Quotation, borrowing, reference, allusion: whatever you call it, a lot of paintings seem to include passages, elements or features which have previously appeared in other paintings. Although common, it is a difficult issue. What we might see as an obvious similarity between two paintings might never have occurred to the painter of the later work. Sometimes, this might happen by chance; more often, perhaps, both artists had a third source, which might have been a mental image rather than another painting.

Bruce Redford’s new book John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion (Yale UP, ISBN 978 0 300 21930 2) is a fascinating exploration of many likely allusions in Sargent’s portraits, which reference great portraits and other works by masters such as van Dyck, who was a particular favourite of Sargent, as he was to other modern masters including William Merritt Chase.

Professor Redford’s book is not one which you will be able to read straight through, I suspect. Approach it with a healthy scepticism and you will, at first, doubt some of the allusions which he claims. I have needed to go away, think about it, look again at its lovely illustrations a few more times, and re-read his highly accessible text. In the end, though, I think that his proposals not only work, but cast new light on Sargent as an artist, and his many portraits.

There are, thankfully, a few occasions where sufficient evidence exists to convince even the most sceptical. This article looks at one example, described early in the book, and broadens its scope a little.

In 1895, two notable young residents of New York City married. He was Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1867-1944), a recent graduate of Harvard who studied architecture for three years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He went on to co-found the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, and was a pioneer in social housing. She was Edith Minturn (1867-1937), daughter of the shipping magnate Robert Bowne Minturn, Jr., and destined to become a philanthropist, socialite, and artistic muse.

A close friend decided that a good wedding gift would be a portrait of Mrs Stokes painted by the greatest of the age, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). For various reasons this was delayed, but in 1897 the artist and the couple got together and Sargent started work. As Sargent kept few written records, we rely on the account given by Mr Stokes in his memoirs, and quoted by Redford.

Sargent’s original intention had been to paint Mrs Stokes wearing formal evening dress, sitting next to an Empire table. However, he changed his mind, and decided to paint her standing in informal walking attire next to a Great Dane. As he was making this reconception in his mind, Sargent turned to a portrait which had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Sargent’s patron, Henry Marquand in 1889: that of James Stuart, by van Dyck.

Van Dyck’s portrait puts James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox (1633–35) at a slight angle, his left shoulder forward, and his left hand on his hip in ‘Renaissance elbow’ position, to show off the silver star worn as a member of the Order of the Garter (itself just visible belowhis left knee). His right hand then strokes the Great Dane’s head.

Unfortunately, Sargent was unable to find a suitable dog. Mr Stokes then “offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture”, as he put it. Sargent therefore painted Mrs Stokes in essentially the same pose as that of van Dyck’s James Stuart, maintaining the line of her right arm to hold a straw boater against her hip. She is the subject of the portrait: bright, boldly lit, and looks directly at the viewer with a smile of confidence and a glint in her eyes.

In contrast, Mr Stokes is tucked back in the shadow of his wife: straight-faced, arms folded, static, and withdrawn. And Mrs Stokes’ right forearm and the boater even conceal his crotch. As Redford puts it: By imitating Titian’s imitator, Van Dyck, Sargent playfully and even provocatively refigures the master/hound relationship in an ambiguous act of homage to a female American democrat, an exemplar of “The New Woman.”

This was not van Dyck’s only portrait in which he posed a man next to a large dog: his Thomas Wentworth, later 1st Earl of Strafford (c 1639) borrows again from the earlier portrait of James Stuart. There are many other portraits of notable men alongside their dogs too. Most involve rather different poses, often with smaller sporting dogs, the man usually holding a hunting gun.

This Flemish School Portrait of Charles-Alexandre de Croÿ, Marquis d’Havré and Duc de Croÿ (c 1610) is rather earlier and slightly different again, but the dog still evokes the common concepts of fidelity, nobility, and status.

The combination of the dog on one side, and the ‘Renaissance elbow’ on the other is quite popular, as seen in this portrait of John George, Count Lamberg (1648), by an unknown artist.

Rembrandt also got into fancy dress, parked a large poodle by his stick, and put his hand on his hip, in his Self-portrait in Oriental Attire with Poodle (1631-33).

Sir Joshua Reynolds seems to have favoured the pose for Richard Peers Symons, MP (later Baronet) (1770-71), here using his hat as an excuse for his ‘Renaissance elbow’.

Neither was this pose confined to men. Admittedly most women – even those in the highest of places – were decorated with small, often belittling, lapdogs, but there were some notable exceptions.

Alonso Sánchez Coello’s portrait of Joanna of Austria, Dona Juana (1535-1573), Princess of Portugal (1557) shows the mother of Sebastian of Portugal who later became regent of Spain for her brother, Philip II of Spain. She may not wear a crown herself, but her dog’s collar appears very regal.

There are also two very similar portraits of Margaret of Austria, that above by Bartolomé González y Serrano in 1609, and that below by Juan Van Der Hamen. Her left hand does not need to be on her hip, as she already has assumed a ‘Renaissance elbow’ by holding that hand so far clear of her voluminous dress.

But for me, the most fascinating of all these paintings is the official portrait of First Lady Grace Coolidge, painted by Howard Chandler Christy in 1924, the year that her younger son Calvin died. When she was First Lady, she was a very popular hostess, but avoided any involvement in politics. I just wonder whether Christy had seen van Dyck’s portrait of James Stuart in the Met, or Sargent’s double portrait of Mr and Mrs Stokes. The latter did not go into the Met until 1938, the year after the death of Mrs Stokes, though.

Reference

Redford, B (2016) John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion, Yale UP, ISBN 978 0 300 21930 2.

“The Vincent Van Gogh Atlas”
Nienke Denekamp and René van Blerk, with Teio Meedendorp
Yale UP and Van Gogh Museum, November 2016
Hardback, 25.4 x 19.7 cm (10 x 7.8 in), 181 pp., £16.99/$25.00
ISBN 978 0 300 22284 5
Not available for Kindle, nor in the iTunes Store.

If any artist lived the life of a restless spirit, it was Vincent van Gogh. Understanding that constant search, the forces that changed his painting to result in his final few climactic years, is surely key to reading and more deeply appreciating his genius.

Conventional biographies lead us through the succession of places that he lived, occupations that he tried, and crises which he faced, and overcame. But painting a vivid picture of Etten in 1881, or Nuenen in 1883-85 using words is very difficult. Even then, it is hard to build a good understanding of how much and how far he travelled: the list of locations is just another half-remembered list.

This book fills this gap in the literature about van Gogh in a unique way: with maps, contemporary photographs, copies of the artist’s own letters and notes, and of course many of his own drawings and paintings. It is not a glossy coffee-table tome bursting with full-page colour reproductions of those paintings – they are usually small, but sufficiently large for the reader to know which they wish to see in better detail.

It is designed partly in the spirit of those portfolios containing reproductions of important documents which invariably get misplaced or damaged, but this book is not a gimmick like those. Its end-papers may be laid out like a scrap-book, but inside there is nothing faux about it. Its table of contents is not just matched by a grand map plotting all his movements, but links to a timeline too. Time and place are the heart of the book.

The start of each location/section/period in his life orientates the reader, explaining how this fits in with his life-story, what he was doing, and why. There are photos of the principal characters involved, postcards or other images of the location, and superb maps and plans. Significant buildings – where his studio was, where he lodged or lived – are shown wherever possible, and paintings and other objects which were particularly important to him then or later.

We are told what van Gogh spent his time doing in that location, whether he attended church much, where he walked, and so on. Accompanying this are small reproductions of his cards, letters, and other writings, and of course a selection of his own drawings and paintings.

The text is written in plain English which may at first seem a little pedagogic, but ensures a readership of almost all ages. Inevitably it refers to van Gogh’s sexually-transmitted disease, affairs, and suicide, so should be used with caution by younger children, perhaps. A valuable side-effect is that it is easy to read for everyone, and the words complement the copious images, rather than distracting from them.

Of all the locations/sections/periods in the book, I found the account of his period (in 1889-90) in the psychiatric clinic at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence the most fascinating, as I understood so little about what it was really like. There are several excellent photos, including one apparently taken from a nearby hill, with small enlargements to show the locations of the artist’s room and studio. Further photos show the window of his studio (from inside), and his room in the 1950s, and the clinic’s hydrotherapy baths.

There are 11 reproductions of van Gogh’s paintings from his time at the clinic, a partial copy of a letter from van Gogh to his brother Théo of 22 August 1889. The text steps carefully through his progressively increasing freedom, through painting in the gardens, and into the Alpilles there, and his unfortunate relapses.

The main text and images end with a short account of Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s work to publish Vincent’s letters and promote his art, leading to the Van Gogh Museum, and a moving full-page spread of Vincent and Théo’s graves at Auvers.

After that, there is one page of further information, which includes a small selection of websites, but strangely does not recommend any further reading, which is the one slight regret that I have about this wonderful book.

I have not attempted to check any of the information given: Teio Meedendorp is a leading expert on Vincent van Gogh who is probably the authority on the subject, and René van Blerk is a senior educator at the Van Gogh Museum. You can’t get any better.

Opinion

This is one of the most fascinating and insightful books about any artist that I have read. Instead of presenting the author’s interpretation of their art, it provides the reader with contemporary information – primarily visual, but well-supported by its text – which helps them understand what the artist experienced.

For Vincent van Gogh, this is particularly important. As the book makes clear, his life was a tumultuous succession of places, occupations, and events. From the age of 20, he lived and worked in 13 different locations in four different countries, from the gloom and grime of the Borinage coalfield in Belgium, to the sparkling light of Arles in Provence – in those 17 highly-productive years before he died. This is the only book which I have seen which brings each of these to life.

This is an ideal Christmas gift for anyone of almost any age who has the slightest interest in Vincent van Gogh and his art. You’ll also want to buy yourself a copy. Highly recommended.

In my last article, I elaborated on my main thread using a sidethread, to enrich my hypertext narrative. So far I have been paying a lot of attention to those threads, and have neglected two other important features of my document: the gallery of example paintings, and the timeline of events. Before I add too many more paintings and sidethreads, I want to attend to those.

At present, I have just dumped all my painting images, large and small, into the gallery. This is a mess which no reader will enjoy, so I need to bring some order here.

On thinking about this, as my images come in pairs, a small and large size, I’d like the reader to enter each painting in the gallery through the small version, but to have a default link to the large version, and back again. Then I will (sort of) hide the large versions on one side, and lay the small ones out on display, in approximate chronological order.

Pairing them up with links is a straightforward task. However, at present the large images are shown in a rather bold green; I think that I should make their tiles a little more subfuse, using a grey which is closer to the background colour. I like the default background colour, as it is reasonably light and neutral, and contrasts well with the dark blue of the small image tiles. So I will keep that as it stands.

Because all the large paintings have a common prototype, all I have to do to change their tile colour is to navigate back up to the top level, then enter the Prototypes container, and change the colour of their prototype. This is simple using the Inspector.

That gives me just the effect that I want: clear enough to see the tile, but not shouting their presence out.

Whilst I am here, inspecting the PaintingLarge prototype, there is another change that I want to make to help clean up the timeline view. At present, each small and each large size painting has key attributes of $StartDate and $EndDate, which ensure that they are inserted in that view. Twice. So I have decided to remove those key attributes from the PaintingLarge prototype, another simple task with the Inspector open on that prototype.

Back in the gallery, I now shrink each of the large paintings (grey tiles) to a vestigial bar, and stack them on one side. The small size paintings, using the PaintingSmall prototype, I now drag out so that the tile exposes the whole of the image. This is why I decided to use the small versions in the gallery, as their exposed tiles are a sensible size for this role.

Although I have removed $StartDate and $EndDate as key attributes for the PaintingLarge prototype, all my current paintings have values set for those attributes, so they are still cluttering up the timeline. Entering the timeline view may seem a bit cryptic in Storyspace: you have to do this using the toolbar on a window. So to make this timeline view, I first created a new window (in the File menu), then showed its toolbar (View menu), and selected the Timeline view in that.

So for each existing large painting tile, now conveniently shown in lighter grey text in the timeline, I bring up the contextual menu, and use the Get Info… command. That produces this floating window, in which I select attributes, Events, and by Option-Clicking over the entered date, I can set it back to the inherited value, which is never.

It does not take long to work through all the large paintings in the timeline view. Those items will then be removed from the timeline when it is next opened, so I save the whole document, close its windows starting with the main map view, and then re-open the document.

I also need to set the start and end dates for the whole timeline display, which is readily done using the Inspector. Here $TimelineStart will be 1000 CE, and $TimelineEnd would be 2010, but it is worth increasing that to ensure there is adequate room at the right end of the timeline for all the labels, e.g. to around 2130.

The finished timeline still shows all the links, but now provides the reader with a much more useful overview of the different stages in the history of oil painting (in red) and the key paintings which illustrate it.

Meanwhile back in the gallery, all my large painting tiles are stacked neatly on one side, with their links looking fairly ordered too.

The gallery view itself is rather lovely, affording the reader an overview of the wonderful paintings included. Each of these small versions links through to a large image, and back again, should the reader wish to browse them individually.

The completed document – which should now open three windows, containing the main map view, the gallery, and a timeline – is free to download here: historyofoils3

Having got these two views more usable and useful, as I add further paintings I can follow the new order. So I am back to adding more sidethreads, to finish the main hypertext.

Happy hypertexting!

The nineteenth century saw great change in painting, and in the role of art critics. Previously the major external influences over painting were patrons and purchasers, and other painters through their guilds and societies. In the nineteenth century, people who were neither professional artists, nor those funding an artist, started to become important determinants of a painter’s career, business, and success.

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was one of the earliest and most influential of this new breed of critic. An early writer, his study of classics at Oxford University was interrupted by illness, and in 1842 he was awarded a ‘double fourth-class’ degree in recognition of his achievements. The following year he published the first volume of his Modern Painters, which was fundamentally an exhaustive defence of the criticism which had been heaped on JMW Turner.

When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) formed in 1848, although its ideals were largely original, its emphasis on painting only from nature, and depicting nature in ‘true’ detail, were greatly influenced by Ruskin’s writing, although members of the PRB did not meet Ruskin for some time later. By that time, Ruskin had already criticised some of the early Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Ruskin sprung to their defence in 1851, writing to The Times and publishing the pamphlet from which I have quoted previously.

Ruskin then became embroiled in the tumultuous personal lives of the members of the PRB – his own wife divorced him to marry John Millais – and from 1855 wrote an annual review of the key exhibition at the Royal Academy. His opinions expressed in the latter made and destroyed reputations and careers. Although he gave considerable financial and critical support to several members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, those could be as capricious as his critical opinions.

Ruskin was a keen amateur painter in watercolours, and a fine draftsman, but does not appear to have undertaken any serious painting in oils, nor to have any deep understanding or experience of the practice of oil painting. His watercolours were strongly influenced by Turner, although by and large they appear to follow the precepts which he laid down in his Modern Painters.

Apparently for the first time in the history of art, a single critic who was not an experienced and knowledgeable practitioner in painting, was largely directing an avant garde movement.

At that time, there was considerable experience in the practical issues involved in painting en plein air using oil paints, but most of that had been gained in the warmer and more stable weather of the Roman Campagna. None of the PRB, nor Ruskin, had any experience of that, nor did they seek the advice and guidance of those who did.

Painters who underwent a classical training, such as Frederic, Lord Leighton, and Corot in France, had that experience, although Leighton did not return to Britain until 1859. Leighton continued to paint plein air oil sketches through his career, some of which are now in the Gere Collection at the National Gallery, London. However, as they followed the classical tradition, as had Constable’s, they did not meet Ruskin’s precepts and the PRB’s derived principles for Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting.

Hunt’s Our English Coasts, 1852 remains one of the few Pre-Raphaelite landscapes to have won Ruskin’s sustained praise, and favourable comparison with the latter’s favourite works by Turner.

Thomas Seddon died of dysentery in Cairo late in the year after he painted this landscape of Jerusalem. Although Seddon felt that Ruskin had been particularly pleased with the painting when he saw it in 1855, by 1857 Ruskin was damning it with faint praise, implicitly putting Seddon in the ranks of “the prosaic Pre-Raphaelites”.

John Brett’s Val d’Aosta (1858) was painted in close collaboration with Ruskin, and later Ruskin asked Brett to give him “some lessons in permanent, straight-forward oil painting.” Ruskin’s Academy Notes on the finished painting, when it was exhibited in 1859, begin with enthusiastic praise, before Ruskin starts to find fault:
A notable picture truly; a possession of much within a few feet square. Yet not, in the strong, essential meaning of the word, a noble picture. It has a strange fault, considering the school to which it belongs — it seems to me to be wholly emotionless. I cannot find from it that the painter loved, or feared, anything in all that wonderful piece of the world.
(John Ruskin, Academy Notes, 1859, in Cook ET & Wedderburn A (eds) The Works of John Ruskin, vol 14, pp 234-8.)

When Brett’s extraordinary Florence from Bellosguardo was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1863, John Ruskin was out of the country, and of all Brett’s friends and associates, responded most weakly, urging Brett to make studies in black and white, preferably using pen and ink.

The fundamental problem for the Pre-Raphaelites was the near-impossibility of the task posed by Ruskin, I am sure quite unwittingly. Painting substantial canvases in fine detail en plein air using oil paint is extremely time-consuming. In the more equitable and stable weather of the Mediterranean and Middle East, each painting is likely to take two months or more; in the more changeable climate of the British Isles, even a single summer may be insufficient.

Because of the protracted periods required, the artist cannot capture consistent details. During the course of painting, much of the motif will have changed substantially, and the painting ends up as a composite of appearance over time.

Unless a painter has a generous patron, such investment of time in a single work is also commercially very risky. As each of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters discovered, when you can only paint two or three significant works per year, it is very hard to pursue painting as a profession.

It is no small surprise, therefore, that most of those who painted landscapes in Pre-Raphaelite style did so for a short and relatively unproductive period, before moving on to less ambitious work. So by about 1870, after less than 25 years, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape was gone.

Compare this with the Impressionists over in France, who defied critics rather than being directed by them, who built upon established traditions of painting, and who were able to paint many thousands of works, and eventually achieve popularity and financial security.

Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting was bold, innovative, resulted in some paintings of extraordinary beauty and impressive technical achievement, but it was utterly impractical for anyone apart from the obsessive amateur.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Newall C (2012) Review of Payne (2010), Burlington Mag. 154, July 2012, pp 498-499.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.)

I previously covered the tragically short-lived Paulus Potter (1625–1654) in this series, unaware that one of his successors in the Dutch Golden Age also had a very brief career: Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672), best known for his fine landscapes and farm animals.

Van de Velde was born into an artistic family – his father and brother were marine painters of repute – and was baptised in Amsterdam. In the first instance he is believed to have been trained by his father. Adriaen was quickly recognised as being exceedingly gifted as a painter. It is not known whether he received any training from another master, but his older brother Willem was trained by Simon de Vlieger. Unlike Willem who continued to work with his father, Adriaen established an independent studio, where he specialised in landscapes, and painted a few religious and narrative works.

One technical problem unfortunately plagues van de Velde’s paintings: his use of a fugitive yellow, probably a lake, in his greens, which has resulted in most of those greens becoming blue. This is most apparent in his paintings from 1662 onwards.

Van de Velde collaborated with Jan van der Heyden in several paintings: van de Velde brought his skill with figures, and van der Heyden his with buildings and the urban landscape. Although the results are often superb, I have not included any in this short article.

Among his earliest surviving paintings are several beach scenes, including The Beach at Scheveningen (1658), which are exceptional for someone who was only twenty-one at the time. Despite the dress and wagons, this has a timeless quality, and gives the most wonderful impression of light and space.

He also showed his talent early in A Farm with a Dead Tree (1658), which must be one of the finest landscapes from the period. It has compositional similarities with Paulus Potter’s Driving the Cattle to Pasture in the Morning (1647) (below), and both artists drew attention to the bull’s horns by setting them against the sky.

Van de Velde was most productive in the early to mid 1660s, when he completed a series of different landscapes featuring portraits of cattle, including the small panel of Mountainous Landscape with Cattle (1663).

Wooded Landscape with Cattle (1663), another small panel, includes a richer menagerie of farm animals, with different varieties of sheep, cattle, possibly goats, and a sturdily-built horse.

His Pastoral Scene (1663) is a slightly larger canvas, which combines figures and animals in the foreground, wonderful depictions of trees, and a slightly incongruous distant mountain. Amazingly, this sold at auction for as little as £12,000 back in 1977, which seems ridiculously cheap for such a classic landscape.

Hilly Landscape with High Road (c 1663) is more modest in its hills, and has rather richer staffage.

View of a Beach (1663/1665) is a more mature beach scene which perhaps lacks the freshness of his early paintings at Scheveningen, but is still masterly.

This image of the small undated panel of Cows and Sheep in a Wood is not of particularly good quality, but shows another painting of farm animals which compares with Paulus Potter at his best.

The undated A Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

The rather larger Animals by the River (1664) shows van de Velde’s skill in its twilight sky, and at composing his animals.

Another outstanding painting from this period is his A Woodland Glade with Animals and Figures (1664), which I am unable to show for copyright reasons. It can be seen online in the British Royal Collection.

In the late 1660s, van de Velde painted increasingly complex figures and compositions, such as The Ferry (1666).

Sometimes known as The Farm, this painting shows a deer park, The Koekamp in The Hague (1666). Its composition has inspired many subsequent landscape painters, and it uses sunlight to brilliant effect.

The Annunciation (1667) is a large canvas, and among the few religious paintings which van de Velde made following his marriage to a Catholic woman, and conversion to Catholicism. Although the angel is a little awkward, it is hard to believe that this was painted by a landscape specialist, and it makes me wonder what he might have produced had he enjoyed a longer career, and developed his figure painting further.

For many years in the nineteenth century, Portrait of a Family in a Landscape (1667) was praised as being van de Velde’s masterpiece, and assumed to be a self-portrait. Although it slowly fell from grace, and it became clear that it was not by any means a portrait of the artist and his family, the painting held further secrets.

X-ray studies have led to the conclusion that it has been cut down considerably, and originally placed the nurse and infant near the centre of the canvas. Infra-red studies have shown that the figures were not painted into reserves, as would have been expected in a portrait of this type, but overpainted on what must have been a completed landscape. No one has yet cast any more informed light on its puzzling history.

Colf Players on the Ice near Haarlem (1668) is one of a small number of van de Velde’s winter landscapes which have survived, and an even more moving twilight sky. The game of colf is popular in Dutch winter landscapes, and shown particularly explicitly here. This work was also popular in the nineteenth century.

The problem with van de Velde’s greens is all too sadly evident in his otherwise superb Vertumnus and Pomona (1670). Vertumnus was the Roman god of seasons and change, who could assume whatever form he wished. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 14) tells the story of his metamorphosis into the form of an old woman, seen on the left here, so that he could gain entry to Pomona’s orchard and seduce her.

The Hut (1671) was one of van de Velde’s last paintings, and has long been esteemed in the Netherlands. It is one of his most natural compositions, sparkling with bright colour in the clothing and animals. The artist even adds the reality – perhaps with a touch of humour – of some fresh cowpats.

When he died in Amsterdam in January 1672, at the age of only 35, Adriaen van de Velde left more than 170 oil paintings and a large number of drawings. Later that year, the Franco-Dutch War broke out, driving his father and brother to London, where they completed their careers.

Unlike many short-lived artists, Adriaen van de Velde’s reputation continued to grow after his untimely death, and Eugène Boudin – a major pre-Impressionist painter and influence on Monet – was particularly keen on his beach scenes, making a copy of at least one of them. I can see why his paintings are now in many of the major collections around the world.

Exhibition

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 15 January 2017. Full details are here.

References

Wikipedia (brief).

Cornelis B & Schapelhouman M (2016) Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape, Paul Holberton. ISBN 978 1 907 37296 4.

One of the commonly-quoted propositions of the Aesthetic movement was that painting could become more like music, which was argued to be a purely sensory experience, without narrative or ‘meaning’. Although other artists explored that idea from the late 1850s onwards, and it is well-illustrated in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Flaming June (1895), most painters avoided the goal of ‘pure art’ painting.

One of the last neo-classicist painters of the Victorian era in the UK who made a career out of such ‘pure art’ works was John William Godward (1861-1922). Very little is known about his life, because he was estranged from his family for much of his career, and his papers were all destroyed on his death. Likewise with his paintings: because he avoided the use of symbols, or narrative, there is remarkably little to say about most of them. We must therefore rely on his paintings to do whatever telling they can.

Godward was born in Wimbledon, south of London, and nothing is known of his training. He does not appear to have attended the Royal Academy Schools, nor to have trained outside the area of London. It is probable that he attended part-time classes at one of the art schools or groups which had become numerous at the time, and that much of his painting was, to a degree, self-taught.

His earliest known paintings date from about 1880, but it was not until 1887 that he first started exhibiting at the Royal Academy.

He soon established himself in similar style to Leighton’s later Aesthetic works, such as Flaming June (1895), expressed using the marble of Alma-Tadema. However, it is not known whether he ever had much contact with those artists. Grecian Reverie (1889) is his parallel to the paintings of Fanny Cornforth by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. However, they lack the emotional intensity and complexity, and their settings are rather bland marble buildings.

A Priestess of Bacchus (1890) is another good example of the gap between the likes of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, and Godward’s plain marble. Apart from the characteristic thyrsus (the staff topped with a pine cone), there is nothing to relate to Bacchus, or the activities of such a priestess. The distant landscape is strongly reminiscent of Leighton’s Mediterranean paintings, but too far away to have much effect on this scene. The young couple seen at the left appear to be staffage, and apparently lack any relationship with the priestess.

The Playtime (1891) referred to in this painting is that of a kitten with a peacock feather, both frequently appearing in Aestheticist paintings. Much of the rest of the painting is then decoration and embellishment around that central scene, begging the question as to the role of the man and second woman. One of the few details shown on the building is an interesting echo, in the painted image of a peacock at the upper left.

Far Away Thoughts (1892) is a beautiful portrait of a young model in thought, but lacks the power and symbols of Rossetti, for example.

Yes or No (1893) assumes the popular theme of proposal of marriage, explored in the direction of gaze, but adopts an altogether blander approach to that of Alma-Tadema’s earlier A Foregone Conclusion (below). Godward reduces what might have been a simple narrative to a single binary question.

Mischief and Repose (1895) is a little more complex, with two diaphonously-clad women idling away their time, one playing little tricks with the hair of the other. Godward’s marble has become more interesting here, and in parts threatens to overwhelm the figures.

The Mirror (1899) is an unusual painting, in that the viewer is not shown the reflection in the mirror of the title, only its reverse.

Dolce Far Niente (Sweet Idleness) (or A Pompeian Fishpond) (1904) is a popular title, applied to paintings by (at least) William Holman Hunt (1866), John William Waterhouse (1880), Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1882), and John Singer Sargent (c 1907) – the first three of which are distinctly Aesthetic. It is one of Godward’s more complex compositions, and probably his most famous painting, again featuring peacock feathers in a fan in the foreground, and a tricky set of reflections in the water. The latter do not appear entirely convincing in the steps, at least.

Godward continued to paint many single figures of women in thought, such as Violets, Sweet Violets (1906), and In Realms of Fancy (1911), below.

In 1912, he left Britain to live in Italy with one of his models. His family consequently broke all contact with him.

Tranquillity (1914) is exactly what it says.

A Souvenir (1920) was one of his last paintings made in Italy. It could perhaps have been a ‘problem painting’, encouraging the viewer to speculate on its underlying narrative. But Godward keeps it purely Aesthetic, in showing us the beads, presumably the souvenir of the title, and no other clues which could be used to read in any meaning – the goal of pure Aestheticism.

Godward returned to London in 1921, becoming increasingly distressed about the advent of modernism, and of Picasso in particular. He died the following year, a suspected suicide. He is reported to have written a suicide note, containing the fragment “the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso”.

Inevitably, through the twentieth century his paintings were forgotten, and became almost worthless. In more recent years they have enjoyed a strong revival in popularity, thanks largely to the interest of a few private collectors, and prices have risen to exceed $1 million for his better works.

Godward’s paintings undoubtedly have a sensory beauty, but I think demonstrate the dangers of dispensing with narrative, symbols, and readings: their beauty is transient, insufficient to hold prolonged attention. They are fleeting moments, static and generally both low in emotion and non-emotive. They look thoroughly nice, but that is all: they’re very good eye-candy.

Reference

Wikipedia.

I recently wrote about an example of allusion in the portrait paintings of John Singer Sargent, based on Bruce Redford’s excellent new book. I cannot resist one more – this time relying on both Redford and the great Sir Ernst Gombrich – which may cast new light on Sargent’s art.

One of Sargent’s most prestigious portrait commissions was for the Duchess of Devonshire, who incongruously lived in the vast stately home of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire (which is well worth visiting), as do her modern descendants. Her three grand-daughters, by her first marriage, were to be the subjects, and Sargent visited Chatsworth during 1901-02 to discuss details.

His completed painting of The Ladies Alexandra, Mary, and Theo Acheson, normally simply known as The Acheson Sisters, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902, where it was both very popular and favourably received. And at first sight, it is indeed a delight, as they sit around the front of a huge urn which is decorated with floral garlands, one of the ladies reaching up to pick oranges from a tree just above the urn. Even the late Queen Victoria would, I am sure, have approved.

To understand Sargent’s allusory meaning, we have to look back to two portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The first, from 1773, shows the Montgomery Sisters, although its formal title is Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen. These three young ladies are depicted in a rather different composition, with some striking parallels. Instead of picking oranges, they are engaged in equally nugatory ‘work’ of making floral garlands, rather more substantial than those in Sargent’s painting.

The garland is destined for the term behind them. Terms are a variant of the classical Greek herma or herm, a sculpture consisting of a head and shoulders (sometimes also a torso) on a plain column of square section. Although quite widely used for sculpted heads, they attained a notoriety with the Romans, who called them termini, hence the English word term. This reputation arose from their association with figures of the god of fertility, Priapus, which often featured male genitalia, sometimes of alarming size.

It is notable that, whilst Reynolds’ term does not have a classical base with a square section, the garland cunningly passes in front of the area of its crotch. The title, though, tells us that this term was not Priapus, but Hymen, the far more respectable ancient Greek god of marriage ceremonies. So Reynolds has artfully steered us away from danger, and declared the three ladies’ interests in marriage. In fact one had even married shortly before he painted their portrait.

Note the pose of the central sister, whose left hand is passing the garland up towards the term, and balanced by the outstretched right arm; she is not looking at the term, but along the line of her right arm to her sister.

In his Montgomery Sisters, Reynolds not only alludes to (or quotes from) much older paintings, but also his own Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel (1739-1768) from 1761. Here the central figure is seen adorning a term of Hymen with garlands, and has turned to her servant, who seems to have been busy making those floral tributes. Although in so turning, both her hands are up on the term (much like the Acheson sister who is picking oranges), she looks back and down towards her servant, and her knee is bent, tucked against the pillar of the term.

The term here is more traditional, in its square-section column, but it has arms which bear a long bridal torch. Its worrisome crotch area is quite solidly blocked from view.

Lady Keppel was unmarried at the time, and is shown wearing her bridesmaid’s dress from the recent marriage of King George III to Queen Charlotte. Her offering to Hymen seems to have done the trick, as she married the Marquess of Tavistock three years later. Sadly he died in a hunting accident three years after they married, and she died of tuberculosis two years later.

Reynolds is also, of course, referring back to notable paintings from more than a century earlier, which could afford to be less coy about their terms, and generally quite ribald. Two are by Nicolas Poussin, and the third the product of the fruitful collaboration between Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan (1636) is unbridled in its revelry, with the red-faced term at the back seemingly brought to life by the caress of the central maenad in blue. Look, though, at that woman’s position: her right arm reaches up and around the term’s neck, and the left stretches down the same line, along which she is looking. Her left knee, at least, is bent.

Poussin’s A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term (1632-33) is an earlier bacchanalian scene, in which a rather more explicit term is being feted and adorned. Another young woman wearing blue is close to the term, her left arm stretched up towards the term, with her right arm not quite as straight this time, but she is looking along the line of that arm, down and away from the term.

Within the joint work of Nature Adorning the Three Graces (c 1615), Rubens’ delightful little scene of the three Graces feting a term with about eight pairs of breasts – who Gombrich identifies as the Ephesian Diana – provides another source for Reynolds’ and Sargent’s triple portraits: the Montgomery sisters and the Achesons were clearly Graces, festooning the more socially-acceptable term of Hymen, hoping for long-lasting and happy marriages.

But somewhere in the more distant past, those deeper urges were at work too. I can’t help wondering whether Sargent might have had a quiet chuckle, knowing just how close the Acheson sisters had come to a Roman bacchanal.

References

Redford, B (2016) John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion, Yale UP, ISBN 978 0 300 21930 2.
Gombrich, E (1942) Reynolds’s Theory and Practice of Imitation, Burlington Mag. Feb. 1942, vol 80 no 467, pp 40-45.

The Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters were by no means the only artists in the mid-nineteenth century who placed high value on detailed realism and painting true to nature. These were as important to several of the great American landscape painters, and in northern Europe, where perhaps one of the greatest exponents was the Norwegian artist Hans Gude (1825–1903).

Born and initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), Gude started to study at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1842. There he joined a recently-formed landscape class taught by Professor Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Gude rejected the conventional teaching that landscape paintings should be composed according to classical or aesthetic principles, preferring instead to paint thoroughly realistically, and true to nature. On completion of his studies (probably in about 1846), Gude returned to Norway.

Landscape Study from Vågå (1846) is an excellent example of one of his early oil studies, and was probably completed in front of the motif, in Norway’s mountainous Oppland county north of the Jotunheimen Mountains. Although its background is very loose and vague, foreground detail is meticulous for a work which appears to have been painted en plein air.

His depiction of lichens, mosses, fungi and plants is comparable to that of the best Pre-Raphaelites, although at this time the only manifesto advocating such an approach was the first volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, published in 1843. I think it most unlikely that Gude would have read or been influenced by Ruskin at this time.

Vinterettermiddag (Winter Afternoon) (1847) is a studio painting which would not look out of place on a greetings card, and a stark contrast.

Tessefossen i Vågå i middagsbelysning (Tessefossen in Vågå at midday) (1848) is a relatively large studio painting which might seem more typical of an American landscape painter of the day.

Early in his career, Gude struggled to paint realistic figures, and in several works he enlisted the help of Adolph Tidemand to paint those in for him.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of his most spectacular works, such as Brudeferden i Hardanger (Bridal journey in Hardanger) (1848). Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.

Not a particularly large canvas, it is as meticulously detailed as might have been expected from a Pre-Raphaelite, although its colours are not quite as brash. Gude became particularly interested in reflections on water later in his career.

By the Mill Pond (1850) seems to have been another plein air study, but is so detailed that it would be hard to class it as a sketch. When looked at more carefully, though, many of its apparently precise passages turn out to consist of very gestural marks, as in the lichens on the boulders in the foreground, and the small waterfall at the back. It is also interesting in containing a figure, which may perhaps be Betsy Anker, who Gude married in the summer of 1850.

This later collaboration with Tidemand, Lystring på Krøderen (Fishing with a Harpoon) (1851), is a wonderful nocturne showing night fishing in sheltered waters, and another masterpiece of detailed realism.

In 1854, Gude was appointed professor in succession to his former teacher Schirmer, which was remarkable recognition for the Norwegian who was not yet thirty years old. He tendered his resignation in 1857, but did not actually leave Düsseldorf for a further five years.

In its composition and foreground detail, Norwegian Highlands (1857) conforms to Ruskin’s precepts, although it was painted in the studio from plein air studies and retains more traditional earth-based colours.

During the 1850s his paintings had aroused some interest in the UK, so in 1862 Gude travelled to Wales to try to develop his British market.

This painting of what he called ‘Eføybroen’, which might be an ‘Efoy’ Bridge, in North Wales was completed in 1863 from studies made of the motif in the previous autumn.

He also painted some grander landscapes of The Lledr Valley in Wales (1864), where he stayed during this campaign, which conform more to Ruskin’s precepts.

Gude continued to work by painting studies en plein air, which he took back to the studio and worked up into a finished painting there. In contrast, local British painters at the time tended to complete their finished works in front of the motif, and seldom painted landscapes in the studio. When Gude’s paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863 and 1864, they achieved little recognition, and failed to sell.

At the end of 1863, Gude was offered the post of professor at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe, which he accepted (there still being no academy of fine art in Norway). During his tenure there, many Norwegians were students; some of the best-known include Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Christian Krogh, and Frits Thaulow.

While he was teaching in Karlsruhe, Gude continued to promote the practice of painting en plein air, and his figures steadily improved. Fjord Landscape with People (1875) shows a typical period scene, with figures, cattle, horses, sailing vessels, and another of his wide open views.

Gude also worked in watercolours, and during his later career visited Scotland on several occasions, where he painted this almost monochrome view of an Estuary at Brodick, Arran, Scotland (1877).

Sandvik Fjord (1879) is a startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.

In 1880, Gude moved to teach at the Academy of Art in Berlin.

Oban Bay (1889) was painted following another visit to Scotland, and shows the small bay beside the town of Oban, on the west coast of northern Scotland. This bay opens out to the Sound of Kerrera, and is now a busy ferry port serving the Western Isles; at this time it seems to have been but a small fishing port. The prominent building in the distance just to the left of the centre of the painting is Saint Columba’s Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop for the Western Isles. The distant mountains are those of the Morvern Peninsula, on the opposite shore of Loch Linnhe.

Kaien på Feste i nær Moss (The Jetty at Feste near Moss) (1898) shows another marine view in the far south-east of Norway, on the eastern side of the broad fjord which leads north to Oslo.

Gude retired to Berlin in 1901, and died there in 1903, one of the founding fathers of Norwegian and Nordic landscape painting.

Like other detailed realists of the nineteenth century, Gude’s paintings lack the distinctive ‘look’ of truly Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, but were far more practical to make, and more compatible with the business demands of the professional artist. They were rapidly being eclipsed in popularity by the Impressionist movement, and like all forms of representational painting were soon to be displaced by the modernism of the twentieth century.

Reference

Wikipedia.

The Italian phrase dolce far niente means (literally) sweet doing nothing – it is the very enjoyment of being idle, the indulgence of relaxation, blissful laziness. If ever there was a hallmark of a painting from the Aesthetic movement, surely it is one titled dolce far niente.

In this article, I am going to use paintings with that title as markers for the development of Aestheticism in painting in Europe and America, and try to establish common features of this select cross-section of paintings.

Prior to 1800, there do not appear to have been any significant (surviving) paintings with the title Dolce Far Niente.

The earliest surviving painting of this title appears to be the most unusual: it is by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and dates from 1836. A group of four men, four women, and four children are shown in idle repose in a garden, with Mount Vesuvius in the distance. These are presumably rich Neapolitans, although one of the women has a baby feeding from her breast. One plays a small lute-like instrument, and fruit is piled in a large tambourine.

Long preceding the Aesthetic movement, this painting appears to meet several of its principles: it serves no other purpose than art, is has no narrative and is devoid of symbols, action, or activity, and alludes to other arts (music) and senses (several).

Another early and atypical painting is that by Frank Buchser in 1857, which shows two young boys smoking and idling in the shade, presumably in some idyllic version of the southern USA. This lacks the allusions to other arts or senses.

Swiss-born, Buchser visited the USA and took photographs there in 1866, after the Civil War, but I wonder if this painting was made during an earlier visit, perhaps.

Much better-known is the first of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ versions, William Holman Hunt‘s, which he worked on between 1865-75; it may have been started as early as 1859, which would coincide with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early ‘Aesthetic’ works. This is the first to follow what became an established pattern: one beautiful woman in repose, looking idly into the distance.

The clothing and furnishings are elaborate and highly-detailed. The reflection in the mirror above the woman’s head shows this to be a domestic scene, with another figure leaning over a large wooden bureau or a dressing-table, perhaps. The visibly affluent woman wears a wedding ring, and her fingers are interlocked, suggesting slight tension, as she leans her head to her left and looks beyond the picture-plane, her face emotionless.

In 1872, before Hunt had finished retouching his painting, William Quiller-Orchardson completed his, incorporating in its printed screen a ‘modern’ flavour of Japonisme. His woman, dressed in sober black, reclines on a chaise longue, her open book and fan beside her as she stares idly out of an unseen window.

Shortly after, in 1877, Auguste Toulmouche painted his version, again one beautiful woman lost in languid thought. A book is open on her lap, but her attention has wondered, and she stares blankly towards the viewer.

John William Waterhouse painted two quite different works to which the title Dolce Far Niente is attached. This, also known as The White Feather Fan, painted in 1879, and sometimes erroneously attributed to Frederic, Lord Leighton (despite the obvious signature), is more classical in its setting, with an oil lamp hanging high on the right, the feather fan, and carpets rather than a couch.

Its lone woman is plucking feathers from the fan and watching them rise through the air (as shown by the slightly ambiguous white patches). Her facial expression is not visible, making it impossible to read her emotion.

Waterhouse‘s second painting from the following year (1880) is formally classical Roman, the fan now made from peacock feathers. Its lone woman reclines amid pigeons and picked flowers, on a crumpled sheet and a leopard skin.

Just a couple of years later (1882), Charles Edward Perugini was the first to pose two beautiful women in his painting. Although they are interacting very little, in their idleness they are enticing a snail with a fragment of leaf. A trivial act, it starts raising questions of narrative or symbolism which put its Aesthetic ideals in danger.

The same year, Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted his A Female Figure Resting, which is also known as Dolce Far Niente. His lone woman looks strangely tired, and slightly more masculine that her predecessors. As ever, Alma-Tadema delivers a solid marble setting, and an interesting coastal landscape background.

In about 1885, Frederick Arthur Bridgman painted this more original interpretation, which is also known as Sweet Nothings. Its lone woman plays with her hair while she dozes with her eyes half-closed in a hammock, surrounded by flowers and leaves which are lit by the sunshine.

Val Prinsep‘s lone woman has gone as far as falling asleep in her hammock, but still holds a Far Eastern parasol to invoke Japonisme. Below her, with her hat, is a book, and the scene is placed in a country garden in summer. This painting was also known as Sweet Repose.

The most devoted painter of Dolce Far Niente, though, was John William Godward, who produced at least three different versions, starting in 1897. This returns to a classical Roman setting, and introduces a brilliant green parakeet, with its bright red bill. This type of play with parrot-like birds may have been established as a symbol that the woman is a courtesan (at best), which may be supported by her posture on a tiger-skin, and her diaphonous dress.

Seven years later (in 1904), Godward painted his more complex version, also known as Sweet Idleness, or A Pompeian Fishpond. More modestly-clad, his lone woman rests with her knees drawn up into a sleeping (near-foetal) position on another animal skin, with a peacock-feather fan in the foreground.

A couple of years after that (in 1906), Godward’s beautiful woman is stretched out on an animal skin on marble, a colour-co-ordinated garden and distant Mediterranean waterscape beyond.

My final example is a break from that succession: John Singer Sargent‘s ‘Oriental’ oil sketch of about 1907, showing three young men and three young women, dressed in ‘Oriental’ attire, and playing chess by the side of a clear stream. Presuming that Sargent chose the title, I wonder if he was aware of its recent connotation?

For over the course of the preceding forty-six years, it had become associated with Aestheticist paintings, almost devoid of story or symbols, showing a beautiful lone woman in repose. Perhaps his use was to make clear that – whilst his art was for art’s sake – he had not chosen the way of the Aesthetic movement.

I was feeling quite pleased after my last article in this series sorted out two of the remaining issues with my hypertext account of the history of oil painting. Until yesterday, when I realised that I had almost committed the cardinal sin of forgetting the ‘end matter’.

Anyone who has read one of my reviews of art books here will know that I am a stickler for the end matter. It doesn’t matter how wonderful a book is, if it doesn’t come with at least one index, I will slate it. This may appear unfair – after all, hardly any works of fiction come with an index, yet À la recherche du temps perdu, Lord of the Rings, and other epics all seem to get by without them. But then I am hardly likely to want to look up the first words said by Gollum, and if I do need to check the names of Frodo’s relatives, there are other places to do that.

There are plenty of times when the reason that you have opened a copy of a non-fiction book is to look up a specific piece of information. You don’t want to idly thumb through a chapter, or have to try to remember the context in which it was mentioned. You just want to go straight to the page, and find the answer. So too with non-fiction hypertext, a reader needs to be able to look matters up.

Glossaries are invaluable to spare your reader from having to look thinks up in an index or, even worse, discovering that you don’t actually explain what a technical term means, rush off to another book to find out. As glossaries are a simpler issue, I will get them out of the way first.

I start where these articles often start, by making a prototype for these new writing spaces into which I will put glossary entries and the index. My plan is to implement them quite differently: the glossary will consist of a container in which individual writing spaces for each of the entries will go, but my index will be a single writing space containing each of the index items. The reasons for this will become clearer as I progress.

These prototypes are, for the moment, only distinct in terms of their badge and the colour of the tile.

Each glossary entry, based on the prototype GlossaryItem, is named according to the word(s) it represents in the glossary, and contains suitably informative text for that entry. It is kept in the Glossary container, which not only keeps it out of the way of the main threads, but allows the reader to open the glossary and browse it, if they wish, just as they can in a physical book.

One note here: I pasted in text directly from an article on my blog on which to base this entry. It needed to be reflowed, using the Reset Margins sub-command from the Style command in the Format menu. If text in a writing space seems to have acquired idiosyncratic margins and spacing, open the writing space containing it, select all the text, and use that command to clean it up.

I am going to use stretchtext to insert the respective glossary contents into a writing space, because it needs to be seen in context. However, it should not disrupt the original context. You don’t want a couple of hundred words about drying oils suddenly appearing in the middle of the main text. So glossary items relevant to each writing space get a section of their own at the foot of the main text. To flag that there is a glossary entry, I have used the open book emoji, both in the main text and in the glossary listing at the end.

I thought about being more subtle and using coloured text, but this would quickly run into issues for readers with limited colour perception. This is, I think, the first good use I have made of emoji, and they do seem to work quite well. They also work happily inside the anchor text, which is pleasing.

This is how that writing space looks when in Read mode. I would have liked to put a space between the emoji and the text, but it ends up being almost a tab width, which is I think too distracting to the reader.

This is the expanded version, in Read mode. I think that you’ll agree that is far too much to stick into the main text above. I like the contrasting font, although perhaps the glossary font size could come down a tad.

I’m happy with that for a glossary entry, so I’ll turn now to the index.

If you have explored Storyspace properly, you will know that it has a powerful Find command in the Edit menu. Why should a reader need both that and an index? This is a similar argument to whether any electronic book or document needs an index, if there is a good find command.

The best answer is to talk to a professional indexer. This seems to be a dying trade now, given the number of books being published without any form of index, but any good indexer will explain how they are so much more skilled than any search command can be.

Having just written a glossary entry for the term drying oil, I’ll use that as an example. The words drying oil and drying oils appear in many of the writing spaces in this document, as you’d expect them to. Most uses are in passing, and not likely to be of much help to someone who, say, wants to read about the different drying oils used in oil painting. A proper index can focus the reader much better, and take them straight to the text that they seek.

So the built-in search, wonderful though it is, is something of a blunt tool. It will find all uses of a word or words, including many which are of no interest to the reader. That said, Storyspace’s search tool is rather better than many: it gives you the name and view location of each writing space containing a hit, which does give the reader more help than most such tools. But I still think a carefully-constructed index will be better focussed.

The way that a reader uses an index is rather more straightforward: they identify the index entry which looks closest to what they want, and then expect to be taken to that entry in the text. This makes it ideally implemented using a text link. If you want to, you can put each index term into its own writing space, but I think that is too finely granular: a single writing space containing all the index terms in alphabetical order, with each term linking out to the writing space containing the destination content.

The secret then is in qualifying each term to guess in advance what the reader will look for. Here we can also give the name of the destination writing space, which should help them choose the right item to click.

If they click on the last entry, drying oil, types, it should then take them straight to the discussion of drying oils in the sidethread which I made a few articles ago. They may then wish to follow its links up, or use the Go Back command to return them to the index.

Other documents will no doubt fare better with different implementations, but for this one, I think that they should meet the expectations of most readers.

Happy hypertexting!

When examining Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting, I briefly mentioned the work of Frederick Sandys (1829–1904). His name is often omitted from lists of Pre-Raphaelites, but I hope here to convince you that he should be included.

He was born Anthony Frederick Augustus Sands in Norwich, Norfolk, England, the son of a painter, and was trained by his father and in the Government School of Design in Norwich. Although distant from the artistic hub of London, in the first half of the nineteenth century the Norwich School of painting was thriving under the leadership of John Sell Cotman (1782-1842). A precocious draftsman, Sandys quickly established himself making drawings and etchings. He moved to London by 1851, exhibiting for the first time at the Royal Academy in that year, and in 1855 changed his last name to Sandys.

His first contact with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was in 1857, when he was working on an engraving; he made friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but remained on the periphery of the Brotherhood itself.

One of his earlier paintings influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Queen Eleanor (1858), draws on the legend that Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of King Henry II of England, killed his mistress, the fair Rosamund (Clifford). Henry was supposed to have concealed her within a complex maze in his park at Woodstock, near Oxford. When Eleanor learned of this, she managed to find her way through the maze to the house at its centre, where she gave Rosamund the choice of drinking a bowl or cup of poison, or dying by the dagger.

Eleanor is shown in countryside (but not apparently negotiating the maze, for which she used a ball of thread), bearing a chalice of poison, and holding the handle of the dagger in her left hand. In fact the whole legend is thought to be false: Henry admitted his affair in 1174, following which Rosamund retired as a nun to Godstow Abbey. Nevertheless, Eleanor and Rosamund were favourite subjects for Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Mary Magdalene (c 1859) is an unusual treatment of a very popular subject, the presumptively ‘fallen’ woman who became, in effect, a disciple of Christ. Sandys’ model is decidedly fair and northern European, and lost in deep thought. Although there is nothing fleshly about this painting, it has similarities with the increasingly Aesthetic portraits of Fanny Cornforth which Rossetti was starting to paint at this time.

From 1859, his drawings became very popular as prints, and were published in major weekly magazines. He did not, though, illustrate books.

Whitlingham, Norfolk (1860) contrasts with Rossetti’s work, being a pure landscape of great beauty in its fleeting twilight; Rossetti does not appear to have painted any landscapes as such.

Sandys visited Holland and Belgium in 1862.

Vivien (1863) continues to run in parallel with Rossetti’s works at the time. The Vivien referred to is the femme fatale in Tennyson’s cycle of narrative poems Idylls of the King, published from 1859-1885, which is a re-telling of parts of Arthurian legend. Vivien used her looks to seduce Merlin and learn his secrets.

The apple is likely to refer to Eve and original sin, and she wears bright red jewellery which may be a symbol of moral laxity. Even more appropriately, his model was Keomi Gray, with whom Sandys had a long affair resulting in four children, although his earlier marriage was never dissolved. Gray also modelled for Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites, but by the time that he had completed this painting, Sandys was living with an actress, Mary Emma Jones, who bore him at least nine more children.

Morgan-le-Fay (1863-64) is another powerful enchantress from Arthurian legend, the term fay referring to a sorceress. An apprentice of Merlin, some accounts portray her as both a sorceress (as shown here) and a wanton woman – another femme fatale. Among her many lovers was Merlin, and she was an indirect instrument of the death of King Arthur.

Sandys casts her as an alchemist-sorceress, working on mysterious spells. Behind her is a large weaving loom, which may be a reference to other stories such as that of the Lady of Shalott.

Grace Rose (1866) appears to be a more conventional portrait, with some gentle allusions to Japonisme in the paintings on the screen behind.

For much of 1866, Sandys stayed with Rossetti in his house in Chelsea, London, and they went on a walking holiday together. However, by the end of that year the pair fell out, with Rossetti accusing Sandys of copying his work.

Love’s Shadow (1867) is one of the most emotionally-expressive of his many paintings of femmes fatales during this Pre-Raphaelite phase. It may be intended to represent jealousy, and Sandys used his partner, Mary Emma Jones, as his model.

Sandys’ painting of Medea (1866-68) is possibly his best-known work today. Medea is a leading character in the Greek mythological story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. She is the sorceress, daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, who falls in love with Jason. She strikes a deal with Jason in which she provides him with assistance (in the form of her magic) in his quest for the Golden Fleece, provided that when he completes that successfully, they marry.

Sandys shows her at work, preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a toad, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo. Medea is another popular theme in paintings, and not just those by Pre-Raphaelites. Despite the fine depiction and Medea’s intense stare, this painting was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1868.

Isolda with the Love Potion (1870) is one of Sandys’ late Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic paintings, and shows another femme fatale, Isolde of the legend and Wagner’s opera of Tristan and Isolde (Tristan and Iseult). The opera had only received its première five years earlier, although its next production did not occur until 1874.

In the operatic version, Isolde is an Irish princess who is betrothed to Marke, the King of Cornwall. Tristan, the adopted son of King Marke, travels to Ireland to bring Isolde back to Cornwall. The pair drink what they believe is a poisonous potion, which instead of killing them both, makes them fall in relentless love with one another. This was later featured in John William Waterhouse’s famous painting Tristan and Isolde with the Potion (1916).

Sandys shows only Isolde, the cup of poison in her right hand, looking into the distance. The floral language – red roses in particular – is symbolic of love.

During the 1870s and thereafter, Sandys concentrated on his engravings, some wonderful landscape paintings of the flatlands and broads in Norfolk, and portraits. This, of Julia Smith Caldwell (c 1890), is one of his best, with its image of a bird (a peacock or pheasant) on the wall behind, in near-continuity with the woman’s hair, and suggestive of a halo.

I think that Rossetti was being unfair: Sandys was perhaps more skilled as a draftsman and realist painter than he was at composing completely original works of art. But I do not think that the evidence shows him to be a plagiarist – indeed in several of his paintings he was manifestly as original as other Pre-Raphaelites.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Think of nineteenth-century paintings of shipwreck and rough seas, and (if in Europe or America) you’re almost certain to bring to mind JMW Turner. Allow me to introduce the master of marine painting of that period, who must have been one of the most prolific marine artists ever: Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900).

If you’d prefer that in Cyrillic, it’s Ива́н Константи́нович Айвазо́вский, or in Armenian, Հովհաննես Այվազովսկի or Hovhannes Ayvazovski. At the time, Aivazovsky was a Russian, who was born of an Armenian family in Feodosia (Theodosia), in the Crimea, which is in the Ukraine – hence the multiple versions of his name. To further confuse, when he was a student he was known in Russian as Ivan Gaivazovsky (Иванъ Гайвазовскій), and when he lived in Italy as Giovani Aivazovsky.

Aivazovsky trained at what was then the Imperial Academy of Arts, alongside the Neva River in Saint Petersburg, from 1833 until 1837, and excelled there, winning gold and silver medals. After graduating, he returned to the Crimea for two years. In 1840, he was sponsored by the Imperial Academy to study in Europe. He then travelled overland through Vienna and Berlin to Venice. When in Italy, he visited Florence, Amalfi, and Sorrento, then stayed in Naples and Rome until 1842. During this period he painted many beautiful views of the Italian coast, and of Venice.

The Bay of Naples (1841) is a good example of his early paintings from Italy, in which he often sought the rich colours of sunrise and sunset. These are not large canvases, but he shows fine details such as the rivulets of water falling from the oars.

He started his return to Russia via Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. While in London, he met JMW Turner, who was particularly impressed by his painting The Bay of Naples on a Moonlit Night. He then travelled to Paris, where he was awarded a gold medal from the Académie Royale, and toured through Europe again in 1843. He finally returned to Russia in 1844, where he was made an academician at the Imperial Academy, and was appointed the principal painter to the Russian Navy. The bulk of his work from the middle of the century is of naval scenes and battles.

His painting of the Battle of Navarino (1846) is one of the classic depictions of this major naval battle on 20 October 1827. Fought between the combined Ottoman navies and an allied force of British, French, and Russian warships, it was the last major battle between traditional wooden sailing ships, and resulted in destruction of the Ottoman forces. It took place off the Greek coast, in the Ionian Sea, as part of the Greek War of Independence.

The Ninth Wave (1850) is Aivazovsky’s best-known painting, and one of the classic depictions of shipwreck alongside Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), although not as a social or political statement. Its title derives from the belief that waves occur in trains of nine, progressively increasing in size to the ninth wave. Some nautical traditions claim that the number is seven rather than nine, and although there is some underlying evidence to support wave trains, inevitably real life is not as regular.

Aivazovsky refers to Géricault’s pyramidal form of the survivors, but has borrowed little else.

When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, Aivazovsky painted from the beseiged fortress of Sevastopol, although he still found opportunity to show its beauty in his Crimean Coast by Moonlight (1853).

View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus (1856) is one of many views that he made of this great city (now known as Istanbul, of course), which he visited on many occasions.

Best-known for his thousands of marine views, Aivazovsky went deeper inland for his Broad Landscape with Settlers (1856). This shows the steppe of Izumskaya, now on the border between Russia and the Ukraine, where ‘salt farmers’ are seen migrating from the crowded lands of the Crimea into the interior of Russia.

Aivazovsky lived in Paris from 1856-7, where he was made a member of the Legion of Honour.

Sunset over Yalta (1861) shows this popular resort city on the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. At this time, it was fashionable for the Russian aristocracy and gentry to spend their summers here, and many bought summer homes or dachas for the purpose.

In 1868, Aivazovsky travelled to the Caucasus Mountains, and into Armenia and Georgia the following year.

Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) (1868) is one of the finest paintings of this cosmopolitan city, showing the camels on its bustling streets, amid the many church towers, and its rugged surroundings, rising to the Caucasus mountains in the far distance.

Aivazovsky was an early visitor to the mountainous wilderness of the North Caucasus, where he painted this Mountain Village Gunib in Daghestan (1869).

Moscow in Winter from the Sparrow Hills (1872) is one of several views that Aivazovsky painted from this vantage point (in Russian: Воробьёвы го́ры Vorobyovy Gory) on the right bank of the Moskva River, looking towards the city.

Winter Landscape (1876) is more generic in its location, and its delicate detail in the snow frozen to the trees contrasts with the dense flight of black birds, and the seemingly endless column of walkers.

Loss of the Ship “Ingermanland” in the Skagerrak on the Night of 30 August, 1842 (1876) is a shipwreck painting comparable in content, but not style, to those of JMW Turner.

The location of Sea Coast (1886) is not clear, but it shows a rugged coastline with a storm sea pounding at its cliffs. The sole ship has both sails and a steam engine, as was becoming increasingly common at that time.

Descent of Noah from Ararat (1889) is one of the finest of the relatively few religious scenes which Aivazovsky painted, and shows Noah with his family and a long train of pairs of animals, following their descent from Mount Ararat, after the Flood had abated.

His travels in Europe continued during the 1870s, and in 1892 he visited America, where he painted the Niagara Falls, and some other landscapes. He later retired to Feodosia, his home town, where he died. He is estimated to have painted more than 6,000 works during the 60 years of his career, which is an average of two paintings per week. Although you may never have heard of him before, good examples of his paintings currently fetch more than $1 million at auction.

Among the Waves (1898) is a late example of Aivazovsky’s favourite subject: the storm sea.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Given his popularity and influence, William Blake (1757–1827) is not an ‘easy’ artist. I have been intending to write this article, introducing my new series examining his paintings, for several months. But each time that I thought that it was ready to go, I realised how little I still knew about him and his art.

Today, his writings – particularly his illustrated books – are probably his most popular works. Although the literature examining his life and work is vast, relatively little has been written about his paintings, and what is available is hardly consistent. Anthony Blunt (the Poussin scholar, former director of the Courtauld Institute, and self-confessed Soviet spy) wrote that “Blake had little natural facility as a painter” and “not only many of his early works but also some of his later works are clumsy”. Yet others praise Blake’s technical and artistic accomplishments.

In truth, many of Blake’s paintings have great beauty, reflecting his skill as a painter and artist. The Death of the Wife of the Biblical Prophet Ezekiel (c 1785) is a fine example, executed in just ink and wash over graphite. The prophet Ezekiel had preached that you should neither weep nor mourn for your dead, and here has to follow that direction when his own wife died, while others express their grief quite openly. However, Blake expresses this simple narrative in a very modern way. His refusal to follow artistic conventions of the day and persistent experimentation throughout his career made it hard for his contemporaries to appreciate his work.

Malevolence, subtitled A Husband Parting from His Wife and Child; Two Assassins Lurking in Ambush, was painted in watercolour and ink in 1799, for the Reverend Dr. John Trusler. Blake described it to his patron in these words:
A Father, taking leave of his Wife & Child, Is watch’d by Two Fiends incarnate, with intention that when his back is turned they will murder the mother & her infant. If this is not Malevolence with a vengeance, I have never seen it on Earth.

Although Blake reassured Trusler that he “had been compell’d by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led”, it was eventually rejected by Trusler, leaving Blake to accuse him of having “fall’n out with the Spiritual World”.

The Spiritual World was central to Blake, to his life, writings, and paintings. His religious and spiritual concepts are largely peculiar to him, and those of his works which refer to Biblical narratives often view them unconventionally. Blake was nothing if not original and idiosyncratic.

His most popular works – his illustrated books – integrate paintings, illustration, decoration, and his own writings into single packages, from which it is arguable as to whether it makes sense to isolate their paintings. Less well-known are the many paintings which he made for his patrons, or which he exhibited apart from his writing.

From the outset, Blake refused to paint in oils, a decision which condemned his paintings to obscurity during his lifetime. Like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), he held strong views about earlier painters, although Blake praised the work of Raphael rather than condemning it as a corrupting influence, as did the PRB. He was held in high esteem by Pre-Raphaelites, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti even purchased one of Blake’s notebooks a year before the PRB came into being.

Blake was convinced that one of the secrets of success of older paintings was their use of the fresco medium, although as he never left the south-east of England his experience of Italian fresco painting was extremely limited. Blake re-invented a method of glue tempera painting which he referred to as “fresco”, but which has sadly resulted in many of his most important paintings ageing very badly. This makes it very hard for us to envisage what they must have looked like when first painted.

Above all, many if not most of Blake’s paintings refer to his unique and highly personal mythology, and to the visions which he experienced throughout life. It can be impossible to understand the references in his paintings which are grounded in this mythology.

It is easy to be misled by modern presentations of Blake’s paintings. The painted etching now known as The Ancient of Days (c 1821), for example, is commonly associated with the Christian God. It would be easy to see him here as the master craftsman, forming the world out of the darkness below heaven, in an innovative but hardly revolutionary interpretation of the opening of the book of Genesis.

That was not Blake’s intention: rather, this painting represents Urizen, one of the many figures from his own mythology, which is documented only in Blake’s writings. There, Urizen symbolises reason, his name most probably a semi-conscious pun on your reason. This painting shows Urizen the architect, creating the world using his compasses. He goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, but his desire for dominion brings about his downfall into a state of Satan.

Los and Orc (c 1792–3) is another watercolour which is impossible to read without understanding who its protagonists are. Los (at the left) represents poetry, the worldly expression of the creative imagination, and the prophet of eternity, who reveals the basic truths.

Orc, seen here bound to a rock at the right, is revolution in the material world. The oldest son of Los and Enitharmon (see below), he hates his father Los in an Oedipus complex of love for his mother. Los is driven to bind Orc to this rock on the top of Mount Atlas, using the chain of jealousy. Orc’s limbs then become enrooted in the rock, pinning him there. This cannot prevent Orc’s imagination from raging, though, and permeating everything.

The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, formerly and misleadingly called Hecate, (c 1795) is another of Blake’s prints painted over with watercolour, whose strange beauty conflicts with Blunt’s claimed clumsiness.

Enitharmon, partner, twin, and inspiration to Los (and mother of Orc), is spiritual beauty, and was modelled on Blake’s wife, Catherine (who may have been the model for her figure here too). In her ‘night of joy’, she establishes her Woman’s World, with a false religion of chastity and vengeance – which is Blake’s view of the 1800 year history of the ‘official’ Christian church.

As the moon to the sun of Los, she is accompanied by symbols of night, such as the owl and bat. She also plays the role of Eve, which may explain the head of a snake peering out towards Enitharmon here.

Read as a painting of Hecate, the Ancient Greek goddess of magic and sorcery, it could conceivably show her popular triplicate form, with the symbols of the night, and the serpent, one of Hecate’s attributes. But this is anomalous, in that all three figures in the triplicate version of Hecate invariably face out.

My next article will look in more detail at the references and influences in The Ancient of Days. I will then trace Blake’s life and career, explaining how his intention to become a history painter was thwarted, and how his rejection of the teaching of Sir Joshua Reynolds (just like that of the PRB) shaped his art.

References

Blake, W (2000) William Blake: the Complete Illuminated Books, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 28245 8.
Blake, W, Erdman, DV & Bloom H (1988) The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised edn, Anchor Books. ISBN 978 0 385 15213 6.
Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Frye, Northrop (1947, 1969) Fearful Symmetry, a Study of William Blake, PrincetonUP. ISBN 978 0 6910 1291 9.
Townsend, J (ed)(2003) William Blake, the Painter at Work, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 8543 7468 4.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

For a long time, women artists, no matter how successful, were prohibited from attending life classes. Indeed, with the strict moral codes of the late nineteenth century, painters such as Thomas Eakins found themselves being ostracised for encouraging the use of nude models. One of those who broke down the barriers was Henrietta Rae (1859–1928), whose paintings of nudes finally became socially acceptable.

She was born in London, and was a precocious artist who attended private art schools until finally gaining admission to the Royal Academy Schools in 1877, where she was taught by Frank Dicksee, William Frith, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Her early work was fairly conventional, and she started to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1880 (or 1881), showing portraits and narrative works at first.

In 1884 she married Ernest Normand, a painter who even The Times reluctantly admitted was not as good as she was, and the couple lived in Kensington, London, adjacent to Val Prinsep and Frederick, Lord Leighton, who became her mentor. Henrietta was unconventional in continuing to work under her maiden name.

A Bacchante (1885) was the first of her nudes to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. The alabaster-like skin and classical setting make it academic rather than erotic, and the thyrsus (staff) held in the left hand and bunch of grapes in the right seem to have made all the difference to the hanging committee. It still caused quite a stir, and Henrietta was offered unsolicited advice not to show such works in public again. She thankfully ignored them.

Doubts (1886) seems something of a ‘problem picture‘, which may have been more biting social comment. A young woman sits on a garden bench, clearly in a quandary. Behind her, forcing his attentions on her, is an older man who is dressed as a tasteless fop. Around her are the signs of his attempts to charm her, with baskets of flowers. The ring finger on his left hand is already occupied, suggesting that he may even be proposing an adulterous relationship.

Zephyrus Wooing Flora (1888) is a delicate ‘faerie’ painting of a far less wholesome classical myth, part of the reading of Botticelli’s renowned Primavera (Spring). In Ovid’s version in his Metamorphoses, Zephyrus abducted the nymph Chloris or goddess Flora, and Botticelli shows the metamorphosis of Chloris into Flora as a result of that abduction.

I regret that Henrietta’s painting of Ophelia (1890) is shown poorly in this image, but I have been unable to find any better colour version. It shows Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, when she has become mad from grief. In Act 4 Scene 5, she scatters flowers and herbs while reciting their names and symbols in front of King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, as shown here:
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love,
remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you,
and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference! There’s a daisy. I
would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father
died. They say he made a good end.
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.

In 1890, the family moved to Paris, where Henrietta studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, and gained experience of Impressionism and its artists. She decided not to alter her style, and remained firmly committed to the salon style of Prinsep, Leighton, and others.

Miss Nightingale at Scutari, 1854 (1891) is a chromolithograph of what was probably her best-known painting, showing the pioneer nursing performed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, giving rise to Nightingale’s epithet of the lady of the lamp. Numerous other artists featured her in their works, usually in similar settings.

Henrietta also painted her version of Mariana (1892), a motif which I examined earlier. She clearly opts for Tennyson’s account, and appears to be alluding to Marie Spartali Stillman’s painting of 1867, with its bottle-glass windows, although her composition looks original.

In 1893, the family moved to Upper Norwood, London, where they remained until her death. She was awarded medals at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and in Paris.

She intended her huge painting of Psyche Before the Throne of Venus (1894) to be her masterwork, but when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy the critics were belittling and misogynist, one calling it “a glorified Christmas card”, so dashing her aspirations. She was successful in selling it, though.

In 1897, she organised an exhibition of the work of women artists to commemorate Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and in 1900 she was commissioned to paint a large mural for The Royal Exchange in London.

Spring (c 1900) is altogether less narrative, and rather looser in the brushwork of the flowing fabric.

The Sirens (1903) marked her return to narrative works featuring classical nudes. Showing a well-known scene from Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ ship is in the distance, as the three beautiful sirens use their pipes and lyre to lure the occupants to their deaths. Henrietta’s brushwork has become more vigorous and in parts gestural. This painting was shown at the Saint Louis Exhibition in 1904, where it sold to a collector from Philadelphia.

In the early twentieth century, frustrated by its lack of success, Henrietta made at least two paintings based on the centrepiece of her earlier Psyche Before the Throne of Venus. This is the derivative Venus Enthroned of 1905.

A second was her Roses of Youth, from around the same time.

Although now little-known, the story of Hylas and the Water Nymphs (c 1909) had been popular, for instance being the subject of a painting by JW Waterhouse in 1896. Hylas was arms-bearer to Heracles, and one of the Argonauts. When he visited the spring of Pegae (Dryope), he was kidnapped by nymphs. Unable to find him, Heracles and the other Argonauts set sail without him, and he was abandoned to his fate with them. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1910.

Spring’s Awakening (The Snow Maidens) (1913) was one of Henrietta’s late paintings, showing three nymphs emerging from snowdrops and ground mist as a symbol of the arrival of spring. The nymphs are listening to birdsong, with several small birds visible on the branches in the foreground.

I am surprised that there does not appear to have been any recent monograph about Henrietta Rae’s life and paintings, given her success and extensive relationships with other leading artists of the day.

References

Wikipedia.

Arthur Fish (1905) Henrietta Rae (Mrs. Ernest Normand), Cassell and Co. Available free at archive.org.

If we should read Blake’s writings in order to better read his paintings, is that sufficient? In the introductory article to this series, I took Blake’s painted etching The Ancient of Days (c 1821) as an example which can easily mislead, and here consider its origins and references in more detail.

Its central features are the figure, which is accepted as being Urizen from Blake’s personal mythology, and a pair of dividers or compasses. The latter are an attribute of Urizen as an architect, and have a long tradition in visual representations of god-like figures, particularly those who are creators.

This frontispiece to a Bible Moralisée from around 1220-30 shows the Christian God as architect, using his compasses during the creation of the world. The compasses continue in various modern symbols, including those which feature in freemasonry, and in its references to the Supreme Being as the Great Architect of the Universe.

The figure has been analysed in detail by Blunt.

Urizen typically appears with long and streaming white hair and beard, and this is demonstrated in Blake’s plates throughout his First Book of Urizen from 1796.

But Urizen is not the only figure from Blake’s mythology who has long white hair and beard: above is Elohim Creating Adam from 1795, for example.

In Blake’s God Judging Adam (c 1795), both figures sport long, flowing white hair and beards, which appear to be markers not so much of their ages or identities, but of the ancient nature of the events.

Long white hair and beards are of course a long-established tradition in visual art: here is a contemporary example of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, in Henry Fuseli’s Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85). Fuseli was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and a great influence on Blake.

Characteristic of the figure of Urizen in The Ancient of Days is the unusual way in which the figure’s hair and beard stream as if in a very strong wind, the figure’s nakedness, and its posture.

This can be traced most immediately to a major work by another contemporary painter who was highly influential to Blake: James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8). Barry was also Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and the similarities between King Lear’s white hair and beard here, and those of Blake’s Urizen in The Ancient of Days, are striking.

Blunt found another potential source, in Pellegrino Tibaldi’s figure of Neptune (1549-51) in his fresco showing the story of Ulysses in the Palazzo Poggi. Although now relatively obscure, Blake saw fresco as being ‘true’ art, and was long an enthusiast of frescos, even if he saw hardly any. At the time, a quite popular book of prints of frescos included an engraving of Tibaldi’s Neptune, so this image would have been accessible to both Blake and Barry.

It is likely that Tibaldi’s Neptune was itself a reference to Michelangelo’s earlier frescos in the Sistine Chapel: the detail above showing God creating the sun and moon, and even more important that below showing the creation of Adam (c 1511).

Blake knew both of these sections of the Sistine Chapel frescos well, having engraved them previously. They also link to Blake’s own Elohim Creating Adam above.

Blake’s Urizen the architect, seen creating the world using his compasses, is distinct from both God and Elohim in his nakedness. In Blake’s written narrative, the distinction between Urizen and Elohim becomes more blurred, when the former goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, until his desire for dominion brings about his downfall into a state of Satan.

It is often tempting to assume that, just because Blake’s paintings appear so original and different, that they originate entirely fron his own mind. However, Blake was just as prone to borrow from and refer to other visual art, and his paintings need to be viewed in that context.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

Two of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 were women: Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman. Despite that, it did not admit another woman as an Associate (the step before becoming a full Academician) until 1922, when Annie Louisa Swynnerton (1844-1933) was elected an Associate.

Annie Swynnerton was a professional painter for her entire working life, an early and active feminist, and campaigner for women’s suffrage. And her paintings are highly individual, and visually very rich. I hope that you will enjoy looking at her work as much as I have done.

She was born Annie Louisa Robinson in Hulme in the city of Manchester, England’s second city after London, and became quite an accomplished young artist, working in watercolours. She was able to sell her paintings to augment the family’s income. She started her formal training in 1871 at the Manchester School of Art, where she won a gold medal and scholarship.

This enabled her to travel to Rome, where she trained from 1874-76, then in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1877-79. She became a close friend with painter Susan Isabel Dacre, also from Manchester, who was a student in Rome and Paris alongside her. Swynnerton was influenced by the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who died suddenly in 1884. Sadly, Susan Dacre’s works have now largely vanished, and I am unable to locate sufficient images to write an article about her.

On their return to Manchester, Swynnerton and Dacre founded the Manchester Society of Women Painters. Swynnerton’s first painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy was in 1879, and the following year she exhibited a portrait of Susan Dacre. In 1883, Annie married Joseph Swynnerton, a sculptor from the Isle of Man. The couple spent much of the year working in Rome, but Annie Swynnerton kept a studio in Shepherd’s Bush, in west London.

The Young Mother (c 1887) shows her early influence by Bastien-Lepage, in this social-realistic depiction of a young Italian country girl and her infant.

Cupid and Psyche (1891) follows the long-standing tradition of showing the couple as being very young. Thankfully Henrietta Rae had earlier blazed the trail which enabled this, a painting of nude male and female by a woman, to be exhibited in polite company.

Mater Triumphalis (1892) appears to have been inspired by Swinburne’s poem of the same name, which starts:
Mother of man’s time-travelling generations,
Breath of his nostrils, heartblood of his heart,
God above all Gods worshipped of all nations,
Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.

This was shown in the Paris Salon, but not until 1905, and was given to the French nation in 1915, so is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The Sense of Sight (1895) is perhaps her most visually arresting image, and a work which deserves to be seen far more widely.

Glow Worm (c 1900) is an unusual nocturne, which shows an elegantly-dressed woman out in a garden on a summer’s night, using a small torch to get a glow-worm to light up in the dark.

The Letter (c 1900) shows a young woman reading a letter inside a mediaeval house, with its bottle-glass windows.

Evelyn (c 1900) is one of her several superb portraits of children.

Illusions (c 1900) is another excellent portrait of a young girl, who is dressed up in a suit of armour.

Her undated Joan of Arc shows this heroine of the French nation as a rather older woman than in most other paintings (including Bastien-Lepage’s depiction), wearing armour, and holding a huge sword.

New Risen Hope (1904) is a wonderful painting of the fresh hope of the young.

Miss Elizabeth Williamson on a Pony (1906) is a fine equestrian portrait.

Swynnerton was particular friends with George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Singer Sargent.

John Singer Sargent appreciated Swynnerton’s work, and purchased some of her paintings, including The Oreads (1907), which he later gave to the Tate Gallery. Sargent was also an important influence in her being elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

When her husband died in 1910, Annie spent more time in London, now in Chelsea, before retiring to Hayling Island, on the Hampshire coast to the east of Portsmouth. In her later years, her eyesight started to fail, but she continued to paint mainly portraits.

The Convalescent (1929) shows a woman still recovering from illness, struggling with her fatigue.

Dame Millicent Fawcett, C.B.E., LL.D. (1930) is a major portrait of one of the leading campaigners for women’s suffrage, who had died the previous year. Dame Fawcett co-founded Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1871, and led the Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies from 1897-1919. She was a tireless worker for the cause since the age of 19 in 1866.

Count Zouboff (1931) was one of her last paintings, and apparently set in rugged hills in mainland Europe.

For once, a reasonable number of her works have entered public collections, particularly that of the Tate. They show her highly individual style, as she progressed from detailed (social-)realism with some Pre-Raphaelite influence, to her later and looser approach. She painted some of the most piercing eyes I have ever seen in paintings, faces and figures which are truly vivid. It is surely time for an exhibition of her work.

Reference

Wikipedia.

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in what is now Broadwick Street, Soho, London. In 1767 or 1768, he started as a pupil at a drawing school in The Strand. In 1772, he started a seven-year apprenticeship with James Basire as an engraver. Basire was a traditional line engraver on copper, and Blake would have gained a sound and practical understanding of that craft. Among the tasks which he undertook was to make copies of the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey for the Society of Antiquaries, and he produced many drawings of them. From the completion of that apprenticeship, Blake undertook commercial engraving jobs when he was able, in order to supplement his income.

In the autumn of 1779, he entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he met the sculptor James Flaxman, who was to remain a friend, and became an important benefactor. The Royal Academy had only been founded in 1768, and its President was still Sir Joshua Reynolds, who viewed Blake’s drawings when a student. Blake’s aspiration, it would appear, was to be a history painter, although the best career prospects were in portraiture.

Lear and Cordelia in Prison (c 1779) is one of Blake’s earliest paintings in ink and watercolour, and shows a scene from Shakespeare’s play King Lear.

In 1780, he exhibited his first work, a watercolour, at the Royal Academy; he exhibited there again in 1784, 1785, 1799, 1800, and 1809. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher. In 1784, he opened a printshop in partnership with James Parker, which was dissolved within three years.

The Good Farmer, Probably the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (c 1780–5) is one of seven sketches which Blake made to illustrate this parable from the Gospel of Saint Matthew.

The Death of the Wife of the Biblical Prophet Ezekiel (c 1785) shows how sophisticated Blake’s work had become, when using pen and wash. Throughout his work as a prophet, Ezekiel had preached that people should not weep or mourn the death of their loved ones. Here he is faced with his own grief, on the death of his wife; whilst others are showing their grief, he must abide by his own teaching.

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c 1786) is a delightful watercolour of this last scene from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and shows the fair and sinuous curves which Blake had acquired as an engraver. Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the fairies, are seen at the left, with Puck facing the viewer. In the words spoken by Titania to her fairy train:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.

In 1787, his brother Robert, who had been involved in Blake’s projects, died, but Blake met Henry Fuseli, Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. The following year, Blake produced his first works using his process for illuminated printing, and the year after he published his first major independent works: Tiriel, Songs of Innocence, and The Book of Thel. This process was based on an acid etch which leaves the design standing in relief, so is sometimes known as relief etching.

For some time since he had been a student at the Royal Academy, Blake aspired to create a series of paintings showing scenes from British history. One which he worked up into a complete painting, albeit rather later, is The Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul’s Church (c 1793), again using watercolour and gouache.

King Edward IV of England had kept many mistresses, among them Elizabeth Shore, known as Jane Shore (c 1445-1527), who had also had affairs with the King’s close associates. Following the King’s death in 1483, Jane Shore was charged with conspiracy and promiscuity. As part of her penance for the latter, she had to stand at Paul’s Cross, by Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in London, and it is that penance which Blake shows here: she is seen holding a candle and wrapped in a sheet.

The painting has yellowed considerably, as a result of a glue varnish which Blake applied, which masks its subtle colours.

In 1793, he published For Children: The Gates of Paradise, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America: A Prophecy. In 1794, he published Europe: A Prophecy, The First Book of Urizen, and Songs of Experience.

Blake’s books of the 1790s were self-published using his illuminated printing process, and the manual application of watercolour paint to the resulting print. The result was a limited edition of often beautiful prints, such as Pity (c 1795).

Blake has again referred to a Shakespeare play, this time the tragedy Macbeth, and its lines in Act 1 Scene 7:
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air…

One of his most sophisticated and relatively conventional paintings, this is unusual for depicting Shakespeare’s figure of speech in literal terms, and demonstrating how effective that is in portraying an emotion.

Nebuchadnezzar (1795–c 1805) is typical of others of these prints, with its strange bestial figure. King Nebuchadnezzar became excessively proud, according to the account in the Old Testament, resulting in him going mad, and living like a wild animal. Blake shows him already partially changed into an animal, with claws instead of nails, and his hands intermediate between human hands and animal forefeet.

Newton (1795–c 1805) is another print, in which Blake makes clear his view of science, and the importance of the spiritual world. Newton, epitomising the pinnacle of rational and scientific thought, is absorbed in a geometric task with his compasses, but cannot see the rich natural and creative world of the rock on which he is seated.

In 1795, he published The Song of Los, The Book of Los, and The Book of Ahania. Between 1795 and 1797, he also designed and engraved illustrations for Night Thoughts, by Edward Young.

Blake’s experiments in self-publishing had not been commercially successful. Extraordinary and beautiful as his illuminated books are to us, neither his poetry nor its presentation in that form had achieved any recognition, nor brought in money to keep him and his wife from poverty. This changed in 1799, when he gained Thomas Butts as a patron, and started painting fifty glue tempera works illustrating the Bible for him.

Because of his choice of materials and media, many of these glue tempera paintings are now badly cracked and severely discoloured, making it hard to appreciate how they would have appeared then. The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross, or Our Lady Adoring the Infant Jesus Asleep on the Cross (1799-1800) has kept its colours rather better than most, and can perhaps give an impression of how they once looked.

This shows at best an apocryphal if not invented scene, in which the young Jesus anticipates his eventual fate, by sleeping on a wooden cross, surrounded by the carpenter’s tools, including compasses or dividers.

The Nativity (1799-1800), which was painted for Thomas Butts using glue tempera on a copper plate, is a unique interpretation of this very popular scene. On the left, Joseph supports the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers – arms outstretched once again – in mid-air. On the right, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth greets the infant, with her own son, John the Baptist, on her lap.

In 1800, under the patronage of the poet William Hayley, Blake moved to Felpham, near Chichester, Sussex, returning to London in 1803.

The Death of the Virgin (1803) is one of another series of paintings made for Thomas Butts, this time using watercolour. His emphasis has now shifted to design, using partial symmetry and better-defined form. His colours have become higher in chroma, although this may also reflect the change in medium.

Although still not even comfortably off, Blake was at last kept more busy with financially-rewarding work: from about 1803-1810, he worked on illustrations for Milton, A Poem; from 1804-20, he worked on his last great poem, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion; from 1803-10 he painted more than a hundred watercolour illustrations for Thomas Butts; and from 1805-7 he made illustrations for Robert Blair’s The Grave.

Blake’s emphasis on design is also reflected in paintings such as The Entombment (c 1805), made in ink and watercolour.

In 1808-09 he illustrated Paradise Lost.

Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury (1808) is one of his more ambitious later works in glue tempera, celebrating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In 1809 Blake held a private exhibition of his work at his brother’s house, which lasted longer than expected, although it did not transform his circumstances. In 1812, he showed four paintings at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water-Colour.

Blake’s most extraordinary and phantasmagoric works largely result from later in his career. His watercolour of Milton’s Mysterious Dream (c 1816-20) is a good example, combining the sweeping curves of the engraver with a cascade of figures, and symbols such as eyes.

In 1818, Blake met John Linnell, the painter, who then became his most important patron and supporter. Through Linnell he met John Varley, Samuel Palmer, and other artists. In 1823, John Linnell commissioned Blake to engrave his illustrations for the book of Job.

In 1824, he illustrated John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, then in 1825 until his death, Blake was busy working on illustrations of Dante for John Linnell.

Blake’s last great project to illustrate Dante gave him free reign to create some of his most visionary works, such as the ‘whirlwind of lovers’ in The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (c 1824). Painters have tended to give the adulterous couple of Francesca da Rimini and her husband’s brother a rather easier if not sympathetic treatment, in some cases perhaps recognising how close they had come to suffering the same fate. Blake’s less-than-condemnatory treatment results not from his own life (he appears to have remained in a monogamous marriage throughout), but curiously from a lifelong disbelief in marriage.

In his late paintings, even the most mundane of themes becomes an exploration of the boundaries of art and the imagination. The Punishment of the Thieves (1824–7), anticipates figurative painting of a century or more later, and the darker psychological recesses of sex and snakes. Dante refers to the thieves being bitten by snakes, but Blake uses the creatures in other ways.

One of his last glue tempera paintings, Count Ugolino and His Sons in Prison (c 1826) shows a complex episode from Dante’s Inferno Cantos 32 and 33, of a nobleman accused of treason. Thrown into prison for his alleged crime, Ugolino and his sons were starved to death, a scene also shown in a painting by Fuseli in 1806.

Blake died while still at work on his Dante paintings, on 12 August 1827. In 1965, following remodelling of the cemetery in which he was buried, even the location of his grave has been lost.

References

Blake, W (2000) William Blake: the Complete Illuminated Books, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 28245 8.
Blake, W, Erdman, DV & Bloom H (1988) The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised edn, Anchor Books. ISBN 978 0 385 15213 6.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Frye, Northrop (1947, 1969) Fearful Symmetry, a Study of William Blake, PrincetonUP. ISBN 978 0 6910 1291 9.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

Europe and America had some pioneering women artists during the nineteenth century, many of whom I have now covered in this series. One I have not yet mentioned is Helen Allingham (1848-1926), who with her friend Kate Greenaway is often considered (or dismissed, maybe?) as an illustrator rather than an artist. In fact, Allingham spent most of her career painting watercolours which were not associated with any text.

Born Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson in Derbyshire, England, she was brought up in Cheshire, then Birmingham. Her mother’s relatives were artistic, and Helen soon showed talent for drawing. She started her training at the Birmingham School of Design, then in 1867 moved to London to study at the National Art Training School, which is now the Royal College of Art.

While still studying there, she struck success as an illustrator, and was soon painting illustrations for The Graphic newspaper, magazines, and books. She abandoned her art studies to pursue illustration as a career, and in 1874 provided the illustrations for a serialised version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for Cornhill Magazine, one of the leading periodicals of the day in Britain. She developed her painting skills in evening classes at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she met Kate Greenaway.

She married William Allingham in 1874. He was an Irish poet, and she was able to stop her work as an illustrator, and devote more time to painting. When the couple moved out of London to Witley in rural Surrey, in 1881, she started to paint the cottages and villages through the country to the south of London, across Surrey and Sussex in particular. In time she extended her coverage to include much of southern England, and as far afield as Ireland, and even Venice, although her watercolours of Venice are less successful.

The Last House in Lynmouth (1874) was painted shortly after her marriage, perhaps when on honeymoon in the west of England. It shows the seafront fishermans’ cottages of the village of Lynmouth in Devon, on the north coast of Exmoor. Lynmouth is on the waterfront at the foot of a gorge which descends from the larger town of Lynton, over 200 metres above Lynmouth. Gainsborough had honeymooned there, and it had become quite a popular resort during the nineteenth century. In 1952, following torrential rain over Exmoor, Lynmouth was largely washed away by a flood, which killed 34 of its residents.

Allingham did not paint many portraits, but this of Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, the major Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, was completed just two years before his death, and remains an important work.

More typical of her mature work is this depiction of ancient woodland and The Lady of the Manor (1880). The manor house is just visible in the distance, behind the small boy’s head. Seen in a small clearing in the mid-right of the painting are deer, implying that this was a deer park; even then, there were few deer park remaining in the south of England.

Rear view of Craigenputtock (1891) shows Thomas Carlyle’s wife’s farming estate in Dumfrieshire, Scotland, which became his spiritual home even though he lived there for only limited periods. Unlike the rest of her works shown here, this appears to have been painted (or at least started) in front of the motif, and may well have been signed there too.

A Buckinghamshire house at Penstreet (c 1900) shows a house in the hamlet of Penn Street, which together with Knotty Green and Forty Green surround the village of Penn, near Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England. This remains a relatively unspoilt part of the Chilterns, to the north-west of London.

A Cottage Near Crocken Hill (before 1905) shows what used to be a small village not far from Sevenoaks in Kent, England. Although the cottage may still stand, this area has been swallowed up into the sprawling south-eastern suburbs of London, and is now only just outside the Greater London border, and heavily populated if still quite leafy.

The remaining paintings that I have located by Helen Allingham are all undated, but most appear to be from the period 1874-1914.

Baking Bread shows a traditional farmhouse baking oven being used to bake the bread for an extended family, or possibly a small village shop. These ovens can still be found in many remaining period dwellings, but are very seldom in use now. Note the very high mantelpiece above.

In the Nursery shows a young woman employed as a nurse to a middle-class family, in the dedicated nursery. The fire has a guard, which would have been unusual in rooms used by adults. On the mantelpiece are what appear to be fans, probably part of the Japonisme which swept Europe and America during the late nineteenth century.

Drying Clothes is one of several watercolours which Allingham painted of this everyday domestic activity, invariably undertaken by one of the servants. I find it curious that, when male Impressionists painted women washing clothes or hanging them out to dry, we feel it necessary to provide an elaborate interpretation in terms of gender roles and sexuality; it was and remains a common motif for painters of all genders.

The Saucer of Milk shows another popular domestic scene: attending to household pets. Cats were not just kept as pets, though. In country cottages, they had an important job of keeping the population of mice under control, so pampering them was not just an innocent pastime. Allingham’s paintings are also valuable in documenting traditional cottage gardens, which virtually died out after the First World War.

Children On A Path Outside A Thatched Cottage, West Horsley, Surrey shows another small village which has changed dramatically since. Not far from the Allingham home in Surrey, West Horsley is between Guildford and Leatherhead, an area which has been heavily developed through the twentieth century. It is now described as ‘semi-rural’.

A Cottage With Sunflowers, Peaslake is not far away, about five miles to the east of Guildford. Although much of this area has been preserved, its roads are extensive and very busy, particularly in the summer. It is not far from the location used by John Brett for his masterpiece The Stonebreaker (1857-58).

A Mother And Child Entering A Cottage is another view of a cottage somewhere in the south of England.

A Village Street is a view which was quickly lost as motor vehicles took to the roads in the twentieth century. As usual, Allingham is honest in her depiction of the gently neglected state of most rural buildings, but this view does not show the drainage ditch (open sewer) which still ran through the centre of most villages, nor the mud and excrement which covered the roads and pavements for much of the year.

Irish Cottage is again a faithful representation of the motif, but tells nothing of the squalor in which most occupants of these cottages had to endure.

Helen Allingham’s countryside is idyllic, it is forever summer, with the banks of flowers in perpetual bloom, and the occupants clean, healthy, and happy. It is a world long lost – indeed, it may never really have existed except in her imagination. The harsh reality was that even affluent middle-class families such as her own (her father was a medical practitioner) commonly faced tragedy: her father and three year-old sister died in 1862 during an epidemic of diphtheria. You couldn’t imagine something like that happening in her eternal countryside.

Reference

Wikipedia.

In 1795, William Blake decided to offer twelve large colour prints, made using a process similar to monoprinting, in which he laid a coloured design out on a flat surface, and brought paper into contact with the wet paint or ink in order to transfer some of that onto the paper. He chose a mixture of images for these prints: some were based on existing designs which he had made for his previous illuminated books, and some were original to this series.

His aim was to sell more than one copy of each print, but making more than three impressions from any single original was unlikely, as their quality deteriorated after the first print had been made. In all, twenty-eight prints are known of the series of twelve, showing that he got two or three impressions of each.

The painting

Pity (c 1795) is believed to have been one of the first prints of the series, and has no obvious precursor in his previous work. We do not know Blake’s original title for it, nor his inspiration for the work. However, it was soon associated by Frederick Tatham with the following lines from Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, in the opening of Act 1 Scene 7:
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. …

It is now generally agreed that Blake’s intention was to depict Shakespeare’s two similes for pity using imagery which matched his words literally, thus to evoke the concept of pity in exactly the same terms as in Macbeth’s speech.

This first impression is the finest-detailed of the three surviving prints made by Blake (the second is shown later). Having made the monoprint, most probably using watercolour paints on millboard, Blake finished each by hand, using pen and ink, and watercolour paints.

Pity has a strongly horizontal linear design. The upper half of the painting consists of the long image of a pair of superimposed white horses, galloping through the air with their eyelids closed, on which there are two riders. The nearer rider reaches down with both arms to raise a miniature human figure (not having the proportions of an infant), and the further figure faces away from the viewer, their arms outstretched along the length of the horses.

The lower half of the painting contains a woman lying on her back, her head at the left and thrown back. Her hands are clasped together on her chest, and from the level of her armpits down she is wrapped in a white or grey funeral shroud.

Thus, Shakespeare’s “naked new-born babe” is the miniature human being raised by the nearer horserider, the “blast” is shown by the horses’ manes and tails, and the rider’s hair, “heaven’s cherubim” are the two riders on the horses, and the “sightless couriers of the air” are the horses with their eyelids closed.

Development

Two of Blake’s preparatory sketches have survived, and a trial proof (image not available for use here). Because the eventual painted prints were made using a monoprint process, these sketches share the left-right layout of the ‘plate’, and are reversed when compared with the prints made from it.

The earlier sketch in the British Museum places the paper in ‘portrait’ orientation, and it is this which suggests that this was an early painting in the series, if not the first. Blake’s design here lacks the strong linearity of the final work, with the lower woman apparently having just given birth to the baby, among rushes or reeds. Only one cherub appears on a single horse.

The second sketch in the British Museum is much closer to the finished work, although it is still not as linear in composition. The lower woman is more horizontal, and her head is now thrown back, although her body is rotated away from the viewer. There is still only a single rider on one horse, which is also more horizontal.

In the final stages, Blake strengthened the horizontal composition further, laid the lower woman out as if already dead, adjusted the posture of the rider, and added a second horse and rider to conform to the text “cherubim” and “couriers”.

The second impression of the final painted print, in the collection of The Met in New York, shows some small differences from the first (in the Tate in London). Most significant of these is the abbreviation of the shroud on the lower woman’s chest, so as to expose her right breast. A third impression is in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.

References to other works

Blunt has drawn attention to the visual similarities between the second rider, added after the second sketch, and the figure of God in a fresco painted by Raphael in the Vatican in the early sixteenth century (remember that this too needs to be left-right reversed for comparison with the painted prints).

As Blake never left the British Isles, he clearly could not have seen the original, but a contemporary engraving made by Marco Dente da Ravenna shows the image even more clearly.

Given Blake’s long experience as an engraver, and his great interest in Raphael’s frescos, Blunt considers it quite plausible that Blake may have copied the second figure from this print (or a later reproduction of it).

Pity also contains common visual elements with some of Blake’s other paintings.

Blake’s contemporary Elohim Creating Adam (1795, c 1805) features a similar horizontal linear composition, placing Elohim above Adam.

Similar images of horizontal bodies in shrouds appear in several of Blake’s works, notably the later The Death of the Virgin (1803) and The Entombment (c 1805), where they are also in the lower part of the composition. Those differ from that in Pity, in that the shroud is wrapped fully around the bodies and heads, and their arms are at their sides. This suggests that Blake wants us to see the lower woman in Pity as not yet dead, but probably dying after childbirth, a tragically common event in his day.

Overall

Of Blake’s more easily-read paintings, this is one of my favourites. Its composition is bold and striking, and the figures finely executed. The idea of turning Shakespeare’s words into the graphic elements is original, and successful in expressing this otherwise tough abstract concept.

The painting contains one remaining mystery, though: Blake elsewhere demonstrates that he is perfectly capable of depicting babies which are fairly true to nature. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text which might have driven him to show “a naked new-born babe” in this anachronistic way. I wonder whether he chose to do so to remain faithful to his quoted style of Raphael and early painting.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Hamlyn R & Phillips M (2000) William Blake, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 8543 7314 4.

At the end of the eighteenth century, when William Blake was developing his artistic career, the Royal Academy had two influential and very controversial members: James Barry, who became Professor of Painting but was then the only member to be expelled until a few years ago, and Henry Fuseli, also Professor of Painting and renowned for his ‘Gothic’ works. Both were major influences over William Blake’s work.

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was born as Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, Switzerland, to a large artistic family. Expecting to train to paint, he was surprised when his father sent him instead to start theological training, with the intention of him becoming a priest. He took up orders in 1761, but fled Switzerland shortly afterwards because of his involvement in exposing an unjust magistrate. He travelled through Germany, and in 1765 arrived in England.

At first, he made a precarious living in England by writing and translating. He seized the chance to show Sir Joshua Reynolds his drawings, and was advised to devote himself to painting. To further this goal, as he had received little formal training at this stage, he went to Italy in 1770, where he studied painting, and changed his last name to Fuseli.

On his return to England in 1779 he found his reputation already building, and a commission to paint for Boydell’s new Shakespeare Gallery, a bold scheme to develop an English school of history painting, based largely on income generated from prints.

Fuseli’s breakthrough occurred in 1782, when he exhibited The Nightmare (1781) at the Royal Academy, and it remains the work by which he is best known. It shows a daemonic incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman, who is laid out as if in a deep sleep in bed, her head thrown back, and her arms above her head. Lurking in the darkness to the left is the head of a black horse, whose eyes appear unseeing. The incubus stares directly at the viewer in a manner which arouses discomfort. Fuseli also painted a second version with a slightly different composition, which is as well-known.

Dido (1781) is almost a conventional history painting, showing the founding queen of Carthage in the throes of death after she had been abandoned by Aeneas, according to Virgil’s epic Aeneid, at the end of Book 4. Fuseli adheres faithfully to Virgil’s account, around line 666: Dido has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love.

She then falls on a sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which will confirm to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

Fuseli’s history is not blood and gore, though, and the only blood shown is on the blade of the sword. Iris is also seen in a rainbow swirl, an interesting presentation which I am sure influenced Blake.

The Dream of Queen Katherine (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene 2) (1781) is a remarkable fragment of a larger painting intended to show this Shakespearean scene, commissioned by Thomas Macklin in 1779 for his Poets’ Gallery, and is most likely to have been cut down from a copy of a painting very similar to The Vision of Catherine of Aragon (1781), below, which was commissioned by Sir Robert Smith and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781.

Queen Katherine of Aragon, wife of King Henry VIII of England, is on her deathbed. After her attendant has told her about the death of Cardinal Wolsey, the queen falls asleep and has a remarkable dream, for which the stage directions read:
The vision. Enter, solemnly tripping one after another, six personages, clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and golden vizards on their faces; branches of bays or palm in their hands. They first congee unto her, then dance; and, at certain changes, the first two hold a spare garland over her head; at which the other four make reverent curtsies; then the two that held the garland deliver the same to the other next two, who observe the same order in their changes, and holding the garland over her head: which done, they deliver the same garland to the last two, who likewise observe the same order: at which, as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven: and so in their dancing vanish, carrying the garland with them. The music continues.

Fuseli has adhered quite faithfully to these, showing the departure of the six figures on completion of their dance. I believe that this painting was particularly influential on some of Blake’s works.

Having made faithful depictions of several well-known narratives from literature, Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma (1783) marks a strange departure, as Fuseli admitted that he invented the narrative shown in this painting. It appears to be one of a series, although only one other work has been identified as part of that, and that precursor is only known from a print of 1782. He also preceded this series with a single painting of Ezzelin and Meduna (1779), which refers to another unique narrative, but does not appear to have any associated works.

Fuseli provides the viewer with a rich array of ‘Gothic’ narrative elements from which to form their own account of the story. There are visions of faces in the distance on the left, chains leading to an unseen figure apparently manacled into a bed at the right, Percival swinging a sword above his head, to strike the cloaked figure of Urma in the left foreground, and a beautiful young woman (presumably Belisane) embraced by Percival’s left arm, kneeling on the floor.

Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85) is another dramatic scene, featuring the strange character of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, who was apparently transformed into a woman for seven years. In Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus was instructed to consult Tiresias about his means of returning home to Ithaca, and does so using a process known as nekyia, with the sacrifice of a ram and a ewe in this painting.

The Shepherd’s Dream (1786) is an elaborate drawing made in preparation for the oil painting below. As it shows many of the elements within Fuseli’s composition more clearly than the painting, it is probably more useful for understanding their narrative.

John Milton’s (1608-1674) Paradise Lost held a special appeal for Fuseli since he had been introduced to it when a student. These works show a scene in the poem when the fallen angels in the Hall of Pandemonium (in Hell) are compared to the fairies who bewitch a peasant with their music and dancing:
… fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.

Fuseli transforms the convention of these fairies dancing on the ground, and instead they swirl through the air above the sleeping shepherd. One of the fairies is touching the shepherd with his wand, to maintain his sleep. At the lower left, a fairy has pulled a mandrake root, which has transformed into a tiny homunculus, which is now standing. At the far right, sat on the steps, is the small figure of Queen Mabs (or Mab), who is responsible for bringing nightmares.

The later painted version of The Shepherd’s Dream, from ‘Paradise Lost’ (1793) cloaks much of the detail of Fuseli’s drawing in his deep chiaroscuro, but some elements, including Queen Mabs, are better emphasised and elaborated.

Titania and Bottom (c 1790) returns to more popular scenes from Shakespeare, here Fuseli’s liberal fantasy based on the opening of Act 4 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Titania’s words:
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

Titania (left of centre) calls on her fairies to attend to Bottom, who wears the ass’s head to the right of her. Peaseblossom scratches Bottom’s head, with Mustardseed on his hand, and Cobweb kills a bee to bring its honey to him. Fuseli has borrowed liberally from other sources: Titania’s pose is from Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda (c 1506), the elves at the right from a Botticelli illustration for Dante’s Paradiso (c 1469), and the girl with butterfly wings on her head in the left foreground is based on some of Reynolds’ child portraits.

Fuseli became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1790, was appointed professor of painting there in 1799, and Keeper in 1803. In 1799, Fuseli exhibited a series of paintings showing scenes from Milton, in the hope of setting up a Milton Gallery, but this proved a commercial failure and was abandoned the following year.

Tekemessa and Eurysakes (1800-10) is one of the most obscure classical Greek mythological paintings that I have come across. Tekemessa (or Tecmessa) was a princess, whose father was killed by Telamonian Ajax during the Trojan War, and who was taken captive by Ajax. She was famously beautiful, and had a son by Ajax named Eurysakes (or Eurysaces). Mother and son survived Ajax’s suicide, and later Eurysakes became king of Salamis Island, Ajax’s homeland.

Fuseli’s painting shows the mother comforting her son, perhaps after Ajax’s suicide, although its subtitle of Eros reviving Psyche is another interpretation altogether.

Many of Fuseli’s later paintings were concerned with a world of Satan, devils, and witches, among them his Satan Calling up His Legions (1802), with their weakening narrative.

Fairy Mab (1815-20) shows another Shakespearean character, referred to by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 4, who is the “fairies’ midwife”, but more probably in the guise of her reinvention in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792–1822) first large poetic work, Queen Mab, which was published in 1813. The name Mab is apparently pronounced as if it were Mave, to rhyme with save.

In the poem, Queen Mab, a fairy, descends in a chariot to earth, where she finds Ianthe asleep on a couch. She then takes Ianthe’s spirit on a tour of her palace at the end of the universe, where she shows him visions of the past, present, and future. Shelley use this as a platform for discussing issues of atheism, free love, and other moral matters.

This presents Fuseli with another opportunity for a liberal fantasy, with a full-sized Mab (contrasting with Mercutio’s “no bigger than an agate-stone on the fore-finger of an alderman”) at the centre of more miniature fairy antics.

As Professor of Painting, Fuseli taught extensively. Among his students were John Constable, William Etty, and Edwin Landseer, and he was a major influence on William Blake, who became a close friend from 1787.

Fuseli was an unusual individual who painted works ranging from fairly straightforward history to the utterly unconventional and seriously weird. Although I do not think for a moment that he drove Blake’s imagination or vision, I suspect that Blake valued their friendship for the support and empowerment that he could provide. Fuseli demonstrated that you can paint from your mind’s eye, however unusual your mind may be.

References

Wikipedia

Myrone, M (2001) Henry Fuseli, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 8543 7357 1.