Immaculate Virgins and Dirty Footed Beggars

“Dulwich Picture Gallery becomes a Seville church”.   At least that’s how the latest exhibition there has been advertised.   Sadly it isn’t quite true.  With the best will in the world the galleries which have been adapted for the purpose are neither high nor long enough to really mimic Santa Maria de la Neve, lack the splendid Baroque stucco work which covers the ceiling there and don’t have the complex architectural structures which betray the church’s past lives as a mosque, then a synagogue.  Nor do they have the scent of incense and votive candles hanging in the air.

I suppose it’s a pardonable exaggeration to publicise an intriguing small scale show which focuses on the relationship between the great Seville painter Murillo and the clergyman Justino de Neve.   Murillo’s portrait of Neve is in the exhibition (see above).   The cathedral canon is shown, richly but soberly dressed as befits his station, looking up from the prayer book in his hand as if to receive an unexpected (but not unwelcome), visitor.  His pug looks adoringly up at him; she’s clearly a much loved companion (rather spoiled, one suspects- she looks rather overweight) as well as a symbol of fidelity.   The richly decorated German clock on the table serves to remind him (and us as viewers) of the inexorable passage of time and certainly of death.   The overall impression is of decorum and low-key benevolence; we are in the presence of an important man but not an intimidating one.

This no doubt reflects how the slightly older Murillo regarded Neve, who appears to have been a friend and spiritual advisor to the artist as well as a neighbour and significant patron.  Neve was indeed an important man.   Descended on his father’s side from a wealthy Flemish merchant who had settled in Seville (I assume the original family name must have been something like “Schnee”), he came from a very well to do and well connected family whose members held posts of power and influence in the city’s government as well as the church.   Justino himself was for many years a canon of Seville cathedral, one of the richest ecclesiastical corporations in 17^th century Spain.   He held a number of positions within the cathedral chapter over the years, including a stint as the man responsible for the upkeep of the fabric and decorations.  He was also a leading member of a range of devotional groups and confraternities, where his path would have crossed that of Murillo.   Neve appears to have been assiduous in performing his priestly duties as well as a hard working and competent administrator.  He was not always as benevolent as he appears in Murillo’s portrait- he was a strict taskmaster on colleagues who didn’t fulfil their functions within the chapter properly and came down very hard indeed on those involved in producing a printed satire on the chapter and its members (sadly this was not included in the show or even in the catalogue- though it’s quite possible that no examples survived Neve’s attentions).   All in all he seems to have tried to live up to the ideals set out for Counter-Reformation clergy.

The exhibition deals both with Murillo’s presence in Neve’s personal art collection (which was rather larger than the average holdings of his cathedral colleagues and contained substantially more Murillos than that of any other private collector in the city) and the art he produced for Neve’s foundations. There doesn’t seem to be any correspondence between Neve and Murillo which would give a sense of how exactly they interacted or provide insights on how they cooperated on Neve’s major commissions.   It’s pretty clear that Murillo was not a servile forelock-tugger.   His self portrait shows a man with a very strong sense of his own worth as a major artist (contemporaries universally regarded him as Seville’s leading artist by the 1650’s and was never short of work).   He may have been a bit of a parvenu by comparison with Neve’s old money but they appear to have shared devotional convictions (in particular the fervent strain of Marian piety common in 17^th century Seville which found its expression in an almost obsessive concern to celebrate the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary).   One of Murillo’s sons became a member of the Seville cathedral chapter, a sign that he was regarded as a fully fledged member of the city elite.

Seville in the second half of the 17^th century was a city with great extremes of wealth and poverty in close juxtaposition- as were most early modern cities, but Seville was a particularly extreme case.   The city (in theory anyway) held a monopoly on trade between Spain and its American colonies; as a result the annual treasure fleets shipping the gold and (increasingly) silver of Mexico and Bolivia to bolster the Spanish state’s budget docked there and all vessels aiming to trade in the New World left from its port.  Substantial trade with other parts of Europe- particularly the Netherlands- grew up on the back of this transatlantic activity.   Huge amounts of money flowed through the city, drawing in a substantial population from its rural hinterland and beyond.   Some did very well, others slid into extreme poverty and destitution.    The city streets were thronged with beggars and day labourers, lackeys in livery (some of them African slaves) and impoverished clergy eking out a living on fees for saying masses.  Things were hardly improved by regular visitations of the plague (there was a major epidemic in 1649) and repeated warfare which disrupted trade and jacked taxes on the non-noble, non-clergy masses to sky high levels.

  

As a rich churchman, Neve was expected to devote a healthy chunk of his income to Good Works of one kind or another.  As a result, he had to fund the restoration of Santa Maria de la Neve out of his own pocket (for obvious reasons linked to his name he had a particular devotion to this particular piece of Marian piety, a Roman legend linked to the foundation of the great Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore).    His biggest foundation, however, was a retirement home cum hospital for aged and infirm clergy known as the “Venerabiles Sacerdotes”.   Concern for poverty and illness among the clergy seems to have been a particular concern for Neve- on one occasion it is said he took personal charge of a priest suffering from dementia.   He put a great deal of money into the home, though he didn’t live to see it completed; Murillo’s portrait was left to the institution to ensure that he remained spiritually present after his death, benefitting from the prayers of the residents to shorten his time in Purgatory (when we see it now in the National Gallery in London it’s easy to forget that we are really supposed to offer up a prayer for Neve).

What about the art that Murillo created for Neve?   I have to confess that Murillo isn’t my favourite 17^th century Spanish artist- I much prefer Velasquez, precisely because his work isn’t so drenched in a style of Counter-Reformation piety which eventually becomes a bit alienating if you don’t share the faith which underpins it.   Ultimately there is a limit to the number of representations of the Immaculate Conception one can look at without a sense of boredom and déjà vu, however skilfully they are done (I’m not technically minded enough in my appreciation of art to really appreciate the slight differences in brushwork and composition which clearly fascinate the real experts).    Murillo developed a model which clearly worked very well for his patrons (not just Neve) but I’m afraid to my eye one graceful female in blue and white blasting off in a great blaze of light amid a horde of putti come to look very much like another. 

Obviously he didn’t just do Immaculate Conceptions.   The decorations of Santa Maria de la Neve included illustrations of the underlying legend squeezed into rather awkward shaped lunettes- there’s a rather charming detail in the picture which depicts the shared dream of the Roman Patrician and his wife with her dog curled up asleep on the floor beside them (dreaming a doggy version of the angelic vision perhaps?). 

 The real pleasures for me, however, come in those paintings which show the interaction of earthly and heavenly powers like the one below (from the Venerabiles Sacerdotes), in which very individual humans- almost certainly real people- share the space with angels and heavenly beings.   There’s a wonderful concreteness about this and a more immediately appealing sense of what baroque styles of piety were trying to achieve in their attempt to weaken and even breach the wall between this world and higher powers.   The bread which the Christ Child offers isn’t an abstract depiction of the sacraments but a basket full of loaves fresh from the bakery down the road which will taste delicious when broken and shared.

Neve’s private collection was naturally also long on sacred pieces.   One might even query how far it is appropriate to talk of a purely “private” collection as it is clear that Neve and his colleagues were expected to put their own paintings in public display from time to time, usually in the context of decorating temporary open air altars set up for major public festivities linked to great events (the canonisation of the Castilian King Ferdinando III, who had taken Seville from the Moors in the 13th century, for instance).   These could be enormous and served as a kind of temporary public art gallery as well as a place of ritual importance.   One hopes it didn’t rain……

Not everything by Murillo that Neve owned lent itself to this kind of display.  Some items were simply too small- several miniatures, including ones painted on the unusual surface of Mexican green obsidian.   Others didn’t quite fit into the devotional context.  One such piece is the gorgeous portrait below, now a permanent Dulwich resident.   There’s a lot of rather inconclusive debate over what (or who) exactly is represented here.  The conventional view is that this is the “Spring” listed in Neve’s collection (and that the male portrait below it is the corresponding “Summer”).   There are problems with both identifications. They clearly weren’t painted as a pair as they date from different periods of Murillo’s life.   Neither look quite right- the flowers and fruits associated with both seem out of synch with the seasons they’re supposed to represent, for instance.  On the other hand it’s hard to find other paintings in the Neve catalogue which they could be (the provenance seems reasonably assured- or so the exhibition catalogues imply).   Nor is it certain who the models are.   There is a theory that the girl is Murillo’s daughter, who eventually entered a convent alongside some of Neve’s female relatives.  The roses the girl bears in her head dress would then be a reference to St Rose of Lima, to whom Murillo’s daughter had a special devotion.   It’s a very ingenious idea- maybe too clever.   Perhaps one should just share the obvious pleasure which the subject took in getting dressed up and having her portrait painted.

“Catalogues” isn’t a typo (shaky though my keyboard skills can be).   There are actually two Murillo-focused exhibitions in Dulwich.  The first, based on his links with Neve, started out in Spain and came to London because of Dulwich’s ownership of key paintings with Neve links.   The second looks at the gallery’s own links with Murillo’s works and takes us into a slightly different world from the high baroque Catholicism of Neve’s Seville.  

While Murillo is well respected as an artist these days, I don’t suppose there are many commentators who would place him in the all-time Top Ten figures in European art.   Things looked very different in the late 18^th century.   Murillo’s work was hugely admired by connoisseurs across Europe and commanded very high prices.  Indeed the demand for Murillos was so high that Seville churches were in danger of being stripped of their paintings to meet it- in 1779 the Spanish authorities imposed a royal embargo on exports of his works.  This didn’t do them any good when the French invaded during the Napoleonic wars.  When the French took Seville in 1810 their forces engaged in targeted art looting on an industrial scale (they had years of practice, having done this in Flanders, the Netherlands, Italy and every other country they occupied).   After 1815 the Spanish managed to recover the paintings which went to the Louvre but a lot of Murillos had ended up in the private collection of Marshal Soult and were untouchable (Soult had jumped ship to the Bourbon monarchy in time as was too important to the Restoration Government- struggling to handle an army crammed with Napoleonic veterans- to alienate).   Soult’s collection was dispersed at his death in the early 1850’s, in a sale which probably marked the peak of enthusiasm for Murillo’s work.

Obviously when Bourgeois and Lenfant were assembling their putative national collection for Warsaw they felt they had to have a good representation of Murillos, whether imported from Spain or acquired on the wider European market.   After some trading, the gallery’s core collection contained some dozen “Murillos”.   Some were clearly the real thing; others were (to put it politely) adventurous attributions.   As a side benefit of hosting the Neve show, Dulwich was able to undertake a thorough programme of cleaning and study of this group of works.  Perhaps unexpectedly, this actually led to a couple of “up-attributions”; one very small (you guessed it) Immaculate Conception turned out to be almost certainly an original while a Nativity scene was revealed as a very rare oil sketch done as a preparation for a major piece now in the USA.   Others, however, remain firmly in the “Anonymous- maybe done by someone who once cleaned the brushes in Murillo’s workshop” category….

The “second” show also examines the influence which Murillo’s works had in 18^th-19^th century Britain.  Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t Murillo’s religious works which were valued in Protestant countries like Britain or the Netherlands.   His reputation there rested on his genre works- especially ones which purported to depict life among the very poor and marginal groups of Seville.   These often involved children, playing into a growing elite tendency to sentimentalise young people- coupled uneasily with a clear wish to draw moral lessons.  

Both Dulwich’s specimens of this genre fit neatly into this model.   An African boy carrying a water jug reaches out hopefully for a share of a pie in the hands of a white lad, who doesn’t seem disposed to share.   A second boy, presumably a companion of the first, appears to be picking the black boy’s pocket.   Underpainting revealed by x-rays suggests that Murillo has toned down the refusal to share the pie; an earlier version gives the child holding it an even more hostile expression.  There are multiple possible stories here and the moral is quite hard to read.   The black boy may be pretty ragged in dress but he’s wearing shoes and at least potentially carrying cash, which suggests he can’t be the very lowest of the low- possibly a servant sent out to the well to fill up the water jug.   The pie, on the other hand, may well be stolen property, slipped in the basket when the stall holder's attention was distracted and being eaten as quickly as possible before it’s missed.  Is this an allegory of greed- the African boy wanting a share of a meal which others need more than him and being punished for it?   A simple warning to keep a close hold on your property and not be distracted from the job in hand?   A neutral observation of daily life in the slums of Seville?   Thieves falling out (there’s no reason why the trio couldn’t be accomplices, with the water jar also stolen goods)?   Or just lads having a lark?  ?  It’s a kind of frozen frame from a film whose beginning and end we do not know (though given how hard life in 17^th century Seville was for the poor one might fear the worst).

While it may be very tempting with contemporary eyes to read racial aspects into the picture as well, I’m not sure whether that would be justified.  17^th century Spain had no trouble with slavery (the boy in the picture may well be the child of Murillo’s slave, a woman whom he eventually freed) and some venomous prejudices against outsider groups (Jews, Muslims- or even Christians with Jewish or Muslim ancestors) but also contained aristocratic convents where the daughters of Christian African rulers were honoured sisters.  It is very hard to guess how the lines of prejudice and discrimination ran in the slums of Seville- and whether they ran in the same places amongst the city’s elites is even harder to determine.

Similar question marks surround the other Dulwich “beggar” painting.  A laughing beggar child seems to be trying to persuade another (very doubtful-looking) lad to join him in a game of “argollo” (this was apparently a primitive form of street croquet- the reclining boy is holding one of the hoops and other paraphenalia for the game can be seen on the ground- though how one found a flat and regular enough piece of land to play a game of that nature in the middle of a city as crowded as Seville is a bit of a mystery).   His true intent may well be to get his hands on the bread the other boy is eating; the rather fox-like dog is a bit more open in its intentions as it looks longingly up at the food.   The picture is full of ambiguities and uncertainties- no doubt quite intentionally. Is the beggar child mocking his uptight (but clearly better off) counterpart or simply indicating the fun to be had in walloping a ball round the streets?   Is he just looking for a game or is this an excuse to rob the other lad, who again looks like an errand boy sent out by a slightly better off household with some small change?   Is the standing boy totally hostile and contemptuous of this street riff-raff or is he actually tempted to pitch in   John Ruskin loathed this piece, positively frothing at the mouth about the vulgarity and even obscenity of the dirty feet on display- which says more about Ruskin than it does about Murillo.  If anything Murillo’s beggar paintings are probably guilty of underplaying the awfulness of slum life in Seville- the models are all remarkably well nourished looking and free from the more visible stigmata of poverty-related diseases.   In the long term Ruskin’s hostility did impact on Murillo’s reputation but the process was a slow one as far as wider taste was concerned- you could buy wallpaper with a design based on this picture in early Victorian Britain, which had its own issues with street children.

For a small exhibition, the Dulwich show offers a remarkable number of insights into the life and works of Murillo.  And the next time I’m in the National Gallery I’ll try to remember to give Justino de Neve a quick prayer…..

Portraying Modern Paris, 1870's style

I caught the Royal Academy’s Manet show at the very end of its run and have been musing on what to say about it ever since- especially as in some respects it was a bit disappointing.   I was certainly glad that, as a Friend of the Academy, I didn’t have to pay the rather inflated price for admission.   While I’ve sometimes complained in the past about overly cramped hangs and galleries so crowded with exhibits that one can’t appreciate them properly, this show went to the opposite extreme.  Less than sixty canvases were on display, which made for an awful lot of arty gaps between items when spread out over the Academy’s main galleries.  While it’s quite interesting to see the locations associated with Manet and his art mapped out on a plan of Paris and its surroundings in the 1860’s and 70’s, the space devoted to this sort of contextual information was a bit excessive even for my historically-inflected tastes.    The exhibition had started out in Toledo, Ohio and close examination of the catalogue revealed an unusually high proportion of works which were only shown in one of the versions rather than both.   In a few cases the catalogue indicated potentially interesting juxtapositions which had never been realised (Manet’s portrait of his fellow artist Carolus-Duran was on show in London only, Carolus-Duran’s one of Manet only appeared in Toledo).   I can’t help wondering whether there were issues over the organisation of the exhibition which limited the number of works crossing the Atlantic and left it struggling for critical mass.

The sub-title for the show was “Portraying Life”.   This was meant to leave a deliberate ambiguity- Manet as portraitist shading into Manet as painter of contemporary life.  Manet is of course frequently brigaded in with the Impressionists in the latter role.   This is slightly misleading as Manet was never a card carrying member of the Impressionist group.  He was certainly sympathetic with their aims and something of a patron of their works but he never showed his own paintings (as opposed to works by others which he owned) in any of the Impressionist exhibitions.   He was slightly older and, for all the controversy which surrounded some of his works, he never turned his back on the “official” art world represented by the annual Paris Salon- indeed he was very determined to ensure that his work was shown there and was very pleased when he eventually qualified for automatic hanging rights.  Admittedly not all Impressionists totally bought into the slightly ostentatious rejection of the mainstream which was the group’s party line- Renoir, perhaps the Impressionist closest to Manet, had a very similar approach to him- but in theory the divide was clear .   In artistic terms too Manet never entirely bought into the scientific theories of colour and vision which supposedly underpinned Impressionist art.

A point to bear in mind when looking at Manet’s works is that he didn’t actually need to paint for a living and could therefore ignore any negative impact that the controversy which often attended his works might have had on sales.   Though he did do commissions, he came from a well-off family and well connected family- his father was a judge, his mother came from a family of senior diplomats and civil servants.   Going into art was something of a rebellion on his part- as was marrying the family music teacher Suzanne Leenhoff, with whom he had a long standing relationship well before he made an honest woman of her.   None of this apparently impaired his long term relations with his family, who make regular appearances in his paintings (and presumably not just as a way of saving money by using them as unpaid models).   If anything he seems to have nudged the family towards the artistic world- the glamorous lady at the top of this piece is Berthe Morisot, a talented painter herself who married one of Manet’s brothers and figures in several Manet paintings.

Manet’s active painting career was relatively short- little more than twenty years in the 1860’s and 70’s.  He was self taught to some degree and took some time to establish himself in the art world at the start of his career.  This in turn was somewhat curtailed because he didn’t live all that long- he was only in his early fifties when he died and had been in poor health for several years before his death.   It’s ironic that he was killed by an almost stereotypical artist’s disease- syphilis, probably picked up in a Brazilian brothel during a short period of service at sea in the French merchant marine- given that he lived a life of impeccable bourgeois respectability with Suzanne and, despite clearly having an eye for attractive women and a fondness for painting them, did not do the classic artistic thing of sleeping with his models or pupils.  The only slight mystery surrounds Suzanne’s son Leon, who was never recognised by Manet as his offspring but was clearly very much part of the family- the show included an unfinished portrait of the teenager perched precariously on a primitive ancestor of the bicycle and he regularly appears in Manet’s compositions.

One sub-text of the exhibition was the way in which Manet’s paintings of his nearest and dearest slip into wider genre conventions.  Are portraits of Suzanne playing the piano (she was apparently a talented performer) or cuddling her cat to be seen as portraits of the artist’s wife or as more generic depictions of contemporary feminine domesticity?     The men in what was (and still is?) perhaps Manet’s most controversial work, “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”, are Suzanne’s brother and a kind of composite portrait of his two brothers- does this in any way affect how one reads the picture (which has always struck me as about the most far fetched depiction of “contemporary life” imaginable- how often did 19^th century women strip off in public)?   Elsewhere he slotted himself and his associates into pictures of Parisian entertainment venues in a way reminiscent of Renaissance artists putting themselves into Nativities or Crucifixions.  Other cases are more complex.  The woman in the rather enigmatic “The Railway”   below was one of his regular models, Victorine Meurant, but the little girl (who is clearly finding the trains running in and out of Gare St Lazare vastly more interesting than whatever her mother/nurse/teacher/elder sister is up to over and above pretending to read a book) was probably borrowed from a neighbour and the work is set in the recently-built and very exclusive Quarter D’Europe just north of the station where Manet himself lived.   It’s tempting to see it as some kind of comment on the anomie and loneliness of big city life- but if so it’s literally very close to home indeed. 

The attempt to portray contemporary life sometimes looked a bit phoney; the supposed café singer in the piece shown below is far too well dressed and well nourished looking for someone supposedly making a living in such a precarious way, even if the whiff of sexual availability implied by the way she swishes her skirts might suggest that music isn’t the only source of her income.

Manet belonged to the first generation of artists who came to artistic maturity in a world where photography had become established as a way of fixing images- and Paris was one of the creative centres of early photography, with figures like Nadar rapidly emerging as celebrities in their own right.   The potential impact on portrait painting was considerable.   The show included a number of photographs of Manet himself as well as of his portrait subjects.   The inter-relationship between painting and photographs was complex.  There are considerable convergences between how individuals let themselves be photographed and how Manet painted them- though this tended to reflect issues of the sitter’s self image (for instance, a leading actor of the day would want to be painted as well as photographed in his “signature” role) rather than necessarily implying that Manet copied the photographs.  Manet is however known to have made some use of photographs to get a sense of a sitter’s characteristic poses and gestures and occasionally as a way of reducing the number of sittings which busy people like politicians had to go through.   At times, though, he subverted the photographic image; his portrait of  Pertuiset the explorer and lion hunter plays off the rather pompous photographic image of the man in full pose, dressed in exploring kit, carrying a gun and surrounded by hunting trophies to create a faintly absurd figure set in a less than convincing jungle gazing pop-eyed out of the canvas as if slightly overwhelmed by what he’s just done to the dead lion behind him.

Manet’s portrait style rather shifted over time.  Initially he was heavily influenced by prestigious models from the 17^th century (Hals and Velasquez in particular) and his ability to do a “well done” conventional portrait never went away (especially when it came to painting glamorous ladies).  Latterly, probably under Impressionist influence, he moved towards a much looser and more sketchy style, perhaps particularly well suited to men of action- or those who liked to think of themselves in that light.

One aspect which emerged very clearly from the show for all its weaknesses was just how far Manet sat in the middle of a complex web of connections which spanned the worlds of culture and politics.   He was on friendly terms with leading writers like Emile Zola (he did the portrait at the bottom of this piece as a kind of “thank you” to Zola for sticking up for him when his work came under fire in the press) and Stephane Mallarme (subject of an engagingly louche portrayal).   Politically Manet’s sympathies lay with the Republican centre left.   This made him an oppositional figure in the 1860’s, under the Second Empire on Napoleon III.  Indeed he ran into some trouble for the overt criticism of Imperial foreign policy embodied in his three successive versions of the execution of Maximilian of Mexico (a well meaning Habsburg Archduke persuaded to take on as Emperor of Mexico under promises of French support and left to his fate when Napoleon came under pressure to withdraw his troops after the end of the American Civil War).    No doubt he rejoiced in the fall of the Empire during the Franco-Prussian War and he joined the Parisian National Guard during the siege of the city in 1870-1.   Unlike most National Guardsmen, however, he was well enough off to be able to leave the city immediately after the French capitulation and rejoin Suzanne and Leon in the south western seaside resort of Arcachon (subject of another one of his domestic interiors which hovers between genre and portraiture- see below).  This meant he was safely at the other end of France during the Paris Commune and didn’t have to take sides in the brief brutal civil war which ravaged the city as the national government regained control- the wrong choice could have seen him facing a firing squad.  

 His subsequent alignments suggest a discreet sympathy with the Communards in line with the position adopted by the Republican movement in the 1870’s engaged in a slow process of turning a nominal republic headed by a monarchist President whose long term aim was to bring the Bourbon monarchy back into the real thing.   One of his brothers went into politics and a close family friend Antonin Proust (no relation to the writer) was briefly minister for fine arts and used his position to award Manet the Legion d’Honneur.   He wanted to paint a portrait of the Republican leader Gambetta but never succeeded- the great man was unable to make the time for the necessary sittings (a reminder of the constraints of traditional portraiture).   On the other hand he did create the wonderfully sketchy and dynamic image of Georges Clemenceau (then a rising youngish figure in Republican politics- as well as a genuine enthusiast for contemporary art) below and a marginally more conventional one of the Communard journalist and renegade marquis Henri Rochefort (beneath Clemenceau).   If he had lived longer he might well have become a quasi-official painter of the new Republican elite as they consolidated their power after seeing off the threat of a Restoration.

Then again, for all the pain of his final years, Manet did at least die before the gloss had entirely come off the Republic he supported.  Within a few years of his death in 1883 the Republic was bogged down in corruption scandals and under increasing challenge from left and right over its perceived failure to provide political stability and economic welfare.  Proust, caught up in financial scandals linked to abortive plans to build a Panama Canal, blew his brains out.   By the mid 1890’s, the milieu Manet had been so comfortable in had fractured beyond repair over allegations that an obscure army captain called Dreyfus had been spying for Germany.   The Affaire which followed saw Rochefort, now an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semite, baying for the blood of Zola, who had taken up the cudgels for the captain.  Clemenceau, having attained ministerial rank, would be detested on the left for his willingness to deploy troops against striking workers and distrusted on the right as an unscrupulous opportunist.   It’s naturally tempting to assume Manet would have been on the side of the angels in this turmoil but we can never be sure- there was no inevitable link between progressive artistic practice and Dreyfusard convictions.   The Manet exhibition turns a spotlight on a world which turned out to be more fragile than it imagined.

Enigmas in the Royal Collection

Trying to catch up with something of a backlog of exhibitions on my “to see” list, I started with the “Northern Renaissance” show at the Queen’s Gallery, slotted in at the side of Buckingham Palace.   This was a lovely show but an oddly difficult one to write about.   There were lots and lots of beautiful pieces on display but it was hard to detect an overarching theme; it wasn’t quite about art created explicitly for English monarchs in the 16^th century or even art from that period acquired later (though both elements were present).   It wasn’t just about painting.  There were a couple of magnificently engraved suits of armour on display, for instance, one of them belonging to Henry VIII and showing signs of the work which the Royal Armouries of the day had had to undertake in what amounted to letting the seams out to accommodate the ageing monarch’s  bloated body in the 1540’s.   I suppose it could be seen as a kind of survey show and those are always quite hard to summarise.

There were some intriguing details.  There were almost as many portraits of Erasmus in the show as there were of Henry VIII.  The media superstar aspect of the Dutch humanist was if anything underlined by the fact that a couple were in fact contemporary copies of portraits produced by others; there was clearly enough of a market for paintings of the great man to generate this kind of second order production.   In educated elite circles Erasmus must have had one of the most instantly recognisable faces in Europe around 1510.   Clearly people wanted to hang his picture on their wall.  Ironically a couple of books I’ve read recently have taken a somewhat less than adulatory line on Erasmus, painting a picture of a dedicated and somewhat craven hunter for patronage, a flatterer who lapped up flattery of himself, a bitchy old queen who ruthlessly exploited his relationship with major printers to squeeze those who crossed him out of the book market and a satirist who tended to go for soft targets (mocking Pope Julius II wasn’t particularly brave when done from a jurisdiction whose ruler was hostile to that Pope’s foreign policy) but panicked when others took his criticisms of the church to their logical conclusion.   I’m not sure how far this led me to see a complacent smugness in the famous Erasmian smile on display in all the portraits which I hadn’t spotted before but I’m sure it’s there…..

The show’s highlights were many.  Predictably there were lots of those wonderful Holbein portraits which give the feeling (or possibly the illusion?) that the leading and not-so-leading figures in the court of Henry VIII are real people whom one could imagine appearing in TV politics shows to explain their policies- and would be as shifty and untrustworthy as their modern successors.   There was a good showing of Durer engravings and sketches; full of fabulous draughtsmanship and observation by also of fantasy and imagination.   The famous rhino from India is there but I found myself drawn to the wonderful greyhound at the top of this entry- a piece of genuine observation from life in a way that the rhino wasn’t.   On the fantasy side, the engravings of the Apocalypse are wonderful confections- even if the heads of the Beast of the Apocalypse (below, mounted side-saddle by a glamorous but quite respectably looking Whore of Babylon) are by turns quizzical, goofy and even quite cute rather than terrifying.

Rather than try to summarise the whole show, I’ve decided to focus on three paintings, all of which repay slightly closer examination (the versions I’ve posted on Flickr possibly work better if you want to see the details- though I imagine they’re the starting point for many visitors here).  The first is “Adam and Eve”, painted by Jan Gossaert.   Gossaert was clearly a bit of a problem personality; we’re told he was notable for his debauched life and (suitably enough in the eyes of moralists, no doubt) died relatively young.   He packed quite a bit of travel into his 30 odd years- in particular visiting Italy where he seems to have seen a lot of the latest art as well as picking up on the fashion for classical statues.  The impact of the latter can be seen in the muscular bodies of both Adam and Eve (is it just me that wonders what might be revealed if the strategically placed leaf was removed from Eve- and whether an artist would really have been allowed to get away with working with nude female models in the 1520s?).   There’s a kind of instability about the way they stand, almost as if they’re about to lurch out of the frame on top of the viewer- a kind of visible correlative for the Fall.   It’s been suggested, on rather tenuous grounds, that John Milton may have had this painting in mind when describing Adam in “Paradise Lost”(it was in the Royal Collection early enough for this to be feasible).   There were some details however which bothered the more biblically minded in 17^th century England.   Why were Adam and Eve depicted with navels given that they had been created and not born in the conventional way?   Who exactly built the rather elaborate fountain to be seen in the background?   One could suggest that God might have chosen to create Adam and Eve with navels to set the pattern for future humans and that some of the angels could presumably have run up a fountain and the associated hydraulics in a matter of minutes but perhaps that’s getting a bit too literal…..  It does however show how differently people might analyse a painting in the past from the criteria they use now- and how details which would pass unremarked now could raise major discussions.

The second painting is a very different piece.  The artist isn’t known, but it’s a very creative reworking of a piece by a Dutch artist called Marinus van Rymerswaele.   It’s conventionally called “The Misers” though the latest view is that the two protagonists are probably tax collectors or just possibly merchants with debts to collect (other versions are explicitly called “The Tax Gatherers”). There was clearly a market for this kind of painting in the wider Dutch/Flemish/Northern French world during the first half of the 16^th century as a number of variations on van Rymerswaele’s piece and ones derived from a now-lost original by Quenten Massys survive.   The painting has recently been cleaned and restored and no reproduction quite conveys the sheer vividness of its colours or the way which it draws you into its world.   Some of this is due to the changes made to the template by the artist, who only partially follows a tracing from the original work.   In the original and some of the workshop copies, the right hand figure was much more separated from the book keeper on the left and could even have been a client handing over money.  In this version the pair are clearly a team- and the viewer is placed in the position of the defaulting tax payer, no doubt being told that, regrettably, the figures don’t add up and unless he comes up with the balance of the cash they will have no alternative but to send the boys round.   The pet parakeet (an introduction to the scene) watches and not doubt has plenty of tales to tell.   There are some strange dissonances in the picture.   The two central figures are richly dressed- but in the fashions of the late 15^th century, a good sixty or seventy years before the date of the picture.   This isn’t a period piece either- it’s possible to read the writing in the ledger and the exchange rates being applied to the piles of coins from different jurisdictions are ones which were in force from 1547 to 1551.   In this version the text is in French; other versions are in Flemish- which shows that it was possible for the artist (or customer?) to customise what could be seen as production line efforts churned out by workshop artists on the basis of tracings.   Just why this sort of scene was popular in one of the most urbanised and commercially advanced (and heavily taxed) parts of Europe is unclear.   Perhaps there are jokes in here at the expense of the taxman which are now no longer legible to us- the archaic costume might be part of that.   Perhaps the moral lesson about the transitory nature of worldly riches implied by the guttering candle on top of the cupboard is the key.  I wonder how many purchasers of van Rymerswaele clones were themselves in the tax farming business….

If there’s an air of implicit menace in the tax gatherers, something a lot scarier is going on in the third painting- indeed it’s much more ominous than Durer’s slightly cartoonish view of the End Times.   On the face of it things are bad enough.  A snow-covered Flemish village is being comprehensively sacked by a composite military force with a core of heavily armoured lancers backed up with German infantry in their distinctive landsknecht costumes.   Villagers run to and fro, trying to escape.  Others plead with authority figures.   The pillage goes on unhindered; the Germans are smashing their way into locked houses and dragging booty out.   Close inspection however shows overpainting in certain areas and more sinister violence going on in the background.  For this is an early, more or less original, version of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s “Massacre of the Innocents”.   As with several of Bruegel’s major works this was to have a very long afterlife as it became the basis for production line workshop production using tracings from the original with versions being produced many years after Breughel’s death (years ago I wrote about an exhibition in Brussels which looked at this aspect of the Bruegel family business, though this wasn’t one of the paintings covered in that show).   The overpaints are old- they seem to have been done when the painting entered the collection of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II some thirty years after it was created  around 1565 (there’s a view that the wintry landscape reflects a particularly cold winter in 1564/5).  

Quite why the Emperor (or those seeking to sell the painting to the cultured but eccentric and somewhat reclusive ruler?) had the overpaints done is just one of several puzzles associated with this piece.   Most of the modifications substitute animals or goods being stolen for children being murdered and turn a very specific and ghastly bit of Christian mythology in the remote into a generic scene from the wars of a war-filled age.   Its understandable why Rudolf would have wanted the tabard of the herald (the man on the horse in the centre right, surrounded by peasants appealing for mercy) overpainted- in the original his tabard bears the double headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire (it’s not unusual for that symbol to stand in for the eagles of the original pagan Empire in medieval and Renaissance art but it was surely a bit too close to the knuckle in this context to imply that slaughter of children- or even the ravaging of a Christian village- was being done under Imperial auspices).   Perhaps he was uncomfortable with the overall subject matter as well- especially on one reading of the message which Bruegel was sending by placing the Massacre of the Innocents in a contemporary setting.   On this account, the biblical reference was itself cover for a protest against the repression visited on the Netherlands by the Spanish Duke of Alba and his army in the 1560’s when they were sent into the region by Philip II of Spain (the ruler of these territories- and cousin of the Holy Roman Emperor of the day) to repress Protestants and rebels against his authority.  

This interpretation was clearly current close to Bruegel’s own time and must have found favour with purchasers of workshop editions as many of these explicitly turn the face of the commander of the mounted unit into a portrait of Alba.  Bruegel’s own religious position is enigmatic and all sorts of claims have been made about him- not to mention attempts to find hidden meanings in other works.   It’s very tempting, even though there are some problems with it.  It’s not clear that the dates fit too well.   The painting is dated to 1565 or so.   Alba’s army only reached the Netherlands in 1567 in response to a Protestant uprising marked by violent image breaking the previous year; his army only really hit its repressive stride late in 1567-early 1568.  Bruegel died 1569.   If the painting is really a veiled comment on Alba’s exactions it has to be rather later than the date conventionally assigned to it.  There are other quirks.  The Imperial eagle doesn’t entirely fit - in a technical legal sense some of the provinces of the Netherlands were within the Holy Roman Empire but they hadn’t been treated as really belonging to the Empire for years and any herald working on behalf of Philip II in his role as ruler of the region would probably have carried the red knotty St Andrews cross of Burgundy on his tabard (admittedly not easy to work into a scene nominally set in the ancient world but the discrepancy would slightly weaken the message of the painting….).   On the other hand the rather washed out flag floating over the soldiers originally bore the arms of the Crusader of Jerusalem and Philip II was one of several 16^th century rulers who laid claim to that title- but so did others.  To my eye the soldiers look as if they belong in the 1530’s or 40’s rather than the 1560’s; landsknecht costume was going out of fashion by the later date, heavily armoured lancers were less common and Alba’s army was noted for its effective and disciplined infantry rather than its cavalry.   None of this entirely disproves the traditional “contemporary politics” reading of the painting but I wonder if it isn’t a bit too pat; Bruegel may well have been being deliberately somewhat generic about the horrors of war and the evil that powerful people can inflict on the powerless when he set out to paint the piece by making it both of his time and a bit timeless (the laws of anachronism aren’t entirely suspended- I can't see any firearms or even crossbows in the picture, for instance).

Have a wonderful Easter, folks.

 

Mughal Treasures

I’m afraid I’m getting back into bad habits over keeping up to date- though I can always blame the 6 Nations rugby for displacing my attention from more cultural events….

I did however manage to fit a visit to the British Library’s exhibition on Mughal India in.   Though supplemented by artefacts from elsewhere ranging from a massive green jade terrapin the size of an adult turtle to the crown of the last Mughal ruler Bahadur II, this was primarily built round the BL’s own collections of Indian manuscripts and book art- a dazzling show overall.

The Mughal dynasty were outsiders to India.   They claimed descent from Timur (better known as Tamerlane in the English speaking world) and, rather tenuously, from Chinghiz Khan himself- in other worlds they laid claim to the Central Asian Mongol/Turkic imperial heritage.  Their own first language was a Turkish dialect, with Persian as the language of high culture and administration.   The founder of the line, Babur, ended up in India only after three failed attempts to get control of Timur’s city of Samarkand in the chaotic succession struggles which filled the century after the great conqueror’s death and seems to have regarded Delhi as a consolation prize which might serve as a springboard for another go.   Well into the 17^th century Mughal rulers still cast covetous eyes northwards beyond the Afghan mountains and tried to assert control in their ancestral homelands- with very limited success.  The art they sponsored never ceased to stress their descent from Timur, though- as the piece below created in the early 17th century shows, with successive Mughal rulers seated at the feet of the old conqueror.

This had an impact on their court style and personnel.  The Mughal court was very open to well born or talented figures from across the wider Asian Islamic world- Afghans, Turks, Uzbeks, Persians and others all found positions there over the years.  Politically this posed problems- ethnically based factionalism was a permanent issue within the Mughal elite and contributed to the rapid collapse of the empire in the 1700s.    In artistic terms however it was a clear positive as styles from well beyond India got a foothold there and hybridised with each other- as well as with local styles and input from much further afield- to create a striking and distinctive artistic culture.

The dynasty nearly came to an end before it got properly started.  Babur died in 1530 just as he was consolidating his power.  His son, Humayun, was plagued by disloyal relatives and external foes; he was driven into exile in 1540 and only clawed his way back to power in Delhi with Persian assistance (always played down afterwards- the Mughals were at least nominally Sunni Muslims and sensitive to the charge that they owned their restoration to the heretical Shia Safavids).   He had just regained control in 1555 when he took a fall in his library and died (I rather warm to a man who appears to have died looking for a book on the top shelf of his massive library….).  Perhaps surprisingly, despite perennial succession issues, the dynasty then entered into its greatest period under the run of rulers conventionally known as the Great Mughals- Akbar I, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.  

Shah Jahan (see above) is the one who probably has most name recognition outside India because he was responsible for the construction of the Taj Mahal though Akbar was arguably an even greater builder- he had a whole new capital city built at Fatehpur Sikri near Agra which was used for little more than a decade before he moved to Lahore as a better base for campaigning in Afghanistan.  There were certain commonalities between the first three.   All were somewhat less than orthodox Muslims, prepared to conciliate the Hindu majority of the population with tax concessions and employ Hindu aristocrats in their administration.   This lack of fervour could take interesting turns.   Akbar was given to mystical revelations (the image at the very top shows him having some kind of spiritual revelation in the middle of a hunt and deciding to call the whole thing off- it’s not entirely clear whether this was a one-off or whether he gave up on hunting for good thereafter).  He gave patronage to sufi brotherhoods and Hindu ascetics alike and at times seemed to be working his way towards launching a new religion of his own devising- when not tinkering with the calendar.    Jahangir continued some of these trends but became increasingly addicted to a mix of alcohol and opium.  Shan Jahan was viewed by the Sunni establishment as soft on Shias- the wife for whom he built the Taj Mahal was Persian in origin.

In artistic terms too, all three men were major patrons of the arts and architecture.   Drawing on Persian and Central Asian precedents they sponsored the production of major illuminated manuscripts.  Their subject matter was a fascinating mix.   Dynastic chronicles and panegyric biographies of the rulers sat alongside new editions of Persian literary classics like the poetry of Hafiz or Nawani.   Manuscripts reproduced tales of a mythologised pre-Islamic Persian past which integrated Alexander the Great into the succession of Persian rulers as half-brother to Darius III and therefore also a legitimate ruler presiding over a dazzling court in which Aristotle and Plato bickered over the ultimate meaning of life until the latter became a hermit and (merging into the classical Orpheus) inventor of music on whom the rainbow-plumaged Simurgh bird swooped to carry him off over a countryside bustling with activity.

 Alongside lovingly rendered lives of sufi saints, Akbar sponsored the translation of key Hindu religious texts into Persian.  How far this was religious outreach to the majority population is less clear as the translation and editing process tended to accentuate the already-strong adventure story side of the “Mahabharata” and the “Ramayana” and turn them into fantastical epic tales of romance and battle and strange doings, losing any spiritual content in the process.    The painters working on these commissions were a mixed group.   The court workshop artists were predominantly Muslim but a number of Hindus worked there as well.   As noted above, they blended a wide range of styles into their work- including a surprisingly large European element.  

By the time the Mughals had consolidated their power in northern India, European merchants were frequent visitors to India ports and the Portuguese had established a toehold in Goa which lasted until the 1960’s.   European powers sent ambassadors to the Mughal court; James VI and I’s ambassador Sir Thomas Roe published his memoirs of his time there.  The relatively open religious environment- men like Akbar and Jahangir enjoyed religious debate and were happy to have learned Christian priests around their court- opened up opportunities which Jesuits and other religious orders were happy to take.  There was no Indian equivalent of Giuseppe Castiglione (the Jesuit who served as court painter to the Manchu ruler in China in then 18^th century) but a great deal of European art filtered into Indian artistic circles one way and another alongside the astronomical and mathematical texts prized by the court (in some cases the content had come full circle, with concepts first elaborated in India returning there in European form).  The main vector of influence seems to have come through engravings but it is, for instance, known that an English miniature by Isaac Olivier was much admired in India and influenced subsequent approaches to portraiture.  Mughal artists merged western approaches to perspective with the conventions inherited from Persian art and borrowed motifs wholesale.   This sometimes has strange results.  What is labelled as a Kashmiri village turns out to be a Flemish village (presumably lifted from an engraving) given a light makeover.  A church stands in the background of an Indian pastoral scene.  A cherub which has clearly escaped from a baroque heaven tugs interacts with Jahangir, who was the only person able to see this angelic presence (I wonder what he was on that day…).   The overall result is art of great beauty and sophistication, marked by extremely acute observation of animals and plants and reflecting a bustling, sophisticated court life- though the squrrel catcher below is probably not a courtier in disguise.

Artistically things began to go sour under Aurangzeb.   He fought his way to power in the final years of Shah Jahan’s reign when the old ruler was incapacitated by ill health.  Unlike his immediate predecessors, he played the orthodox Sunni Muslim card for all it was worth- no doubt reflecting a genuine piety (he had the Koran off by heart).   In power he re-imposed discriminatory taxation on the non-Muslim majority and fought endless wars to expand Mughal power into the deep south of the Indian peninsula.    There was precious little state patronage for artists under his reign- one suspects that he would have disapproved even of the portraits which depicted him as a conqueror.  

Since he ruled for some fifty years, the long term impact on court art was pretty devastating as artists drifted away into the service of local grandees with a more tolerant view of painting.   A sense of what got lost can be seen in some of the most exquisite portraits in the show, drawn from a book prepared for Prince Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb’s main rival executed in 1659. 

Politically his reign was the peak of the Mughal Empire- it never controlled more land than it did when he died in 1707.   Well before his death, however, the cracks were beginning to show.  He spent his final years campaigning deep in the south, far from the Mughal heartlands.  It wasn’t really possible to run the empire from a campaign tent on the remote periphery, however- especially as the crushing taxes imposed to fund the wars sparked protests across the Empire.  Over-extension loomed.   Outsiders- whether traditional rivals in Persia and Afghanistan or newcomers like the English East India Company- were beginning to circle menacingly (the exhibition includes some ill-tempered correspondence between Aurangzeb and William III over the depredations of English pirates on shipping in Indian waters).  

After his death things fell apart with astonishing speed.   Like his contemporary Louis XIV he had outlived his immediate heirs; unlike Louis, succession practices were fluid enough for there to be multiple potential candidates for power.   The empire had seen contested successions before but in this case none of the contenders were talented enough to halt the slide.   By 1739 the empire was so badly weakened that a Persian army was able to sack Delhi and loot the royal library as well as stealing the Peacock Throne of the Mughal rulers.   Though there was something of a revival of court art as the century wore on, many of the most interesting and innovative developments in art were being made at regional power centres like Lucknow, capital of Awdh (one of the intriguing aspects of the exhibition was meeting old friends from the Royal Academy Zoffany show like Colonel Polier in their Indian context). 

It’s perhaps predictable that a lot of the material which ended up in the British Library was commissioned in one way or another by British residents or other figures operating on the still-fluid margins between British and Indian society.   One of the major patrons of art in the early 19^th century was James Skinner, son of a Scottish soldier of fortune and a local woman, who made a career in his father’s profession.   Excluded from a formal East Indian Company commission by his origins, he nevertheless raised and operated a highly effective light cavalry unit kitted out in distinctive mustard coloured uniforms (hence their nicknames “The Canaries” and “The Yellow Boys”).   “Skinner’s Horse” still exists as a regiment in the modern Indian army (officially they’re the 1st Bengal Cavalry- I wonder if their tanks reflect the regimental heritage in their paintwork).  Skinner’s English was fragmentary and he corresponded with British officials in literary Persian- a hybrid figure in a short-lived but fascinating era when such individuals had a major role to play.  Indian artists for their part had become adept at creating art in whatever style the person paying for it wanted( the example below was commissioned by a British collector, for instance); as a result, the later exhibits possibly overstate the “Europeanisation” of Indian artistic practice. 

Politically Mughal power had gone beyond recall.  By 1800 the Mughal ruler controlled little more than the Red Fort in Delhi (see below) and survived on the sufferance of the dominant local powers of the Ganges plains, who claimed a faint sheen of legitimacy by pretending that they were acting as his representatives.   After 1803 this domination passed to the East India Company, whose representatives begin to pop up in pictures of court life and ceremonial in deceptively humble postures which can have fooled nobody- seated on one of the rearmost elephants in a noisy and colourful court procession, for instance.   The political reaction to this slow motion annexation was violent and, from the Mughal point of view, fatal.   When the Company’s sepoy regiments rebelled in 1856-7 they claimed to be seeking to restore the Mughal Empire to its former glory- how far this was a genuine goal rather than the latest example of aspiring political forces claiming legitimacy without the slightest intention of obeying any Mughal order they didn’t like is far less clear.   Bahadur II, a talented poet and a cultured man but not much of a politician, wavered uneasily between the rebel leadership and the British and ended up distrusted by both sides.  When British armies took Delhi he was taken into custody and deposed; the exhibition ends with photographs of the Red Fort taken after the British capture and of Bahadur himself, looking somewhat dazed by the turn of events.  He died in exile shortly afterwards.

Landscapes, sublime and picturesque

I took advantage of the gap in Six Nations rugby to pay a visit to the Royal Academy at the weekend.   I wasn’t going to the latest blockbuster Manet show however (I’ll catch up with that later) but catching a rather less vigorously touted exhibition before it closed.   This was entitled “Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and the Making of Landscape”.  

Like an awful lot of exhibition titles, this was a bit of a misnomer- some might say a bit of a cheat.   While there were some very striking works by the three big names on display, they only formed a small part of the show.  The “making of landscape” side of things also needed a bit of glossing.  Landscape art in one form or another was not exactly a novelty in Britain the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries- there had for instance for years been a lively, if lowish status trade, in producing more or less accurate depictions of country houses and estates for sale to their owners.   “Making” in this context meant a willingness to accord depictions or more or less idealised British landscapes the respect given to depictions of more or less fantastical Italian landscapes by the stars of the 17^th century artistic firmament as collected in Britain.  Even more relevant, however, was “making” in the simple physical sense of creation- not so much the creation of paintings, however, but the processes of engraving and reproducing those paintings for a much wider audience than would ever have seen the originals.  Indeed the bulk of the exhibition was made up of engravings and mezzotints rather than original oils (supplemented by a few watercolours- another relatively cheap and “popular” medium of the day).  

Some visitors may have been disappointed by this focus.   I found it fascinating- indeed I’d have liked rather more on the ways in which the “big name” artists and their less well remembered contemporaries interacted with the wider market for art and a bit less on “the Sublime” and “the Picturesque”. While these concepts clearly did inform art commentary in the late 18^th century and artists sought to conform to expectations in order to get the right sort of reviews, I began to get lost in the distinctions which the exhibition’s display material and little quasi-catalogue sought to make between different works and I’ve a suspicion that the artists themselves were apt to play games with the concepts.

After a bit of a false start of works by contemporary artists drawing (very loosely indeed in some cases) on the landscape tradition, the exhibition proper started with engravings of works by the stars I referred to above- Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and “Poussin” (in fact 18^th century collectors had a lot of trouble distinguishing between the great Nicolas of that ilk and his prolific if somewhat less talented brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet and were apt to collapse their works together).   It’s well worth being reminded just how difficult it was even for professional artists to experience admired art works first hand.   There was no publicly accessible art gallery in Britain before Dulwich opened its doors in 1812.   Most of the works imported from Italy by returning Grand Tourists disappeared into private collections which might be hung in country houses spread out from Galway to Kent and from Aberdeenshire to Cornwall.   Even an artist with good connections to open doors for him would at best see a very limited selection of pieces, probably those in London and the Home Counties.   Even artists, therefore, relied heavily on engravings to get a sense for what this much-admired art looked like.  

Landscape figured prominently in this art- though in a rather specific way.   The landscape in question was a very idealised version on the countryside round Rome-with higher hills, more rugged rocks, larger and clearer lakes and cooler and lusher woods than the reality (and no sign of the malaria-infested marshes which filled the region until Mussolini’s day).   It was rarely the nominal subject of the painting.  That was usually drawn from classical mythology or, more rarely, from the Bible, though you sometimes needed a magnifying glass to see the figures involved in the action.   Its very artifice contributed to the Sublime aspect of such works as understood by contemporaries- a good going thunderstorm in the background or other weather-related light effects helped as well.   I suspect that the fact most critics would also experience a lot of art in engraving form may have shaped their appreciation of it- the darks and lights and shadings on a basically black and white colour range would tend to enhance the dramatic effects.

Given the cultural prestige of this art, it’s not surprising that British artists wanted to break into the market.   The first to do so wasn’t one of the show’s headline names but the much less heralded Welshman Richard Wilson (one of the great might have beens of British art- a man of great talent but very quarrelsome and far too fond of the bottle).   Jones was Roman trained and his breakthrough work (nominally based on the myth of Niobe) still refers to that tradition.  This was picked up for engraving by  the publisher John Boydell, who had spotted the market potential and was a man on a mission to compete with the high quality French imports which dominated the British market; in this venture he was fortunate to have the services of a top class engraver in the shape of William Woollett.   Wilson moved on from idealised depictions of Italian scenery with events from classical mythology as the nominal subject to idealised depictions of British (indeed often specifically Welsh) scenery with the odd reference to ancient Cambrian mythology- though this historico-mythological alibi became less and less important and eventually vanished.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Wilson was far from the only British artist feeding the market for engravings of domestic landscapes.   It’s worth being reminded that what is conventionally described as a Romantic taste for domestic tourism to more or less remote (preferably mountainous) parts of Britain considerably predates the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which are supposed to have stimulated it by making Continental Europe inaccessible.   I’d have liked to know a lot more about how the domestic market worked.  The assumption is that these prints served a wider (though still pretty well heeled) market than would have purchased original oils but it would have been nice to have a bit more detail on who was buying (subscription lists clearly still exist)?  How far was consumer demand shaping what artists like Wilson or local figures like Thomas Smith of Derby (who managed to make the Peak District look like the High Alps) created?  Or were the publishers setting the agenda and moulding demand to conform to their own preoccupations?   Boydell was clearly articulating a distinctly patriotic standpoint in his choice of works to engrave, and not just in the field of landscapes (he commissioned a major set of worked based on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, for instance).

The three big names headlining the show responded to this market demand in different ways.  Gainsborough enjoyed doing landscapes as a relief from the treadmill of the bread and butter portrait work but did his own engravings almost on a hobbyist basis and with limited commercial sales.  His approach to landscape art tended towards “the Picturesque” rather than “the Sublime”- an artistic lineage going back to 17^th century Dutch work which valued the informal and irregular aspects of the countryside and largely eschewed overt dramatic gestures (his countryside is peopled by gypsies rather than heroes of classical mythology).   How far it was any more “accurate” and less idealising is another question…..  Turner (perhaps predictably) revelled in the commercial side of things, launching a subscription series of landscape engravings produced by a team of engravers bulled and badgered into meeting his quality control requirements.  Equally predictably he never quite delivered all the engravings promised in the series.  In some ways Turner emerges as rather conservative and “academic” in his practice, working up the final versions for engraving in the studio well after the original sketches had been made- and with a distinct air of the Sublime in the exaggerations he incorporated (hills are always that bit higher than the Ordinance Survey figures say they are, rivers that bit wider- as with the image of Norham Castle at the top of this piece).   Constable by contrast found one collaborator, Charles Lucas, who worked closely with him on making the engravings of the grand “six footer” paintings which made his name.  Constable’s oils manage to combine the grandeur of the Sublime with the apparently commonplace of the Picturesque, getting a full measure of spectacle and drama out of the flat and relatively featureless landscape of East Anglia (as in the picture of Flatford Lock below).   A very English fascination with the weather helped; the exhibition contained a couple of the innovative oil sketches of cloud formations which he made out of doors as an aide memoire when  it came to creating drama in the big skies over his landscapes.   Lucas in turn did a brilliant job of translating Constable’s dynamic view of every day life into the black and white shadings of engraving- at times the engravings are even more dramatic than the oils they popularise.  

The exhibition also contains a section on the work of lesser lights like the wonderfully named Michael Angelo Rooker (no doubt over the trade his parents expected him to follow…) and the development of sketching and water colour work as arts in their own right rather than purely preparatory stages for producing masterpieces in the studio- Constable’s clouds also fit into this model.   Here too, however, the wider social context remains (perhaps appropriately) a bit sketchy.  Clearly there was money and fame to be gained from fine art engraving- an important point in a world where traditional approaches to artistic patronage were shifting and artists had a very much higher view of their own social standing than would have been the case a generation or two earlier.  Being “His lordship’s most humble and obedient servant” was going out of fashion as top range artists presented themselves as gentlemen and even began to become part of the social elite themselves (knighthoods for Presidents of the Royal Academy like Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West pointing the way).   Ironically (or perhaps revealingly) the social recognition didn’t extend to the engravers and water colourists, who struggled to gain election as RA members in their own right and were very much second class citizens in the republic of arts.   The exhibition scarcely begins to examine the complex dynamics of that situation, where a “fine” artist’s fame outside the specialist art world, not to mention his revenues, were largely dependent on the work done by others who remained restricted to artisan status.  The discrimination has still not quite disappeared; I can’t imagine the RA getting sponsorship to stage an exhibition which majored on names like Woollett or Lucas any time soon.