Well, this was disappointing. ‘Flaming June’ is one of the most important and famous works by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830 to 1896) President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896. It was originally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. However, due to the vagaries of the art market it has for some time been owned by the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Puerto Rico of all places.
Now, for a whole year, it is on an extended loan back to the Academy where it was first exhibited, by one of its most famous luminaries, almost 128 years ago. Here she is, flaming away:
Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895) Museo de Arte de Ponce. Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc.
The curators promise that ‘Flaming June’ is being shown alongside other popular works from the RA Collection, including:
other works by Leighton
works by his contemporaries
works which inspired him (including Michaelangelo’s Taddei Tondo)
works which he in turn influenced
Which fired me up to expect an orgy of masterpieces, not least by Leighton’s fellow Olympians who specialised in diaphanously dressed Roman and Greek ladies draped over marble benches playing ancient lyres or scattered with rose petals. Critics often describe it as late-Victorian soft porn.
Well, apart from June herself, there’s absolutely none of that here and the display is a big disappointment.
Confusing
For a start it’s been put on in the Collections Gallery, which already hosts a couple of absolutely vast Renaissance murals and some hefty Renaissance statues which dwarf the Leighton and confused me about where the Leighton display ended and the works on permanent display started. Off to one side, on the way to the small temporary exhibition room, was Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’. This is the only carving by Michelangelo in the UK and was part of the RA Collection during Leighton’s presidency so… is it part of this display or not?
No good paintings
Second, there are none of the large sensual depictions of the ancient world I was looking forward to, none. Instead there are only two other paintings:
2. A less well-known work by fellow Olympian, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘The Way to the Temple‘ (1882) which – bizarrely and perversely given that the whole point of ‘Flaming June’ is the combination of shimmering sea and Mediterranean light and female sensuality – is a picture of a woman hidingin the shadows of ancient buildings while, in a narrow sliver, you can see a few people in some ancient procession marching by in the sunlight. Yes the redness of her pre-Raphaelite hair and shawl, yes the detail of the bronze brazier, the architectural reliefs in the background and so on – but really, could they possibly have selected a less appropriate work to compare June with? The wall label make the most tenuous connection imaginable by pointing out that the female figure in this painting is holding…what? Can you see what she’s holding? It’s a votive statue – so the curators are able to shoehorn this inappropriate work into their overarching theme of sculpture and painting and sculpture in painting.
So the ‘paintings by contemporaries’ turn out to be a bit rubbish.
Sculpture versus painting
Instead, all there really is to look at is some pretty technical, art school stuff about the contrast between sculpture and painting, illustrated with drab, black-and-white preparatory sketches.
The first wall label tells us that the debate about which art form was superior goes back to Leonardo and Michelangelo. It then goes on to explain Leighton’s process, which was to make sketches on paper with squares on, trying out this or that composition, until he had it right and was then able to transfer the small (A4 size) sketch up to the much larger scale of the finished painting (in Flaming June’s case, 47 inches by 47 inches).
There’s a sketch and a model made to model the figures in his painting The Garden of the Hesperides. As you can see, the figure on the left is wearing pretty much the same colour dress as June and is also sculpted to have a great haunch of thigh.
There are some small dark sketches he made in preparation for his painting Perseus and Andromeda (1891), these are the ones on squared paper. God if only they’d been able to include the finished paintings of Hesperides and Perseus what a different feel the display would have had!
The Sluggard
Oh yes, on the way in to the Collections Room they’ve placed an impressive sculpture by Leighton, The Sluggard, dominating the entrance and, I suppose, announcing the curator’s theme of ‘sculpture versus painting’ or ‘how Leighton incorporated sculpture into painting’. I’d say this was worth going to see except that it belongs just a mile or two up the road at Tate where it’s regularly on public display, so not much of a treat either.
The Sluggard by Leighton
There’s another sculpture, the ‘reduced’ i.e. preliminary version of ‘Athlete struggling with a python.’ I think we can safely say that this lacks the scale and finish of the final version and so contributes, somehow, to the second-hand, shabby feel of the whole display, as if they couldn’t afford the real thing. A Tescos exhibition.
Academic
Frankly, this would all have been better in an academic textbook where it could have been more fully explained with more examples and more discussion. Instead: June herself, two inferior paintings from the period, a good Leighton sculpture, half a dozen sketches, some preparatory masques, and that’s your lot.
Some learnings
Well, at least there’s a bench to plonk yourself down on in front of ‘Flaming June’ and give it a damn good looking at. Some points emerge:
The sea Fool that I am, I hadn’t, from the hundreds of reproductions I’ve seen, quite realised that the horizontal band just above her head is a view over the shimmering sea, with the vast sun just out of sight.
The foot For some reason I’d never really noticed the model’s left foot poking out at you from under her right knee; it’s there in all the reproductions but somehow, in the flesh, appeared more prominent.
The body This foot had the effect of transforming the image which I had previously considered as an almost abstract design – with the line of the neck and head almost aligned with that of the enormous slab-like thigh to create a sort of abstract pattern – anyway the foot brought out the reality of the human model more than reproductions do, and I began to connect up all her limbs, the right hand hooked into the left arm etc.
Happy accident Now, given how the curators go on about Leighton’s worship of Michelangelo and the entire display makes a big deal of sculpture I was expecting the model’s striking pose to be the result of detailed study of the arcana of Michelangelo’s sketches or sculpture etc etc; instead, the wall label informs us that the entire pose, in all its famous combination of hugeness and sensual abandonment, was completely accidental – according to Leighton the model curled up and went to sleep in that pose and he thought Eureka!
Sculpture and painting The point of including The Sluggard is to demonstrate Leighton’s terrific fluency with both painting and sculpture and how experiments with posing the human body in one medium influenced the other. The rather more obvious point is that, like June, it’s an image of tremendous sensuality, caught in a moment of relaxed intimacy and quite unlike the heroic Greek and Roman statues it derives from. The ‘expressive dynamism’ of figures like this led Leighton and friends to be labelled as the New Sculpture Movement.
Michelangelo The one useful thing the curators say about Michelangelo is pointing out that the great sculptor became fascinated with seeing how much he could convey in very compacted compositions and cite the compact, almost circular composition of Leda and the Swan as an example. As soon as you see this, you realise its influence on Leighton’s composition of June. And go on to realise that the composition is the opposite of The Sluggard. Whereas The Sluggard is thin and vertical, is long, is about height and stretch – June is all about monumental compaction and compression.
Embarrassing
If I was the head of the Puerto Rican gallery which loaned ‘Flaming June’, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, and flew over with my assistants to see what the world famous Royal Academy had done with their priceless painting, I’d have been furious. And seen from this perspective, I think this shabby, half-arsed display is an embarrassment.
Related links
Flaming June continues at the Royal Academy continues until 12 January 2025
Angelica Kauffman (1741 to 1807) was one of the most celebrated artists of the 18th century. She isn’t an obscure figure from the past who’s been dug up by revisionist feminist curators – she was genuinely a leading artistic and cultural figure of her time, one of the most successful portrait painters in Britain, celebrated here and across Europe, prints of whose works sold in the thousands, described by one of her contemporaries as ‘the most cultivated woman in Europe’.
Self-portrait with Bust of Minerva by Angelica Kauffman (1780 to 1781) Grisons Museum of Fine Arts, on deposit from the Gottfried Keller Foundation, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
This exhibition is not a blockbuster, it isn’t an encyclopedic overview of her career. Instead it’s staged in just three rooms in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at the top of the Academy building, and contains just 30 or so works, including 20 or so paintings, 7 or 8 prints, some historical letters and her sales book.
It is, in other words, not an arduous ordeal of an exhibition like the vast ‘Entangled Pasts’ show in the main galleries downstairs – instead it is a light and airy overview, as calm and civilised, as interesting and undemanding as her Enlightenment-era portraits.
Potted biography
Angelica Kauffman was born in the Swiss town of Chur in 1741. She trained with her father, the Austrian painter Joseph Johann Kauffman, and was quickly recognised as a child prodigy.
The family moved between Austria, Switzerland and Italy and Kauffman trained as both a musician and as a painter. She eventually chose to pursue the latter career professionally, a decision she dramatised in one of her most famous paintings, ‘Self-portrait at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting’ (1794). (Note the three facial poses – half-turned, slightly turned, and profile – something we’ll come back to later.)
It was in Italy that she established a reputation as an artist and was elected a member of the Roman Accademia di San Luca at the age of just 23. Although, as a woman, Kauffman was not able to officially enrol at an art academy, she nevertheless studied the works of the Old Masters and classical sculpture at first hand.
In Italy, she mixed with neoclassical artists and scholars and also met many Britons undertaking the Grand Tour. Her popularity among the community of British visitors and expatriates encouraged her to move to London in 1766.
London
Soon after arriving in London, Kauffman established a close friendship with Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painted in Britain, a friendship commemorated in the portraits they painted of each other. Her friendship with Reynolds and other artists, along with Royal approval, helped to ensure that when the Royal Academy of Arts was established in December 1768, Kauffman was among the group of 36 founder members (along with one other woman, the painter Mary Moser).
The founding is commemorated in Johan Zoffany’s famous group portrait of the Royal Academy members, ‘The Academicians of the Royal Academy’ (1772). As women, Kauffman and Moser were not allowed into the Life Room, where the portrait is set (on account of the nude male models). Instead, their presence was signalled by their portraits on the wall on the right (Kauffman on the left, Moser on the right).
For her part, Kauffman portrayed Reynolds in his studio seated at his easel with a desk full of books and a bust of Michelangelo, his artistic hero, by his side. Standing in front of Kauffman’s atmospheric portrait of Reynolds, and reflecting on his role on getting her elected a founder member, I couldn’t help remembering the old proverb, ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you paint that counts’.
Kauffman became one of the most sought-after artists of the period. She was in great demand as a portraitist in London – as one contemporary commented, ‘the whole world is Angelica-mad.’ In London she enjoyed a prosperous career, earning significant fame, fortune and an influential circle of patrons, many of whom were women
Richard Samuel’s Muses
Her success was marked in many ways, not only by membership of the Academy but also inclusion in a painting of eminent women of the day by Richard Samuel.
‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo’ by Richard Samuel (1778) National Portrait Gallery
The eminent women are, from left to right:
Elizabeth Carter, scholar and writer
Anna Letitia Barbauld, poet and writer
Angelica Kauffman (seated at the easel)
Elizabeth Ann Sheridan, singer and writer (in the middle, singing)
(sitting, left to right): Catharine Macaulay, historian and political polemicist
Elizabeth Montagu, writer and leader of the Bluestocking Society
Elizabeth Griffith, playwright and novelist
(standing at the back): Hannah More, religious writer
Charlotte Lennox, writer (holding the guitar)
Somerset House commission
In the late 1770s, at the time she was appearing in this painting, Kauffman was commissioned by the Royal Academy to paint a set of four ceiling paintings depicting the ‘Elements of Art’, to be displayed in the Council Room of New Somerset House which opened in 1780.
Again Reynolds was influential because she chose to depict the four stages of composition of a work of art, as described in Reynolds’ hugely influential ‘Discourses on Art’. The four oval paintings she produced represent the four stages of Invention, Composition, Design and Colour, as classically dressed female figures bearing a remarkable resemblance to herself. (The Royal Academy owns these works and all four of them are usually on display in the Front Hall of Burlington House.)
The exhibition includes two of the four paintings (why only two if the RA owns all of them?) alongside four of her preparatory oil sketches (now owned by the V&A). ‘Design’, in particular, is a deeply impressive work in terms of composition, colour, shade, everything.
Rome
However, despite her success in London, in 1781 Kauffman decided to return to Rome. Returning to Italy at the height of her career, she established an international clientele and a famous salon which attracted celebrated visitors including Goethe and Canova. Her studio near the Spanish Steps became a hub for the cultural elite and her status and reputation continued to prosper. One contemporary described her as ‘the most cultivated woman in Europe.’ She continued to be popular among contemporary women who wanted themselves portrayed, such as:
Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, as Muse of Comedy by Angelica Kauffman (1791) Private collection
Kauffman kept up her connections with her many British friends and patrons, continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy, sending commissions back to the UK and painting British Grand Tourists visiting Rome. She continued to develop her practice as both a portraitist and a history painter in Rome, demonstrating ever greater confidence and skill in both genres.
Death
When Kauffman died in 1807, her grand funeral in Rome was arranged by the famous sculptor Antonio Canova and a bust of the artist, sculpted by her cousin Johann Peter Kauffmann, was subsequently placed in the Pantheon, beside that of Raphael. Recognition indeed. The funeral itself was described in a letter sent to the Royal Academicians in London and read out in their General Assembly and this, like several other letters from key moments in her career, is on display here.
Self portraits
Throughout her career Kauffman produced a series of self portraits, presenting herself in different costumes and guises. As a woman artist, portraying herself enabled Kauffman to define her identity and take control of how she was seen by others. Her many self portraits shape and cultivated her aesthetic identity and they are clearly among her best works. What comes over to the visitor is how consistent they are, the three or so really great portraits collected here are almost identical in shape and feature.
Kauffman painted some of the most influential figures of her day and who more influential than royalty? She started with a commission to paint Princess Augusta, sister of King George III, and subsequently painted Queen Charlotte herself in an allegorical attitude.
Her Majesty Queen Charlotte raising the Genius of the Fine Arts, published 19 May 1772 by Angelica Kauffman
As the curators explain:
Kauffman’s commissions from royal women were an important marker of her success in London and contributed to her inclusion as one of the founding members of the Royal Academy. In 1767 she painted Queen Charlotte with her eldest son, George (later King George IV), in the guise of the ‘Genius of the Fine Arts’. The painting is now lost but its appearance is recorded in this large
mezzotint. Prints after Kauffman’s paintings proved hugely popular and helped to make her famous throughout Europe.
Enlightenment men
There are a few lords and ladies on display but the best portraits on display here are not of royalty or aristocracy – in the true Enlightenment spirit, they are of men of intellect and character, namely Joshua Reynolds, actor David Garrick, architect and theatrical-set designer Michael Novosielski. All these portraits are astonishingly good, vividly conveying the sitter’s character. You feel Garrick is just about to tell a joke, you get a strong feel for Novosielski’s inventiveness and flair. Her portrait of classical scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1764, painted when she was just 22 years old, was celebrated for its exceptional likeness.
And yet, despite her social and financial success as a portraitist, Kauffman identified herself primarily as a history painter, the genre Reynolds placed at the heart of the Royal Academy’s teaching. She exhibited history paintings each year at the Royal Academy’s influential annual exhibitions, displaying her erudition by depicting scenes from a wide range of mythological, literary and historical sources.
According to the curators, Kauffman reinvented the genre of history painting by focusing largely on female protagonists from classical history and mythology, as in:
Apparently, Kauffman regarded these works as the core of her achievement which is a shame because they’re generally the weakest. ‘The Death of Alcestis’ (1790) demonstrates why.
‘Death of Alcestis’ (1790), Angelica Kauffman. Voralberg Museum, Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter
Three things:
the poses of the characters are absurdly histrionic, posed and theatrical – I imagine they conformed to theatrical conventions of the day which is why the ‘serious’ plays from this period haven’t survived
as a result, the bodies are bent and contorted into uncomfortable and ungainly positions
somehow, as a result of the first two, the faces are universally unconvincing – they are meant to be conveying extreme emotion and feeling but the faces themselves are curiously void and blank
Now the colour of the cloaks and fabrics and the realistic depiction of folds and shadows, are marvellous. But everything else is too staged and contrived for modern taste.
Bible history
Something else noticeable in the historical paintings is the ramrod straight Roman noses. Look at the woman third from the right in Alcestis. This is particularly obvious in the one Biblical painting in the exhibition, ‘Christ and the Samaritan Woman’, (1796). The curators tells us that this was one of two canvases carried in triumph at the artist’s funeral procession, organised by the sculptor, and her close friend, Antonio Canova, along with other contemporary artists and scholars. Yes, yes, very pious and impressive but…look at Jesus’s nose! The clothes, the fabrics, the colours, the folds, the copper basin all are done very well but…that nose!
Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Angelica Kauffman (1796) Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich – Neue Pinakothek
Alerted to the nose issue, I realised that The Roman Nose is a sort of symbol throughout her works of History and Seriousness. It features in all the history paintings (examine the noses of Odysseus and Cleopatra) and in the famous Crossroads painting, where the figure of Art has another razor-straight, Roman schnozz.
By contrast, compare the noses of the portraits – the noses of, say Reynolds or Novosielski. These are much more realistic i.e. generally soft and nobbly. It’s one of the reasons the portraits are warm, because they have realistic noses. And then I realised the straight noses are so noticeable because the History figures are often portrayed in profile.
In fact I realised there’s a spectrum at work here: at one extreme are the ruler-straight Roman noses of the Stern and Noble History Paintings. In the middle are the realistic noses of accurate portraits such as Reynolds, Garrick and Winckelman. And at the other end of the spectrum, she has a kind of bland and diffuse style where the faces are generic late-18th century, lacking the specificity of the best portraits.
And then I began to obsess about the eyes. In the best portraits and self portraits the eyes have colour and character. In her more perfunctory work, they eyes are just black, which tends to give the faces a generic, almost cartoon quality.
Although it’s not a blockbuster in size or ambition, nonetheless this is an interesting exhibition because the curators have assembled a various enough selection to allow to get to know Kauffman’s work, to see her addressing different genres, and to start to get a sense of her strong points and weak points.
Bad
I shouldn’t end before saying she could be actively bad. I disliked the contorted bodies and bad faces of the history paintings but could see their purpose and was impressed by the brightly coloured fabrics in many of them. But two or three paintings on display here are just bad: in ‘Penelope at her Loom’ (admittedly an early work) the folds of curtain on the left and the golden fabric Penelope’s wearing are tremendous – but look at the face! Disaster!
‘Penelope at her Loom’ by Angelica Kauffman (1764), Brighton & Hove Museums
Arguably, Poor Maria (1777) is even worse, one of her typical histrionic poses, a badly done face, but look at the dog in this one, the head far too small for the body.
Nathaniel Dance
The friend I went with really disliked the history paintings, grudgingly admired some the self portraits and the portraits of eminent men – but insisted that the only work she really liked in the whole show was in fact by someone else altogether, a tiny watercolour portrait of Kauffman by Nathaniel Dance. Still very much in the style of its day, this tiny work is a masterpiece of minute detail and, in its way, contains more feeling and precision than anything by Kauffman. A reproduction doesn’t do its shimmering, intricate detail justice.
‘Portrait of Angelica Kauffmann’ by Nathaniel Dance (1764 to 1766) National Galleries of Scotland
To my surprise, and not mentioned in the RA exhibition, the website of the National Galleries of Scotland (who own the painting) tells us that Dance spent a great deal of time in Italy, developing his inventive approach to drawing and painting and that, while in Rome in the 1760s, he had a love affair with fellow painter, Angelica Kauffman. Maybe that explains the extraordinary care and attention to detail which characterises this miniature masterpiece.
Invisible men
This raises a small but pertinent point. Only in the label to the case displaying the register of all her paintings kept by her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, do we learn that she married at all. With this sole exception, the exhibition very studiedly excludes all reference to Kauffman’s husbands, lovers, or children, if there were any. In other words if focuses entirely on her professional and artistic achievement, with no mention of her role as wife or mother or whatever. Which I admired.
Quality of reproductions
And just a note that all the images in this review are poor quality, even the ones supplied by the Royal Academy press office. The portrait of Reynolds and the Nathaniel Dance image are particularly disappointing and don’t convey at all the colour and liveliness of the originals. Without exception all the works I’ve included are much, much more vibrant, gripping and alive in the flesh. That’s why I choose to live in London, despite the expense, pollution and inconveniences – because with very little effort and relatively minimum expense, I get to see beautiful and exquisite, exciting and breath-taking art, on a weekly basis. And all of these art works, all of them, are infinitely better seen in the flesh.
Related links
Angelica Kauffman continues at the Royal Academy continues until 30 June 2024
The Renaissance artist Fancesco Pesellino (about 1422 to 1457) was successful and famous in his day. Whether producing commissions for Florence’s ruling Medici family or working collaboratively with leading artists of the Italian Renaissance, Pesellino’s talents were hugely sought after during his lifetime.
However, Pesellino died young and this, combined with the difficulty of attributing works (many have been attributed to collaborators or to his grandfather, who had the same name) has meant that his legacy has been largely overlooked, making him ‘one of the greatest Renaissance painters that few people have heard of’.
This FREE exhibition at the National Gallery aims to rectify this neglect. It brings together 20 or so of Pesellino’s works across a range of media, including altarpieces, chest decorations, sketches and illuminations.
Central to the exhibition (all held in just one dazzling room) are two masterpieces from the National Gallery collection: the Pistoia Trinity altarpiece (1455 to 1460), and the newly restored ‘Stories of David’ cassone panels (about 1445 to 1455).
The ‘Pistoia Trinity Altarpiece’ is one of only two large-scale altarpieces Pesellino is known to have produced. Left unfinished at his death, it was completed in the workshop of Filippo Lippi, for whom Pesellino had completed a predella for the Novitiate chapel in Santa Croce 15 years earlier and who added the predella, or base. This is the earliest pala (an altarpiece with a single main panel) in the National Gallery.
The altarpiece is an ambitious depiction of the Trinity, the Christian doctrine of one God in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (represented as a dove). Pesellino designed and partly painted the main panel. In the 18th century, the altarpiece was sawn up to make independent paintings for sale. Individual pieces arrived in Britain incrementally and were later acquired and reassembled by the National Gallery. The lower right section is a modern reconstruction.
Biography
Francesco di Stefano was born into a family of painters in Florence in about 1422. ‘Pesellino’ is a diminutive of his grandfather’s nickname, Pesello (‘the pea’). His grandfather was a specialist in banners and festive ephemera who taught him the rudiments of painting. Pesellino likely received further training from leading masters in the city. Early in his career, Pesellino often worked in collaboration, both with established painters on major commissions and on smaller projects alongside his peers. By his late twenties he was already undertaking commissions for high-ranking clergy and Florence’s ruling elite.
Pesellino devised lucrative profit-making schemes in partnerships with fellow artists and set his sights
on becoming a specialist in painting altarpieces. The exhibition includes templates of popular subjects he created for other artists to copy, such as the Madonna and child.
His ambitions were cut short in the hot summer of 1457, when Florence was ravaged by plague. He died leaving his most ambitious work to date, the Pistoia Trinity altarpiece, unfinished. It was eventually completed by his elder contemporary and one-time collaborator, Fra Filippo Lippi.
Narrative paintings
The show emphasises Pesellino’s skill at narrative or storytelling in paint. His range is indicated by some of the painting titles (the first four are scenes painted at the base of the Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece, above):
Saint Mamas in Prison thrown to the Lions*
The Beheading of Saint James the Great*
Saint Zeno exorcising the Daughter of the Emperor Gallienus*
Saint Jerome and the Lion*
The Stigmatism of Saint Francis and Miracle of the Black Leg
A Miracle of Saint Silvester
Obviously, most of these paintings are religious in tenor, depicting scenes from the Old Testament, New Testament or Legends of the Saints. An example of the legend category is the striking painting of ‘King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land’.
A fleet of vessels carrying colourfully dressed crews navigates an impossibly short stretch of water, the shorelines dotted with walled cities. The seascape is fantastical, but with carefully observed naturalistic details like the foamy spray around the boats and pink undersides of the clouds at sunrise. Enthroned at the stern of the largest ship, Melchior travels to pay homage to the new-born Jesus, bringing a casket of gold. The panel was part of a series Pesellino made in collaboration with other artists. Some of the faces reveal the hand of another painter.
Three things struck me about this painting. One was the childlike clumsiness and lack of perspective. The main ship is much too huge for the tiny bit of sea it’s wedged into, the little rowboat in front of it looks silly, the dog at bottom right is poorly done, the tiny monk hiding in the rock at the bottom is a bit absurd.
Second was the extraordinary simplicity of the landscape: the rocks at the bottom and bottom right, the headlands and hill further up, are ridiculously simplified; they look like the polystyrene rocks from an episode of Star Trek.
But what really his me is how bright and vivid the colours are. The red and yellow striped awnings over the stern of each ship look like children’s sweet wrappers. Almost everyone’s clothes are painted in super-vivid shades of blue, green and red. The whole affect is almost day-glo.
Compare and contrast with a work which has a completely different feel, a diptych (two paintings in adjacent frames) of The Annunciation.
Diptych: The Annunciation by Francesco Pesellino (about 1450 to 1455) The Courtauld, London. Photo by the author
This feels completely different from the Melchior painting: the perspective is accurate and effectively conveys the sense of the colonnade on the left and room on the right. And the realistic depiction of the folds of the angel’s and the virgin’s cloaks. But above all the subtle use of shading, on the cloaks and on the walls (e.g. behind the virgin) give it a completely different feel from the Melchior. It feels warm and intimate and sophisticated.
Illuminations
Off to one side and easy to miss is a set of three beautiful illuminations Pesellino made for a book.
Three illuminations from the De Bellum Poenicum of Silius Italicus by Francesco Pesellino (1447) being: Allegory of Carthage, Mars in a Chariot and Nicholaus V Pontifex-Maximus, courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg, the Biblioteca Marciana Venice, and the State Hermitage Museum, respectively
As the curators explain:
A milestone in Pesellino’s career was the illuminated manuscript he made for Pope Nicholas V. He again worked in collaboration, this time with the established miniaturist Zanobi Strozzi, a fellow Florentine. The partnership was probably a calculated means of advancing his reputation. Together they produced a lavish volume of the Roman poet Silius Italicus’s epic about the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BCE).
Pesellino’s full-page illuminations show allegorical figures, ancient generals, the Roman god Mars and a portrait of Pope Nicholas himself. With their exuberant colour and animated drawing, these miniatures embody his aptitude for grandeur and dynamism on a small scale. They also indicate the heights that Pesellino had reached by the age of just 25. Whether commissioned by Nicholas himself, or perhaps given to him by a member of the Florentine elite, the volume was apparently a successful calling card. Pesellino subsequently received further commissions from the papal court.
Restoration of David
The Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece is the biggest thing in the show – it is huge and dominates the whole room – but it’s not really the centrepiece. That role falls to the two wide, narrow panels depicting the ‘Stories of David.’ In fact, from what I can make out, it’s the recent completion of conservation work on the panels which provided the peg for this whole display.
To quote Wikipedia: ‘A cassone or marriage chest is a rich and showy Italian type of chest, which may be inlaid or carved, prepared with gesso ground then painted and gilded.’
Pesellino created two of these cassoni and both are given the full treatment here. They are displayed next to each other along with picture labels which explain the origin and purpose of the paintings, and then identify individual people and elements in each painting.
The panels illustrate the Old Testament story of David and Goliath. The first panel shows three successive episodes in the same frame, something which takes a moment to get used to. Over on the left young David is leaning over to select a stone for his sling. Just right of centre, right of the prancing white horse, he is shooting the sling at big Goliath who dominates the right-hand side. And then in the centre, just below the prancing white horse, is depicted David gruesomely sawing Goliath’s head off.
The second panel shows the triumphant procession of David, accompanied by a boisterous entourage, bearing Goliath’s head back to his local town where he is greeted by elders and a clutch of toothsome young ladies (far right).
There are hundreds of talking points but four things stood out for me.
1) How incredibly packed and dense they are, huge crowds, scores of people and animals in all kinds of poses. Their arrangements have dramatic and psychological impact. For example, silly though it sounds, I really liked the scene on the right of panel 2 where half a dozen fresh-faced young men are being welcomed back to the town by a group of lovely young women. They both, young men and women, look so happy, so young and fresh and full of life. It gave me a moment of pure loveliness.
2) As the commentary points out, Pesellino very obviously tested his technical abilities by depicting, especially animals, in unusual poses; hence several horses with their bottoms towards us (for example, next to the fallen Goliath in panel 1) and the dogs facing away from us in panel 2.
3) As regular readers of my blog know I rather dislike the Italian Renaissance. This is based primarily on the feeling the drought-ridden, barren rocky backdrops give me, bereft of plants, flowers or life. I much prefer the contemporaneous art of the Northern Renaissance. A good example of this sterile barrenness is the simple-minded ‘landscape’ of the Melchior painting. By complete contrast, these panels show in great detail the grass everyone is treading on, and that it is sprinkled with flowers. It has the lovely feel for nature I associate with more northern paintings. For this reason alone I loved it.
4) Lastly, the gold! An extraordinary amount of the picture has been painstakingly gilded with gold leaf. Off to one side of the panels is a TV monitor showing a 4-minute video which is hugely instructive. Silent, using close-ups and written captions, it takes you into the secrets which were revealed during the panels’ extensive restoration work. Above everything they showcase the ubiquity in every part of the paintings of gold leaf – X-ray photography shows that about a third of the images is golden. But the video also showcases the astonishing attention to detail given to every feather, every head-dress and countless pieces of armour. I was dazzled by the use of splashes of tiny dots which create a shimmering highlight on the golden sections.
Pesellino carefully applied gold and silver leaf, sometimes in tiny pieces, to describe items as small as horse shoes. These details were then burnished, incised, punched and sometimes glazed to create shimmering effects.
The display cases feature magnifying glasses to help you pick out the thousand and one details and marvel at the intricacy of the metalwork. Amazing.
It’s 50 years since the David panels were displayed side by side like this and it’s a marvel and a delight. They emphatically demonstrate ‘the depth and breadth of Pesellino’s talents as a painter of complex narratives, ceremonial splendour, animals and intricate detail,’ just as the curators claim.
Thoughts
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy loads of religious paintings very much but was entranced. The annunciation and the illuminations are lovely, but I got really absorbed in the David panels, especially after watching the video which opened my eyes to the gilding technique and the amazing detailing throughout. The more you look, the more you see.
Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance artist and biographer, included Pesellino in his Lives of Artists, writing that, ‘From what we know of him, if he had lived longer, he would have achieved much more than he did’. One of art history’s great might-have-beens.
‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ is generally considered the masterpiece of Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702 to 1789). It was made not in oil paint but in pastel, of which Liotard was an acknowledged master.
Executed across more than six sheets of paper, ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ is Liotard’s largest and most ambitious pastel. It depicts a breakfast between an elegantly dressed woman and a young girl, whose hair is still in paper curlers. Between the two lies a luxurious breakfast still life. Although not strictly a portrait, the sitters have long been associated with relatives of Liotard’s, the Lavergne family, who lived in Lyon.
The calm domesticity of the scene is accentuated by the tremendous technical brilliance of his pastelwork, recording a hundred tiny details – the sheen on the metal coffee pot, the shiny ceramic jug, the silky fabrics, the reflections in the black lacquer tray, down to individual notes on the sheet music peeping out from the drawer at the bottom left.
But it is not only a remarkable work in itself, it is also remarkable for the fact that twenty years later, Liotard painted exactly the same scene, with almost digital accuracy, in oil paint. According to the curators this is an extremely rare example of a painter anywhere ever painting the precise same subject with such photographic accuracy, in two different media. Above is the pastel version. Below is the paint version.
In 2019 the National Gallery acquired the oil version and this provided the impetus to request the loan of the pastel version (in a private collection) so that the two works could be hung side by side. Both versions were made for Liotard’s most important patron, William Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon (1704 to 1793) and this is probably the first time in 250 years that they have been seen side by side to compare and admire the difference in technique and effect between the two.
Can you spot the differences? The oil one is better at depicting darkness – the shadows, on the figures’ skin and on the background wall, are deeper and richer. As to the actual design, the curators remark only two significant differences between the two versions: There are only two differences: in the oil painting the bright blue decorations on the porcelain have turned brown, probably due to the use of smalt (a blue pigment that loses its colour), and in both works the signature on the sheet of music poking out of the table drawer bears a different date.
Using this pairing as a centrepiece the National Gallery has created a small (three rooms) but lovely and FREE exhibition, bringing together about 20 other works and objects to give a charming overview of Liotard’s life and career.
Pastel
Liotard was extremely versatile, producing works in pastel, oil, enamel, chalk and even on glass, but was best known for his work in pastel. Pastel is a notoriously delicate medium but the exhibition doesn’t just tell us this, it devotes an entire display to it.
Installation view of ‘Liotard and the Lavergne Family Breakfast’ at the National Gallery. Photo by the author
Here we can see an antique box of pastels from 1910 Paris alongside the tools you needed to use them, namely:
a colour chart from La Maison du Pastel, Paris, showing the range of colours available in the 1930s
a box of charcoal sticks for drawing, produced by the Maison Macle in the second half of the 19th century
a porte-crayon (chalk holder) used for holding chalks whilst drawing
a selection of ‘stumps’ used to blend pastels on the picture surface
blue rag paper, of the sort used by pastellists
And there’s a lovely, calm, silent 4-minute video showing modern-day French artisans creating pastel pencils by hand. As the curators explain:
Pastel crayons are made of coloured pigment, a pale, chalky filler and a binder to hold them together. Until the late 17th century they had to be rolled by hand in the studio – a lengthy and laborious process. By the 18th century it was possible to buy ready-made pastel crayons in major European cities. The pastels on view here are antiques, made in Paris in the 1910s.
The act of using pastels is described as ‘painting’ in pastel. But unlike oil paint, pastel was not applied with a brush, nor could you mix pastel crayons to create new colours. Artists therefore needed many crayons to work with. In Liotard’s day pastellists painted onto vellum (prepared animal skin) or thick paper made from rags. These surfaces were often roughened with pumice stones or razor blades so that the pastel medium – in essence, millions of coloured particles – had something onto which to cling. The 18th-century art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713 to 1784) described pastel, which commanded very high prices but was also extremely fragile, as ‘precious dust’.
Fascinating and instructive.
Travels
Liotard worked across the length and breadth of 18th-century Europe, from Paris, Rome, London and Amsterdam to the courts of Versailles and Vienna, and the show features a wall-sized map showing his extensive peregrinations.
Map showing Jean-Etienne Liotard’s travels round Europe. Photo by the author
Liotard’s most extended stay was in distant Constantinople where he accompanied his patron Viscount Duncannon. He spent four years there and developed a taste for oriental life and manners. He grew a long beard, adopted Turkish dress and nicknamed himself ‘the Turkish painter.’ The exhibition includes a group of black and red chalk drawings made on his travels, most strikingly charming studies he made of (European) women in Oriental dress.
Liotard drew this portrait in Smyrna (present-day Īzmir) in May 1738, while on route to Constantinople. Smyrna was the busiest port on the Turkish coast, and Signora Marigot probably belonged to its thriving international community. Liotard captures her confident pose with great economy, using bare paper to create the folds of her gown and the ornaments in her hair. The high level of detail is characteristic of an artist skilled at working on a miniaturist’s scale.
Liotard in London
Liotard’s arrival in London in 1753, with a full beard and Turkish dress, created a sensation. He was introduced to the Royal Family, took lodgings in Golden Square near Piccadilly and advertised his works in the newspapers. A young Joshua Reynolds, later first President of the Royal Academy, enviously described Liotard’s ‘vast business at 25 guineas a head in crayons’ and Horace Walpole marvelled at a viscountess having her four daughters painted by Liotard ‘as his price is so great’.
London provided rich possibilities for a portraitist. It was taken as fact in the 18th century that the British loved having their portraits painted. Even allowing for a visit to Lyon in 1754, where ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ was painted, some 50 works survive from the two years that Liotard spent in London between 1753 and 1755. Nobles, celebrities and even the Royal Family asked Liotard to paint their portraits in pastel, some of them donning Turkish dress themselves.
Take this striking portrait of Lady Anne Somerset, later Countess of Northampton.
With her cascading auburn locks and plunging neckline, Lady Anne (1741 to 1763) looks older than her fourteen years. But women’s lives were accelerated in the 18th century and Lady Anne was already active on the London social scene when this portrait was painted. She may have chosen this Turkish dress – either a garment Liotard owned or one inspired by his drawing Woman from Constantinople (also in display) – to create a more grown up, sophisticated persona.
Miniatures
Liotard also gained a reputation for his skill at creating miniatures. Several are featured here including a stunning miniature self-portrait. It’s only about 2 inches tall so the exquisiteness of the detail is breath-taking. Surely he must have used some kind of magnifying glass and the brushes must have had only a handful of hairs in them. A photo doesn’t do the richness of the real thing justice. Look at the perfectly painted flowers decorating his collar!
Liotard exploits the smooth and luminous surface of enamel to paint his wiry beard, the folds of his raspberry-red jacket and the tiny flowers that dance along his collar in minute detail. His first training as an artist in Geneva was with a miniaturist and he could rely on his skill in this demanding form of painting to impress. This miniature was probably intended as a means of self-promotion on his first arrival in London, capturing his unusual appearance.
Chocolate tracing
As well as the Family Breakfast the exhibition displays several other works highlighting Liotard’s skill at depicting porcelain services. Sadly, they don’t have the original of one of his other Greatest Hits, The Chocolate Girl (about 1756), which is astonishing both for the wonderful poise of the central figure and the incredible realistic detail of the chocolate cup and glass of water. What they do have is a tracing of the original work which Liotard would have used to generate copies, the same technique he used for making his copy of the Family Breakfast.
Porcelain
And this brings us to the final section of the exhibition, which focuses on Liotard’s fascination for, and incredible skill at depicting, porcelain.
Throughout his career Liotard was fascinated by porcelain, repeatedly depicting cups, saucers and the act of using them in his works. In this he was not alone: throughout the 18th century, paintings of people drinking tea, coffee and chocolate became extremely popular. Such paintings played on the idea of taste: both the literal tastes depicted in these pictures and the tasteful refinement of the scenes portrayed. Liotard was unusual, however, in his fidelity to the porcelain he depicted.
The cups and saucers in ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’, for example, can be identified as true Japanese porcelain and not cheaper European imitations. It is not surprising that Liotard owned several pieces of important porcelain, including the boxed tea service displayed nearby.
And here’s a photo of that tea service:
Luxury tea service given to Liotard by the Empress Maria-Theresa during his third visit to Vienna in 1777. Photo by the author
The curators:
Liotard received this luxury tea service as a gift from the Empress Maria-Theresa (1717 to 1780) during his third visit to Vienna in 1777 to 1778. He had not only worked extensively for the Empress as a portraitist, producing likenesses of her and her family in pastel, oil, enamel and chalk, but he had also enjoyed privileged access to the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory where this tea service was made. Liotard’s lifelong fascination with technical experimentation led him to help develop new enamel colours for production.
I suppose I’m quite a Bob Dylan fan. I’ve got most of his albums and have seen him perform three times (in London), I’ve read half a dozen books about him and have three or four of the ever-expanding Bootleg series (27 box sets and counting).
I knew that Dylan had been a painter for almost as long as a singer and that the cover art of several of his numerous albums feature his own paintings, namely Self Portrait (1970) and Planet Waves (1974). But I was surprised, cutting along New Row towards Covent Garden a few weeks ago, to walk past the Castle Fine Art shop and see that the entire front window was showcasing art works from Dylan’s latest ‘collection’.
Castle Fine Arts specialises in representing a number of celebrity artists, including Dylan, Ronnie Wood and Johnny Depp. The Covent Garden branch is just one of three Castle Fine Art galleries in central London, and a total of 40 around the UK.
To see the Bobworks you had to go to the downstairs gallery, which was until recently dedicated to displaying and selling copies of this latest collection.
Installation view of ‘The Beaten Path’ by Bob Dylan at Castle Fine Art, Covent Garden
The works are a set of six limited edition prints of original paintings which are themselves part of the larger ‘The Beaten Path’ series and signed by the artist. As you can see, they are vivid and brightly coloured but at the same time pleasingly rough-and-ready depictions of iconic American scenes, namely the open road, motels and bars, the Golden Gate Bridge and more.
‘Terminal Bar’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries
He’s come a long way since the (haunting) self portrait for ‘Self Portrait’ (which, according to an interview cited in the Wikipedia article, he knocked off in five minutes) or the quirky cover art for ‘Planet Waves’. The roughness, irregularity and weirdness of the latter was, for me, tied up with the ‘back to the roots’ and sometimes haunting feel of the music on that album (for example, Going, going gone, the traumatising Dirge, or the brilliantly ragged, troubled Wedding song).
Well, as you can see Dylan’s technique is quite massively more advanced than 50 years ago, in fact some of the works are staggeringly realistic, with an impressive creation of depth and perspective, as in the fog obscuring the top parts of the Golden Gate Bridge.
‘Golden Gate Bridge’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries
Dylan himself is quoted as saying:
“The common theme of these works is how you see the American landscape while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth. Staying out of the mainstream and travelling the back roads, free born style.
“My idea was to keep things simple, only dealing with what is externally visible. These paintings are up-to-the-moment realism – archaic, most static, but quivering in appearance. They contradict the modern world.”
I’m not sure this is really true. The Golden Gate Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge are hardly ‘back roads’, they’re iconic images of the USA which feature in countless tourist brochures and glossy movies. The second paragraph is a slice of the impressionistic prose which he has written ever since those stream-of-consciousness early LP covers through to his first book of memoirs, Chronicles Volume 1 (2004), featuring the deployment of unexpected vocabulary (‘archaic’) etc. I don’t think it quite comes off here.
Also, the quote comes over as Dylan trying to hang on to his ragged, rebel, hobo image of himself, and this is in stark contrast with the works themselves, which are slickly packaged products. If the paintings are surprisingly bright and vivid, so too are the prices. A beautifully framed copy of one of these works will set you back a cool £2,950, the entire set in nice plain wood frames costs a tidy £14,950. You don’t need a weatherman to know that’s pretty pricey.
‘Omaha Rain’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries
In the original display there were more than just 6 paintings on display here, there were at least as many again from other series, so maybe 15 or so to spend half an hour checking out, enjoying and comparing.
The books
In a way the biggest surprise to me wasn’t these vivid colourful paintings but the books, enormous heavy coffee table books devoted to all his previous series of works. Flicking through the pages of some of these very heavy, glossy hardback productions I began to realise that His Bobness’s output isn’t a minor hobby but the result of prodigious and sustained productivity for decades. There’s loads of these books containing hundreds of paintings, many of them astonishingly finished and evocative images of all aspects of Americana.
‘Pink Motel’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries
None of the 6 foregrounded in this sale happen to feature human beings which I thought, at first, was a conscious choice, but in the books I saw that hundreds of others do, depicting quite stunningly realistic images of people in bars, clubs, the street and so on.
Thoughts
Having recovered from the surprise of realising that Dylan painted a) so well and b) so much, I settled down to mull them over. I think it’s pretty obvious that these artefacts are nice decorations for yuppies who fancy themselves as cool, maybe the perfect gift for the ageing finance exec who has a collection of expensive guitars in his music room.
Although much more consciously rough around the edges, they reminded me a bit of the paintings of Jack Vettriano, much looked-down on by artists and critics because they are so obviously shallow, superficial products designed to appeal to unsophisticated tastes. Dylan’s art, although coming from a different place and consciously lacking the smooth finish of the Scotsman’s paintings, is in its way even more showy, bright and supremely assimilable.
The way that they’re prints, nicely framed and ready to pop up on your wall, made me think of Ikea where they wouldn’t be out of place, bright and bold and completely unchallenging.
Thinking about it for the half hour it took to examine the paintings and leaf through the (big, heavy) books I realised I miss the quirkiness of the cover of Self Portrait – much more powerful if, admittedly, in a turn of the century proto-cubist sort of way – or of Planet Waves, which has a similar ‘primitive’, early Picasso vibe (the Picasso of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon).
Both of those feel, to me, genuinely weird and do have something uncannily ‘archaic’ about them, to use Dylan’s own word. By contrast, for me, the modern suite is impressive, slick and empty, with only occasional flickers of life, like a lot of Dylan’s later music.
Time marches on
Since I visited and wrote this review a few weeks ago the gallery has moved things around. The Bob Dylan display has been moved into the back gallery, and the downstairs space is now devoted to works by a clutch of celebrity artists: four paintings by Johnny Depp from his spooky Bunnyman series (accompanied by a video interview with Depp about the series’ origins and showing him at work actually creating them), an OK portrait of Mick Jagger by Ronnie Wood, one big work by James McQueen, and a single print in the corner by Andy Warhol.
But worry not: if you like the Dylan works I’ve described, you can see many more Dylan prints at the Halcyon Gallery in New Bond Street.
Last call
Despite all the art critics who make a living talking about art’s subversive, revolutionary purpose, a shop like this (or, in a different register, the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition) make it perfectly clear that art, like the music of Dylan or Jagger, although you can attribute to them any kind of meaning or emotion you care to, are ultimately about selling stuff, about shifting units.
The curators think the American artist Philip Guston (1913 to 1980) was one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century. Usually I can see what they’re getting at, even if I don’t like an artist much, but this a rare occasion when I really didn’t get it at all.
On the evidence of this huge, major retrospective, which contains more than 100 paintings and drawings from across Guston’s 50-year career, it feels like he toyed with or experimented with a series of 20th century styles, never an innovator, seeming much more like a follower who did copied styles invented by other people, often very competently, until, in the late 60s, he had painted himself into a corner, had reached the end of road copying other people, and had a massive block, painting nothing for a couple of years.
When he re-emerged it was with a radically new style, because he had discovered cartoons. The curators call it ‘drawing’ and there’s plenty of drawings here, a roomful of the studies which got him back into the groove, but, in my opinion, all in a cartoon style, and certainly it eventuated in hundreds and hundreds of paintings which look like this.
In this brief review I’ll reprise the shape of his career so you can judge for yourself.
Early years
He was the son of dirt poor Jewish immigrants, the Goldsteins, who had experienced antisemitic pogroms in the Ukraine, and then the tragic deaths of family members when they made it to America, crossing all the way over to Los Angeles to settle in 1922, when our guy was just 9 years old.
So he was raised in a hard-working, socially conscious, left-wing environment, with a particular sensitivity to racism of all forms (which was to come out, a lot later, in the form of a weird obsession with the white hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan – see below).
Picasso
His early works seem to me to straight copies of Picasso’s neo-classical 1920s style with some surrealism thrown in. Thus this woman seems Picasso while the stitched head or ball on top of the easel looks like de Chirico.
The 1930s were a very political decade, and he was also drawn to the large-scale and very socially conscious mural art of the Mexican Diego Rivera. In fact Rivera helped Guston get a commission, alongside Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, to create a large mural in Mexico in 1934.
The result, ‘The Struggle Against Terrorism’ (1934 to 1935) was later painted over by the Mexican authorities. Only recently has restoration work made it available again, and this exhibition features a massive video projection of it, highlighting its theme of the oppressive nature of the Mexican church.
Back in the States Goldstein changed his name to Guston, precisely to avoid a growing swell of antisemitism in America and moved to New York. Moving among artists and writers and intellectuals boosted his left-wing attitudes even more and led, among other works, to a defining work of the era, ‘Bombardment’ from 1937, which combines the clear sheets of colour from the classical Picasso with the large-scale composition of his mural approach and a popular (cartoony?) treatment.
Then came a massive change in his style. He began teaching at universities in lowa City and Saint Louis and turned away from public political art. He continued doing portraits (in their quiet way, maybe these are the best bits of the show). But, like so many of his generation, appalled by the trauma of the Second World War and the revelation of the Holocaust, he turned to increasingly abstract compositions. It was the birth of Abstract Expressionism and Guston chucked his old figurative style(s) and threw himself into the new way of seeing and working.
The exhibition has two rooms of his abstract expressionist paintings, one from the 1940s, then moving on to the 1950s and it seemed to me blindingly obvious that he got steadily worse. In the winter of 2016 the Royal Academy hosted a blockbuster exhibition of Abstract Expressionism and it came as a revelation; I was blown away; room after room of masterpieces; a revelation that paintings which don’t depict anything could be so varied and so exciting.
None of Guston’s abstract paintings did it for me. He hadn’t the excitement of Jackson Pollock, the meditative power of Mark Rothko, the dynamic patterning of Lee Krasner, or the stark drama of Clyfford Still. In my opinion the first room of Guston abstracts is bad and the second one is horrible.
Nonetheless, he was, apparently, an influential figure in the New York School alongside his high school friend Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
Disillusion
As the gusty 1960s turned into the colourful 1960s, though, Guston got sick of painting in the same mode. For me, it really shows, his abstract paintings start off poor, become terrible, and then it feels like he gives up in disgust. The exhibition compensates for the poor quality of the art with a great deal about Guston’s political views. He was not, as you might have guessed, a big fan of the Vietnam War, but in fact it was the resurgence of racism back home in the states which really got to him.
Extras
The curators have done their best to make this a really defining, landmark exhibition of the full range of Guston’s work, along with all kinds of supporting material and documentation. The show is accompanied by commentary, stories, and personal reflections from Tate curators and guest contributors, including:
the artist’s daughter Musa Mayer
writer Olivia Laing
art historian and curator Aindrea Emelife
artist Charles Gaines
Tate paintings conservator Anna Cooper
illustrator and artist Blk Moodie Boi
chef and family friend of Guston’s, Ruth Rogers
Also included in the exhibition are specially commissioned responses from musician Anja Ngozi and poet Andra Simons, inspired by Guston’s collaborative spirit.
In his 1950s abstract phase he was friends with avant-garde composers –John Cage, of course, everyone knew Cagey, but also Morton Feldman and one of the abstract rooms plays bits from the very long (four hours) piece by Feldman which the composer wrote specially for Guston. It is characteristically serialist or abstract, but quiet and lovely. I like Morton Feldman. As one of the commenters on YouTube says, it ‘sounds like an alien trying to make human music’, which is precisely the quality I like, away off the edge of something.
Blockage
A wall label tells us that in the late 60s Guston abandoned painting altogether for 18 months or so. But during that period he continued drawing and sketching obsessively, mainly the objects in his own apartment, tables and chairs and shelves and beds but above all, books.
Note the vertical black lines in the book, and lying around on the (invisible) table. Using these lines as decoration, to create space, to define objects, would become a signature trick of his final style. Because out of this drawing came a way out of the corner he’d painted himself into. He embraced figuratism again, but of a very, very simplified, reductive type. He expanded the drawings into paintings, and then suddenly found himself painting unstoppably. The dam had broken. His block was over. for the next ten years he would paint hundreds and hundreds of really big paintings all taking the new approach.
Note several things. The colour is pink, pinks and reds, a worrying shade of pink skin, pink flesh, a world of burned or flayed human skin. Then the dotted lines, like the nails in hobnailed boots. Are those boots piled up behind the bed? Certainly the use of dots and dashes to fill and decorate objects became a signature.
The Ku Klux Klan
The Klan was a symbol of evil racism for the young Guston. Now in the era of the Vietnam War, of the ferocious racist pushback against the Civil Rights Movement, and the tide of violence sweeping across America, they make a startling reappearance in Guston’s work, as disturbing cartoon emblems of the banality and ludicrousness of evil.
So: 1) pink, very pink, buildings, sky, road all shades of pink, so a kind of abstraction. 2) The obviously ‘naive’, untrained, outsider cartoon style. 3) Those lines of dashes, giving definition to everything from the windows in the skyscraper, the wheels of the car (or tractor?), the eyeslits of the Klansmen, and the odd dotted lines on the back of their hoods.
In 1970 Guston showed 30 of these works at a now infamous show at New York’s Marlborough Gallery. Almost all the critics and his friends were appalled. Abstract Expressionism was closely connected with an immensely serious, ‘committed’ attitude to life and art and politics, a tragic worldview mixed up with European existentialism.
All of that had (apparently) been chucked out in the name of what most critics thought a disastrous turn to a naive, crudely cartoony style. But Guston persisted, and the last four rooms of this huge exhibition are stuffed with scores of examples of the same approach applied again and again.
Many of them are depictions of interiors but coloured with a kind of naive surrealism, giant eyes, mountains of legs, abandoned shoes, and everyday objects rendered both familiar and strange. There’s a lot of him or some human being in bed, like ‘Couple in Bed’ that I opened with.
I found that once you’d assimilated the approach, the pink worldview with dots and dashes, men in pointy hats, other men curled up in bed, er, there wasn’t much more to take in. To try and be positive, there’s no doubting that he had finally created a signature style – his early works seem to me straight copies of Picasso, de Chirico-style surrealism, Rivera-style social murals, and then Pollock and Rothko abstraction. In all of them he seems, to me, a follower. Here, though, in his last fertile decade, he emerges as utterly original and distinctive. I can see that much, and I managed to like some of the images, the best of them, but most of the ones in these four big rooms left me indifferent.
The last room contains one of the best uses of his new style which has, justifiably, been chosen as the poster and promotional image. On its own it looks great. Set amid 30 or so other very similar images in a closely related palette and style, not so much.
If you’re anywhere near Tate Modern and fancy an exhibition, I wouldn’t go and see this – see the outstanding exhibition of African photography, instead.
Related links
Philip Guston continues at Tate Modern until 25 February 2024
This the largest exhibition devoted to the paintings of Dutch master Frans Hals to be held in the UK for more than thirty years and it is a joy from start to finish.
This painting of a carefree lute player in a jester’s costume is one of Hals’s earliest and most successful half-length genre paintings. Unusually, Hals depicted him as seen from below, a vantage point he normally reserved for some of his commissioned portraits. The young man’s sideway glance, cheeky smile, tousled hair and lopsided hat convey a moment of suspended animation. Freely applied brushstrokes enhance the painting’s sense of liveliness and spontaneity.
Joie de vivre
Joy is the key word, along with fun, humour, life and laughter. Hals is the painter par excellence of the enjoyment of life. Eschewing all the other genres of painting, Hals concentrated on the art of portraiture. His master and teacher, Karel van Mander, was a specialist in big works depicting scenes from the Bible and thought portraits were a peripheral, trivial sideline unworthy of a real artist. But his pupil was to prove him wrong and to establish portraiture as the basis of an entire career.
This exhibition demonstrates that portraits themselves come in a variety of types or genres. There are:
formal portraits showing men of business and of importance in the community
informal portraits catching people in moments of relaxation
husband and wife portraits which themselves come in two flavours, either 2 individual works designed to be hung side by side or double portraits with the couple in one composition
group portraits of, say, the elders of a church, the directors of a company, regents of almshouses or, as here, of local civic guards
fictional portraits of character types such as the drunk, the buffoon and so on
tender intimate portraits of family, children and friends
So ‘the portrait’ is a much larger and more varied genre than you would at first think, and this exhibition brings together brilliant examples of all these sub-genres by one of western art’s greatest masters of the form.
The wealthy cloth merchant Willem van Heythuysen commissioned this small picture more than a decade after he posed for one of Hals’s largest portraits (on show in the second room). Hals depicted him nonchalantly tipping back his chair – a highly unconventional pose. His direct gaze and the riding whip in his hand add to the sense of tension. Van Heythuysen hung the portrait in a private room in his Haarlem residence.
Frans Hals (1582 to 1666)
Frans Hals was born in Antwerp in Flanders but worked for most of his life in Haarlem, a Dutch commercial city overshadowed by Amsterdam.
Not long after the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish in 1585, as part of the 80 Years War, the Hals family moved to Haarlem in the northern Netherlands. In 1610 Hals enrolled in Haarlem’s Guild of St Luke in order to set up shop as a painter. His skill as a portraitist earned him many commissions from wealthy individuals, married couples, families and militia companies.
Hals’s lifetime was marked by plagues, war and religious controversies but none of that is in this exhibition, none of it intrudes on the stream of joyful, characterful portraits, on the life of people, rich people, businessmen, husbands and wives, drunks, city militias, jokers, entertainers and naughty children.
Laughing children offer coins to a cheerful busker, delighting in the dreadful sounds produced by his ‘rommel-pot’ (a pig’s bladder stretched over a jug). Wearing a fool’s foxtail, the man performs at Shrovetide, a time of merry-making before the fasting of Lent. This early genre painting reveals Hals’s extraordinary talent for characterisation and portraying laughter convincingly – especially that of children. The Rommel-Pot Player became one of the artist’s most popular paintings and was frequently copied.
Northern soul
If you’ve read any of my other art reviews you’ll know that I’m biased against the Italian Renaissance, which I find barren, sterile and humourless, and in favour of the Northern Renaissance, which I find full of life, humour and lovely touches.
The early Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery alternate between Italian and northern (German and Flemish) art, the former all hot, harsh, rocky landscapes with humourless Madonnas, the latter lush fields covered in daisies and sweet flowers, smiling ladies with ornate hairdos, quirky characterful northern portraits. I prefer Quentin Matsys to Botticelli.
For me Hals is a continuation of that northern spirit. Instead of sleek beautiful Italians who are all planning how to poison each other or dream of mortifying themselves for Jesus, Hals portrays ugly, jovial, boisterous northerners shouting for more wine, about to tell a particularly rude joke or burst into song. His people are so obviously having fun that it’s impossible not to be carried away by their bonhomie.
The confident pose of this man echoes that of ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, painted more than a decade earlier. It also repeats that picture’s low viewpoint so that the sitter appears to tower over us. Hals rendered The Laughing Cavalier’s decorated outfit fairly precisely, but here he evokes the sheen of the sitter’s satin jacket through wonderfully free handling of the brush.
Quick technique
As far as scholars can tell Hals never made preliminary sketches, he just dived straight in, working alla prima which means applying paint onto previous layers of still-wet paint in a single session, layer over layer, with quick confident brushstrokes.
On the plus side this quick expressive style adds to the sense of vigour and joie de vivre in his sitters. On the downside sometimes it leads to a wonkiness about the features of his people but you’re never quite sure whether that’s down his painterly shortcomings or because many of his sitters were a bit wonky in that ugly north European way.
The young woman gazes sassily to the side, her smile revealing her teeth. Most 17th-century Dutch viewers would have seen her expression as improper for a woman, indicating lack of refinement or even immorality. Her low-cut blouse suggests that she is a sex worker. This striking painting may have originally been intended for a brothel, where clients could sometimes choose from portraits of the women working there.
Laughter and joviality
When you see a painting or photograph of someone smiling or laughing I think most of us have a tendency to respond positively, maybe to smile along with the image, sometimes unconsciously. When you see a whole series of people laughing, joking, smiling and enjoying life, I think it has a cumulatively positive effect. The more I strolled around this exhibition, reading the wall labels about his friends, families, various bigwigs of Haarlem who Hals depicted in his brisk jovial style, the happier I became. I left the exhibition with a song in my heart.
The curators make the simple point that it’s hard enough to capture the likeness of someone in coloured oil brushed onto a flat canvas, but it’s fiendishly difficult to capture people laughing. All too often the attempt results in people who look like freaks or grotesques which is why so few big name artists ever attempted it. Hals is one of the few artists in all art history to successfully depict people having fun, a major part of human existence which is surprisingly absent from so much art. As the curators put it:
Hals was one of the very few artists throughout the history of Western painting who successfully managed to paint people smiling and laughing; a challenge shunned by most painters because it was so difficult.
His most famous work, ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, is a classic example of this ability although, a moment’s study makes you realise the man is not in fact laughing at all, instead has the ghost of a knowing debonaire smile on his lips, the old dog.
The identity of the smiling (rather than laughing) man depicted in what is arguably Hals’s most famous portrait is not known to us. Its curious title was coined in 19th century England. His luxuriously decorated clothes suggest he was probably a bachelor. Married men tended to dress more soberly. With the man’s hand-on-hip pose, Hals generates a palpable sense of depth.
1. Early works
Between 1601 and 1603 Hals was apprenticed to Karel van Mander, the artist, biographer and art theorist. In 1610, Hals became a member of the painters’ guild of Haarlem and quickly became the most sought after portrait painter in the city. None of Hals’s early works survive. Instead he bursts on the scene aged 28 with a fully finished and marvellous style. Straightaway he is not just portraying people but giving you a vivid sense of their living presence, as in early paintings such as ‘Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her nurse’, about 1620.
Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her Nurse by Frans Hals (1619 to 1620) Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Jörg P. Anders
2. Portraiture into art
In Hals’s time, portraits had a dynastic function. They preserved the sitter’s place within the family line for posterity. Portraits also expressed status and wealth, often derived through the Dutch Republic’s colonial empire. This room explores how Hals’s fresh, energetic approach allowed him to transform portraiture from a merely functional genre into an expressive, imaginative art form. This was aided by his extraordinarily free, confident brushwork. Most of the paintings are of individual sitters but it also contains two big group portraits of militias.
I find their studied theatrical poses funny e.g. the guy on the right holding out his hand as if to burst into song. It takes a moment to notice that the third sitting from the right is turning his wineglass upside down, ‘More wine, waiter!’ while to his right and the other side of the table a fellow is mashing a lemon in his right hand, squeezing the juice onto a plate of fresh oysters. These are meant to be the respectable members of a responsibly civic guard and yet it looks like a frat party. And the faces! How distinctive and characterful each one is. The curators write:
In Holland, wealthy male citizens often served as officers in their city’s voluntary guards. Earlier group portraits of such militias tended to be formal and static. Hals infused the genre with life, capturing his sitters’ characters and relationships. Hals’s militia group portraits proved popular – he painted six between 1616 and 1639.
3. Invented characters
Portrait commissions for wealthy sitters required a certain decorum. In his scenes featuring ordinary people of the 1620s and 1630s Hals allowed himself more freedom. In many of these works his brushwork becomes even more rough and vigorous.
Hals depicted social ‘types’ with individualised traits, blending elements of portraiture, expressive head studies and ‘genre’ subjects from everyday life. The genre pictures show how Hals engaged with subjects that were popular in Rederijkerskamers (Chambers of Rhetoric), dramatic societies whose performances and poetry featured outlandish characters and imagery.
His characters include merry musicians, laughing fools and rowdy drinkers. He based these on real people, possibly even his own children, as well as on stock characters from satirical plays. Hals himself was a member of a chamber of rhetoric that staged such performances.
Musicians seen up close were already popular subjects when Hals painted this lute player. But he made the motif his own through more plausibly animated characterisations. This merry youth has put down his lute to raise his glass in a spirited toast. Hals has expertly captured the way light reflects on different surf aces, including the glass, the wooden lute and the boy’s sleeves.
Loose brushwork
The exhibition refers continually to Hals’s loose expressive brushwork and this is very evident in every painting. But it’s difficult to judge how this compares with his contemporaries’ practice until you come to a massive painting in this room. This is ‘Young Woman with a Display of Fruit and Vegetables’ and what’s interesting is that Hals only painted the human figure, everything else was done by noted still life painter Claes van Heussen.
The trouble with online reproductions like this is that you can’t make out what is immediately obvious when you see this huge picture (2 metres wide by 1.5 metres high) in the flesh, which is the complete difference in technique between the woman and the fruits. Her face, her clothes, her hands are all done with free vigorous loose brushstrokes and these are in striking contrast with all the fruit, the vegetables, the barrels and baskets and so on, which are painted with microscopic pedantic precision, striving as much as possible for photographic accuracy.
This one painting makes abundantly clear the difference in technique between Hals and other contemporary artists.
4. Family ties
Hals’s sensitivity to personality and presence made him a brilliant observer of relationships. Only one double portrait by Hals survives. This relaxed and intimate work probably represents Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and his wife Beatrix van der Laen. Hals and Massa were friends and Massa is represented in two other portraits on show here.
Few artists can represent nonchalance as well as Hals. The laid-back poses of this couple suggest they are completely at ease with each other. Hals brilliantly captured the casual way the woman rests her hand on her husband’s arm, smiling at us disarmingly.
A large part of his oeuvre consists of pendant – or paired – portraits of couples. Many have been separated over time but pendants are best understood and enjoyed as a single work of art. The exhibition reunites two sets of pendant portraits which have not been seen together in living memory (i.e. Fran ois Wouters and his second wife, Susanna Baillij; and pendant portraits of Tieleman Roosterman and Catharina Brugman).
Occasionally Hals painted an entire family. As with the group portraits of militia guards in the second room, Hals managed complex composition with an air of deceptive ease. The care taken to arrange the sitters is disguised by an overall impression of brisk brushwork and relaxed expressions.
A symphony of zigzagging brushstrokes, this portrait of an unidentified family centres on the parents. Their eyes are locked in a tender gaze, their joined hands symbolising loyalty and devotion. The daughter looks on while the son and the Black boy look directly at the viewer. The latter’s role in the family is unclear. Forced servitude was illegal on Dutch soil, but he may have been brought to the country as a result of the Dutch Republic’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. European artists in this period often depicted Black people with generic facial features, but here Hals presents the young man’s distinct personality, portraying him with dignity and humanity.
5. Up close
This small room displays half a dozen miniature masterpieces. Best known for his large works on canvas, Hals also painted on a much smaller scale throughout his career. He preferred to paint these smaller works on a smooth surface, usually a wooden panel. Using smaller brushes, Hals employed the same free and expressive technique as in his larger works.
These small portraits make for a more intimate viewing experience. Some will have been intended for the private quarters of a sitter’s residence, to be seen only by family and close friends. Others – mainly of scholars and clergymen – were copied to scale by Haarlem’s most prominent printmakers. The resulting engravings would be used to illustrate books or to circulate the sitter’s likeness. The two standout pieces in this room, for me, were the pendant pair of children making music. These really display loose brushwork to create a terrific sense of immediacy.
These jewel-like pendants celebrate the delights of music. The girl looks down, reading from her song book and tapping her hand to the beat, whereas the boy looks up while playing the violin. These may be the ‘two square portraits of the children of Hals’ mentioned in an inventory of 1644. A Haarlem resident who knew Hals’s children recalled that they were fervent musicians.
6. Late work
In his late work Hals’s painting technique enters its bravest phase. He was around 80 years old when he painted some of the works in this room. At that age the human eye rarely sees as clearly as it once did, but we should not attribute Hals’s late style to diminishing eyesight. His tendency towards an ever-bolder application of paint was a deliberate artistic choice.
The later 17th century saw a general trend towards a smooth style in Dutch painting, think Vermeer. But Hals resolved to pursue his own methods. And as this room attests, there were patrons who preferred his dynamic brushwork and powerful characterisation over what was fashionable.
Like Titian before him, and Rembrandt around the same time, Hals must have decided that a bold – even rough – painting style was a fitting culmination of his lifelong practice.
Here you can really see his brushwork become free and open. Some details made me think of the deliberately rough brushwork of Cézanne or the Impressionists from 200 years later, and the curators tell us that Hals, whose reputation had sunk low, was revived and praised by Impressionist painters, especially Manet.
Probably the single work where you see it most is the Portrait of Jasper Schade. If you scan back through the pictures I’ve included you can see the extravagant attention Hals paid to the details of fabric in his portraits of the lute player, Willem van Heythuysen, Nicolaes Pietersz Duyst van Voorhout, the laughing cavalier or the extraordinary detailed depiction of the gold pattern on the dress of the baby held by Catharina Hooft. Compare the fabrics in all those paintings with the treatment of the jacket worn by Jasper Schade – it really is just a blizzard of white and grey zigzags, completely quick and cursory compared to all those earlier works.
This portrait suggests that Jasper Schade was extremely concerned with looking fashionable. We know from contemporary sources that he had a reputation for spending excessive amounts on his clothes. Throughout his spectacular taffeta jacket, but especially in the sleeve, we can delight in Hals’s brush dancing over the surface of the picture. Tracing each rapid stroke with our eyes probably takes about as long as it took Hals to paint them.
Less obviously rough and ready, my favourite work in the final room is this portrait of a stern, sturdy north European burgher who reminds me of Oliver Cromwell. The loose brushstrokes the curators are talking about are less obvious here, though visible if you peer in close to examine his huge white cuff or the strips of fabric hanging from his belt. Unlike the theme of joking, bantering, laughing joie de vivre which I’ve emphasised to far, it was this guy’s brooding intense stare which stuck with me as I left this wonderful life-enhancing exhibition.
Hals’s life almost exactly matched what is now called the Dutch Golden Age:
The Dutch Golden Age was a period in the history of the Netherlands, roughly spanning the era from 1588 to 1672, in which Dutch trade, science, and art and the Dutch military were among the most acclaimed in the world. (Google Arts)
He is generally considered one of the trio of great Dutch artists, alongside his younger contemporaries Rembrandt (1606 to 1669) and Vermeer (1632 to 1675).
I’ve read comments sagely pointing out that he’s probably the least of this trio: Rembrandt beats him for his extraordinary handling of chiaroscuro which gestures towards a deeper humanity and a more mysterious spirituality than Hals ever reaches; and Vermeer’s silent interiors take us to a completely alternative universe of stillness and exquisite perceptions.
But still, there is also room in art for lolz and bantz, for the rumbustious enjoyment of life, for squeezing lemon juice onto the oysters and shouting for another bottle of wine. And Hals is the poet par excellence of that smiling, joking, jostling love of life.
Related link
Frans Hals continues at the National Gallery until 21 January 2024
This is a stunning exhibition bringing together over 40 paintings by one of the most famous names from the classic period of western art, Peter Paul Rubens (1577 to 1640). It brings together masterpieces from international and private collections, many of which are appearing in the UK for the first time i.e. it represents a unique opportunity for lovers of classic Old Master art. There are some really stunning paintings and a suite of exquisitely crafted chalk drawings on display. It is a feast for the eyes and mind and imagination.
Questioning the Rubenesque
However, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that it is very much a themed exhibition. It really is about Rubens and women.
The stereotypical view of Rubens is as a painter of ample, fleshly, nude women, hence the adjective ‘Rubenesque’, which the Collins dictionary defines as:
‘of, characteristic of, or like the art of Rubens; colourful, sensual, opulent, etc. 2. full and shapely; voluptuous; said of a woman’s figure.’
This exhibition very much sets out to question that stereotype and to show that Rubens painted a much broader range of female characters, in a far greater range of postures, poses and compositions, than the stereotype suggests. Which explains why the poster for the show is very much not of a plump scantily clad woman but of the impeccably buttoned-up Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino (see below).
Strong independent women
Not only that but, in line with contemporary feminist ideology, the exhibition is keen to emphasise that many of these women were far from being passive victims of the male gaze, but in all kinds of ways were, in real life, and in the iconography of the paintings, strong independent women possessed of that key quality of feminist theory, agency.
Portrait of a Lady (about 1625) by Peter Paul Rubens. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery
Thus almost all the 40 or so pictures here are of women, with men playing only peripheral or negligible roles, if they appear at all.
There are paintings of women members of his family, rich influential female patrons, lovely chalk sketches of naked women, key women figures from Christian iconography, and the show builds to a tremendous climax with a final room showing four enormous oil paintings of women figures from classical mythology.
There are some men in some of the paintings, but they are always playing a secondary or negligible role. In the words of the press release:
‘The exhibition will be the first to challenge the popular assumption that Rubens painted only one type of woman, providing instead a more nuanced view of the artist who painted more portraits of his wives and children than almost any other, even Rembrandt. The exhibition reveals the varied and important place occupied by women, both real and imagined, in his world.’
Rubens’ changing style
In a more specialist, art history kind of way:
‘A further theme follows the evolution of the female nude in Rubens’s art. It demonstrates how Rubens’s early nudes were quite different in style from those he became famous for, tracing how he arrived at his preferred form through an engagement with sculpture, careful study of antique models and observation from life.’
Room 1. Introduction
Room one contains eight wonderful oil paintings. One is an early self portrait to introduce the man himself, and then, in line with the exhibition theme, seven portraits of women. First, some historical background:
‘Early in his career Rubens realised that his extraordinary ability to paint portraits could open doors. In May 1600, aged 22, he left Antwerp for Italy, where he stayed until 1608, employed by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. This position afforded him opportunities to travel to Spain, Venice, Florence, Rome and to Genoa, where his qualities as a portraitist became fully apparent. Rubens’s dazzling and innovative portraits of noblewomen revolutionised the genre and cemented his relationships with wealthy and powerful patrons.’
The first room is dominated by an enormous, sumptuous and commanding full-length portrait of the Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino. No reproduction can convey the scintillating, dazzling richness of the oil paint which makes up this awesome, luxury portrait. It is deliberately placed to dominate the first room and announce Rubens’s supreme skill as a painter of power, money and women.
Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino by Peter Paul Rubens (1606) National Trust Collections, Kingston Lacy (The Bankes Collection)
Once you’ve gotten over the visual shock of this huge masterpiece, you can move on to process the six other paintings of women. There’s a further portrait of a powerful woman, Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, though depicted in the outfit of a nun, a member of the Order of Poor Clares, reminding us that this was the period of heightened Catholic religiosity referred to as the Counter Reformation.
There’s a series of portraits of ‘unknown women’, resplendent in 17th century dresses, whose luxury fabrics are depicted with loving precision, obviously well-off though not aristocrats.
But maybe the most affecting paintings is the set of ‘intimate’ portraits depicting Rubens’ family, namely his first wife Isabella Brant (1591 to 1626) and eldest daughter, Clara Serena (1611 to 1623), both of whom died relatively young, his daughter at just 12.
Clara Serena Rubens, the Artist’s Daughter by (1620 to 1623) Private Collection
Room 2. Figuring Faith
The second room is a long corridor shape and contains paintings and drawings of a religious nature. Working for the Catholic rulers of Antwerp, Rubens was commissioned to create works designed to promote the Counter-Reformation, the Europe-wide movement to revive and reinvigorate Catholic faith, theology, institutions, and project the power of the Catholic monarchs who defended it.
However, in line with the exhibition’s theme of women, the 20 or so works on display here are for the most part not huge, grand, overpowering and religiose images; most of them are relatively modest in scale but what they do have in common is the curators’ wish to foreground Rubens’s treatment of women in the Christian stories.
The Virgin in Adoration before the Christ Child by Peter Paul Rubens (1616 to 1619) KBC Bank, Antwerp, Museum Snyders & Rockox House
It is quite drily funny how, no matter what the subject depicted, the curators insist that the female figures in them are the real stars, the real centres of attention, exercising agency and power in the way every 21st century feminist would approve of.
There’s a wall-sized digital print of an adoration of the Virgin, printed out and plastered on the wall, in which the Virgin is quite obviously receiving her dues from an array of grovelling men.
In a depiction of the Flight into Egypt, it is Mary who taking the ‘heroic’ role of protecting the baby Jesus.
‘Despite the sense of foreboding, and the shadowy rider visible on the horizon, Mary radiates calm.’
There’s an Ascension of Mary which features lots of men in 17th century clerical dress (actually the apostles) but all they can do is stare upwards in amazement at the Virgin taking off into the sky.
There’s two long narrow portrayals of women accompanied by skinny clerics and these turn out to be portraits of two women saints, Walburga and Catherine of Alexandria, strong independent saints.
There’s a study of Saint Barbara fleeing from her father, who has his sword drawn ready to kill her. Typical toxic patriarchy.
By now seeing everything through the eyes of the curators what we notice in a depiction of the ‘The Lamentation’ is that:
‘it is the women who model how we are to respond to this heart-breaking sight. Gazing at Christ, Mary Magdalen pulls at her hair in distress. The Virgin cradles Christ’s body and tenderly closes his eyes. At his feet are The Three Maries (Holy Women from the Bible).’
And at the centre of all this fuss, a dead white man, the best kind.
The Lamentation by Peter Paul Rubens (1614) Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Gemäldegalerie
Denying the Rubenesque
The curators are at pains to emphasise that Rubens’ women are no more voluptuous than those of his predecessors. They are simply more life-like, their skin more convincingly elastic and believably warm. Rubens’ nudes aren’t plumper or more fleshly, they insist, just better painted.
It’s an interesting claim, and I suppose you couldn’t assess it for yourself without reviewing hundreds more works by Rubens and as many by his contemporaries. But the evidence of your eyes tends to suggest that the most striking of Rubens’ women, the climax of his development as displayed in the stunning final room, are chubby, well covered, however you want to express it. See room 4, below.
Room 3. Stone Made Flesh
‘The female nude was a subject of fascination and constant evolution within Rubens’s art. In Italy, Rubens intensively studied ancient sculptures, memorising their forms and postures. He also drew on the Renaissance artist Michelangelo who was similarly informed by ancient art. Recording observations in his notebook, Rubens devised a new type of vigorous, monumental, female nude.’
This room is the most scholarly of the three, an exploration of how Rubens’ modelling of the female figure evolved, especially after a visit to Rome early in his career. This includes a series of studies, finished paintings, a classical marble sculpture, a silverware design, sketches of classical statues, and one large finished oil painting, of Adam and Eve, to demonstrate his early handling of the female nude – all demonstrating his changing approach.
‘Rubens’s nudes became increasingly dynamic and lifelike throughout the 1620s and 1630s.’
All of these works are relatively small and require quite a bit more study and historical knowledge than the bigger, more attractive, finished oil paintings, certainly for an amateur like me.
Alongside these scholarly specimens are eight or so lovely chalk studies of female nudes. I love chalk or charcoal sketches of nudes, male or female. After all these years I still find something magical in the way the human form and shape, the lifeliness of a human body, its warmth and shape, the beauty and pathos of the bare forked animal, can be conveyed by lines of chalk on flat paper when crafted by a master.
All of them were, obviously, really good, but one in particular stood out for me and, despite the blare of the bigger, finished paintings, might have been my favourite thing in the show. After I’ve finished walking slowly through an exhibition, weighed down by the duty of reading the wall captions, I always turn around and walk back, liberated from facts and figures and free to like whatever takes my fancy.
I often play a game where I ask myself, if I can choose just one work from each room, which would it be? This is the one work I’d want to own from the whole exhibition. Scholars think it might be a study for Mary Magdelene, maybe leaning down to wash the feet of Jesus.
What grabbed me is the immense skill of the shading and cross-hatching, the use of black and white chalk, leaving most of the surface untouched and so parchment colour standing in for fleshtone, and how this technique, this skill, can make a person of flesh and blood appear in front of you. The depiction of her lower back, the curve of her bottom, the shading of the thighs and the shadow where her calves are tucking up under her thighs, the creases in the sole of her foot, the five little pinkies. The delicacy, the skill and the exactitude never cease to pluck my heart, make me gasp.
Study for Mary Magdalen by Peter Paul Rubens (1610s) British Museum, London
Room 4. Goddesses of Peace and Plenty
In line with their feminist slant the curators emphasise that:
‘The women Rubens depicts are not simply passive figures to be observed but active agentsof their own destiny. Nowhere is this clearer than in the dramatic mythological narratives that he loved to paint. Inspired by the Renaissance paintings of Titian and the ancient stories of Ovid and Virgil, in these scenes the goddesses Venus, Juno and Diana are presented as strong and intelligent. It is no coincidence that Rubens’s depictions of powerful, peace-making women were created at a time when his homeland was ravaged by the Eighty Years’ War (1568 to 1648).’
Hence it is that the fourth and final room contains four huge and awe-inspiring paintings with mythological themes and reputedly depicting these active agentsof their own destiny, namely:
Venus, Mars and Cupid (c. 1614) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s own collection
Diana Returning from the Hunt (1615) from Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
The Birth of the Milky Way (1636 to 1638) from the Museo del Prado, Madrid, on display in the UK for the first time
Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia (1625 to 1628) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
The thing is that, although the curators try their best to claim that these women are not subject to the male gaze, but are strong independent women overflowing with agency, that’s not really how they actually look.
In my opinion this one, ‘Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia’ can be taken as a test case. It depicts the horn of plenty overflowing with the good things of life, namely a grocer’s shop full of ripe plump juicy fruit, so ripe and juicy that it has attracted the attention of scavenging parrots and a cheeky monkey, to add drama and narrative to a classical allegorical scene.
Is it just me or are the two naked women depicted as extensions of this vision of youthful fertile juicy fruitfulness?
I think they are. Far from asserting anyone’s agency, I’d have thought this picture epitomises the reverse: surely these women are totally objectified, depicted in all their youthful sexiness as direct extensions of the world of fruit and fecundity.
This is one of eight paintings Rubens took to Spain as a gift from his patron, the Archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia, to King Philip IV, to butter him up. Made by a man to flatter a king, far from being a rebuttal it strikes me as being a kind of triumph of the male gaze – sexy topless fruitful babes designed to decorate on the walls of the most powerful man in Europe.
Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia by Peter Paul Rubens (1625 to 1628) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
More interesting to me, more persuasive and touching, is the information that Juno, in this huge representation of ‘The Birth of the Milky Way’ resembles Helena Fourment, Rubens’s second wife.
According to the curators, it is thought that his happy second marriage to Helene inspired his increasingly sensuous presentation of women during the 1630s. That seems to me a plausible and happy explanation of the plump sensuality of the nudes he painted in his final decade, just as Rembrandt’s love for his wife shine through his later paintings. I’m not sure anybody portrayed in a painting, male or female, has any ‘agency’. In my opinion they’re all trapped by composition, design, treatment, by the artist’s aims and whims, and all subject to the human gaze of us, centuries later, completely cut off from the value systems in which these works were created.
But paintings very much can convey tenderness and love. And that’s what I found in this small room full of magnificent works of art. The milk of human kindness. Motherly love. The pure, naked, redemptive love we all wish, deep down, we could recapture.
In fact this final wall caption made me realise that mention of Rubens’ second wife had been seeded throughout the show, starting with early mention of how, after the early death of his first wife, in 1630 Rubens married his second and much younger wife, Helena Fourment (1614 to 1673).
‘Their blissful marital state in the final decade of his life, during which time they had five children, provided a wellspring of love and an increased interest in sensual mythological themes.’
In a world afflicted with terrible pain and suffering it cheered me up to learn that this great artist was blessed with a long, happy, rewarding marriage. Good for him! And these images, painted late in his life, at the peak of his experience of art and life, however others may wish to interpret them, struck me as wonderfully accepting celebrations of beauty, humanity and love.
Rubens among his peers
I was struck by a quote from co-curator Dr Ben van Beneden which gives a pithy summary of three of Western Art’s Golden Greats:
‘If Raphael endowed his female figures with grace, and Titian with beauty, Rubens gave them veracity, energy and soul.’
Strong independent parrots
I noticed that one of the most powerful paintings in the final room, the Cornucopia, featured some beautifully vivid parrots pecking away at the fruit flowing from the horn, and this reminded me that the awesome painting of the Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino in the first room also features a parrot perched on her grand chair and bending down, twisting its neck in that inquisitive parrot way.
It occurred to me that maybe Dulwich’s next exhibition should be about ‘Parrots in Painting’. It could bring together depictions of a variety of strong, independent parrots who resist the human gaze to insist on their psittacine agency.
The video
Related links
Rubens and Women continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 28 January 2024
This is a lovely exhibition, the first major UK exhibition of the leading French Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s work since 1950, but it’s also much more than that.
It is also a sustained comparison of Morisot’s work with the 18th century artists she knew and loved, which means that about a third of the paintings on display (about 15 out of a total 45 or so) are not by Morisot at all, but by eighteenth century classics, such as Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and, surprisingly, the Brits Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.
A collaboration
How did this come about? Well, the Musée Marmottan Monet is ‘the world’s leading research centre for the work of Berthe Morisot’ and it turns out that Morisot was very influenced by eighteenth century art – the French eighteenth century work of Fragonard and Watteau and Boucher, but also the English eighteenth century art which she saw on her honeymoon to England in 1875.
And Dulwich Picture Gallery houses a celebrated collection of 18th century painting. So this exhibition is by way of being a collaboration between these two galleries – The Musée Marmottan Monet providing nine key examples of Morisot’s work (along with prime examples from international collections) and these are then juxtaposed with French and English eighteenth century paintings from the Dulwich collection and elsewhere – with the aim of demonstrating Morisot’s debt to the previous century, both in subject matter and aspects of her painting style.
Berthe Morisot potted biography
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841 to 1895) was a French painter and a founding member of Impressionism. In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the ‘rejected’ Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, a show which included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Morisot went on to participate prominently in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 (she missed one in 1878, having just given birth to her daughter, Julie). In 1894 the art critic Gustave Geffroy as one of ‘les trois grandes dames’ of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.
Morisot was well connected. She came from an affluent family who secured her painting lessons, first copying works in the Louvre, and then as a pupil to landscape painter Camille Corot, who taught her to make swift outdoor sketches.
She married Eugène Manet, brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet. Her sister, Edma, was also a painter. The Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé was a family friend. She was a member of the haut bohemien.
Room one
The exhibition is in four rooms. The first room contains eight paintings, designed partly to give you an introduction to her light and airy style, but almost all of the captions also draw attention to the fact that, even at the time, many critics spotted her closeness in spirit to eighteenth century painting.
Installation view of Room 1 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery
What they meant was that something in the lightness and airiness of her style, something in the domestic intimacy of her subjects (almost entirely women), and even in her use of shades of white and silver, related directly back to the mood and tone of French Rococo painting.
‘Woman at her Toilette’ by Berthe Morisot (1875 to 1880). Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Stickney Fund
Take ‘Woman at her Toilette’. To quote the curators:
With its silvery palette and fluent brushwork, the painting appears as ephemeral as a mirror reflection. Reviewing it at the Fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, art critic Paul Mantz noted: ‘everything floats, nothing is formulated […] there is here a finesse like that found in Fragonard.’
Or:
‘The genius of the eighteenth century, but not its debauchery, lives again in these familiar and select images, which are animated by a kind of airy voluptuousness.’ (Henri Focillon)
Or take the painting at the start of this review, ‘At the Ball’. The woman in evening dress is holding an eighteenth-century fan, opened to display a picture-within-the-picture, a scene of outdoor courtship known as a fête galante, a genre invented by the eighteenth-century artist Watteau. (The fan belonged to Morisot and is included in the exhibition so we can admire its civilised 18th century style.)
Morisot was fond of making this kind of allusion to eighteenth-century visual culture and the connection proved attractive to collectors. The curators tell us that Rococo art had gone into a long period of neglect after the French Revolution but that, in Morisot’s generation, it underwent a revival. Exhibitions reintroduced eighteenth-century French art to the public and the Louvre opened new rooms devoted to the era.
So when Renoir declared her ‘the last elegant and “feminine” artist that we have had since Fragonard’ and Paul Girard, reviewing her summary exhibition in 1896 commented that her work was ‘the eighteenth century modernised’, it showed that she was very much on trend, and it was reflected in her sales. ‘At the Ball’ was bought from the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876 by art collector Georges de Bellio, to complement his existing collection of eighteenth-century art, and many of her works were sold to collectors with similar tastes.
Room two
The second room has the highest proportion of non-Morisot to Morisot, 8 or so works by other artists to her four. This is the room where the curators show a number of eighteenth century works and explore Morisot’s relationship to them. This turns out to be quite complicated, in the sense that she had a multi-levelled relationship with the artists of the preceding century, which evolved over time.
Engaging the classics
In her late teens and early twenties she had undergone supervised training which consisted of copying classic works at the Louvre. Over 20 years later, she returned to the Louvre to engage with the classics, no longer copying them but translating them into her own, loose, rough, late-impressionist style.
In her forties and fifties, Morisot engaged directly with grand mythological paintings in museum collections, translating elements of their compositions into her own Impressionist language. Unlike the copies that formed part of her own early training, these are original interpretations by a confident, mature artist.
Thus the exhibition shows us (a photo of) Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé by the great Rococo painter François Boucher:
‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé’ by François Boucher (1750)
And then shows us Morisot’s interpretation or translation or reinvention of the two embracing young women at the bottom left of the painting into her own hazy, light, unfinished style:
Now this raises all kinds of questions. On the face of it, I prefer the Boucher, as I consistently preferred all the 18h century originals to Morisot’s ‘interpretations’ when they were laid side by side. There’s more depth, more perspective, more (wonderful) painting technique, more detail and more visual pleasure to be had by the works by Fragonard, Boucher and Watteau on show here. They look and feel like the luxury objects they were intended to be.
And yet, Morisot’s work is doing something different: its looseness, its rough finish, its lack of interest in realistic perspective or twinkly detail are the result of something else. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the technique, namely the long, blunt, wide brushstrokes which can be seen in the green reeds. (And it’s fascinating to learn that Monet very much liked this feature of Morisot’s later style, and went on to use a similar combination of short and longer sinewy brushstrokes and pastel colouring in his paintings of water lilies.)
But, arguably, there’s also a psychological dimension at play. In the Boucher work, the embracing women are yet more examples of the kind of sumptuous sensuality which floods the painting. In Morisot’s version they’re still naked, and we can see the outlines of their bodies, and yet these bodies are being dissolved into or drowned or clambered over by the powerful green reeds, powerful green reeds which, on the left, swirl and curve, leading the viewer’s eyes into a background which isn’t magically alluring but is more unadorned and bleak. Humanless and troubling.
The female gaze
Something similar can be said of another direct comparison the show gives us. First, look at this characteristically sensual and saucy painting by Fragonard of a woman reclining, all pink nipples and soft porn confection:
‘Young Woman Sleeping’ by François Boucher. Fondation Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Domaine de Chaalis, Fontaine- Chaalis
Pretty obviously this painting, and this entire genre of painting, was designed to please and titillate its male audience with what T.S. Eliot called the ‘promise of pneumatic bliss’. And here is Morisot’s reinterpretation:
‘Resting’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) Private Collection
Same subject i.e. head and shoulders of a topless young woman reclining on an ornamental sofa or bed and yet…the Morisot comes from a different world, both artistically and psychologically. On the painterly level, the Bouchard buries the outlines of the subject in a realistic depiction i.e. you see more or less what you would see in real life, maybe a little Photoshopped and improved, but the outlines are soft a gentle.
On the contrary, the Morisot makes a point of emphasising outlines. Note the strong green lines shaping her hair, particularly as it tumbles onto her shoulder, the outline of her right shoulder against the pillow, the outlines of her right boob and forearm and left handing resting on it.
This painting isn’t interested in realism; it is making a statement about the artificiality of painting itself. In this respect, several of her later (this is from 1892) works reminded me of Gauguin, who had long ago ceased bothering about ‘realism’ and become interested in simplifying patterns and designs using heavy outlines, shapes which refer back to objects in the real world but take them a long way towards a kind of primitive abstraction.
Morisot isn’t Gauguin, but I thought some of her later works had moved just as far beyond impressionism, but in her own distinctive way. Another vivid example is ‘Julie Manet and her Greyhound Laertes’ from right at the end of her life (1893 – she died in 1895)
The straight-on face and the black, very loosely painted dress, reminded me of Edvard Munch more than Renoir or the other classic-era impressionists.
And this brings me to the other aspect of the work, which is its psychological impact. The Bouchard woman, a sleek airbrushed imago, has been painted for male viewing pleasure. The Morisot picture for other reasons altogether. As discussed, it is, on one level, an exercise in painterly technique, in exploring the world beyond pure realism. But on a psychological level it is just as complex. This woman doesn’t exist to give any man pleasure. This isn’t painted for the controlling male gaze. She comes across as a real individual, with idiosyncratic hair, colouring, non-male-fantasy boobs; like a painting of a woman who happens not to be wearing a top.
And, as well, there is some kind of power radiating from t, a sense of psychological depth. She reminds me of the heroines of late Victorian fiction, of Hardy or Zola or Henry James, of women whose every transient thought and emotion and response is annotated and analysed in vertiginous detail over three or four hundred pages novels.
There are a lot of paintings of women in the exhibition but, in my opinion, there is quite a big gulf between Morisot’s pretty-pretty, dressed-up Victorian women from the 1870s and 1880s, which are often variation on Renoir’s delightful dancing ladies – and these later depictions, which are something altogether different. They anticipate the much blunter honesty and psychological complexity of much early twentieth century portraiture.
Working in pastel
Room three also contains a useful contrast in the medium of pastel. From the 18th century we have a stunningly beautiful portrait of an unknown man by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. This is the kind of work that has to be seen in the flesh to be appreciated. A reproduction like this flattens and smooths it out. In the flesh you can see the amazing amount of work that’s gone into the pastelwork, for example the way repeated layerings of broad blue crayon create a rich sensual impression like you could reach out and touch it, whereas, the wall label tells us, the intricate detail of his neckerchief was achieved with a fine-nibbed pen. It looks pretty good in this reproduction, but it’s a wonder to stand in front of.
Portrait of a Man, Thought to be Louis Journu, Known as Montagny by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1757 to 1758)
And so, placed next to it is a very good pastel portrait of her daughter Julie by Morisot:
Girl carrying a basket by Berthe Morisot (1891)
Again, the Morisot doesn’t have the astonishing finish or visual depth of the Perronneau. And yet, in its very sketchiness, it indicates an infinitely more modern consciousness, a proto-modern sensibility made of gaps and fragments, the strange ellipses and leaps of consciousness which modernist literature was about to start exploring about a decade later (I’m thinking about the earliest works of Kafka and Joyce).
The French eighteenth century
So, as mentioned above, the exhibition is worth visiting to see not just works by Morisot, but also (an admittedly small) number of works by French eighteenth century masters. There’s a pretty poor portrait of a young girl by Fragonard but a dazzling work by Watteau:
Les Plaisirs du bal by Antoine Watteau (1715 to 1717) Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery
Completely different in style from those guy’s frothy confections and commedia dell’arte whimsy, there’s a lovely piece by the master of eighteenth century realism, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Scullery Maid, a characteristically humble domestic scene of a serving maid getting eggs out of a jug surrounded by beautifully depicted bowls and servant-level bric-a-brac.
This leads off in another direction because it turns out that Morisot’s sister, Edma, was also an artist and she is represented here by just one work, a beautiful landscape in the manner of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who both girls had studied under. These are all delights.
Landscape by Edma Morisot (1860s) D. and J. Waller
The English connection
But back to the English. The exhibition explains that Morisot spent her honeymoon (with Manet’s brother, Eugène) on a trip which took in the joys of the Isle of Wight and then London. In London she saw the huge collection amassed by Sir Richard Wallace, Marquess of Hertford, which has been preserved for the nation as the Wallace Collection.
It was here that she was introduced to the works of 18th century English masters such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. The exhibition takes a little detour to explain the different styles of these three men, and discuss some key works by each of them, and then how their styles or motifs found their way into Morisot’s work.
Gainsborough is the most obviously close to Morisot because of his light, feathery, sketchy approach, which drew criticism from the more grand and finished Reynolds, yet was precisely the quality that attracted the quick, sketchy Frenchwoman.
Installation view of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, setting ‘Mrs Mary Robinson’ by George Romney (1781, on the left) against ‘Winter, or Woman with a Muff’ by Berthe Morisot (1880)
Summary
Not all of Morisot’s work is great. The fourth and final room contains only works by her and I have to admit I didn’t like most of them.
Installation view of Room 4 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Worthy depictions of domestic interiors, of her growing daughter, intimate portraits of women outside in the Bois de Boulogne or out in a boat or resting on divans (clearly a full-time occupation for many Victorian ladies), I often found their style either washed-out (several of the supposedly sweet and intimate studies of her daughter gave her such a yellow-pale face she looked like a corpse, for example, ‘Children with a basin‘) or so quick and sketchy as to feel amateurish.
Very good amateurish, but in many of her paintings the multiple clumsinesses wherever I looked just stopped me really enjoying them, giving in, surrendering, saying Yes.
By contrast, I was enraptured by almost all the eighteenth century works (except for the ghastly, ugly Fragonard in room one), by her sister’s one work, and also by the massive work by a painter I haven’t mentioned yet, her contemporary James Tissot (The Ball on Shipboard), included because Tissot moved from Paris to London and made a great success of his career, so much so that, on her honeymoon trip, Morisot seriously considered doing the same and moving to London.
Even the 18th century ‘cartoons’ or preliminary sketches for big works like by Boucher (‘Vulcan’s Forge) delighted and enchanted with a depth and finish and wonderful technique, in a way that most of the Morisot didn’t.
For this reason I hardly think it the scandal of the century that Morisot isn’t as well known as many of the other impressionists. To be blunt, I don’t think she’s as good. Or definitely not on the strength of the works presented here, a handful of which are really good, some are pretty good, and some are positively poor.
But then again, it depends on your aesthetic. Did my general preference for the 18th century works indicate that I’m a peasant, a man of poor taste, a liker of pretty pictures and chocolate box art, who doesn’t appreciate more demanding (and hardly that demanding) art?
Here’s a test. Here’s the bold, take-no-prisoners self-portrait which the curators open the show with.
I get that she’s a strong independent woman, and that this comes over not only in the directness of her gaze but in the super-confidence with which she didn’t finish it. The French have an expression, ‘je-m’en-foutisme’, which translates as ‘I don’t give a damn-ism’ (or ruder, four-letter equivalents).
So, is the scrappy finish and the lack of immediate visual appeal outweighed by the strength of character and psychological depth of a painting like this? Your answer will determine whether you like Morisot, or at least the selection of 30 or so Morisot paintings to be found in this small but incredibly stimulating and hugely enjoyable exhibition.
The merch
I’ve made the point in previous reviews of Impressionist exhibitions, but one reason for the ongoing popularity of the Impressionists is simply that their paintings transfer so well onto posters and mugs and tea towels and jigsaws and the whole world of merchandise. Painting which, large and in the flesh feel half finished and scrappy, when reduced to the size of a coffee cup or tea tray, suddenly look finished, light and attractive. Never ceases to amaze me. As you can see from the full range of Morisot merchandise on sale at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shop:
Books & Boots 