behind the image of the artist, is the canvas that Knight is currently working on. Having seen the model herself, here we see her painted image, and, to the left of her, the part of the red screen that the artist has completed so far.

The inflection of Knight’s right wrist means that her hand is held away from her hip, so that she will not get paint on her skirt. It also serves to draw attention to this hand, and to the gold ring on the fourth finger. It looks like a wedding band, even if it is on the right hand (I don’t think she was looking in a mirror to see what her own back looked like: the clothing itself does not reflect her appearance, and she may well have got someone else, possibly even the same model, to model for the back – so I don’t think that this is her left hand as seen in a mirror). She was born Laura Johnson in 1877, taking her husband’s name when she married artist Harold Knight in 1903, at the age of 26. They were both born in Nottingham, and met at the Nottingham School of Art, where Laura’s mother taught.

In some of her early works Knight experimented with the pointilliste technique of George Seurat, and she continued to return to it when it suited her – as it does here in the separately coloured brushstrokes which define ‘The Cornish Scarlet’. In this case, the brushstrokes are perhaps closer to the Impressionist tache (meaning blot, patch or stain) – a short, broad mark which emphasizes the making of the image. The brushstrokes do not allow us to confuse the painting of the cardigan for the thing itself: it is undoubtedly a painting. What you are looking at, the brushstrokes say, is the work of an artist. How appropriate that she uses this technique as part of her own image, given that she is the person who made it.

If the depiction of herself – or at least of her clothing – focusses on colour, the depiction of the model is all about form. In the detail above, look how the precise tonal shifts tell us the exact structure of the feet, the slight lift of the right heel from the rug, the width of the Achilles tendon, and the structures of the muscles and the backs of the knees.

Looking at this detail I am more convinced that there is a cloth hanging over the screen – the vermillion appears to wrap around the dark frame. And the painting of this cloth is entirely different to that of the cardigan – extremely ‘painterly’, with long, broad, flowing brushstrokes painted wet-on-wet and blending in with each other. Although not part of the image that she has painted of herself, the use of a different ‘style’ of painting is surely another way in which she is inviting us to enjoy her skills as an artist, demonstrating as it does her ability to choose the brushstroke according to the nature of the material she is representing: here the vermillion cloth is broad, and flows downwards, just like the paint. The subtle but precise modulation of flesh tones continues, defining the curve of the spine and flexion of the muscles, as well as delineating the model’s long, slim fingers. Compared with the impressionistic image seen in Knight’s unfinished painting of the model, this might start to appear like photorealism – but the brushstrokes never let us forget that it is a painting. The canvas she is working on is still clearly unfinished, though. She may have started to paint the model’s shadow on the screen, but not the lit area: the white background remains, and is precisely what allows Knight’s bold profile to stand out so clearly. She is, effectively, in contre-jour – ‘against the day’: her face is depicted in shadow against a light background.

When first exhibited in 1913, at the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery in Newlyn, Cornwall (where the Knights were then living), this self portrait – then called The Model – was well received. But later it was apparently turned down by the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition, and instead was seen in London at the Grosvenor Gallery, where reviews were mixed, to say the least. The Telegraph Critic, Claude Phillips, called it ‘harmless’ and ‘dull’ (which it is not, in my humble opinion). However, he seems to have been in two minds, as he also thought it ‘vulgar’, saying that it ‘repels’. As a work which was, he had decided, ‘obviously an exercise’, he thought it ‘might quite appropriately have stayed in the artist’s studio’. So what was his problem with it?

I think that if we focus on this central section we might get a good idea. One of the first things to remember was that women had little or no access to life drawing classes. At Nottingham, the men and women (or girls – Knight studied there for around six years from the age of 13) had been segregated, and the women did not draw from the nude. The model in this painting is Laura’s friend, and fellow artist in Newlyn, Ella Louise Naper. So for one thing, this is a bold statement declaring that women should have access to the same education as men [at the Royal Academy, women gained access to life drawing classes in 1893, as we shall see on Monday]. However, the painting also creates some surprising juxtapositions. The light comes from the left – you can see Naper’s shadow on the screen to her right – and, given that Knight turns to the right, her profile is entirely in shadow. Nevertheless, it stands out clearly thanks to the brightly illuminated canvas. The negative space created by the artist’s profile – the brilliant white patch of canvas – is similar in form to the equivalent area in red around the model’s left side, with a startling echo from Knight’s nose to Naper’s breast. And, as Naper is standing on a platform, her brightly-lit buttocks are more or less on a level with Knight’s shadowy face, surely enough to make any self-respecting (male) critic blush.

As a whole, the contrast between the two women is intriguing. One clothed, the other naked; one has both arms down, the other up; the artist on the left is turned to the right, the model on the right is turned to the left. Their poses, with the shoulders on a diagonal going back into the space, echo each other, inverting only the arms, with Naper’s left arm hiding her profile. Laura Knight, despite the shadow on her face, is the one we can identify, but the various echoes and inversions could lead us to think about substituting one figure for another. With this comes the realisation that the artist herself might easily look the same as the model if she weren’t wearing clothes. I suspect it is this that made men uneasy. It was one thing for them to paint naked women – they could tell the difference between artist and subject – but in this painting, the difference is not so clear. In addition to this, of course, was the fact that Knight’s acknowledged skill was clearly a threat to the men’s supremacy.

One last question: what painting is Knight actually working on? We know that it is not finished, but we only see part of it. Nevertheless, what we do see is entirely consistent with the idea that the work she is painting is the finished self portrait itself, if we assume that we only see around 40% of it – the section which includes the vermillion cloth. Laura Knight is taking a break from painting herself painting herself painting a model – her painted image in this painted image is beyond the frame. Having said that, I do have a sneaking suspicion that she would finish the red screen first.

[Sadly this complexly-conceived portrait is not in Now You See Us – but happily at home in the relatively recently refurbished National Portrait Gallery. Another painting you won’t get to see is one of her most famous, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, as it dates from 1943, which is too late for Tate’s survey. However, I’ve left this link in (from the original post) as it will take you to a wonderful contemporary newsreel clip. If nothing else, it’s worth watching to see Knight being handed a cigarette by the presenter, and both of them lighting up in the Summer Exhibition itself. It also demonstrates how remarkably accurate her portrait of Loftus is. The painting dates from Knight’s time as a war artist in the 1940s. Before Now You See Us I hadn’t realised is that there were also women working as war artists during the First World War: I will look at some of their paintings on Monday.]

Renewed Devotion

Marie Spartali Stillman, How the Virgin Mary Came to Brother Conrad of Offida and laid her Son in his Arms, 1892. National Trust Collections, Wightwick Manor and Gardens, Warwickshire.

There’s no talk this Monday, but as I have decided (after some delay) what will take up the rest of the Summer, I thought I should let you know. This also gives me the opportunity to revisit a post about one of the artists who is included in both Now You See Us at Tate Britain, and National Treasures: Velázquez in Liverpool, but whose work I have not dealt with fairly: Marie Spartali Stillman (more on her below). My next talk will be the third and final installation of the exploration of Tate’s encyclopaedic exhibition of Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920, and 3. From photography to something more modern on Monday 5 August at 6pm will conclude the Victorian Spectacle section which I couldn’t get to (I ran out of time: bad planning I’m afraid, having tried to cover too much in the first talk). and go on to look at the small rooms dedicated to watercolour, photography, women’s access to art schools, and their forays into modernism. Thereafter, on 12 August I will visit the Royal Academy’s exciting In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s. After this I want to revisit Laura Cumming’s beautiful book Thunderclap. I talked at length about the main artist whose life and work she explores, Carel Fabritius, but she touches on a number of other ‘greats’ from the Dutch Golden age, including Hendrik Avercamp, Rembrandt, and two of my recent favourites, Gerard ter Borch and Adriaen Coorte. They will all be included in Thunderclap: the ‘other’ artists on Monday 19 August. Finally, on 26 August, I want to look at one of the National Gallery’s ‘small but perfectly formed’ exhibitions, Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, which includes paintings by David Hockney and Piero della Francesca, as the title suggests. The details of all of these talks are in the diary, of course.

Meanwhile, let’s look at a rather glorious painting by Marie Spartali Stillman – with apologies for having treated her in a rather cursory manner in two recent talks. This post was originally published as ‘147 – Inspiring Devotion’ on 27 January 2022:

We find ourselves in the middle of a forest of fairly young trees, a landscape in which, from the title of the painting, we would expect to see at least three people – the Virgin Mary, Brother Conrad of Offida, and the Christ Child – and they are clearly visible on the right of the image. Mary stands as far right as possible, wearing a full, pink dress, and blue cloak, and holding her Son in front of her. White lilies, symbols of her purity, grow at her feet. Both mother and child look down towards the man we must assume is Brother Conrad, as it is to him that the Virgin Mary has come. Dressed from head to foot in brown, with a rope belt, he kneels at her feet, and reaches up towards them – an act of humility and devotion, but, from the title, we can assume that he is already hoping for the honour of holding the Christ Child. And indeed, we know Conrad’s hope will be fulfilled, as the title tells us that Mary will lay ‘her Son in his Arms’.  But these three are not the only ones present. On the far left is another figure in brown. He could not be further away in this painting, and is also half-hidden by a tree, suggesting that maybe he should not be there. Nevertheless, he holds his hands together in prayer, and leans towards the miraculous visitation. The brown habits and rope belts tell us that these men are Franciscan friars – from the Order of Friars Minor, founded by St Francis – and it is indeed a story which Marie Spartali has taken from one of the devotional biographies of the Saint, I Fioretti di San Francesco (‘The Little Flowers of St Francis’). Most authorities now believe it was written by Ugolino Brunforte (c. 1262 – 1348) some time in the 14th Century – over a century after Francis himself had died.

The image is painted on paper in watercolour and bodycolour (any sort of opaque, water-soluble pigment – watercolour is transparent), with the addition of gold paint. It is intricately detailed, showing every leaf of the dense thicket. (It’s not clear what the trees are: I’ve just asked the Ecologist. They could be holly, not all of which is prickly, or bay, but they’re not willow, as I originally thought, because they’re not by a stream). The simplicity and innocence of Brother Conrad’s devotion is shown by the simple clarity of his face, and his open gesture, stretching his arms full length towards the child (notice the subtle highlights on the top of the sleeves). Both Mother and Child look towards him, their heads lowered, Jesus’s expression being one of determined love, his mother’s perhaps more reserved. But that is not surprising. She knows what is in store, and her head is neatly framed by the Cross at which Conrad was presumably praying before she appeared: you can see in other details that his prayer book is lying open on the ground beside him. The cross itself is a humble as the friars – a tree trunk and a sawn section of a branch tied together with the same rope used for the friars’ belts. Jesus’s head and arm lie in front of the vertical of the cross, an unmistakable reference to his fate. Indeed, the way in which he is held seems to echo some images of the Descent from the Cross, when the dead Christ’s arms fall down to one side of his inert body. Here, however, he stands – almost miraculously, almost weightlessly – on his Mother’s left hand, her right supporting his stomach as he leans towards the devoted friar. For Mother and Child this gesture of their love for the faithful is effortless. Mary’s divinity is different to that of Jesus. His halo is a simple loop, formed from the gold paint, which floats above his head. Hers is a radiant burst made up of beams of light of different lengths. The gold also picks out the hems of the blue cloak, which is slung over her right shoulder and held up by her right arm, so that it falls beneath the Christ Child and makes his pale form stand out. We can also see short brushstrokes of gold defining the shape of the pink sleeve: this is no ordinary occurrence, and in the right light, both Mother and Child would glisten. According to the story, they appeared in a ‘great light exceeding bright’.

The Fioretti tells us that the other figure is Brother Peter, who followed Conrad ‘by stealth’. It’s such a lovely story that I am quoting it in full:

The holy Brother Conrad of Offida lived in the House of Forana, in the Custody of Ancona. He went one day into the wood to meditate on God, and Brother Peter followed him by stealth, for to see what might befall him.

Brother Conrad began to pray, most devoutly beseeching the Virgin Mary to beg of her blessed Son this grace, that he might feel a little of that sweetness that Saint Simeon felt on the day of the Purification, when he held in his arms the blessed Saviour Jesu. And when he had made this prayer, the Virgin Mary of her pity heard him; and behold: there appeared unto him the Queen of heaven with her blessed Son in her arms, with a great light exceeding bright, and coming near unto Brother Conrad, she laid in his arms her blessed Son: who taking Him with great devotion, embracing and kissing Him and pressing Him to his breast, was melted altogether and dissolved in the love divine and consolation unspeakable.

And in like manner Brother Peter, who from his hiding-place saw all that befell, felt in his soul exceeding sweetness and consolation. And when the Virgin Mary had departed from Brother Conrad, Brother Peter gat him back in haste to the house, that he might not be seen of him: but thereafter, when Brother Conrad returned all joyful and glad, Brother Peter said unto him: “ O what heavenly great consolation hast thou had this day!” Quoth Brother Conrad: “What is this that thou sayest, Brother Peter? and what dost thou know of that which I have had?”

“I know full well, I know,” said Brother Peter, “how the Virgin Mary with her blessed Son hath visited thee.” Then Brother Conrad, who being truly humble desired to keep secret the favours of God, besought him that he would tell it unto no one; and from that time forth so great was the love between these twain, that they seemed to have but one heart and soul in all things.

That Brother Peter was an upright and trustworthy man – despite his ‘stealth’ – is clear from the way he echoes the upward growth of the tree behind which he is barely hidden (an oak, as it happens), although as the tree grows left he leans right. He wears sandals: St Francis told his friars they should not wear shoes, much as Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 6:28-29 not to worry what they wear:

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

… and there are plenty of flowers growing beautifully here to underline that point. Brother Conrad’s humility is such that he does not even seem to be wearing sandals: the hem of his habit falls over his heels, but this leaves his unshod toes clearly visible. The woodland is beautifully structured. Further back, and to the right of Brother Peter’s tree is another, and at the same distance back and to the right we see a third stand of trunks. Then to the right, and coming forward is fourth.

Coming forward and to the right again we see Brother Conrad – he is as sturdy (in his faith) as these trees growing in the wood, and he kneels between that fourth clump and the Cross, which is itself often described as the ‘Tree’ on which Jesus died – with Jesus as the fruit of the tree.

If we look back to the whole image, we can see that these trees are arranged in an unmistakeable ‘V’ shape, leading back into the woods from Brother Peter, and then forward to Brother Conrad. It is one of the devices which emphasizes the distance between to the two friars. Not only are Peter and Mary at the extremes of the painting (although Spartali makes sure that both Mary and Jesus are higher than Peter), but this ‘V’ creates an open space in the middle of the painting. I do not think it is a coincidence that the diagonal formed by the heads of Mary, Jesus and Conrad lands at the base of the painting directly beneath the central cluster of trees, the point of the ‘V’.

It is just to the left of this central growth that the brightest elements of the distant landscape can be seen – the sky around a church on the horizon. This helps to tells us the extent of Conrad’s devotion. Not only is the church well lit – the source of his enlightenment – but it is also far: in his humility he has retreated far from the world, not wanting his prayers to be witnessed, or to ‘show off’ the strength of his belief. As a result, he has been duly rewarded. The expression on Peter’s face also reminds us that, as the story tells us, he ‘felt in his soul exceeding sweetness and consolation’ – although I can’t help thinking that Spartali has also added in a little hint of guilt, acknowledging that perhaps he really shouldn’t be there spying on his Brother.

I think this image is remarkably beautiful, telling a charming story with clarity and delicacy – both in terms of emotional truth and detailed naturalism. It has all the hallmarks of the Pre-Raphaelite ‘greats’ – but sadly, the artist is little known. Having trained with Ford Maddox Brown, Marie Spartali – part of the Greek business diaspora in London – married the American journalist William Stillman against her father’s wishes. When Stillman was posted to Florence, she inevitably went with him, and there they lived from 1878-83, socialising with the Anglo-American ex-pats, among whom the most interesting must surely have been John Singer Sargent. From ’86-’96 they lived in Rome (I’m not sure where they were in between!), and in 1892, when today’s picture was painted, they spent some time near Perugia – and so not far from Assisi where St Francis himself is buried. In all that time she continued to visit England, and to send paintings around the world, often – like Evelyn de Morgan, who I wrote about way back in April 2020 (see Day 41 – Night and Sleep) – supporting her husband with the income from her sales. There would have been plenty of opportunities for her to see art, and to be inspired – and there are many influences on this painting, as there are for any good artist who will acknowledge their work as part of a greater whole. The story itself is not so terribly far from the story of the stigmatisation of St Francis, which took place at Mount La Verna, in a ‘secret and solitary place’, according to St Bonaventura. On that occasion St Francis was accompanied by Brother Leo, and although Leo was not physically present, but nearby, he gave the first account of the stigmatisation, and many artists paint Leo as if he were in full sight when it happened. Spartali could have seen the fresco by Giotto in the Upper Church in Assisi, although I am showing you the version by Domenico Ghirlandaio from Santa Trinità in Florence (1483-5). Not only is the format similar to that of her painting, but in other works she seems to draw on Ghirlandaio for details of renaissance clothing.

The wooded landscape itself is derived from Giovanni Bellini, and his Assassination of St Peter Martyr (about 1505-7) – presented to the National Gallery by Lady Eastlake in 1870: Spartali could easily have seen it there.

Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, about 1505-7. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG812

And the last thing I would suggest is a source for the rather precarious way in which Mary holds Jesus. I am sure it is inspired by a Botticelli in the Palazzo Pitti – again, somewhere she is bound to have visited while she was in Florence. In this case Jesus embraces his cousin John – and it is as if Spartali ‘wound back’ the event (as well as reversing it), to depict the moment just before the child was lowered into Brother Conrad’s arms.

Two last images: the first, a portrait of Marie Spartali-Stillman by Ford Maddox Brown (1869, Private Collection). He is said to have had an unrequited passion for her, but I really can’t speak to that. He does, however – unlike many other male artists painting their female colleagues – show her as a competent, practicing artist. She sits beside her easel on which we can see one of her own works, her palette and mahl stick leaning up against it. This is, to my mind, one of her early works, The Lady Prays-Desire (1867, Private Collection) – the other image I have posted. However, some people wonder if the painting on the easel could be her first publicly exhibited work, Korinna (also 1867, now lost), but I really can’t believe that she would have replicated this precise chin-on-curled-finger pose in two contemporaneous images. Nor that in both the centrally-parted red hair would have been held back by black ribbons.

This is a good place to leave her. After all, she said, ‘it was Madox Brown who encouraged me to become an artist and who taught me to paint. I can never feel sufficiently grateful for his having given this immense interest to my life’. If you would like to know more about Marie Spartali-Stillman, I can recommend the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Sisters. There is also a catalogue to an exhibition held at Delaware Art Museum in 2015, Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman, although this is now only available second hand at considerable expense.

A new life for The Death of Cleopatra

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Greetings from Sunny Sidmouth, where I’m enjoying a brief stint playing the title role in Yes, Prime Minister. It’s a short run, but by the time it ends I will probably have been in post almost as long as Liz Truss. I’ll be back online by Monday, 22 July when I will give the second talk in my scattered series dedicated to Tate Britain’s thorough introduction to Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920, Now You See Us. The talk is entitled Victorian Splendour, and will start with the gradually introduced restrictions which were imposed by the Royal Academy on submissions to their annual exhibition. They turn out to be rather important, and can help us to understand where our views on what constitutes ‘Art’ come from. This will lead us into the wealth and riches of both painting and sculpture produced by women in the 19th Century. The third and final talk, From photography to something more modern will follow on Monday, 5 August at 6pm, and will look at the new techniques, new approaches, and new means of access to the world of art which were available to women from the end of the Victoria era into the early 20th Century. Today, as my head is still caught up in the world of politics, I am looking back to a post from four years ago, looking at a remarkable American artist whose work is included in Now You See Us because she spent the last years of her life in Britain. I haven’t edited it at all: when I say ‘today’, it was 8 June, 2020.

Today I’m finding it hard to say who or what had the most unusual history – the artist or their art, the subject or the sculpture – and given the fame of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt that’s really saying something.  But Edmonia Lewis was a remarkable woman, and, if anything, her history is further shrouded by the mists of time, and by whims of the imagination, than that of her famous subject. So let’s start with the sculpture. Cleopatra is seated on her throne, her left arm hanging down, her right hand resting on her thigh, her head tilted to one side, for all the world as if she has just nodded off. But as we know from the title, carved on the base of the sculpture, this is the sleep of death. Rarely has it been portrayed so calmly.

Intricately carved, you may yet be struggling to focus on some of the details: the sculpture is badly worn, the result of an unconventional history. Cleopatra wears an approximation to the headgear of Egyptian pharaohs, a combination of the nemes – the striped head cloth, with its two lappets hanging down behind the ears (familiar to us today from the mask of Tutankhamun) – with a form of pinnacle, perhaps derived from the hedjet – the white crown of Upper Egypt. The stylised leaf decoration on the back of the throne creates a foil to the crisply-carved folds of the dress, making the figure stand out from its background. The half-length sleeves are caught up twice into bunches, and the dress is gathered at a high waist, so that there is a counterpoint between the freely-hanging, more deeply carved drapery and broader areas where the cloth clings to the underlying anatomy. One breast is defined by fabric and folds, the other revealed. Her right hand, apparently relaxed, still holds the asp that killed her.

The queen wears two necklaces, both beaded, and the lower also has a pendant, possibly representing a bucranium– the skull of an ox – although, given the lack of detail, this is not certain. The full skirt flares out behind her hips, and hangs over the arm of the throne, which is carved along the sides with mock hieroglyphs.

The two heads on the arms of the throne, also wearing the nemes, represent the twin sons of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. Whether the ring she wears on the fourth finger of her left hand represents her relationship with him, or is merely decorative, is not clear. She wears wonderfully inventive sandals, the large loops revealing her delicately carved toes, the smallest of which is slightly lifted. The skirt of the dress hangs down from her knees, wrapping round her left shin, with the hem to revealing her feet. From there, it trails down to the right, falling over the edge of the sculpture. A rose has dropped onto the foot of the throne, and lies there, resting on the dress, the fallen bloom symbolic of the subject’s death. 

On one side, as we have seen, the arm of the throne is covered by drapery. The other is decorated with a leaping griffin holding a leaf in its front paw, and surrounded by other, stylised leaves. From this angle, the tail of the asp can be seen lying across Cleopatra’s right leg.

The Death of Cleopatra was first exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadephia in 1876, but it had been shipped from Rome. Edmonia Lewis had settled there a decade before, having travelled from Boston via London and Paris. However, it is only the middle of her life that can be documented with any certainty. She was probably born in 1844 in the State of New York, to an Afro-Haitian father and a mother of mixed heritage, African American and Chippewa: as an adult Lewis would claim an affinity with Hiawatha. Both parents had died by the time she was nine, when she was brought up by her maternal aunts. As she said of her own childhood,

Until I was twelve years old I led this wandering life, fishing and swimming … and making moccasins. I was then sent to school for three years… but was declared to be wild – they could do nothing with me.

Apart from this it is hard to pin down her childhood. Like so many artists she became the master of her own history, and like Andy Warhol or Tracey Emin, was arguably her own greatest creation, drawing on different parts of her heritage according to the public she was addressing. She was good at marketing, it would seem, even if not financially secure. Her half-brother had made enough money in the Gold Rush, though, to send her to Oberlin College, which accepted both female and black students. Nevertheless, as part of a tiny minority she was subject to continual racism, and forced to leave after unfounded accusations that she had poisoned two fellow students and stolen from the College itself. She moved to Boston (again, supported financially by her brother), where the sculptor Edward Beckett acted as a mentor and helped her to set up her own studio. Her work was supported by a number of prominent abolitionists and advocates of Native American rights, of whom she modelled portrait medallions in clay and plaster, later carved in marble: one example is illustrated here. Her bust of Colonel Robert Shaw, a white officer who had led a company of African-American infantrymen during the Civil War, was enormously successful. She sold numerous copies, these sales paying for her trip to Europe.

Edmonia Lewis, Wendell Phillips, 1871, NPG, Washington D.C.

In Rome, she was befriended by American sculptor Harriet Hosman, who, like Lewis, was one of very few women to carve marble. On the whole, sculptors would pay stonemasons to carve their works, having first modelled them in clay or plaster. Figures as eminent as Canova would do this (Picture Of The Day 68) but Lewis could rarely afford to pay anyone, so did most of the carving herself. Nevertheless, the connection with Canova was real: when in Rome, she did as he did – and rented his former studio.

The Death of Cleopatra is said to have taken her four years, but by the time it was completed she couldn’t afford to ship it to the States. She travelled back alone, and sold smaller works to pay for it to be delivered. It was the hit sculpture of the Centennial Exhibition, although not universally popular. Traditionally Cleopatra had been seen as very much alive – decorous, alluring, and tantalising with that oh-so-dangerous asp. But definitely not dead. Curiously, there is a precedent – Artemisia Gentileschi painted Cleopatra post-bite, her lips already blue, but I doubt that Lewis would have known that. No slight on her – nobody really knew who Artemisia Gentileschi was in the 19th Century: they were only just rediscovering Caravaggio. 

In this sculpture there is an undoubted sense that Cleopatra, as a strong African woman, had a mastery over her own fate, and Edmonia Lewis, who is also known to have claimed her own biography, was in a position to show her doing so. The material was also ideal: it allowed Lewis to depict a strong African woman, while also giving her license to portray her white – not as white, but carved in white marble – which might have made the image more acceptable to some of the audience, as would the more-or-less fully clad figure. Most artists had portrayed the voluptuous Queen in a more advanced state of undress – including Artemisia, who showed her lying on her bed completely naked more than once, dead and alive. In this case, it really was the fact that she was already dead that some critics didn’t like. One, an artist himself, William J. Clark Jr., thought that “the effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent—and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.” Ironically, this was a form of praise: what Lewis was attempting to do, she had done too well.

Despite its popularity, the sculpture did not sell. Nor did it sell when subsequently exhibited at the Chicago Industrial Interstate Expo, but Lewis could not afford to ship it back to Rome. Somehow it ended up as a feature in a Chicago saloon, until it was bought from there by a shady character named ‘Blind John’ Condon, a racehorse owner and gambler, who used it as the gravestone for a favourite horse – also called Cleopatra – by side of a Chicago race track. The race track became a golf course, then a Navy munitions site, and finally a postal depot. The sculpture was covered with graffiti, until well-meaning boy scouts painted it white. Although rescued in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that it ended up at the Smithsonian, where it was cleaned up as much as was possible. However, after decades in the open air, there is no hope of restoring its original finish.

Henry Rocher, Edmonia Lewis, c. 1870, NPG, Washington, D.C.

And Edmonia Lewis? She was successful, for a while, and could employ as many as six assistants. But then she disappeared from view for the last two decades of her life. It was only recently that it was discovered that she died in London in 1907 – she had been living in Hammersmith, and was buried in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green. She had disappeared from view, and sadly so had many of her sculptures – but there are just enough, in the Smithsonian, and the Met, to keep her name alive.

[Since I first wrote this post four years ago I have learnt that there are several sculptures by Lewis in the UK – not only the Bust of Christ which is exhibited in Now You See Us, and will feature in Monday’s talk, but also a portrait of Edward Wadsworth Longfellow at my new local, The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. And there are more – do let me know if you find one!]

225 – Necessity is the Mother of Inventiom

Angelica Kauffman, Invention, 1778-80. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Rather brilliantly, Tate Britain’s encyclopedic survey of Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920, opens with Angelica Kauffman’s Invention. It was one of the four Elements of Art which she was commissioned to paint for Somerset House, where they were installed in the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s new Council Chamber in time for its opening in 1780. Invention was one of the many reasons that it was said that women couldn’t become artists, as it was one of the many qualities that men said women lacked. Indeed, it was probably the chief quality, as the merely practical ability to copy things which already existed – whether portraits or living human beings – was granted them. And that is why I think it is a brilliant opening to the exhibition. It also means that the first of my talks, Up to the Academy, will be framed by Kauffman’s work, as she was, famously, one of the two women who were founder members of the Academy in question. The other, Mary Moser, is far better represented than I was expecting, just one of the many reasons to go. This first talk will be on Monday, 1 July at 6pm, and it will be followed by Victorian Splendour and From photography to something more modern on 22 July and 5 August respectively, scattered as the result of an unexpected theatrical engagement, and a long-planned holiday. If you want to book for all three, I have, against my better judgement, re-instated the tixoom bundle which will give you a reduction on the overall cost of the tickets (available via those links). I will cross my fingers until 5 August, hoping that nothing else gets in the way!

As I said above, Angelica Kauffman’s painting Invention is one of a series of four, and if you would like more background for the commission, I wrote about two of the others way back in May 2020 (see Day 48 – Colour and Design). The series was dedicated to the Elements of Painting, as defined by the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. The other three are Colour, Design, and Composition. While ‘colour’ and ‘composition’ are standard terms, the difference between ‘composition’ and ‘design’ might not be obvious. Sir Joshua was aware of historic debates among European artists and theoreticians, and chose a direct translation from the Italian ‘disegno’ to give us ‘design’, even if ‘drawing’ would be a more logical choice given its standard use in English. But we’re not thinking about any of these today. Instead, we will focus on Invention, that quality which, as I have said, women were said not to possess. How do you come up with the ideas that make a great work of art? And for that matter, how do you represent that concept? This is how Kauffman chose to personify it.

Invention wears a white dress and a butterscotch-coloured cloak, the former matching the lighter colours of her pale complexion, while the latter blends with her golden hair. She sits in a landscape on a rock, which has undefined vegetation growing around it. Her right knee is raised with the shin vertical, and the ball of the foot planted firmly on the ground, while her left knee is lower, the foot trailing off to our right. A dark blue globe lies on the upper surface of the sloping rock and rests against Invention’s knee. Her right hand, draped with the butterscotch cloak, rests on the globe. Her left arm is raised, the hand upturned, as if towards the heavens. She gazes upwards, past what, at first glance, might appear to be a peculiar form of headdress. On the far right there are distant, blue mountains, with a river, or lake curling around their base – not unlike the mountains of Switzerland, where Kauffman was born. On the other side of the painting, in there middle ground, there are two tree trunks. They cross each other (they grow on opposing, steep diagonals) and close off the composition to the left.

Invention’s right hand is resting on what can be seen to be a celestial globe, with five stars marked quite clearly in white. There are two between her thumb and forefinger and three in a row lower down and to the left. Her index finger points to the globe, and could be pointing to the lowest of these three stars. Below it, and a little to the right, there is a sixth star in the shadows. It’s not a constellation that I recognise, but I have never considered myself to be an astronomer (and yes, before you suggest it, there are hints of Orion). The headdress – if that is indeed what it is – is in the form of two wings, both white, and with well-defined plumage, although it is not clear whether this is part of Invention’s anatomy, or something she is wearing. The clouds are slightly darker behind the head, allowing the face to stand out clearly. Some of the billowing forms between the wings may relate to a pentimento – a change of ideas about the length and form of the hair.

Whatever the meaning of the various elements portrayed, the painting is, surely, incredibly inventive in itself. But what could it all mean? It really helps if we turn to a book published originally in 1593, the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa, in which various ‘abstract’ qualities, whether virtues or vices, arts or sciences, moods and even cities were described as visual, allegorical figures. The work became truly successful – and useful for artists – ten years after its original publication when a new edition was brought out which included woodcuts, thus giving visual form to some of the many concepts described. Many other editions followed, including an English translation, published in 1719. I have chosen this version as a result of its availability: it was digitised in 2009 by the Warburg Institute, and is available online. Below is the title page – I hope you can read it, but don’t worry if it’s not clear – followed by the description of Invention, which I have transcribed for the sake of clarity.

FIG. 168 Inventione: INVENTION.
  This Mistress of Arts appears in a white Robe, whereon is written, 
NON ALIUNDE; two little Wings on her Head; in one Hand, the 
image of Nature, a Cuff on the other, with the Motto, AD OPERAM.
  Youth denotes many Spirits in the Brain, where Invention is form’d; the white Robe, the Pureness of it, not making Use of other Mens Labor, as the Motto shews. The Wings, Elevation of Intellect; naked Arms, her being ever in Action, the Life of Invention. The Image of Nature shews her Invention.

To clarify, NON ALIUNDE translates as ‘not from elsewhere’, while AD OPERAM means ‘to work’, as in ‘for the purpose of…’ But how does the illustration from the English edition compare to Kauffman’s painting?

The white dress is more overtly depicted in the painting, a natural result of the medium, even if Kauffman does not append the motto. However, the most obvious similarity between the two are the ‘two little Wings on her Head’, showing ‘Elevation of Intellect’. The ‘image of Nature’ is completely different, though. The woodcut is hard to read, but it is meant to be an image of the Diana of Ephesus, reaching out her arms, just as Invention does. In its original form it is an image of fertility, with many breasts (see below). This was presumably chosen as an illustration of the fecundity of nature, from which we can draw inspiration, which in itself will lead to invention. Kauffman instead chooses a celestial globe, a view of the heavens, which would seem to speak of divine inspiration as much as drawing on the natural world. Unlike both the woodcut and the description, Kauffman’s Invention only has one arm naked – and there is no ‘cuff’, or second motto. The woodcut illustrates two columns, which are not mentioned in the text, and, like Kauffman’s image, has distant mountains on the far right. Kauffman’s choice of two trees (rather than columns) would seem to make sense, and could imply that the background, as much as the object held, might be seen to illustrate ‘The Image of Nature’.

There is, of course, a contradiction at the very heart of Kauffman’s painting, but it is one that is embedded in Ripa’s own work: NON ALIUNDE – ‘not from elsewhere’. Clearly, anyone drawing on Ripa’s idea is taking something from elsewhere, so it is not inventive. Does it even make any sense, therefore, to include this painting at the beginning of Now You See Us? You could argue that Kauffman was not being at all inventive – but then, when commissioned to paint Invention, what else could you do? I would argue, as the title of this post suggests, that necessity was the mother of Invention: where else would you turn, other than a readily available source of almost any personification you might be asked to paint?  

However, not only was she using someone else’s idea, but she was relying on the work of a man. I state it like this because it would really agitate some writers on art made by women. I remember reading a social media post some time ago which berated Tate Britain for stating, on one of the gallery labels, that the work of Marlow Moss, an artist working in Britain in the first half of the 20th Century, was influenced by that of Piet Mondrian. Why should the work of this notable, but neglected woman be directed back towards that of a far more famous man? Could her work not be seen in its own right? To be honest, I can’t remember the exact phrasing used. However, what this particular (and now well-known) commentator had not noticed – or was deliberately ignoring – was that in the same room it was also stated that Ben Nicholson’s work was influenced by that of Piet Mondrian. So, my question would be, should only men be influenced by other men? And does this imply that women have to rely on their own ideas, or are they allowed to take inspiration from other women? Or, and this would be my suggestion, is it maybe that both men and women are part of an artistic community which is a community quite simply because it does have ideas in common? After all, it wasn’t just Angelica Kauffman who relied on the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Painting (also in Now You See Us) is drawn from it – but then, as she was also a woman, maybe that’s not such a good example. However, Vermeer’s Art of Painting uses Ripa’s Clio (the muse of history), while his Allegory of Faith draws on more than one of Ripa’s suggested qualities. And then, there is also this painting, which I saw by chance in the Accademia when I was in Venice a few weeks ago:

Pierantonio Novelli’s Il Disegno, Il Colore, e l’Invenzione (or Drawing, Colour, and Invention) is dated 1768-69, ten years before Kauffman’s four Elements of Art, and (coincidentally) exactly the date when the Royal Academy was founded. But then, it’s a very academic idea. If we compare Novelli’s Invention to the version by Kauffman, something should become quite clear.

Saying that Kauffman relied on the ideas of others does not, in any way, belittle her achievement, or make her less of an artist. It shows that she was part of an artistic community, and operated within that community in the same ways that her male contemporaries did. Indeed, one of the definitions which helps us decide what constitutes a work of art is that it is aware of its status as an art object. In other words, it acknowledges the work of other artists. I’m fairly sure that this is another feature of Kauffman’s image. The pose of Invention is not unlike many of Michelangelo’s seated figures, and is ultimately related to the Torso Belvedere, which features in Kauffman’s Design (again I would direct you to Day 48 – Colour and Design). The two trees on the left are also relevant, I think, given that they remind me of those growing in the background of Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr, which was widely copied and quoted before its destruction by fire in 1867.

I think we should be more specific about the extent to which Kauffman is reliant on Ripa. Her image of Invention is not the same as Novelli’s, which, like the woodcut above – and every other illustration from different editions of the Iconologia I have seen – shows the ‘Image of Nature’ as the Diana of Ephesus. Kauffman is not copying ideas mechanically, and, for whatever reason, she chose a celestial globe instead of the Diana. She also set Invention within an entirely natural setting, rather than including any architectonic elements. In some ways, therefore, she was actually more inventive than Novelli. She was also, undoubtedly, part of an artistic community – indeed, she was part of several. For these reasons, and more, the painting really is a perfect introduction to Now You See Us.

Revisiting Velázquez and Juan de Pareja

Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The more I think about the Walker Art Gallery’s display National Treasures: Velázquez in Liverpool the more I am impressed. In terms of the way it is curated, it is undoubtedly one of the best exhibitions I have seen this year. I am currently putting together the presentation for my talk about it, which will be this Monday, 17 June at 6pm, and I keep noticing more and more connections between the exhibits: each has its own specific role to play, and is linked carefully to everything around it. I will spend a lot of time looking at the masterpiece that is The Rokeby Venus, before considering the works drawn from the museum’s own collection with which it is exhibited. Not only do they help us to see the painting in a refreshing new light, but they do not get in the way of a traditional interpretation.

Two days later, on Wednesday 19 June at 1pm, you can join me in person, or online, at the Wallace Collection for a free talk entitled Getting carried away with Michelangelo and Ganymede – there are more details on those links. The talk will also be recorded, so you can always ‘catch up’ afterwards if you have booked one of the free tickets. There’s nothing the following week, but the week after, on Monday 1 July, I will give the first of my talks relating to Tate Britain’s encyclopedic Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. Entitled Up to the Academy, it will consider works from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries.

After that, I’m afraid I don’t know quite what is happening. Something has come up which means that I might have to reschedule the other two talks about this exhibition, but until things are settled (which I was hoping would be yesterday, but it’s looking like it won’t be until next week) I don’t want to do anything too drastic. For the time being I have suspended ticket sales for the other two talks, and for the bundle of all three. If you have booked any of these, I am sorry, but please don’t worry: I will contact you as soon as I know what I’m doing, and let you know what the situation is. And apologies, of course, in advance, for any inconvenience…

In the meantime – because I’m having one of ‘those’ weeks – I thought it would be a good idea to look at a rather wonderful portrait which I originally used as an illustration for an even earlier post back in June 2020. I had written about about Juan de Pareja’s own painting of The Flight into Egypt (See Picture Of The Day 85), but I wanted to look at Velázquez’ portrait of Pereja in its own right, simply because it is rather wonderful – and also because it gave me a good opportunity to talk about both artist and sitter.

The portrait was painted in 1650 in Rome, when Velázquez was visiting Italy for the second time [and it was possibly there and then that he painted The Rokeby Venus]. He was in Rome at the behest of King Philip IV of Spain, and he had been sent to acquire paintings and sculptures for the Alcázar in Madrid. He was accompanied by Juan de Pareja, who had been in his service since the early 1630s. They sailed from Málaga to Genoa, and then travelled through Milan to Venice. There he bought paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese – all of which seem to have influenced Pareja’s own work, although they were, in any case, already in plentiful supply back in Spain. From there they headed to the Este Court in Modena, and thence to Rome. While there he was commissioned to paint Giovanni Battista Pamphili, better known as Pope Innocent X. ‘In order to get his hand in’ (as Jennifer Montagu phrased it in an article in the Burlington Magazine of November 1983) he practiced by painting ‘a head’ of his assistant. This was the term used by Antonio Palomino, who wrote one of the first biographies of Velázquez, published in 1724. From our point of view this masterful painting is far more than just a head – it is a fully finished portrait – but that was the term they used. Indeed, Palomino went on to say that it was included in an exhibition held in the portico of the Pantheon on 19 March 1650, and that, “it was generally applauded by all the painters from different countries, who said that the other pictures in the show were art but this one alone was ‘truth’.” 

The comment speaks for itself in many ways, even if the portrait does include much ‘art’. It is a herald of Velázquez’ late style, which his contemporary Spaniards called the maniera abreviada , the ‘abbreviated style’. When you look closely, there is the most remarkable freedom in the handling of the paint, however detailed it may appear from a distance.

All of the details are there, we know how every item of clothing fits, where and how it is attached – and yet it is nothing but a mass of paint. Velázquez’ style had been developing a greater freedom ever since his earliest days of minutely detailed precision (see POTD 20), but added to that we might be seeing a way of making a virtue out of necessity. You don’t always get long with a Pope, and Velázquez needed to be sure that he would be able to paint him quickly, and from life, rather than relying on a pre-existing portrait (a very common practice at the time for anything ‘official’) – hence the need to practice on Pareja. The challenges were very different, but even here he might have been rehearsing. 

Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome.
Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Apparently the Pope had quite a high, reddish, complexion – but was also to be shown wearing his scarlet biretta and mozzetta – the hat and cape – while seated on a red throne against a red curtain.  Although completely different in appearance, Pareja was also portrayed with a limited palette, but this time of mid- to dark-browns. It is a far subtler portrait, as a result, and I think a far more beautiful one, however brilliant Innocent X may appear – although of course I’m more than happy for you to disagree!

The gentle highlights on the forehead, nose and cheeks give us a real sense of form, while a softness around the mouth and eyes – and especially the double catch-lights that make the eyes seem so moist – create a sense of inner sadness, which may be projection on my part. Pareja may have been very happy at this point. 

He was born in Antequera, not so far from Málaga, in 1606, just three years before the Moors were expelled. His mother, Zulema, was mixed race, and in part of African descent, while his father (after whom Juan was named) was a white Spaniard. Pareja came to Madrid in the early 1630s, probably entering Velázquez’ service soon after the latter returned from his first visit to Italy in January 1631. I say he entered ‘his service’, but it’s not that simple. Pareja was Velázquez’ slave, Velázquez ‘owned’ him, an idea which I still find both astonishing and appalling.

It would have been in Velázquez’ service that he must have learnt how to paint. However, Palomino says that the master wouldn’t allow him to do so because of his status, adding that in the Classical world only free men were allowed access to such sophisticated practices. He goes on to say that Pareja did paint in secret nevertheless, and arranged for one of his own paintings to be in the master’s studio one day when King Philip IV visited. The King was so impressed that he insisted Pareja should be freed, and allowed to practice in his own right. Sadly, this charming story is manifestly not true. A document in the archives in Rome, dated 23 November 1650 – published by Jennifer Montague in the article cited above – is a notarial act granting Pareja his freedom, ‘In view of the good and faithful service the slave has given him and considering that nothing could be more pleasing to the slave than the gift of liberty’ – provided that he stayed in Velázquez’ service for a further four years. This was quite a common clause, apparently, as was the ‘ownership’ of slaves by artists (and, I assume, other members of Spanish society). Francisco Pacheco, Murillo and Alonso Cano all had enslaved assistants, for example.

Pareja’s earliest dated painting is the Rest on the Flight to Egypt – which I mentioned above (POTD 85) – but that was not painted until 1658, four years after his ‘freedom’. It could be that other, earlier paintings have been lost (only ten survive, as far as we know) or it could be that he really didn’t start painting on his own until he was free. But however much he might have relished his liberty, he did not go far, as I said in the previous blog. He continued to work as Velázquez’ assistant until the master died in 1660. He then became the assistant to Juan Bautista del Mazo, Velázquez’ son-in-law, and remained part of that household until his own death in 1670, even though Mazo himself had died three years earlier.

Back in 2020 I finished the post with the sentence ‘I hope to look at another of his paintings tomorrow’ – and indeed I did (see POTD 89 – The Baptism of Christ). More significantly, in 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged an exhibition of his work, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, with this portrait as the centre piece. I only wish I could have gone. Still, all the paintings are out there in the world somewhere, and who knows, there may yet be more to be identified.